Summer vacations in my hometown of Santee were long and slow and lazy. My parents sent me and my brother and sister to summer school a few times to keep us busy and because there weren't enough kids to make a full school several districts were combined and we occasionally were bused to other elementary schools to mix with other kids from Hill Creek, Rio Seco, Pepper Drive. Summer school always ended in August anyways and so even with it, we kids found ourselves with a ton of time on our hands. Daytime television was boring as hell and so we ended up geeking out on video games for SNES and Genesis far more than was healthy. RPGs took up whole blocks of my break. Mostly the ones by Squaresoft. Also hanging out at our neighbors' place playing Street Fighter II and listening to his old hip hop CDs. Snoop Dogg and Warren G were really popular back then and the West Coast was becoming known for its sound (the creation of G-Funk). It kills me sometimes to think of how many white, asian and mexican kids living in the suburbs of southern Cali would sit around watching Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society. We shot hoops during the day when it wasn't too hot and occasionally played games of street football in the afternoon or early evening when things had cooled down. We'd drink beers bought by someone's older brother, or alcohol taken from the liquor cabinets of friends' dads and other times spent the day sitting around playing cards with MTV or Jammin Z90 on in the background. We were mostly too poor to buy CDs, that or just about always seemed to want to buy video games with the money we'd saved up and so MTV or the radio was just about always on to give us something to listen to.
Our bikes gave us mobility and we sometimes didn't know where we might end up going when we set out over the course of a summer day's lackadaisy. We'd head out to town center, to Santee Lakes, and sometimes all the way down Magnolia Ave to Wunderland, the nickel arcade, where we'd spend hours (and tons of nickles) on games like Samurai Showdown and Alien vs Predator. In and Out Burger was there too, still just about my favorite when it comes to fast food, and one of the places I miss fiercely now that I call Japan my home instead of Cali. That and good, cheap Mexican food on every corner.
Candybars may have cost a nickel when my parents were young as they so often liked to remind us, but back when we were kids three for a buck was about the best we could do and you had to bike to the drugstores like Long's on a hot summer's day for it though you usually had to eat it there or it'd melt some before you got home. Thrifty's on Cuyamaca and Mission Gorge had really cheap ice cream which I'd learned long ago when I was little and realized that my mom I would buy it for me almost everytime I went running errands with her that took her to that store.
It was also at drugstores that you usually found comics. We'd read as many as we could before we either got bored or were given sharp looks by the storeclerks telling us it was time to leave. I think it was in an actual comic store, however, that my brother and I first discovered manga and a love for the new and different form took hold in me. From it I suppose you could say sprung my interest in Japan and ultimately my desire to see it firsthand. Funny how one thing can lead to another...
My little brother built a treehouse out in the unclaimed area behind Rio Seco. It was mostly made of tough, black netting draped between the large boughs and then pinned and tied on super tight to hold our weight. Oh, and old boards nailed up the trunk to give us a ladder to climb up. It was like a set of large hammocks to relax in. We got high in those branches a few times while hanging out and wasting time.
Not far from our house is a series of rolling hills that used to be a quarry for mining or something like that long ago. Santee has changed a lot from when I was young, there used to even be some stables and horses there on some of the properties when I was a child. Even at that time those little "ranches" (if you could call em that) were really starting to dwindle. We used to go hiking in those hills when there was nothing else to do. It was my dad who first introduced my brother and I to it. We would go on weekends up those big and dusty mounds covered with brush and dried out shrubbery and large white boulders some of which had been sprayed painted up by others. We hiked up the hills and climbed up the rocks, scurrying and jumping gaps, and learning how to gain footholds and grab handholds with our fingers to pull ourselves up. The rocks came in all shapes and sizes and my little brother and I gave silly names to all of them (many of them after which of our favorite cartoon characters they reminded us most of, mostly Disney characters or GoBots). I remember in the beginning the big one we would go to, we called "Mickey Mouse Rock" because it was two large boulders on an even larger boulder and the way they were set kind of reminded us the famous mouse ears. If you sat between those ears you'd get a nice breeze that blew over the valley up the hill and whistled between the two rocks. It also gave you a great view of Santee including where we lived at the time and Cajon Park, the elementary school we went to. Other impotant ones were Blue Rock which must've had a half a hundred coats of paint on it (all by various passersby over the years) before it ended up being the color which gave it its namesake. And finally there was "Boot Rock" which we'd named for it's shape. It was the one nearest the old quarry with its hundreds of abandoned shards of stone laying scattered and stacked unevenly about like the gigantic wooden toy blocks of some long forgotten colossus. You could still see the grooves in the old stones where those who'd worked the quarries before had drilled the holes to put in the blast caps and break the stones aparts. I used to go up there with my friends and we'd play hide and seek in those piles of old blocks. If there was one thing that place provided, it was a lot of good places to hide though we found after a while that it was easier to catch people by listening rather than looking. The sounds of nature were all around but the rustle of loose gravel and echoing of footsteps was easy to hear.
