On the street where you live
Last weekend I went on a mini-vacay for an overdue whirlwind visit with friends and family — four nights, two aunts, my step-mom, two friends in Sacramento and a sister day in San Francisco — 500 miles in four days. When I'm working with International Training Programs, months will pass without seeing family so a few days with kin keeps me grounded.
I travel south several times a year with my work, but it's dramatically different when I can roam as I please. On this recent trip, I visited my hometown and remembered how lucky I was to grow up just a mile from the Carquinez Strait. My sister and I languished for half an hour and ate gelato in Washington Square in North Beach. I unabashedly eavesdropped on a dysfunctional conversation between a father and son and my sister and I counted the couples (young and old) snuggling on blankets on the grass. We strolled through Haight-Ashbury and grooved on Latin Music at the corner bar a few blocks from her funky apartment. I watched seagulls while she did yoga in an Alameda park overlooking the Bay.
Leaving the water behind, I drove through the horse country of Calaveras County with fresh eyes, the rolling green hills were a warm welcome.
On my final trek back to Chico, I dropped back into civilization via a rural route to meet a friend for coffee in Rancho Cordova. As the green hills faded into the backdrop, the modern civilization appeared rather abruptly. Just a few miles before I reached the dense housing developments, I passed roads including Frogs Leap Drive and Bear Hollow. Do any frogs remain in this area, I wondered. Were there bears in some long-gone hollow?
Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cringe at street names that now seem out of place with a landscape of street lights and stucco, gas stations and places that sell food to eat in your car.
In Chico we have the Almond Orchard shopping center, where there was likely once an almond orchard. In the Bay Area an entire town is called Walnut Creek, named in the 1860s because of the number of walnut trees. Now there are five zip codes in Walnut Creek and you would need to do a long search to find a walnut tree.
We can complain about urbanization or we can keep searching for places to escape on a long weekend and enjoy the history hidden in street names.
In Paradise, you can find Apple View Way, which is just a half a skip from Noble Orchard. I have passed by Lucky John Road many times, and I hope some historian will tell me the real story. I always imagine there was a guy named John who found a very large gold nugget during the Gold Rush. Maybe he bought a big plot of land
and found a pretty wife.
Other towns have street names that fit a certain category. In Chico's case, we have Mangrove, Palm, Spruce, Laburnum, Oleander, Magnolia, Citrus. I looked up the word Arcadian and one definition is “an ideal rural Paradise.”
Elk Grove has many cowboy street names, including Wrangler and Equestrian drives, and roads called Sloughhouse, Eagles Nest and White Rock.
In Durham you won't wonder why we visit Blossom Lane to view the almond bloom. There's also a Nut Buggy Lane. You can also find Big Dog Court on the map, which makes me wonder if they named the road rather than posting a “beware of dog” sign.
Some of the charm of new street names is lost in our day of large housing developments. We'll see streets named along some generic theme, such as female names or flowers. There's a neighborhood near my nieces' house in Redding with names out of this world, including Comet Street, Martian and Galaxy Way, Corona, Nebula and numerous planets. Someday, maybe streets will be named after things that are soon to be obsolete, including Landline Telephone Way, Gas Turbine Engine Avenue and Paper Currency Drive.