Where Wild Things Were
Something is lost when something is built

Story By ROGER ANDERSON
December 8, 1988

When you went out the front door of our home at the corner of Broadway and Anza in El Cajon, you found yourself in a yard shaded by a blue-green canopy formed by the joining branches and leaves of six olive trees whose gnarled trunks rose from the tattered lawn. The bitter olives and sliver-shaped leaves that littered the yard were kept from turning into a compost by my sister and me, who were paid a penny a minute by my father to rake the lawn periodically, with a yearly assist from a family of itinerant gypsies who would come and lay a tarp on the ground, shake all the olives down from the trees, and truck them off to an olive-oil plant somewhere. A fence of peeling, criss-crossed white laths separated our yard and Broadway, whose two shaded lanes ran an immeasurable distance east and west and were lined throughout by palms and pepper trees. About a block and a half to the west, 100 feet or so north of Broadway, there was a huge grove of eucalyptus where the kids of our neighborhood sometimes sneaked off and where we liked to construct crazy fortresses out of the windfall wreckage of bark and branches. Directly across Broadway from our house, wild grassy fields — broken up only by an occasional pocket of old houses and by hidden streamlets that chuckled along beneath the tangled, bending stalks — spread clear to Main Street, about two miles away.

After about 1955, all this began to disappear. First the eucalyptus grove was ploughed under to make room for a housing development with the name Valley Village. The fields between Broadway and Main went down before an onslaught of rambling stucco school facilities, apartment buildings, tracts, and finally (around 1960) a modern freeway. Then, in the mid-Sixties, our family and the rest of the neighborhood watched helplessly as the individuals who owned large parcels of land along Broadway succeeded in having the street widened — a necessary move if those acres were ever to have any significant commercial value. The City of El Cajon bought from us (at an enforced discount) about two-thirds of our front yard and sent in heavy machinery to chop down the olive trees and grade away the lawn and the fence. The other yards along Broadway, as well as the peppers and palms that actually lined the street, got the same treatment.

In the course of a few short years, the semibucolic paradise that my sister and I and our friends had known all our lives was irretrievably lost. Broadway's four-lane length — unshaded, lined by asphalt parking lots and gimcrack shopping strips — became the lurid headstone for our vanished childhood.

The older I've gotten and the more people I've talked to about days gone by, the clearer my understanding has become that my own story of paradise lost is no isolated case but part of an ongoing and nearly universal pageant of extirpation and wrenching change. When I first became rational enough to understand the hardships and dangers of World War II (which ended a few years before I was born), it struck me as unimaginable good fortune that the American homeland had never been directly threatened by bombers and tanks and goose-stepping legions, that El Cajon and 10,000 communities like it had never been shelled, gassed, or shock-trooped into a mangled condition. Later, I realized that the American land war didn't even begin until after the treaties had been signed at Potsdam and that it was a war waged against us not by the Axis powers but by returning U.S. troops (that is, our fathers — my own was a surveyor) looking for work and Lebensraum, and especially by the burgeoning industries and corporations that had fattened on the business of war and afterward could see no reason for palliating their imperial ambitions. Deploy the bulldozers ...

The San Diego area provides a classic example of what can happen when growth is allowed to run unchecked across the land, tearing down, building up, altering beyond recognition. In some ways, the "typical" San Diegan is someone who arrived in the area seeking sun, sand, and ephemeral career opportunities five or ten years ago and whose sense of local history extends back no further than that. But there are people who have a lifelong personal investment in the place and who — provided only that they are asked — have many memories (highly subjective, as you will see) to share concerning county neighborhoods they knew and loved that have vanished, leaving only their names behind.

Jim Kilijanski

Jim Kilijanski's father was stationed in San Diego, in the navy, during World War II, and afterward got married and settled in Chula Vista. Today,  Jim himself is 35 years old and lives with his wife in a tidy little house just down the street from the house where he grew up. He works as an airline mechanic, and the day I spoke with him he was due to go in soon for his regular two-to-ten-p.m. shift.

"When I was a kid, my friends and I played down in Rice Canyon," he told me. "At least, that was our main place. We'd walk through Hilltop High School down into the canyon, and later we rode our bikes down there, and still later our dirt bikes. Since the canyon was so close to the coastline, there was a lot of rainfall, and if you dug two or three feet down, the soil was black. The rain made the canyon rich in animal life and plant life. Of course, it was all pretty dry during the summer, but during the winter it came alive with green grass, wildflowers, succulents. There were foxes and skunks and a lot of the other animals you'll see in bottomland. Some people think there isn't much wildlife in such places, but they just haven't looked for it, and they don't realize that during the daylight hours a lot of these species don't like to show themselves. But if you spend enough time in bottomland, you'll see there's just an incredible variety of wildlife, an entire food pyramid.