I remember hiking up there with my little brother and Dad one spring after some heavier rains and stumbling onto something which has lived on long in the fuzzy memories of my childhood. In a deeper puddle of water left by the rain runoff we found some tadpoles and even some frog eggs with the little black creatures wiggling round inside them. My dad, perhaps sensing an opportunity to teach my brother and I something about nature, suggested we return with jars to catch some of them so we could watch them grow before returning them to the hills. We did so, and returned each year when the seasons changed to collect the little froglings in old pickle jars and applejuice bottles. "Polywogs" we used to call them and I still remember many a morning spent crouching down on a little shard of rock catching them in the "Big Pond" and "Little Pond" as we called the two places we most often could find them. If it was my dad's plan, it worked, and we did indeed learn a few things about nature by catching and watching them. We learned what they ate, what they looked like as the grew, and that when animals in the wild that have a lot of offspring all at once, only the most robust tend to live to maturity, even with a safe environment to grow in.
I first moved out during my years in university and found myself spending more and more time driving to the beach and surfing since I now had access to a car and lived closer to the shores than before. I'd drive home to see my mom and dad, occasionally do my laundry, and use the computer and burn CDs out of mp3s I'd downloaded, though I sometimes wonder now if this wasn't more just an excuse to go back and visit. I'd watch the Simpsons with my brother and sister if they were around or stay for dinner if it was late enough. My friend Phil said it best when he told me that at first the house you grew up in will seem like it's always been, but that gradually it simply ceases to be your home.
The first time I left California was in 2003. I went to Florida. I came back after several months when things didn't turn out quite as expected, and then lived in San Diego for a little over a year before deciding to come to Japan since Phil had moved here a few months earlier. I've been here for over four years now.
Living away from home during college I noticed how much faster things changed each time I came back home: a new building here, a shop closed down there. Nowadays when I return I see the changes happening by leaps and bounds with each turn since it now occurs only seldom over a matter of years rather than weeks or months. The one thing that never changes is the hills around my hometown. I'm sometimes reminded of the Chili Peppers' song "Under the Bridge" and he way Anthony Keidis refers to his city as an entity that can see and empathize with him. If there's ever been a place I've identified with it's them, the hills that surround my hometown. As I got older I found myself visiting them less and less over the years. We'd still go hiking up there every now and then with beers or bottles of alcohol and we'd get drunk or get high while chatting and looking out over the little city that raised us. At night we could see the lights of Santee shining like a puddle of stars that had spilled into the valley, interupted only in the areas where the hills rise out of the ground by the blackness that is nature at night, devoid of manmade light. The last time I came back to Santee was last summer, 2009 to see my friend Josh get married. That was the last time I visited the hills that watched me grow. Each time I go up it surprises me to see the way the urban sprawl of the city keeps slowly creeping up the sides of the valley, coming ever closer to the quarries and the rocks I climbed as a child. I wonder sometimes if it'll ever all get cleared away to make room for more houses.
It's not that I long for the past so much as treasure what memories I have been able to have. I know that things change and we can't go back, it's what makes the past so stirring and for that same reason the times we live in now so exciting. There's only one now. And things will never be same.
The hills surrounding Santee
Topmost on the hill: "Mickey Mouse Rock"; you can see how the two smaller boulders on top make sort of like "ears"
Mickey Mouse Rock up close
The view from between the ears, you can see the school from here
Blue Rock
It's in the shell created by these shards of rock that the water collects like a bowl after the rains. We called it the "small pond" next picture as well.
A bunch of rocks and dirt had fallen into where the small pond was when last I went up there to see it
The old quarry in front of where "Boot Rock" sits.
Boot Rock closer up
The quarry we'd hide in
Boot Rock over-looking the city
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