April 5, 2000

Edges that define our lives

Pacifica is an exciting place to live. The reason? Edges!

We live on the edge of everything. We live at the edge of the sea. The edge of our city and the edge of the ocean form a common boundary, a place of transition. As we leave Pacifica going west, there is a whole different world. The surfers use its near surfaces, but some people live their whole lives in Pacifica without exploring in the least the world whose edges are next door.

That world takes little notice of us in turn, except when we dump our waste water into it, when we fish for its inhabitants, or when we attempt to cross over its top to get to another part of the kind of world we're more familiar with.

We live on the edges of hills and valleys. Climbing the hills, or going into the valleys, we change our perspective with each step. The hills divide our city. Each part of town has a distinctive climate and a distinctive character defined by the way it treats its hills.

Vallemar snuggles cozily into its valley. It nestles among its trees. It looks up to the hills that surround it. Forty years ago mountain lions lived in those hills. Perhaps they still do. In Park Pacifica they scraped off the hillsides and filled in the valleys. In Sharp Park they look toward the sea from a marine terrace. On Pedro Point they took to the hills for a better view of the sea.

The hills keep us from becoming a mixed porridge poured together without distinctivesness or character.

Edges.

Our city is exciting because it has for so many years been on the edge of failure. But its very struggles are exciting. City Council meetings sometimes feature critical harangues. There has been infighting, disputations, arguments. It's all a symptom of people who know they can still have input into the way their city is going. By contrast the county has bogged down lately. People who might have run for the Board of Sups won't put the effort in unless they are guaranteed a win. The result is that a total of only three people ran for three separate offices during the recent election. They won, but we lost. We lost the chance to hear their ideas, learn how they would improve our county. They lost too. They will never know if they deserved to win, or if the people who wrote in Donald and Mickey and Goofy should have prevailed.

While Pacifica has long been on the edge of failure, we are also, perhaps, on the edge of success. Like the birds who live on the edges of fields and forests, we can go either way.

On the east the edges are the watershed properties of San Francisco. With lakes and hills, the Watershed divides us from the rest of the Peninsula, makes our community unique.

To our south is the mountain edge. It defines our city. It forms a wall. It is so difficult to cross that it sets the rules for the territory to its own south.

Thousands of us daily migrate north, to the urban metropolis known simply as "The City." The city is another kind of edge, which also strongly affects our lives.

Even the weather is created by our edges. Fogs, winds, and what Sunset calls "the Marine Influence", all are determined by the edges that so influence this place where we live.

Some recent Reactor columns may be found at Paul Azevedo's website, http://www.thereactor.net/ Reach him by e-mail at Paul@thereactor.net