"One of the most remarkable things I remember seeing in Rice Canyon were these huge flocks of quail. I guess I was in about the third grade, and I had no idea what they were — just all these birds, maybe three or four hundred of them, covering an entire hillside. And at one end of the canyon there was a flower farm, where someone cultivated flowers for sale. Thousands of flowers; it was just beautiful.

"There were a lot of little finger canyons leading into the main canyon whose sides were so steep you couldn't climb them," he went on. "One of them we called Fossil Canyon; it was a real deep crevasse where you'd find clam fossils and all kinds of ocean fossils. I guess it was under water a few million years ago. There were these huge bones that people said were whale bones, and years later, when they were grading down there, some guy found a dinosaur egg. Up towards the end of Fossil Canyon, there were these strange trees whose name I never knew — like sagebrush, only they were trees. Sage trees.

"Down at the end of J Street, there were the ruins of some old Mexican house, adobe ruins. I don't know when it was built, but it must have been before the turn of the century because it was really decayed. We thought it was haunted, and we used to love to go sneaking around in there. There were all kinds of artifacts just lying around on the ground that got picked up by people over the years. There were old ironwork grills on the windows, and I remember seeing some guy pulling the grills down, scavenging them. Then the whole thing got torn down so they could build houses. "There really wasn't any fishing in Rice Canyon, though, so if we wanted to go fishing we went over to Bonita Valley. There used to be some pretty big ponds there — like the one we called Miller's Pond, which must have been a good eight or ten acres. Once a friend of mine who lived across the street from us brought a bunch of live crappie fish back from Otay Lake, and I took some of them and put them in our bathtub. For some reason my parents weren't too happy about that, so I took them down and planted them in Miller's Pond. As time went on, those crappie got bigger and multiplied till it got to where people were taking their poles down there to catch 'em. You'd have to know where the pond was in order to find it, because it was surrounded by trees and dense vegetation. Big ponds all in through there. There were crawdads and bass and catfish and the crappies I planted. Bluegill. We'd all go down there just about every day after school. It's really sad that none of it's there anymore. There was also a golf course at one end of Bonita Valley, but they took it and moved it to the other end."

They moved the golf course?

"Well, they didn't really move it," he admitted. "They just got rid of the golf course at the western end and then built another one at the eastern end."

Since there was still some time left before he had to report for work, Jim and I took a drive through Chula Vista and Bonita. As we tooled along, he pointed out the "native desert" that still remains: long swaths of brush and grass that run like Mohawk haircuts over the Chula Vista hills, above or adjacent to housing tracts and office parks and places where heavy machinery is even now making further inroads into the landscape. Soon we were driving through Rice Canyon, where a large shopping complex called Terra Nova Plaza — faux adobe with red Spanish tiles on the roofs -- now sits.

"We'd ride our bikes along the floor of the canyon here, and during the winter it was so cold your hands would get red," Jim recalled. "Then when you pulled up out of the canyon, it would suddenly seem about ten degrees warmer. And I'd go biking around down there with my dog — sometimes we'd hike all the way to where Southwestern College is now. These days there's no place for kids to go but this shopping center, and it's nothing but trouble. I mean, the shopping center's a part of life too, but there has to be a balance. Sometimes at night I go walking through Chula Vista and I see these kids making a phone call at the pay phone. Now, I know where these people are coming from, and I have respect for them, but I know what they're into — a gang, they call it. That's fine with me. But I just can't help thinking how different  it could be if they had some open space to go to after school. You know, like 'Let's go throw a line in the water and see if the fish are biting.' Work out some of their frustrations that way.

"It was a terrible, terrible thing when they built this shopping center,” he said, tapping on the window. "That was about 1978, and I was working up in Alaska at the time. I got a phone call from a friend of mine down here, and I said, 'What about the canyon?' It's gone, Jim. It's gone.' 'Oh, no. The canyon’s gone?' It was very depressing, because this was a dear place to me, it was part of my life. I really hated to see it go. I had nightmares about it. Once I dreamed I was down in the canyon and it was all fenced in; there were bulldozers everywhere, and people were running around yelling at me to get out.

Everywhere I turned the land had been graded level. Then I woke up and realized it wasn't a nightmare, it was reality."

As we drove toward Bonita Valley,  Jim pointed out a water tower on a hilltop and said that this was where he and his high school friends used to go to build big bonfires and have parties. "And do you see way over there?" he said. "See that other water tower surrounded by trees on that other hill? Everyone used to call it Breezy Hill because of the prevailing winds. It was where you'd go on your first date. Kids used to talk about how their parents met 'up at Breezy.' That's how they referred to it."

