When I first move to California--to Vallejo--the drive to San Francisco was through hills that in winter and spring were green and covered with wildflowers and when they turned brown (golden) in summer were turned by the divine sculptor, the late afternoon sun, to beautiful voluptuous flesh--reminiscent of Edward Weston's images of green peppers, etc. Now they are covered with houses and shopping centers and the smell of the smog overpowers the lowtide smell of the remaining wetlands around the bay. Head northeast of Vallejo you can still a stretch of these hills until you break into the Sacramento valley at Vacaville: what was once glorious farmland is now Factory Outlets, more subdivisions, and highway businesses. Finally, when you pass Davis, the farms appear again--until you cross the Sacramento River into the state capitol where urban sprawl is so odious that it took the completion of the freeway bypasses to get rid of smog worse than that in Los Angeles. Your journey continues east for another fifty miles of the outskirts of Sacramento before you finally reach the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and its forests which will soon be recycled into newspapers and Christmas catalogs.

--seed