I've been thinking about layers for the last couple of months. While I've been pondering layers, I received a gift of a beautiful book, The Infinite City, by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit. Each time I sit down to read the book, I can't get past page 3, not because the book is boring, but because Solnit writes about maps and that makes my mind wander all over the place.
We moved to Danville more than 30 years ago because we could afford the housing prices and because Danville was a 45-minute drive to San Francisco for my husband Bill and a 45-minute drive to Fremont where I taught school. My map of Danville is not 2-dimensional. Instead the map is like a cube with many layers. Our townhouse that we bought was part of the beginning of the extension of Danville out into the Tassajara Valley with its rolling hills and cattle ranches. The cowboys would come into town and dine at the restaurant and bar that is now another coffee shop. I haven't seen a Stetson in town in a long time.
We could easily bike into town from our townhouse. We knew all our neighbors, including the man who rebelled against our homeowners' association and painted six-foot nudes on his garage door. We ate breakfast every Saturday morning at Vally Medlyn's, a 1950's coffee shop with a counter, steel-tubed tables and chairs, and a few booths against the back wall. When we exited Medlyn's, we walked by the fire station next door with its arched doors, looked across at Elliot's, the local dive bar with a couple of motorcycles already in place outside, and crossed over to the Danville Hotel, constructed to look like an old pioneer town.
Vally Medlyn's and Elliot's are still here, the fire station was converted long ago to shops, then to several restaurants, and the Danville Hotel was torn apart and renovated. It now houses condos on the second floor over the shops and restaurants in the new buildings. We don't see cowboys there anymore. Instead Danville has become a mecca of small restaurants where you can find families fresh from soccer tournaments sharing pizzas, singles looking to meet up while ordering a Manhattan or couples sharing Spicy Pomegranate Chicken Wings at Bridges, a restaurant which was once featured in the movie
Mrs. Doubtfire.
We used to come into town to the hardware and lumber store, which were later replaced by a car wash. The car wash disappeared and now the land is part of a block of stores and restaurants including our local Peet's Coffee where the cyclists from all over the Bay Area descend. When the space was a hardware store, the cashier asked us what we planned to do with our purchases and offered advice to us weekend DIYers. We would take 30 minutes to get past the cash register. Now we sit outside Peet's and watch the cyclists gang up around us while we all spend the rest of Saturday morning drinking various coffee drinks.
After our first ten years in Danville, we moved farther out in the Tassajara Valley. When we moved into our new house, the hill behind us was bare. We planted small stick-like trees that now tower over our house. Even our house has layers as rooms changed from office space to baby's nursery to child's room and back to office space again. Underneath our house are the layers that came before: the cattle ranches, the Miwok indigenous people, and the dinosaurs that left their bones to help build layers of new ways of living.
My map of Danville also takes into account the parks, animals and plants that have changed since we moved here. Crows and turkeys have discovered that Danville is a great place to live. Flocks of turkeys strut the hillside and down the streets where they had never been before. The crows now sail above the trees, scaring away the hawks and other smaller birds. We've had plagues of mice and grasshoppers over the years, but the pair of great horned owls that we saw in our first year at our new home disappeared.
If you live somewhere for a long time, you know how things change. Your map of your town would be different from your neighbors, depending on when you and they arrived. Can you begin to imagine the cubes of your own mind map? What does each layer represent? What do the cars, the houses you lived in, the rooms, the place tell others about you?
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