My guides on this expedition were two young students who have just finished an apprenticeship year in the factory. They’re full of information and observations. It seems that the entire population of Alviso, about 9,000 people, lives within a radius of a half mile from the transit station. But even this density allows for many small park-like places: sometimes merely widenings of the streets, sometimes planted gardens. Trees are everywhere—there are no large paved areas exposed to the sun. Around the edges of town are the schools and various recreation grounds. At the northeast corner of town you meet the marshes and sloughs and saltflats of the Bay. A harbor has been dredged for small craft; this opens onto the ship channel through which a freighter can move right up to the factory dock. My informants admitted rather uncomfortably that there is a modest export trade in electric vehicles—the Ecotopians allow themselves to import just enough metal to replace what is used in the exported electric motors and other metal parts.
Kids fish off the factory dock; the water is clear. Ecotopians love the water, and the boats in the harbor are a beautiful collection of both traditional and highly unorthodox designs. From this harbor, my enthusiastic guides tell me, they often sail up the Bay and into the Delta, and even out to sea through the Golden Gate, then down the coast to Monterey. Their boat is a lovely though heavy-looking craft, and they proudly offered to take me out on it if I have time.
We toured the factory, which is a confusing place. Like other Ecotopian workplaces, I am told, it is not organized on the assembly-line principles generally thought essential to really efficient mass production. Certain aspects are automated: the production of the electric motors, suspension frames, and other major elements. However, the assembly of these items is done by groups of workers who actually fasten the parts together one by one, taking them from supply bins kept full by the automated machines. The plant is quiet and pleasant compared to the crashing racket of a Detroit plant, and the workers do not seem to be under Detroit’s high output pressures. Of course the extreme simplification of Ecotopian vehicles must make the manufacturing process much easier to plan and manage—indeed there seems little reason why it could not be automated entirely.
Also, I discovered, much of the factory’s output does not consist of finished vehicles at all. Following the mania for “doing it yourself” which is such a basic part of Ecotopian life, this plant chiefly turns out “front ends,” “rear ends,” and battery units. Individuals and organizations then connect these to bodies of their own design. Many of them are weird enough to make San Francisco minibuses look quite ordinary. I have seen, for instance, a truck built of driftwood, almost every square foot of it decorated with abalone shells—it belonged to a fishery commune along the coast.
The “front end” consists of two wheels, each driven by an electric motor and supplied with a brake. A frame attaches them to a steering and suspension unit, together with a simple steering wheel, accelerator, brake, instrument panel, and a pair of headlights. The motor drives are capable of no more than 30 miles per hour (on the level!) so their engineering requirements must be modest—though my guides told me the suspension is innovative, using a clever hydraulic load-leveling device which in addition needs very little metal. The “rear end” is even simpler, since it doesn’t have to steer. The battery units, which seem to be smaller and lighter than even our best Japanese imports, are designed for use in vehicles of various configurations. Each comes with a long reel-in extension cord to plug into recharging outlets.
The factory does produce several types of standard bodies, to which the propulsion units can be attached with only four bolts at each end. (They are always removed for repair.) The smallest and commonest body is a shrunken version of our pick-up truck. It has a tiny cab that seats only two people, and a low, square, open box in back. The rear of the cab can be swung upward to make a roof, and sometimes canvas sides are rigged to close in the box entirely.
A taxi-type body is still manufactured in small numbers. Many of these were used in the cities after Independence as a stop-gap measure while minibus and transit systems were developing. These bodies are molded from heavy plastic in one huge mold.
These primitive and underpowered vehicles obviously cannot satisfy the urge for speed and freedom which has been so well met by the American auto industry and our aggressive highway program. My guides and I got into a hot debate on this question, in which I must admit they proved uncomfortably knowledgeable about the conditions that sometimes prevail on our urban through-ways—where movement at any speed can become impossible. When I asked, however, why Ecotopia did not build speedy cars for its thousands of miles of rural highways—which are now totally uncongested even if their rights of way have partly been taken over for trains—they were left speechless. I attempted to sow a few seeds of doubt in their minds: no one can be utterly insensitive to the pleasures of the open road, I told them, and I related how it feels to roll along in one of our powerful, comfortable cars, a girl’s hair blowing in the wind….
We had lunch in one of the restaurants near the factory, amid a cheery, noisy crowd of citizens and workers. I noticed that they drank a fair amount of the excellent local wine with their soups and sandwiches. Afterward we visited the town hall, a modest wood structure indistinguishable from the apartment buildings. There I was shown a map on which adjacent new towns are drawn, each centered on its own rapid-transit stop. It appears that a ring of such new towns is being built to surround the Bay, each one a self-contained community, but linked to its neighbors by train so that the entire necklace of towns will constitute one city. It is promised that you can, for instance, walk five minutes to your transit station, take a train within five minutes to a town ten stops away, and then walk another five minutes to your destination. My informants are convinced that this represents a halving of the time we would spend on a similar trip, not to mention problems of parking, traffic, and of course the pollution.