Down in Bonita Valley, it was good to see that the bottomland Jim remembered had not been entirely razed: a belt of grasses and trees still stretched along, for some distance, under the rubric "Sweetwater Regional Park Open Space Preserve." "The thing is," he explained, "since this is Bonita, no one's ever been able to come in and just tear things out any way they want to. After all, it's rich people who live in Bonita, and rich people get to have a say about what happens in their neighborhood. They get to say, 'Hey, not in my back yard; you take it someplace else.'"

But when we reached the spot where Miller's Pond was — or used to be— we were in for a depressing sight. There, some governmental agency had installed a huge "environmental flood-control channel" — an unsightly mass of cement slabs bristling with rebar and outjutting steel beams, all resting in the mud like a foundered garbage scow. For a moment we stared at this juggernaut the way the Parisians must have stared at the panzer divisions grinding down the Champs Elysées. "This is what our children are going to inherit," Jim said at length. "They talk about the greenhouse effect — this is another worldwide phenomenon."

As is generally true in other kinds of war, when the troops and artillery of development come along and start implementing a scorched-earth policy in your neighborhood, you hardly ever see the generals. You see the foot soldiers (construction workers, carpenters) and the, first lieutenants (supervisors, foremen), but whoever is masterminding and directing the operation is almost always out of reach in some office building somewhere, maybe even in another state — or, these days, in another country. To this extent, Christine Garland is fortunate: the man responsible for pushing the buttons that blasted her childhood to smithereens actually lived in her neighborhood. Unlike most of us, she's seen the enemy face to face.

Christine's parents (her father was retired navy) bought a house in Sunnyside, which is part of Bonita, in 1959, and she was born a year later. The house, which was built during the 1920s and still exists, has hardwood floors and originally sat on its own acre of hilltop land. Christine's father died in an auto accident in 1975, and in '77 the family (she has two older brothers and an older sister) moved to Chula Vista. Today, Christine is 28 years old and works as a computer operator for the county. She is single and lives in Chula Vista. I met her at a downtown Chula Vista watering hole called Jimmy's — one of those combination coffee shop/steak house/lounge bars that are always filled with a lot of noise and where you always see tired insurance salesmen and their spouses lingering over a stale bite to eat.

"Sunnyside was a minuscule town in those days, with no more than 15 houses or so," she recalled. "The people who lived there were good people. Everyone knew each other; it was a very neighborly kind of thing. The postman always brought us candy. All around the area there were cow pastures and hills with flowers growing on them. I used to pick sweetpeas to take home as a present for my mom. I remember one day Arnold Palmer, the famous golfer, came out of his house and yelled at us for picking sweetpeas on his land. There were brooks and bridges, too, where you could catch frogs and polliwogs. Once a couple of the older kids picked me up and threatened to throw me off one of those bridges, and my brothers used to catch garter snakes and scare me with them. I guess since I was the baby of the family they liked to pick on me. There was a pond off Bonita Road where we built a treehouse, and we dragged a bunch of boards and an old couch into the bushes there and built a little fort. That's all part of Bonita Golf Course now.

"Our old house had a barn out in back when we first moved in, and it was so decayed and so termited we finally had to burn it down. So my father got a keg and invited all his friends over, and they set the barn on fire and everyone had a good time. We roasted marshmallows over the flames. I really loved living in that house. We had chickens and rabbits and a goat, and there were wolves and foxes running wild. We used to go out looking for them.

"One day the bus driver was driving us to school along a road that ran through these pastures," she went on, "and he turned off the road and said, `I think this is something every kid ought to see' And he showed us this cow giving birth to a calf. He waited till it was all done and the calf had stoodup, and then he said, 'Okay, I'd better get you to school.'  We were late. That's a beautiful memory."

As it happened, Corky McMillin — a man who would become famous all over the San Diego area for building and selling thousands of new housing units — lived in the neighborhood. Christine, as they say, remembers his family when.

"I grew up with Corky's family," she recalled. "His son was my first love back in grade school. This was before Corky made it big. Then in 1968 or so Corky's father died, and things changed. I guess Corky's father owned a lot of land in the Chula Vista area, and when he died Corky inherited it all. Pretty soon he started building it up, and money started coming in, and the family changed. The kids got a little snottier. But that was typical of Bonita. We weren't one of the rich families there; we were fairly poor. True, we had an acre of land, but we didn't have much money. And Corky's family got to where they had a lot of money. I don't want to knock anybody, but it was like they became too good to talk to ordinary people. When my father died in a car crash in 1975, Corky's family was real nice to us. They sent us clothes and stuff like that. But they had moved into a nice little mansion in Bonita, way off the street, and gotten into a very reclusive kind of thing.

