The Hills That Watched Me Grow

As a teacher of Japanese school kids I sometimes find myself telling them about my life back home. A recent story I told some of my classes about school in America and its differences with school in Japan turned to something more when found myself suddenly bombarded with a ton questions about the details of my childhood in southern California. The whole thing left me grasping for memories that had long since flitted away in different directions like birds out of a cage suddenly free. Of particular interest to them was how summer vacations played out in the US since it lasts a full month longer for the kids in America (kids in Tokyo are only off the month of August and for a few weeks in the end of July). It's June now and with the American summer about to begin, I find myself waxing nostalgic about the life I had that once was.

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

Mad with Knowledge...

It's often been said that ignorance is bliss, but if this is true, does that mean knowledge is pain? If one were to follow things through to their natural conclusion, wouldn't knowledge then be corrosive to our happiness? It's certainly been the subject of many jokes, that those who don't try to set their sights any higher, suffice by aiming low, hit their targets more often, and can find themselves entertained by things so simple that others regard it as absolute nonsense. Isn't it the simple things in life after all that give us the most satisfaction? Sometimes by learning more and more, the only thing we come to really know is just how screwed up everything is. Could we really be any better off in the dark?

A Nostalgia of Youth and Past Alike

I can't help but think that the conception of the unintelligent being more content than others comes in part from an idea that children are the least educated, and at the same time the least burdened. As the years pile their knowledge upon us, the weight of it all begins to slowly crush many of our dreams, and with it usually, our gentle and childish spirit. Of course this analogy can only be taken so far because of the fact that someone out there has to take care of the child, and consequently, take responsibilty. We can't return to our childhood ways of thinking, not simply because we can't just forget or unlearn the things and push the difficult parts out, but also because we've taken on responsibilities that cannot be pushed back onto our parents or someone else. There is, however, another major defect to this way of thinking lying beneath it all: we often continue to look back at our childhoods with an idealized perfection that goes beyond a simple longing or nostalgia.

While we generally think of our youth as being the best part of our lives it isn't always simply because we were free of obligation and responsibilty. We have a habit of sanitizing our own pasts within our memories if for no other reason than to make the future bearable. Even thinking back a short period ago in one's life provides an interesting example. Thinking for only a moment where were you just six months or one year ago, generally a very clean, sterile version of events springs to mind. Often we remember the things that made us happy first, but once you really begin to question how you felt while you went about your everyday life, the full picture comes to focus. It's easier to remember the good times you had throughout the years, laughing with friends, rather than the times you spent crying alone in your own room.

How often do parents tell their children that things were so much better when they were young? That things have changed and it's mostly been for the worse, that even the things which make our lives easier have robbed us of the building of character which those difficulties provide. It's nothing new that members of the older generation will complain about how the young lack responsibility, motivation, and morality. About how they're just different, really.

In considering the generational divide, I've felt for some time that the young and old feel angry at the world for entirely different reasons. The young (especially teenagers) tend to be upset because they want the freedoms and other advantages of being treated as adults, but the world still sees them as children. They often rebel and as they age they change the world wanting to make it different than the one they feel held them down as they grew up. The old, on the other hand, tend to be upset because they view the world as having changed and that they are no longer the ones harnessing that change, it's all been taken from them, life's passing them by, and now it's all changing so fast they can't keep up. Sometimes I wonder if what the aged are really complaining about when they do it, is just being old themselves, and that what made things so much better in the past they remember, is that they were young when it happened.

The past was not sparkling and perfect in anyone's life, but we all look back on our own with nostalgia, even though there were of course problems we all had growing up, as well as struggles unique to each generation. When you apply this idea of sanitizing one's past, you begin to see examples of it extend even further to whole periods of time. The old sitcoms from the 50's present a very idealized version of the era they portray (the movie Pleasantville did an excellent job of demonstrating and deconstructing this point), and if you apply this concept even further, so too is many conservative americans' view of Victorian America, and many americans' view in general of the founding fathers and colonial era. In the U.S. we often have a habit of putting the ancient Greeks on a pedestal as if they were the forerunners of our democracy so to speak. The ancient Greeks themselves believed they had descended from an even greater culture that preceded their own, which in turn believed the same thing. In his book "The Third Chimpanzee", Jared Diamond dubbed this phenomenon quite appropriately as, "The Golden Age that never was".

