By the Diablo mountains

Concord on the northeast side of the Bay Area of San Francisco lies on the western slopes of the Diablo mountain range whose peak and hills extends from Costa Contra County in the north to the Kern County south where Bakersfield is county seat. Concord is the largest city of Costa Contra next to the county seat of Martinez.

My daughter’s house is about four houses from Buchanan Airfield that straddles the border of Martinez and Concord. The airport is a controversial prime property and its function as an airport with jets has since been replaced by Byron airport and as an airfield diminished to hosting small propeller engine planes. Buchanan’s history began as the Concord Air Force Base in the 1940s on to being an originating point to military flights headed for the Korean theatre.

On this week’s visit, my daughter’s Queensland heeler dog barked as pilots training to fly prop planes from the airfield buzzed the neighborhood. The U.S. Coast Guard uses the facility for emergency purposes, particularly to drench bush fires in the brown hills surrounding the verdant forest of the Diablo peaks seen from a distance.

This is not a travelogue on the mountain range nor on the interesting Bay Point of the San Francisco Bay Area extending toward, Pittsburg, CA, the current end point of the BART’s Yellow Line. A descriptive tour might delight our California readership, but that has not been the regular tone of this column.

Nor an introduction of Concord, Martinez, and Walnut Creek (CM&WC) would be unwelcomed by the towns consumers for they have converted their downtown areas as shopping centers of boutique quality, and in this mode, the towns are quaint with antiques, and contemporary in coffee shops where a hazelnut macchiato in espresso is not an uncommon fare!

It is the “devil” in “Diablo” that intrigues us and why that would even be relevant in the downtown areas of CM&WC where retirees tend their social nets well and have come to live and are visibly in display all over the place enjoying the sunset of their years. There are younger families in the area, my daughter’s included but of the short times she cruised with me in the three towns looking for a place that might sell USB connectors to two external drives that have photos of my China home I wanted to share, the places teemed with well-heeled retirees who did not hesitate to draw out their credit cards for any purchase in any of the stores.

A disambiguation: “Diablo” is used as name for fictional characters, music pieces, video games, places like the aforementioned mountain range, sports personalities and teams, a gene that negatively interacts with the death cell, and a type of hot, dry wind common in many deserts.

There was once a USS Diablo American submarine named after a deep-sea bottom-dwelling batfish of the West Indies whose first assignment was to sail to Saipan after it was commissioned just before the end of WWII hostilities. Exchange of firepower on Mt. Tapuchao ceased before the Diablo reached its destination so its eventual first portage was Guam. The submarine was delivered later to the Pakistan navy in a military assistance package and became the Ghazi, Pakistan’s sole underwater military submersible that mysteriously sank in 1971.

My devilish sense looking up at the majestic mountain range from Concord probably stems from my detachment from the rabid consumerism now attendant to a country that still holds my fealty and political devotion. Everywhere I turn in my visits to my two daughters’ families, the symbols of economic prosperity around them are held up as the overriding preoccupation of identity, vocation, and lifestyle. No activity or value is worth pursuing until one had done the math on how much it will cost, or what amount will be gained, a cultural practice of estimation I am not privy to.

As a retired member of the straddling class between the “silent” and “baby boomer” generations, I might still carry the traditional value of personal character against personal wealth as criteria for measuring an individual’s worth. While finances are obviously very important, and my daughters are not by any measure counting their pennies, they have yet to make it the overriding consideration in gauging people’s social standing. Happily, I might claim that my daughters’ attitude, to a certain degree, reflects that of their father.

I am evidently divorced from the contemporary preoccupation of personal worth by accumulation and expenditure, not from the inability to earn the dough (though the charge had been leveled against my earning skills) as it is an absence of passion to follow the acquisitive path; I am too habitually at home in the monastic practice of earthly detachment. I do not condemn the practice but I acknowledge that I no longer belong to this age. In fact, my room smells too much of my age that I have to open my window to let the Diablo air and the hydrocarbon emissions of fast moving traffic on CA State Highway 4 not too far from my breathing, to come in.

The devil is in the details, we say. This one is mountain size.