The Town That Lives Up To Its Name

 On my last night in California I woke up in the Best Western Plus by the freeway. It was not yet light. I began packing up to checkout. I used all the remaining single-use coffee packets in the little plastic machine by the sink, and by shortly after sunrise I had placed the plastic card keys on the dresser by the television with a cash tip for housekeeping. The television remote was still in its cardboard stand. I had not turned on a single television during the entire trip. 

I had stayed two nights in Pleasanton, but I hadn't really experienced the real town. I'd only experienced the fringe where the city limits extend past the freeway. This is Freeway California---the Metropolis of All California, that everyone recognizes.

To see the town, I followed the boulevard from the hotel and, having planned it out via Google maps, I navigated easily into downtown Pleasanton, where I found a public parking lot that was quiet and ample, with fallen leaves on the asphalt, located behind buildings on Main Street.

I locked the car and walked out the parking lot driveway onto Main Street. Most of the businesses were closed, but I could not tell whether they were closed because of the shutdown or because they were not yet open. As I would discover, things in Pleasanton get off to a slow start. The breakfast cafe didn't open until ten. The bakery didn't open until nine. I was persuaded to stay for the latter by a kid running a drive-up/walk-up dairy grocery that had been in the same spot for seventy years, as he told me.

Besides being the ideal location for my foray into the city, Pleasanton was a place I had wanted to visit because it is the home of the cartoonist Scott Adams, who has been so instrumental as a voice in this phase of the Trump movement, over the last year or two. His house is up in the hills of course, but he talks about the town frequently in his Periscope broadcasts. I knew for example that last spring, during the initial shutdown, he had admired the resourcefulness of the local restaurants in offering outdoor dining in the open air in the street. At the time, I thought, "Yeah, that's Northern California. Try that in the summer in Phoenix (or the winter elsewhere)."

Adams is a decent guy. I enjoy his comments. But ultimately I cannot trust him on the level I would like. He's an atheist who believes there is no such thing as objective reality that we can access, that we have no free will, and they we are assigned our opinions. His obsession is Persuasion, not Truth. That was enormous useful as a perspective during the run-up to the election, but now we are beyond that. We are into evidence in a courtroom. 

I consider Adams to be a good bellwether. He has stuck his neck out on the line as a Trump supporter, so admire him greatly for that, but he himself has said would pivot immediately to the "President Biden reality" if he saw things truly going that way. I feel sorry for him in that sense, not to know the deep conviction of Truth. The Trump movement is a big tent with room for many people. In this moment, however, we must all be Americans. As long as he is with us on that score, then I am with him too.

As far as the town where he lives, I  already knew enough about the area to know that indeed it was probably the perfect balance of climates. It was a wonderful little community, all in all. By the time of my visit, the outdoor dining of the restaurants had begun to form semi-enclosed or almost-all-enclosed huts on the street, like organized versions of homeless camps, or like Burning Man. It looked as if the restaurants had simply been allowed to colonize  the street in front of them.

The essential truth about the town came forth when I peeked at the listings in the front window of a still-shuttered realtor on the main street. It was the kind of display each house listing in its own photographic display, mounted in tinted light like the cover of glossy magazine. The first one I looked at was a three-bedroom house in the old part of town, near Main Street. It was listed as three bedrooms, but it was no more than a cottage, and had been built perhaps even before the Second World War. Asking price was 995,000.  When a place is as pleasant as Pleasanton, a lot of people want to live there.