Cupertino is about process.

The process is about—

The process is—

***

The town, when I moved there, was a quiet, somewhat pleasant place at the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains with rather basic homes and cherry orchards here and there, half bedroom community, half unresolved. Most I ran into, like me, were starting out in life, on their way up and out. I largely knew Cupertino by the streets that led to the highways of my commutes, 35 miles north to Hayward State on 280 and 30 miles south on 17 to UC Santa Cruz. I was a part-time college English instructor.

That was almost thirty years ago. 

it was time to come to terms with the place where I lived.Marriage, a job in town at the community college, later a son—it was time to come to terms with the place where I lived. But also my writing—I wanted to start another novel. Memories of other places had decayed and those places had changed, beyond recognition. Writing, like life, is a matter of taking what you have before you and seeing what you can figure out. So I tried to discover the world I had bypassed.

I couldn't find it.

Another eight years have since passed, time I have trouble accounting for. So I went out again recently to see what has changed, what I might have missed.

I still can’t find it.

Still, there is something in the air.

***

Cupertino now. Of course it looks like a blowup of an integrated circuit. Cupertino is in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is more a concept than a precise physical area, extending roughly from Stanford University down to San Jose. During the boom years the tech firms clamored for more green cards, and programmers and would-be entrepreneurs and still others poured in. Ranch houses started going for a million or were leveled and replaced with huge, stucco palaces on small lots. It amazed me anyone had that kind of money. The orchards are gone, and there is housing all the way up into the hills.

Apple has its corporate headquarters here and HP once had a presence, large complexes they call campuses, worlds unto themselves. Employees refer to themselves collectively as families, as communities, who work together long, hard hours to make deadlines and beat the competition as they rush to bring out a new program, the next release, the next bump in processor speed, the latest version of their devices. It is easy to get caught up in their tempo. You become aware of the time it takes your screen to refresh, for numbers to crunch. Fractions of seconds begin to matter, you think about your pulse. We now have more memory than we know what to do with.

But those worlds are closed off from me. You need a badge.

Also scattered throughout the town, an orchard of small buildings with Apple logos out front, some of them places for special projects, so I've heard, where small teams work together, away from the fold. Along with these, other small, faceless buildings of other tech concerns, whose names on their signs out front, many with an x or two, give no indication of what is being done inside.

***

Once, on the Apple main building, visible from 280, a huge picture of Einstein appeared, who exhorted us to Think Different.

Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the Italian saint after whom the town was named, could spontaneously rise in miraculous levitation or fall into trancelike states.

***

I started reading—overviews, basic guides, books on the industry, inside looks. I even learned a little programming, Pascal, C, C++. Ethnogenesis is the process of creating a new culture, and in Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. A. English-Lueck, an anthropologist at San Jose State, studies ours. Our dominant institutions, she tells us, are the corporations and networks, our heroes the technological wizards, our chief values efficiency, innovation, and entrepreneurship. She interviewed one former employee at Apple, who said:

Being in Silicon Valley, it's part of a culture of people who put their heart and soul into their jobs. . . . [It] seems to be more socially conscious. . . . [Y]ou think about how the place you work affects the community or affects the world. . . . When I first [worked at] Apple, we felt we were changing the world. At Apple you definitely have the feeling that you impact people's lives.

All that is constant about Cupertino is the rate at which it disappears.The bookstore is gone. The stationery store is gone. Vallco, our mall, has lost its anchors and rests half empty. The story of a Friday night often is that I decide to go to a small restaurant I once knew only to find it gone as well. My supermarket of some seven years closed down. The WaMu branch bank around the corner, needless to say, went with the housing bust. WaMu, like many financial firms, had banked its future on subprime mortgages. All that is constant about Cupertino is the rate at which it disappears. I take my words from Joan Didion's essay on what it was like living where she once lived, Sacramento.

McDonald's, Target, Home Depot, etc. don't count.

***

The Apple headquarters is at 1 Infinite Loop, just off De Anza Boulevard and before 280. I used to go to the Apple Store there to see the latest. It reminded me of the sparse, modern architecture you see in sci-fi movies where it appears the future has brought peace and order but something is not quite right.

