Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  But the old man had made an awful mistake! In his will, he’d expressed a foolish wish to be brought back home for his burial, and once his body was interred in California, the “health-giving zephyrs” went to work on him, and he leaped back to life with a renewed vigor and an otherworldly physical prowess.

  PALO ALTO (median house price, $457,800) used to be strictly a satellite of Stanford University, but during the boom years in Silicon Valley, roughly from 1970 to 1980, some big spenders from the chip factories had drifted into the area and had started buying up some prime real estate. In the hills around town, in Woodside, Mountain View, and Los Altos, brave new homes had blossomed on a scale previously associated only with the excesses of Hollywood.

  The houses seemed to be engaged in a mute competition, each trying to outdo the other in terms of size and expense and most of them having little or no architectural relevance to the land upon which they’d been built. There were mock villas in the Tuscan or Provençal mode, turreted fortresses flying pennants, horse ranches off the Montana plain, and great boxes of glass and redwood so divorced from any aesthetic concerns that their sole effect was to scream, “My owner’s rich!”

  Not for nothing did the name of Walt Disney keep cropping up around Silicon Valley. Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s founder, the progenitor of Pong, Pac-Man, and Miss Pac-Man, those first-generation video games that already seemed as whimsically primitive as cave paintings—Bushnell had roared out of Utah’s Mormon wastes after college hoping that his experience as a worker in an amusement park would earn him a niche in the Disney empire. He was turned down cold, but he had the last laugh, parlaying his company into a mansion in Woodside.

  During the same go-go epoch, Stephen Jobs, a driving force behind Apple computers, whose net worth had been assessed at $200 million at the time, had acquired a massive Tudor estate in nearby Los Gatos. Another Los Gatan, Philip Hwang (net worth, $610 million), who had started Tele Video Systems, resided in a faux Welsh castle that had a dining room comfortably seating four hundred guests.

  In California real estate circles, such residences were sometimes known as “I-made-it” houses. An “I-made-it” house marked the exact historical moment when a Californian rose above the masses and was liberated from the confines of a melting-pot suburb like Hercules, where the detective powers of a Sherlock Holmes were required to tell one home from another.

  “We’re building a house in Wildcat Canyon,” you heard people say, or “We’re building a house in Blackhawk,” and the words appeared to give them a potent lift. A custom-built house was assertive and implied a certain control over your destiny.

  In the past decade, the average “I-made-it” house was getting bigger, with the floor space doubling from 2,400 to 4,800 square feet. The houses had gyms, screening rooms, Nintendo midways, and subterranean quarters for au pairs from foreign lands. Children slept in their own wing, miles from their slumbering parents.

  SILICON VALLEY, USA. I watched the morning sun bounce off mirrored buildings, while cars ripped and swirled through hastily planned intersections, performing the daily push-and-shove of the money dance.

  In the dicey maneuvering from stoplight to stoplight, there was a weird mimickery of computer-board circuitry, wires and switches in bright, Mondrian colors processing information at the quickest possible speed. The drivers had the look of overextended debtors, in hock up to their ears just to keep the Jag or the Lexus free from the clutches of the repo man.

  Sunnyvale was often cited as the key town for computer wizards, but Silicon Valley’s boundaries were really indistinct. It didn’t draw its coordinates so much from any fixed points on earth as it did from the overheated force field that sparked and crackled between the lobes of its central players’ brains. The computer game inspired a consummate amount of gossip, and you absolutely couldn’t function if you weren’t in the loop.

  A venture capitalist once said that the greatest legal creation of wealth in world history had taken place in Silicon Valley—yet another California Gold Rush, then.

  So rich, complex, data-dense, and militarily important was the valley that the old Soviet nuclear team had selected the San Francisco Peninsula as one of its top-ten targets in the country. I drove to Ground Zero at Walsh Road and San Thomas Expressway in Santa Clara and pictured it as a nuked-out crater, where mongrel humans from beyond the mushroom cloud were wandering in oblivion.

