Upon the Saddleback
A Retrospective
The cities that I grew up in were suburban sprawls that, aside from Anaheim, one would have little reason to visit unless you knew someone who lived there. These towns and cities all were nestled in a region we know as the Saddleback Valley, or at the very least under the watchful eye of those Saddleback mountains, that loom over Orange County like watchful brothers.
Perhaps to some indigenous group they were once sacred, before the Spanish arrived with missionaries and conquistadors. I don’t know. What I do know is that they are sacred to me, but in different ways.
I once drove my jeep up to the top of those mountains, with people I wouldn’t speak to now. It was cold up there. There was snow. I drove quite dangerously, so it’s a good thing we made it down. We smoked some weed up there. I can’t say it was a thoroughly good time, but it wasn’t a bad one. It was not too many years before 2012, and we had those sorts of stupid end-of-the-world conversations. In a way the world was ending. Just on a more personal level.
But it was a good thing that it was, and that sort of Apocalypto was necessary for rebirth. From the top of the mountain, you could see a great deal. There was some sort of comms tower up there. It was a bit Lovecraftian really, like that short film AM 1200, that I was fond of in the years following. One could imagine aliens or eldritch horrors lurking within that station, dictating the hopes, wishes, and dreams of the people in the Saddleback Valley below. Controlling reality with a Psychic Dominator. But it was probably just a comms tower, and nothing unordinary or paranormal.
The school district I went to was called Saddleback Valley Unified School District. They had better libraries than their rival district, which was Capo Valley, and also a name that didn’t evoke concentration camp guard allies, instead sounding closer to Brokeback mountain, which would later become a joke as to how gay it all was. We also called it Saddlecrack sometimes. And Trabuco Canyon, another place to take the Jeep offroading, was known as Tobacco Canyon. Its actual name came from some idiot Spanish explorer who lost his ‘trabuco’ or musket down there. So a lot of the names came from Spanish. Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, Aliso Viejo, etc etc.
Saddleback College was the local community college, and it was a feeder for all the high schools. I called it high school 2.0. The plan was to get out in 2 years. But the mental health toll of life and the lack of any real direction made that experience for me into a 6 year ordeal of dicking around, dropping classes, and wondering if God existed. Someone I knew once compared the place to the Pit from The Dark Knight Rises, where Bane and Raz Al Ghul and Batman escape from in that film. Just a hole that you have to get out of. Another comparison might be the Doldrums from The Phantom Tollbooth.
But for all my disdain and troubles there, I do have to say that there were many teachers there that were far better than some I found at university. Of course, University had its great teachers too, but I found CSULB to be a far more liberal place, with less of a place for any centrism, and rational discourse came through a different lens—that of the drug-addled, amnesiac streets of a beautifully mercurial part of Los Angeles where Sublime and Snoop Dogg rose out of the ether of the beachside energy—but it was a real city, unlike Orange County, which was nothing but suburbs that evoked Cthulhu more than they did any other God.
In retrospect, I loved them both. Both places had their honor and their ethos. But Orange County is a place that I understand to be the past, and I only visit family and friends there. It is not a home any longer.
I sit now in a chair in my building’s recreation room. I am about to read a book. The sunlight drifts in at all angles. Bangkok early morning traffic whizzes by below. One could almost imagine flying cars and dirigibles amidst this scene. My belly is full of food, and the soft hum of a fan keeps me cool.
I’m going to read now, and recollect on other things.
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