During the dot-com boom, everyone seemed to have a plan for something, even those of us who weren’t in the trade, and throughout the Valley there was a lightness—an uplifting, a looking up—that didn’t come entirely from the desire for cash. You could see someone with hopeful eyes walking down the street carrying a portable whiteboard. Other hopefuls met in empty offices and sat on folding chairs. The community college offered courses on how to program and manage stock options. 

At one of my son's Little League games I started talking to a father who had a project in mind and was looking for someone to write the proposal. I met several times at his house, in his living room, which had been cleared to make space for a whiteboard and a large slab table where we sat. I read a few books and realized his project wouldn't work. I'd like to tell you about it, but I signed a nondisclosure agreement. He was a nice guy, and I liked him. I don't know what happened to him, though.

With the dot-com bust, startups went under and large firms grew larger, those that survived. Programmers started showing up in my classes, bright, optimistic guys looking to start new careers. I liked them, too, and got some ideas for my novel. 

I don't know what happened to them either.

Latinos still gather early morning in front of the Home Depot looking for day work, the look on their faces menacing and expectant.

***

We have been through one major earthquake—our chimney snapped—and numerous others I don't always feel. The state has gone through a series of tremors itself, budget crises of varying degrees. I've forgotten how many. As goes the state, so goes my school. For us, hiring freezes, course cancellations, pay freezes, program cancellations, benefits put on hold, even during the boom—the money didn't reach us. 

A classroom at my school.

But during downtimes more students come to school and its energy rises. There is a renewal of purpose, at least for a while. A degree is their best shot at a better life, perhaps their only one.

I'm still a part-time instructor.

***

Within a ten minute walk from where I live, there are a half dozen title companies and just as many after-school enterprises—"Little Genius" comes to mind. The two are related. Our schools are good, everyone says, and our school district borders are known around the world and in every real estate office and apartment complex in town. So property values held during the housing bust. And they’re taking off once more.

I once had an absentee neighbor whose parents rented the apartment for their daughter so she could have a Cupertino address. It amazed me anyone had that kind of money. But also small apartments are crowded with whole families so their kids can get a shot at our schools as well.

My son's high school, where math and the sciences are pushed, boasts of its placement into Stanford, Harvard, and the increasingly competitive UC's, students on the way up and elsewhere.

In a survey taken there 80% of the students admitted to cheating.

A colleague of mine, now at Stanford, started a program called SOS—Stressed Out Students.

My dominant impression of my son's years in the public schools is of paper—green sheets, assignments, worksheets, fill-in-the-blanks, study guides, outlines, exercises, packets, folders, schedules, and planners—an unending stream. Paper found its way all over our place. I did my best to help him but got headaches trying to keep track of all the procedures.

Process—

***

The town does have history. For example: 

And:

And:

And:

Monday, March 25. I said Mass. We set out from Arroyo de las Llagas at quarter to eight in the morning, and at four in the afternoon halted at the Arroyo of San Joseph Cupertino. . . . Along the way many Indians came out to us. On seeing us they shouted amongst the oaks and then came out naked like fawns, running and shouting and making many gestures, as if they wished to stop us, and signaling to us that we must not go forward.

From Petrus Font's diary of Don Juan Bautista de Anza's second expedition, March 1776.

But almost nowhere in Cupertino can you find a structure, a visible sign, that remains from its past.

***

The center of Cupertino is defined by the crossing of Stevens Creek and De Anza Boulevards. On opposite corners, two gas stations. Behind the Chevron, a shopping center where the stationery store once was, where other stores have come and gone. On another corner, what was once East West Bank, now vacant; across from it, Cupertino City Center. 

The Center—more sparse, modern architecture, a complex of office spaces and apartments and a hotel and a few restaurants, maybe something else. Seagate has a building to itself. Behind the Center, some kind of amphitheater. 

The hotel has changed ownership, as has the Center, now in the hands of Prometheus, and office space has been slow to fill. The Center was still largely empty when I walked through the other day and no one has been able to tell me what the amphitheater is for or if it’s ever used.

There is nothing to do in the center of Cupertino at night.

I do not know the name of our mayor.

I almost never run into anyone I know anywhere, especially students or colleagues. Few of us can afford to live here. (After the divorce, my son and I moved through a series of apartments.)