  Electronics and high-tech businesses had always found a home on the peninsula. The intellectual climate was conducive to innovation, to the swapping of new ideas and the jerry-rigging of new firms. The list of inventions born here was long—two-way radio telephones, shortwave radios, the klystron tube (essential in radar and in microwaves), transistors, and transmitters.

  In San Francisco proper, Philo T. Farnsworth had done his first experiments with the Frankenstein that became television, but Palo Alto was a more significant place for brainstorming on account of Stanford Industrial Park, more than eight thousand acres of university land committed to R&D by Frederick Turman, Stanford’s dean of engineering, in the 1930s. Hewlett-Packard, Ampex, and Fairchild Semiconductor were all initially situated in the park, a start-up heaven.

  The peninsula was well prepared to receive the new breed of high-tech entrepreneurs who began to collect there in the late 1960s. They were the maverick geniuses from the American fringe, readers of Mad and Dune, gizmo lovers since the second grade, pale and unathletic, owners of chemistry sets and remote-control cars, devotees of Dungeons and Dragons, diligent masturbators, adolescent in their ardor and their enthusiasm, serious consumers of junk food, celebrants of Dr Pepper and Diet Coke, envoys of the late night—fantasists, savants, and dreamers.

  The new entrepreneurs were courageous. Having been out of step all their lives, they were not thrown by the rapid advances in technology that flustered the less flexible. Computers were their catnip. Give them access to a mainframe, and they’d gather around it in a red-eyed knot, hacking away at all hours, breaking into phone-lines or databanks and pondering the “what-ifs” of the future. The military knew of their escapades, and its procurers sometimes used the big Crays at Lawrence Livermore Lab to seduce them into defense work.

  The hackers put out underground papers and dealt in samizdat. They held beer busts where everyone got drunk and exchanged techno-secrets. To support themselves, they often took lower-echelon jobs at electronics firms on the peninsula and distinguished themselves by not following orders and asking too many questions.

  Stanford was the hot spot. At the Home Brew Computer Club, Steven Jobs and his high-school chum, Steve Wozniak, started selling personal computers to their pals in the mid-1970s. They relied on scavenged hardware and put together their prototype, Apple I, in a garage, using a twenty-dollar microprocessor. They pitched the personal-computer idea to their respective employers at Atari and Hewlett-Packard, but there was little interest, so they branched out and sold the machines at a byte shop in Mountain View.

  Jobs, a bearded, long-haired vegetarian, was the business person, while Wozniak handled the science. In 1976, they came up with Apple II, a significant technological advance. The PC weighed just twelve pounds and was so simple to operate that IBM and other corporations became convinced of the market appeal of such computers and embarked on a crash program to manufacture them.

  When Apple went public in 1980, Jobs and Wozniak made millions, as did their investors. Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist, earned about $14 million on stock he’d bought for nine cents a share two years earlier. In the boom years, with the mingling of investors, MB As, and entrepreneurs, there were many similar scores. In 1983, for instance, toward the end of a huge growth cycle, nine men and women hit the big time by going public with their stock. The smallest payoff to any of them was $31 million.

  By 1984, Apple was profitable enough to slip into the Fortune 500, the first company ever to do so after only five years in business. The stakes were high now, and a new seriousness set in. The halcyon age of hacking a
nd goofing was over. Computer Shack was transformed into Computer Land and Kentucky Fried Computers turned into North Star. As the entrepreneurs got more sophisticated, their hobbies did, too—private airplanes, superluxury automobiles, and such esoteric pursuits as Transcendental Meditation, est, and Scientology, as though everyone had simultaneously perceived a spiritual void blipping across their monitors.

  The early 1980s were a watershed moment in Silicon Valley. The valley had a past now, a history—it had fallen from grace. The same year that Apple joined the Fortune 500, Atari laid off a thousand workers, while founder Bushnell veered wildly in the direction of Pizza Time Restaurants and Chuck E. Cheese. A grand shakeout was under way.

  In the bars were hopeful programmers and MBAs met for exploratory discussions, the talk had a wistful flavor of nostalgia at the passing of a golden age. It was the same nostalgia you heard in San Francisco when gay men talked about a time before AIDS, the same sad acceptance that came into the voices of loggers and fishermen when they spoke of the lost abundance of the forests and the seas—the same high-pitched note of regret that hung in the air everywhere in California when the party was over at last.

