I don’t know how many of you know this, but I’m not from around here.

Wednesday, March 28, 2001

I don’t know how many of you know this, but I’m not from around here. Yes, I’m not from Austin, but I’m also not originally from Minnesota either. I was born and raised in California. Actually, I was raised in Santee, a suburb of San Diego, Calif.

A few weeks ago most of you had probably never heard of Santee, but with the shooting at Santana High School, my hometown made national headlines. When Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams shot at his fellow students in the boys’ bathroom and the small quad area of Santana, the world discovered Santee and at the same time learned it is far from a perfect place.

I learned those lessons years ago.

Santee was a nice place to grow up – a perfect place, really – or so I thought at the time. My life was mom, dad, sister, dog, ducks, rabbit, playhouse – all the components to a happy childhood. But exteriors lie. My parents fought out of the eyes of the public and later divorced, my duck regularly nipped my rabbit between the eyes and yes, it does rain in California. The fairy tale was more grim than Mother Goose.

To many people, California seems like a promised land. Miners in Volvos and minivans travel to the west in search of a "gold rush" of fame, fun, fortune, beauty, sun and eternal youth. But everything good comes with a cost.

As I grew up and started to work, I learned the reality of a traffic jam on four lanes of traffic, all going one way. Those traffic jams meant getting to and from work took anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes one way every day. Those were hours spent driving in the sun most of the time, but hours none the less.

I learned that three women – my mom, my sister and I – without a college education can’t afford a house payment in that state, unless they are willing to do things that are illegal. No, we all stayed legal … and poor.

When our water usage was restricted, we three women finally decided to move out of that state. The last straw was a vacation up north that revealed water reservoirs dangerously low. We could see that things in California would not be getting better.

It not only rains in California, the weather resembles biblical events – droughts, fires, earthquakes, mud slides. And the people, well, you can say they are biblical in nature as well.

Some time take an honest look at the people in the Bible – they’re flawed. Ditto with California. We native Californians are just as screwed up as the rest of the country. We don’t have any more answers than any of you and we make more than our share of mistakes.

I am the same as one of those children who made fun of Williams and Hoffman. Though I made fun of other children in a different time, the cloud of my words dissipates and appears again and again around the world every day. I can remember specific instances of making fun of fellow students in school. I was made fun of and I returned the favor to someone else. I can never erase the words I spoke to hurt other people, just as no one who lashed out at Williams and Hoffman can take their words back. I carry the burden of the words I spoke with me and I hope those kids carry their words as a burden with them as well.

Did the teasing cause Williams and Hoffman to lash out? I don’t know, and none of us will ever know, because we can’t reverse time and erase what was done.

Listen, Austin! Santee is Austin. Austin is Santee.

If you care about Austin, teach your sons and daughters that what you say becomes tangible – that each word is like a strand of a web and they are spiders, weaving and creating the world with each step, each word, each breath. Only with responsibility for what we weave can we prevent the destruction that currently is California.

Santee was never a perfect place to live. It was just a place. California was once, to use another Eagles reference, "The Last Resort," but is now scarred, twisted, dark (rolling blackouts, anyone?) and used up. The sun still shines there, but it fights with a haze of smog. The trees and grass are brown, the ocean is polluted. If you search for green in that state you must go north to the Redwoods or wait for the hours just after a good rainstorm, when all of the muck is washed from the plants, grass and trees. And even then the land is covered with houses from ocean to mountains. It is covered in pollution that permeates the soul.

What was once my home is a memory. "You can’t go home again" has never been more profound to me. Home no longer exists. The optimist on my right shoulder continues to search for a fairy tale place where people are good to each other and where the land is unspoiled and bright with natural colors. But the pessimist on my left shoulder tells me California is an indication of things to come throughout the world. The end of my innocence sits somewhere between those two perspectives.

Kevira Mertha’s column appears Wednesdays. Call her at 434-2233 or e-mail her at newsroom@austindailyherald.com.