What will be the fate of the existing cities as these new minicities come into existence? They will gradually be razed, although a few districts will be preserved as living museum displays (of “our barbarian past,” as the boys jokingly phrased it). The land will be returned to grassland, forest, orchards, or gardens—often, it appears, groups from the city own plots of land outside in the country, where they probably have a small shack and perhaps grow vegetables, or just go for a change of scene.
After leaving Alviso we took the train to Redwood City, where the reversion process can be seen in action. Three new towns have sprung up there along the Bay, separated by a half mile or so of open country, and two more are under construction as part of another string several miles back from the Bay, in the foothills. In between, part of the former suburban residential area has already been turned into alternating woods and grassland. The scene reminded me a little of my boyhood country summers in Pennsylvania. Wooded strips follow the winding lines of creeks. Hawks circle lazily. Boys out hunting with bows and arrows wave to the train as it zips by. The signs of a once busy civilization—streets, cars, service stations, supermarkets—have been entirely obliterated, as if they never existed. The scene was sobering, and made me wonder what a Carthaginian might have felt after ancient Carthage was destroyed and plowed under by the conquering Romans.
(May 8) Something peculiar is going on in this place. Can’t yet exactly locate the source of the feeling. It’s like waking up after a dream and not being quite able to remember what it was about. The way people deal with each other—and with me—keeps reminding me of something—but I don’t know what. Always takes me off guard, makes me feel I was confronted with some fine personal opportunity—a friendship, learning something’s important, love—which by then has just passed…. And they often seem to be surprised, a little disappointed maybe—as if I was a child who was not proving a very fast learner. (But what am I supposed to be learning?)
Then sometimes life here seems like a throwback to a past I might have known through old photographs. Or a skip ahead in
time: these people, who are so American despite their weird social practices, might be what we will become. (They miss no chance, of course, to tell me we should get on with it.) Also keep feeling I have gotten stuck on vacation in the country. Partly it’s all the trees, and maybe the dark nights (which still make me feel a power blackout must have struck), and also it’s hard to get used to the quiet. Must be doing something to my New York paranoia system, geared to respond to honking, screeching, buzzing, bangs, knocks, not to mention a shot or a scream now and then. You expect silence in the country. But here I am in a metropolitan area of several million, constantly surrounded by people—and the only really loud noises are human shouts or babies crying. There’s no “New Man” bullshit in Ecotopia, but how do they stand the quiet?
Or for that matter, how do they stand their isolation from us? Has bred a brash kind of self-sufficiency. They seem to be in surprisingly good touch with the rest of the world, but as far as we’re concerned, they’re strictly on their own—like adolescent children who have rejected their parents’ ways. They’ll probably get over it.
Ecotopians a little vague about time, I notice—few wear watches, and they pay more attention to things like sunrise and sunset or the tides than to actual hour time. They will accede to the demands of industrial civilization to some extent, but grudgingly. “You’d never catch an Indian wearing a watch.” Many Ecotopians sentimental about Indians, and there’s some sense in which they envy the Indians their lost natural place in the American wilderness. Indeed this probably a major Ecotopian myth; keep hearing references to what Indians would or wouldn’t do in a given situation. Some Ecotopian articles—clothing and baskets and personal ornamentation—perhaps directly Indian in inspiration. But what matters most is the aspiration to live in balance with nature, “walk lightly on the land,” treat the earth as a mother. No surprise that to such a morality most industrial processes, work schedules, and products are suspect! Who would use an earth-mover on his own mother?
Hotel was okay for a while, but has gotten kind of boring. Have taken to spending a good bit of time a few blocks away, down near the waterfront, at “Franklin’s Cove,” a sort of press commune, where maybe 40 Ecotopian journalists and writers and TV people live. They’ve been extremely hospitable—really make me feel welcome. The place must have once been a warehouse, and is now broken up into rooms. They cook collectively, have work rooms (no electric typewriters, I notice, but lots of handy light video recorders), even a kind of gym. Beautiful wild garden in back where people spend a lot of time lying around on sunny days—part of it in crumbling ruins of one wing of the warehouse, which nobody has bothered to wreck and haul away. (“Time is taking its course, and we just let it,” replied one of the residents when I asked why this unsightly condition was tolerated.) Center of things is a lounge-library filled with soft chairs and sofas. I’ve been there so much I even have a favorite chair.
Ecotopians, both male and female, have a secure sense of themselves as animals. At the Cove they lie about utterly relaxed, curled up on couches or floor, flopped down in sunny spots on little rugs or mats, almost like a bunch of cats. They stretch, rearrange themselves, do mysterious yoga-like exercises, and just seem to enjoy their bodies tremendously. Nor do they keep this to themselves, particularly—I’ve several times walked in on people making love, who didn’t seem much embarrassed or annoyed—it was hardly different from walking in on somebody taking a bath. I find myself envying them this comfortableness in their biological beings. They seem to breathe better, move more loosely. I’m experimenting, trying to imitate them….
