Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
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Sunday, May 2, 2004
21:13 - Don't chop California off into the sea just yet http://homepage.mac.com/btman/PhotoAlbum11.html	(top)
Up the Almaden Valley in the southern end of San Jose, literally just out my back door, there's a long and winding finger of the Silicon Valley lifestyle: an almost creepily new and modern series of neighborhoods with manicured lawns, large houses on small lots, big new Safeway-anchored shopping plazas, and mansions on the hillsides overlooking the valley where people on rolllerblades walk their elegantly coiffed dogs down the paved path next to the creek. But take Almaden Road when it forks off from Almaden Avenue, and the first thing you see is a huge American flag flying over a biker burger bar with a row of Harleys parked outside, and a handful of guys talking and laughing around a roadside barbecue. It's at this point that Silicon Valley gives way, in the space of less than a city block, to a rural farming region full of horse ranches one after another. Almaden Road winds its way up into the hills, toward the hunched Santa Cruz mountains that raise their dark wooded bulk up behind my house, and you'd think that there was nothing past the horse farms except for more horse farms, a canyon through which squids on sportbikes wind, and a reservoir or two. Well, you'd be wrong. At least on the horse-farms part. Much to my surprise, and my parents' (who were along for a car trip through the mountains up Hicks Road, where the giant square building that once housed an Air Force communications tower leans mysteriously over the valley below), there's a vibrant little row of cute and perky houses, nestled into a canyon at the base of the mountains, where the Almaden Valley narrows to a crinkle in the hillsides, and the road narrows to a two-lane tributary through the tunnel of trees. According to a sign next to the road by the biker bar where Almaden Road begins, it's called "New Almaden", and it's 2.5 miles from the intersection of the two worlds. It's also home to someone named Kevin. Check out this slideshow for a look at the California that seldom makes news. Remind yourself at all times that you're not five minutes' drive from the McMansions that house the technoveau riche that filled up the nooks and crannies of Silicon Valley in the last two decades; you're just a couple of turns of the wheel from the Bay Area, the region that also contains Berkeley and Market Street. It's all the same California, believe it or not. Just imagine what it's like once you're actually over the hills and out into the rest of the state�the wine country, the Central Valley, the Salinas Valley, Fresno, Bakersfield. And lest you get the feeling that people like this represent the entirety of the Golden State, take a look at how the Almaden Valley chooses to remember Pat Tillman. Up on Bald Mountain today, overlooking this same valley from a shoulder of the Santa Cruz mountains where the trees clear to give you a panorama of everything from Mt. Tamalpais to Gilroy, my mom told me that she thinks I've landed in a pretty good place, here. You know, I'd tend to agree. UPDATE: Particularly as long as I'm guaranteed to be far, far away from Ted Rall.