"When Corky first started building, I didn't realize what was going on. Bonita Glen was his first project, and I didn't think much about it one way or another.  After all, there were still plenty of places to play, and the construction site itself was just another playground — even though the workers were always yelling at us to stay out of there. Later he started on Bonita Highlands, then Bonita Woods, just developing every bit of available space, and after maybe eight years it finally started to dawn on me what was going on. Most of the land was gone before I realized what he was doing.

"Not long before my father died, Corky showed up at our house to talk to my mother about some plans he had for the land adjacent to ours. He wanted to grade down the hill next to the hill our house was on, put new houses in there, and improve the streets so that sewer lines could go in and so forth. Since my mother was basically simple country folk,  all she asked was that he put in some ivy and a fence as ground cover so that our land wouldn't get eroded as a result of the grading. He said okay. She didn't ask him to put it in writing or anything. Before too long the bulldozers came in and cut down the hill next to ours so it was level with Central. Every weekend I was wakened by the sound of bulldozers. But he never did put in the ground cover, and he never built the fence like he promised. Then my father died, and my mom didn't feel like she could fight it. By that time, if we wanted to stay on in the house we'd have to get on the sewer line and meet all these other requirements, and we just didn't have the money. So we sold the place and moved to Chula Vista. As the years went by, Chula Vista filled up with condos and tracts as well."

She paused and sipped her drink while I signaled an oblivious waitress for more coffee.

"It was a very traumatic thing to go through," Christine said finally. "I can still remember looking out from our hill and seeing all these bulldozers everywhere, coming right up to our back yard. It was scary. It was terrible being a little kid and seeing these big noisy things tearing down the places I used to play in. For a while, I had dreams about being run over by bulldozers that had come to get us and get our house."

Even though Christine now lives and works only 10 or 15 minutes from Sunnyside, she almost never goes back to visit. "It's too depressing," she told me. "I did drive out there with a friend of mine about five years ago. Our house is still there, but now there's another house on the same acre. We stopped, and I asked the lady who was living in our old place if we could come in and look around. She said it was a haunted house and asked me if I could remember anything strange ever happening there. I did remember when I was a little kid that I'd hear these odd sounds at night sometimes.

"Then, about two years ago, I was out in Bonita at a party, and afterward I went driving by the old place and heard loud music. So just on a whim I stopped and knocked at the door. Now there were these young guys living there; they'd converted our old fake fireplace into a real fireplace, and they had a fire going. They were nice, but I could see that the neighborhood just wasn't the same. There was nothing but houses everywhere, and the neighborly thing was gone.

"I don't think I could ever live out there again. I'm still a country person at heart, and I'd really love to be in a country environment again. I'd love to have a garden and some animals. But I don't think I could ever move back to Bonita — it'll have to be to Ramona or Jamul or someplace like that. You know that Bonita means 'beautiful'? The thing is, Bonita isn't bonita anymore. The pasture where I saw the calf being born — there's nothing but condos now.

"To tell you the truth, I'm mentally shaken to this day by what happened to our neighborhood. And I hate to say it, but I do have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to Corky McMillin. I think he screwed us. But then, that's what happens: the rich take advantage of the poor."

If you visit the organ pavilion in Balboa Park and look off to your left, you'll see a big canyon that separates the pavilion from the picnic area called Pepper Grove. The canyon's terrain and vegetation might best be described as unimproved parkland. Wild grass carpets it, old overgrown paths run along its floor, pepper and palm trees hang tilted along the upper and lower slopes. All of Balboa Park seems to be riddled with little untended inlets and gouges that break up the carefully landscaped level of the park itself. And the North Park area, northeast of Balboa, might best be described as a residential plateau shot through by canyon archipelagoes.

People who live in North Park and are no longer children themselves probably go for months at a time without even taking in the existence of the larger and smaller island canyons that loom beyond the back boundaries of certain yards along certain streets, but if you look at the area with fresh eyes, you may be tempted to compare it with the town where Snuffy Smith and his wife have been eking out their slovenly comic-strip lives in the Sunday comics for several decades now. The poetic appeal of Snuffy's world is that its few ramshackle houses and barns and churches seem to be situated on rare tufts of level earth, which are separated from each other by abysses and sudden drops and crags and crevasses that must be navigated by walking on rickety old foot bridges and rotting logs. North Park's advantage (if you want to call it that) over Snuffy's domain is that it is under the control of a powerful American city that has had the foresight to lay out the area's streets and avenues in such a way that the canyons, in the normal course of daily adult life, need never be taken into account — they have been city-planned into inconsequence, like planets that have blundered into a cosmic singularity and fallen out of space, out of time, out of mind.

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