* * *
Especially in the evenings, though of course they have a lot of free time during the day as well, people gather round and talk—the kind of leisurely talk I associate with college days. Jumps around from topic to topic, and people kid a lot, and cheer each other up when need be, but there’s some thread to it usually. Last evening spent quite a while talking to an interesting guy I’ve met at the Cove—Bert Luckman (that seems to be his real name). He was studying at Berkeley at the time of Independence—bright Jewish kid from New York. Had gone through Maoist phase, then got into secessionist movement. Politics and science writer (not an odd combination here) for the S. F. Times. Has written a book on cosmology, has a mystic streak, but still a reporter’s reporter: tough, wry, well-organized writing. Is surprisingly skeptical about U.S. science, which he regards as bureaucratically constipated and wasteful. “You made the dreadful mistake,” he said, “of turning your science establishment over to established scientists, who could be trusted. But it’s mainly young and untrustworthy scientists who get important new ideas. —You still have a few things happening, but it’s lost the momentum you need.” (I wonder. Check when get back.)
After some drinks the conversation got livelier and more personal. Thought I’d do some probing. “Doesn’t this stable-state business get awfully static? I’d think it would drive you crazy after a certain point!”
Bert looked at me with amusement, and batted the ball back.
“Well, don’t forget that we don’t have to be stable. The system provides the stability, and we can be erratic within it. I mean we don’t try to be perfect, we just try to be okay on the average—which means adding up a bunch of ups and downs.” “But it means giving up any notions of progress. You just want to get to that stable point and stay there, like a lump.”
“It may sound that way, but in practice there’s no stable point. We’re always striving to approximate it, but we never get there. And you know how much we disagree on exactly what is to be done—we only agree on the root essentials, everything else is in dispute.” I grinned. “I’ve noticed that—you’re a quarrelsome lot!” “We can afford to be, because of that root agreement. Besides, that’s half the fun of relating to each other—trying to work through different perspectives, seeing how other people feel about things.”
“It’s still flying in the face of reality, this striving for stability.” Bert took this more seriously: “Is it? But we’ve actually achieved something like stability. Our system meanders on its peaceful way, while yours has constant convulsions. I think of ours as like a meadow in the sun. There’s a lot of change going on—plants growing, other plants dying, bacteria decomposing them, mice eating seeds, hawks eating mice, a tree or two beginning to grow up and shade the grasses. But the meadow sustains itself on a steady-state basis—unless men come along and mess it up.”
“I begin to see what you mean. It may not look so static to the mouse.”
After his student years Bert traveled a lot—in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia. Even thought of going to the U.S. sub rosa—but didn’t do it (or says he didn’t). Attached to a charming giddy woman named Clara, some years older and also a journalist—they have separate rooms at the Cove. Bert seems to be a wanderer—has also worked on papers in Seattle, Vancouver, and a little California coast resort town called Mendocino. We exchanged life histories, and he pumped me for inside intrigues on my travels, my relations with sources in our government, and so on. Caught me in a couple of prevarications, but seems to take their measure quickly and understand them. We went on talking in a frank and almost brotherly way, so I tried harder to be candid and scrupulous. Told him about Francine; he wanted to know precisely the nature of my relationship with her, and seemed surprised that it is so tentative, even though it’s gone on for three years now. “It seems contradictory to me,” he said. “You live in separate apartments, see each other a couple of times a week, spend weeks on end away from each other altogether. At the same time you don’t have a group of people to live with, to support you emotionally, to keep your collective life going on actively and strongly while you’re apart. I’d think that during one of these absences you’d have split up long ago—one of you would have taken up seriously with someone else, and then there’d be two other little separate worlds, instead of the two you have now. I’d find that very scary.”
“It is very scary,” I said, “and
once or twice we have gotten involved with someone else. But we have always come back to each other.” “It still sounds frivolous to me,” he said, frowning. “It gives too much power to loneliness. Here we try to arrange it so we are not lonely very often. That keeps us from making a lot of emotional mistakes. We don’t think commitment is something you go off and do by yourselves, just two of you. It has to have a structure, social surroundings you can rely on. Human beings are tribal animals, you know. They need lots of contact.”
“You might be right,” I said doubtfully. “I never thought of myself that way particularly. Though at one point I remember wondering if having lots and lots of children might not be a good thing.” “Well, there are other kinds of families, you know,” he said gently and with a slight smile. “I’ll take you to visit some.”
Have also had some good talks with Tom, a writer for a major magazine called Flow. He’s maybe 35 but has a face that already shows lines; also a temper, and he was swearing at somebody who had challenged his view of recent American strategy in Brazil. I kept quiet at first, but it happened I knew Tom was right: we had set up a system of electronically fenced enclaves in Sao Paulo as a means of controlling guerrilla movements, though it had been portrayed as an urban-redevelopment measure. “Look,” said Tom finally, “we have a goddamn American reporter right here, why don’t we ask him?” “All right,” said the other guy to me, “do you know anything about it?”