Truth, Lies, Reality

I've understood for quite some time that the past was not the perfect, idyllic vision I once held of it, and yet the question which now confronts me is: Has any of this made me any happier? Doesn't life keep on kicking you when you're down anyways, and can you really blame a person for wanting to escape reality when everything is just so fucked up? The people who break the rules and cheat tend to get their way, the people who are honorable get screwed. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, those with the most will always be on top and never stop wanting more. I've sometimes wondered if perhaps all that's actually happened by realizing something like the concept behind our nostalgia of the past, is that I've robbed myself of what is a natural defense for us to duck into the bliss of ignorance. There are certain things we'd rather not know, aren't there also some things we're just better off not knowing?

When the truth feels unbearable, many of us resort to telling lies to spare others what we feel will just hurt or burden them. The so-called "white lies" we tell others, because we're trying to be merciful and not malicious. When everything is wrong with your life and you're sad and hurt beyond words, and then pass someone in the hall at work who asks you how you're doing and you simply reply, "Fine" you're already doing this starting to do this. When you believe another person's similar reply even though there is clearly something wrong, you're accepting the relief that comes without probing further. We all have our own problems we have to deal with in our own way, but some problems belong to us all and we simply believe things that cannot be true as means of escape.

The ignorant are not immune to misfortune, even children find themselves unhappy and reduced to tears, and even people who avoid the harsher truths of life have to deal with some sorts of hardship when it come right down to it. Accidents, injuries, sickness, taxes, arguments with other people, rotten luck, life. These things are everyone's problems and they happen to the ignorant as well as the wise, the ignorant just don't understand how and why and are left more confused than others. We can choose the comfort of believing lies or we can confront the pain of the awful truth. White lies may ease our discomfort for as long as we can believe them, but therein lies the risk not only of learning the painful truth, but also the added agony of discovering you've been lied to. Lies may indeed be necessary, but the advantages they hold are illusion, the advantages the truth holds are of reality.

What we are learning now

There is one final implication of knowledge I'd like to to address, an idea that has been lingering in my head for the past few days. It pertains to some of the possible dangers of knowledge. While the whole argument of "knowledge is power" and "power corrupts" could be easily linked and fuel much more discussion, I don't want to dwell too much on that for what I had in mind has also to do with what we are (and aren't) learning on the whole today.

The term "specialization", when used in an evolutionary sense, refers to certain species becoming so specifically adapted to one particular aspect of their environment that they often end up becoming dependent on it. Pandas and koalas, for example, have developed very specialized digestive systems for bamboo and eucalyptus respectively, and both species are now at a point where neither can live without their particular source of food. Specialization is generally viewed as a disadvantage in an evolutionary sense because in addition to the multitude of other things that can kill off a species (i.e. predators, natural disasters, etc...) a simple thing that merely threatens what they are dependent on (a famine or disease affecting bamboo or eucalyptus for the case of pandas and koalas) has the potential to devastate their population and the risk of extinction is therefore much higher. Humans, with our ability to eat many types of plants as well as meat and survive in hot as well as cold climates are considered to be very generalized (or unspecialized), and hold an advantage by being able to change food sources when one runs out or move to a new area if one becomes unstable.

