Malcolm Harris - Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate; the people are educated, rich, healthy, innovative. Remnants of a hippie counterculture synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley. In some circles the small citypopulation near 70,000, as of this writinghas acquired the mythical reputation of a postmodern El Dorado, where money flows by the billions from the investors on Sand Hill Road to hundreds of garages where scrappy coders are changing the way we do everything, from driving around to eating food. On per-capita terms, the Valley ranks with the planets wealthiest spots: Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg. A few people seem convinced that Palo Alto is in fact the center of the world.

Leland and Jane Lathrop Stanford gave the town its reason to be and its name, but they werent the first to colonize the area and they didnt invent the words palo alto, which mean tall tree in Spanish and refer to a particular specimen. El Palo Alto is a sequoia that got its name from a governor of Californiaor, rather, the Californias. The Spanish expedition of Gaspar de Portol was the first European group to reach the San Francisco Bay area, and many of the names they assigned to the natural features remain. (A quarter-millennium or so later, nearby Portola Valley is the richest town per capita in the richest country in the world.) For five days in November of 1769, the expedition camped under a towering tree near what is now San Francisquito Creek. El Palo Alto, now over one thousand years old, still stands, a straight mile shot from Palo Alto High School, right down the train tracks.

Todays settlers find the schools a bigger draw than the foliage. For parents hoping to give their children the best chance at a successful life, the Palo Alto Unified School District is choice. In a society where skills and education are supposed to make the difference, its hard to make a better tuition-free bet than PAUSD. Even more than the hot job market and the Silicon Valley stock options, the school system is what has driven the median home price up near $3 million at the time of this writing.

I was born in Santa Cruz, California, but my mother and father met in Palo Alto, as a research assistant and a temp typist respectively. They moved our family back to town in 1996, and I spent the second half of my childhood on quiet culs-de-sac in the very nice place. My life felt traditionally United States suburban, a lot like what I saw on TV. But every now and then something else shone through the figurative fence posts at the edge of town. There were signs that, if Palo Alto was normal, it was too normal, weirdly normal.

I attended Ohlone Elementarynamed for what we were told was the tribe that used to live on the Peninsulaand one day in fourth grade we had a substitute teacher. Most of the adults in my life were pretty stable as far as I could tell; I wasnt used to their behaving unpredictably. Maybe thats why I was so spooked that day when, instead of following the regularly scheduled curriculum, the substitute sat us down on the carpet and tried to tell us something important. You live in a bubble, she said, her voice strained and urgent. The rest of the world isnt like this. Do you know that? Two dozen wide-eyed children looked back at her. We did not know that.

I dont recall a lot of specific days from that age, but this one stuck with me. Apparently some of my classmates told their parents about the unscheduled bubble lecture because when he returned, our regular teacher apologized to us for what happened and reassured us that the bad substitute wouldnt be back, that the district had blacklisted her. If that was supposed to make us disregard what we heard, it had the opposite effect on me.

As I grew up, Palo Alto gradually offered its own explanation for why things were the way they werewhy some people had big houses and others didnt, why some people lived here and everyone else didnt: They deserved it. Hard work and talent allowed some people to change the world single-handedly, and they earned whatever they got. Sometimes this message was literally written on the wallslike the stories about Hewlett and Packard in the Stanford engineering building, printed on a permanent informational display near a water fountain I frequented as a teenagerbut it was also the towns implicit underlying ideology from its founding. We all got the message.

The suicides started in 2002. That year, a Palo Alto High freshman stepped in front of the Caltrain, the same locomotive line on which Leland Stanford One thing the coverage missed was that the official tally undercounts the victims by at least half because it excludes young people who killed themselves after graduation, even when they returned to the tracks to do it. The community experienced not two clusters but a constant flow of tragic deaths in the twenty-first century. It continues: a month before I finished this manuscript, a twenty-two-year-old Gunn High graduate ended his life on the tracks.

As kids, when we talked about the place where we lived, my brother, sister, and I used to make morbid jokes about Sunnydale, the fictional California setting for the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer