Life on the Edge.(California)(Brief Article)

If you don't like the weather in northern California, wait a few minutes and it'll change. (Mark Twain might have said that.) Other climates are similarly mutable. A year or so ago the streets of quiet Stanford and Palo Alto were made impassable by shoals of new SUVs and by the parking valets for a galaxy of costly new restaurants. People with serviceable homes in the neighborhood were being offered Skywalker prices for them, in cash--on condition that they move out right away. Ordinary contracting work, underpinned by plentiful Hispanic labor, was hard to commission. It's pretty safe to say that the last thing on anyone's mind was the electricity bill.

Scroll on 12 months and Silicon Valley is in midinquisition about who lost the dot-com empire. Rolling blackouts encourage a reflective mood. Property prices are realistic again, and seats in good restaurants are easy to get--avec parking. And suddenly, now, the state has a surplus of power and even sells the stuff across its border. So what, as they say around here, was all that about?

This vertiginous alternation between public and private crisis must satisfy some need in the Californian soul. After all, "laid back" and mellow is itself an evolutionary response to deep-seated insecurity. Californians are never more than a rumble away from "the Big One," and there are buildings in Stanford still undergoing repair from the Loma Prieto quake of 1989. Ultra-refined as the Bay Area's lifestyle may be, it is a counterweight to the buried knowledge of temblor, tsunami, flash fire, drought and the business cycle.

That's the way it's supposed to be. As a character in Susan Sontag's "In America" phrases it, America has, in the West, its own America, its own object of desire and apprehension. People keep heading here in search both of change and stability. That contradictory longing registers in various ways. A decade ago the Republican Party seemed to have a lock on the state; now it has a difficult time even making the scoreboard. I feel increasingly like an idiot because I have only a few handholds on conversational Spanish; the next generation won't have this problem. More than once, though, on the edge of a remark, I have heard "native" Californians express guilty concern about the most obvious demographic change--the reduction of the European population to the novel status of largest minority. This will no doubt remain an apologetic ...