I watched "Gorillas in the Mist" a short while ago, became interested in the basis of the events and poked around Wikipedia until I ended up reading about Louis Leakey, a famous archaeologist, and important figure in the field of human evolution. He helped set up and guide the initial placement of Dian Fossey, as well as Jane Goodall, into positions where they'd observe primates in a natural setting. One quote of his that I read, in particular, has stuck with me for the past few days:

"We know from the study of evolution that, again and again, various branches of animal stock have become over-specialized, and that over-specialization has led to their extinction. Present-day Homo sapiens is in many physical respects still very unspecialized− ... But in one thing man, as we know him today, is over-specialized. His brain power is very over-specialized compared to the rest of his physical make-up, and it may well be that this over-specialization will lead, just as surely, to his extinction. ... if we are to control our future, we must first understand the past better."

-From L.S.B. Leakey, Adam's Ancestors, Fourth Edition, final page.

I've been thinking to myself recently of just what could possibly cause humankind's noticeably high brain power to be any kind of a detriment, let alone one which could lead to his downfall. It's hard to believe it could have any negative potential when considering all the accomplishments we now enjoy that are based upon it, things such as technology, logic, increased food production, science, transportation, communication, etc...

When I look to the future, it's difficult not to be excited by the seemingly limitless potential of humankind. Maybe I'm just getting older, but recently I've also been left with a sense of unease at times at just how uncertain it all is. I heard recently that the most in-demand jobs of today, didn't even exist 10 years ago, and that most of the students of today are basically going to school to prepare for jobs that don't yet exist, to fix problems we don't even know about yet.

Given our propensity to kill one another, it could be said that knowledge has indeed become a very dangerous thing. We are now far more efficient at doing so than ever before, nuclear weapons alone could destroy the planet many times over. It's no exaggeration to say that society stands balanced on a razor's edge and could tip over at any time. Robert E. Howard once observed coldly through one of his characters that: "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind, Civilization is unnatural, a whim of circumstances." It's difficult not to be pessimistic when littered throughout history are examples of mankind's savage nature to kill others. Society as we know it could fall. We could turn on one another, or we could create the means for our destruction by tampering too much with mother nature. In either event, many of us could die very suddenly.

But what of the aftermath should the apocalypse ever come? The skills it would take to survive (hunting, farming, other ways of acquiring food and building shelter), aren't too widespread within the common people of today, and such an event would certainly take most of us completely by surprise. In today's society nearly all centers around the sea of information. Those who can navigate it successfully thrive, those who can swim it survive, those who cannot sink to the bottom. The fact that we now all seem to be learning things for jobs and problems which might not even yet exist might just be another way of saying we lack the skills to survive in the following turmoil of a cataclysm. I'm not saying that our priorities aren't straight, but our knowledge could very well prove to not only be the proximate source of our own extermination, but the final nail in the coffin in the form of our own unpreparedness.

The stance of the cautious optimist really seems best. We cannot negatively dwell only on the harsher aspects of the past and hope to still remain optimistic and boldly move into the future. To do so is to remain in darkness. But the mixed consequences of knowledge should not be underestimated as well. Knowledge does have the capability to do us harm as well as enlighten and improve. It strikes me that in many ways, we do fear certain types of knowledge; we fear to know more about the things and people we find despicable, even though such things can sometimes be helpful. It makes sense to some degree, why would any decent person want to understand the mind of a psychopath unless we wanted to try and stop them? By learning of things we hate or fear we become afraid that we'll grow to be more like that which we study. It amazes and frightens us that while in the beginning we can't help but turn away, after a while we can't stop looking.

"I was just guessin’, At numbers and figures, Pullin’ the puzzles apart
Questions of science, Science and progress, Do not speak as loud as my heart"

- Coldplay, The Scientist

"Write page after page of analysis
Looking for the final score
We're no closer than we were before"

- Keane, Perfect Symmetry

Looking at the way our artists view things I sometimes wonder if they represent the caution and skepticism present in us all everytime a new discovery is made. Sometimes I feel like the words of our poets and singers simply tear away at those of our great thinkers and inventors. As if to say the mind of humankind will never be a match for our hearts, that despite all our realizations we can't conquer misery or hardship, that for all of our knowledge it in the end brings us no happiness.