After a godawful decade in dystopic Los Angeles, I moved to Eureka, California on the 4th of July, 2011, MY new Independence Day. I was attracted to Eureka by it's proximity to rivers, lagoons, and the sea, as well as vast forests, a modicum of city life, and relatively low rents. I had passed through and stayed briefly in Eureka several times on North Coast treks through northern California, and into coastal Oregon and beyond to Washington state and Vancouver, Canada. I had mainly enjoyed its historic downtown and nearby beaches. Compared to Los Angeles, Eureka and environs seemed like a bucolic utopia...
But residing behind the "Redwood Curtain" for only a few weeks, I already see that Eureka is both beautiful and ugly, inspiring and disturbing, rich and poor, homey and scary. It is complex and paradoxical, like the humans that inhabit it... My next two posts will highlight several of these extremes. The first discusses the local food-bank, Food for People, where I am a new and impressed volunteer.
The second describes a violent crime that took place 30 feet from my new home's front porch, and how being a clueless "witness" to a shooting gave me my 15 minutes of local "celebrity."
I'll explain the contexts and outcomes of each of these stories in subsequent posts... Welcome to my NEW dystopia, different, but not SO different from the old one!