  Silicon Valley was not dead, though, not by a long shot. In such hangouts as the Lion & Compass in Sunnyvale, youths with bad haircuts and too many pens and pencils in their breast pockets still hunkered over pints of beer to whisper about matters pending.

  The single constant in Silicon Valley was its intellectual fecundity. Only in this sliver of the state—in this sliver of America—could you rent an office, install a phone, and begin a round of blind calling to the very best minds in the high-tech universe, each genius listening closely to see if you were a clue to the next thing coming.

  ON MAPS, Santa Clara Valley is a welter of urban and suburban density, red lines that crisscross and cancel one another out. The density breaks only on the southwestern flank of the valley, where the Santa Cruz Mountains form a barrier between progress and the ocean.

  Native Californians of my generation, people who grew up around Campbell or Cupertino or San Jose, sometimes become emotional when they tell about what happened to Santa Clara Valley during their childhoods. They have sweet memories of being born into a pastoral landscape where peach, pear, prune, and apple trees put out a plethora of blossoms every spring, but they remember, too, how by the time they turned eighteen and left for college, the orchards were all gone, replaced by houses, strip malls, shopping centers, and industrial parks.

  Among planners in California, Santa Clara Valley, congested and overbuilt, its greenbelt reduced to scattered blades of grass, is often held up as a model of what not to do. And yet the lesson of my tour of Bay Area suburbs was that the model was being repeated ceaselessly and consciously, with no hope for a let-up in sight.

  The San Francisco Bay Area had a population of about 7.5 million, fully a quarter of the state’s residents. There were still 2 million acres of agricultural land—row crops, farms, orchards, vineyards, and pastures—but about 30,000 acres of it fell to development each year.

  A farmer in Brentwood, in Contra Costa County, might have paid about $6,000 an acre for farmland in the mid-1980s, but he could get about $15,000 an acre for it now by selling it as ranchettes in five-acre parcels. If the local planning commission rezoned the area to allow for subdividing, the price would shoot up to about $85,000 an acre.

  Happiness, for a moment.

  IN SAN JOSE, I walked through the old downtown past Mexican restaurants that smelled of peppers and cooking oil and ate my dinner at a Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall, the only white man in the joint. Families sat quietly at tables spooning in pho, a nourishing beef broth of lean meat and tendons sprinkled with bean sprouts and cilantro.

  San Jose was a bigger city than San Francisco now. Asians from all over were moving in, dispossessed Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais. They were not worried about the vanishing open space in California and the ongoing slaughter of the greenbelt. They were the newest bench-sitters, glad for an indoor toilet and a window with a view.

  I ordered Vietnamese coffee at the end of my meal. The shy, teenage girl who brought it, reedlike in a silk dress, was the very stuff of haiku. And what a lovely smile! I felt a blackness in my heart for ever worrying about anything.

  Watch it, brother, I counseled myself. You’ll wind up living in Berkeley.

  Tomorrow, the twentieth of July, I would hit the road again, hellbent to reach the border before autumn, so I meditated for a time on simple, direct things—on the high, cool cirques of Yosemite and the dusty farming reaches of the San Joaquin.

  PART FOUR

  SAN JOAQUIN

  By the roadside the dust lay thick and grey, and, on either hand, stretching on toward the horizon, losing itself in a mere smudge in the distance, ran the illimitable parallels of the wire fence.

  —Fran Norris,

  The Octopus

  Lines of people moving across the fields.

  —John Steinbeck,

  The Grapes of Wrath

  CHAPTER 14

  PROFESSOR JOSEPH LE CONTE of Berkeley, Georgia-born, holder of a doctorate in medicine from New York State University and a postgraduate student of the great Louis Agassiz at Harvard, took leave of his family in Oakland in the following way on July 21, 1870:

  Amid many kind and cheering words, mingled with tender regrets; many encouragements, mingled with earnest entreaties to take care of myself, and to keep out of drafts and damp while sleeping on the bare ground in the open air; many half-supressed tears, concealed beneath bright smiles, I left my home and dear ones this morning. Surely I must have a heroic and dangerous air about me, for my little baby boy shrinks from my rough flannel shirt and broad-brim hat.…

  Le Conte and nine other men, the “university excursion party,” were embarking on a horseback trip to Yosemite Valley, which had been designated as a state park six years earlier. Although he made light of the journey, assigning all fears to sentimental women and innocent babes, there was some genuine concern beneath the jaunty surface of his prose.