My most frequent and most intimate connection with the town and its people still is on the major streets, Stevens Creek and De Anza, six lanes each, usually crowded, and, with all the stoplights, stop and go. Quite crowded after work, and driving then is edgy, a little risky. My car has been rear-ended four times in the last seven years.

People are generally friendly, though, once you get out of the car.

***

There are neighborhoods in Cupertino, many, though they are always quiet when I bike around. You have to search to find life, and for me it was Cupertino Hoops, a basketball league for grade-school kids. That’s my son with the ball, left and right.

Saturdays they would run two games in a high school gym side by side, all day, both courts filled with ten kids running up and down, shooting, missing, hitting, following imperfectly, with hesitation, with abandon, the coaches' plans, and there would be more kids on the benches, waiting, and parents in the stands, watching, everyone shouting, a daylong release for all of us from what the past week contained, a release for me into a rare joy...

***

And once more there is a new vision of the future, risingIn my novel, the narrator, a programmer, lands a job at Summit, a large outfit in a fictional town that, not surprisingly, resembles Cupertino. He works all hours at breakneck speed on a botchy network system, also called Summit, coding quick fixes as Summit tries to steal the march on their rival. The campus, as he says, is charged with wonder and the tension from all that is left unsaid. Then he goes off campus with a dozen others to a small office on Bubb Road where they write a new system called Summix, which they build on Unix, this time getting it right.

I'd like to tell you more about his life there, but Summit went under a year later.

***

Steve Jobs on Kindle:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

But then we got the iPad.

The iPhone, of course, and now the Apple Watch.

The Watch, like the iPhone, has been encased in gold.

***

It is difficult to get my students to move to abstractions or talk about values and ideals. I have to explain the term democracy and it’s hard to get a rise. Their working definition of ideals, from what I can gather, is that they are notions that might be desirable but also are flakey, thus are suspect, at any rate are unattainable. Reality is whatever the world throws them at the present moment. There doesn't appear to be any connection between the two. 

It is taking them longer to finish and transfer to four-year schools, acceptance where, with their cuts and crowding, is more uncertain, as are jobs should they finish.

***

This is a program I wrote in C language designed to create heavenly objects—stars (asterisks)—in a void. The program, in fact, contains an infinite loop, code that asks the program to repeat a process but doesn't call for an end to that process, so it creates stars, theoretically, endlessly. When the output screen fills with stars it refreshes and causes the stars to *blink*. I have received various interpretations as to what would happen if the program were allowed to run long enough, how long it would take the system to crash.

***

Cupertino does have parks, though they are lightly used, but almost no other open spaces. So it was a surprise, years ago, to see a field at the corner of Stevens Creek and Tantau with tall weeds and strewn trash and No Trespassing signs and signs prohibiting dumping in four languages, which has been vacant most of the time I have lived here. It was a toxic superfund site, whose soil was contaminated by leakage from two semiconductor plants, both long gone, of organic solvents including trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichlorofluoroethane, and dichloroethylene. It was, in fact, our most enduring landmark. 

But manufacture of our devices is now done beyond our borders. 

And the lot has been reclaimed and healed and will soon become a mixed-use complex. 

And there is resurgence again—I can feel it—an upward shift in spirit, and I see once more rising faces. 

And Apple has bought the land left by HP when they moved to Palo Alto, and their new campus now rises, a Norman Foster vision.

And once more there is a new vision of the future, rising –

***

Actually I live in San Jose now, about 50 feet away from Cupertino and not much further from Saratoga. It's hard to know where you are in Silicon Valley by sight because the towns run together and there's little visible difference. I moved to my current apartment because it was quieter and cheaper. I had to go to a special meeting at the school district office, however, and make an appeal to let my son finish at the same high school.

There is nothing to recommend my apartment or much to distinguish it from the other fourplexes that line my street. But the market value of my apartment, steep to begin with, has doubled in the last few years and is rising.

Yet I feel fortunate because a creek runs behind my place and outside my windows I see mostly trees. The creek and land around it are owned by the city, thus the trees are protected. Not many have this view.

One spring, after a winter of especially heavy winter rains, there was an explosion in the frog population around the creek, tiny tree frogs, I think. At night the sound of their collective croaking—there must have been thousands—was loud, incessant...

A previous version of this piece appeared on Numero Cinq, and has been republished here with permission from the site.