  Yosemite Valley had come to symbolize everything wild in California, every untamed natural force that could not be controlled. Its name was derived from an Awani Indian word that was presumed to mean “grizzly bear.” Even before the Southern Pacific began promoting tourism, J. M. Hutchings, an English writer, was carrying on in his California Magazine about the awesome dimensions of the valley, where he happened to own a hotel. Seven miles long, its rocky walls rose to a height of 4,800 feet in some spots.

  In salons on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, passersby were moved to gasp at the mammoth-plate portraits of Half Dome and Bridalveil Falls, the work of such expeditionary photographers as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Yosemite Valley was both compelling and disturbing. It outstripped the power of the brain to imagine it.

  In Le Conte’s departure, too, you could see the origins of wilderness adventuring as a leisure activity, nascent backpacking and mountaineering, with Everyman and Everywoman cast as Natty Bumppo. The idea of risking pneumonia by sleeping in a bedroll on the ground held an increasing appeal to the stout of heart. If you survived, you’d be a better person, a more fully fleshed Californian.

  Professor Le Conte had just turned forty-seven and hadn’t mounted a horse for ten years, but he was determined “not to be an encumbrance to the merry party,” whose goal was to cover about thirty miles on their first day, riding over Contra Costa Ridge and through Hayward Pass. The men got so excited, though, that they pressed on for an extra five miles to Laddsville before striking camp. That proved to be a miscalculation. Le Conte estimated that Laddsville had a mammalian population of about two hundred, one hundred and fifty of which were dogs that barked all night and kept the campers awake.

  Laddsville was Livermore now, a town still on a main route to Yosemite National Park, in which the valley reposed. Livermore had a weapons lab, many replicating subdivisions, and some land planted to vineyards. It had a Mobil station whe
re I stopped to fill my tank on the way to the park. The owner-dealer was Pyung Jung.

  It was a lovely, breezy morning, and the hills around Livermore had gone to their summer gold-brown. I thought of the country in Le Conte’s time, of the ranches, cattle, and rippling wheatfields. I saw the saddle-sore, dog-persecuted university crew waking up, the men coughing, farting, and peeing on the campfire embers after a breakfast of bacon, cheese, bread, and good tea, feeling refreshed and comforted.

  Ahead of them lay the unknown mountains and their mysteries. The only mystery confronting me was whether or not I’d get a campsite without a reservation from Ticketron.

  From Livermore, I climbed over Altamont Pass on Highway 580, where turbines spun with the ecstatic energy of pinwheels to harvest electricity from the wind, and then I- crossed the California Aqueduct, a conduit that brought water from the Sacramento Delta to the San Joaquin.

  Turning southeast, I took Highway 99 into Modesto under a sky that was gray with dust, smoke, and chemical fumes. A Rotary Club sign pumped the virtues of Water, Wealth, Contentment, and Health. The town’s founder, William Ralston, a railroader, had refused to let it be named after him, but he hadn’t quite succeeded. “Muy modesto,” said his Spanish constituents, commenting on his humility and bestowing a backhanded tribute.

  Turlock, Atwater, Merced. The plains of the San Joaquin, and the noon heat ablaze. There were no dams or aqueducts when Le Conte had galloped through. The land was still as arid and very nearly as treeless as the Sahara.

  The university crew suffered from parched throats, baked lips, and bloody noses. They saw mirages and had fantasies about water. Their thighs ached and their butts hurt—“an exquisite tenderness of the sitting bones.” One rider, Everett Pomroy, known to the company as “Our Poet,” tried to ease his haunches by sitting side-saddle, but his mount threw him. Pomroy, infuriated, set the beast right by punching it.