I remember when they blew up the mountainside to build the freeway.  They used to call it Helix Fwy or 67 but now it is a link in 125.  LA is really big on names for their freeways, but San Diego has stuck with numbers.  Always and ever this little stretch that exploded nearby my early (3yrs-8yrs) home was the precious link between Interstate Eight (ex-US 80) and State 94 (which we took thenceforth to get to Grandmother Margaret's house).  None of that -- except for my grandmother -- matters.

What matters is what I remember on the steep hillside above Eucalyptus Park and its tiny, babeling creek, I call it Eucalyptus creek but it might also be called Bancroft or Helix. I always knew it simply as "The Creek" because it was the nearest stream to my water-hungry body -- never mind that I must Never Drink It.  *Sigh*   It still echoes in my dreams, finding and looking for that stream, ever and always the nearest stream to my youth, achingly close, sadly contaminated, sweet sweet water of septic tank disease -- the same curse that killed all the avocado trees.  The eucalypt are all there, still... except the ones what blew down.  They do that.

San Diego is a last raft of valleys and mesas beyond the steep hills breaking off this peninsula from our continent.  See, down there in the edgeiest corner of your map.  No roads can go straight there, except for the sea, and even that has reefs and rocks and ships that go bump in the night.  But on land... twist and curve down canyons and over hills -- the flat places are illusions for city blocks, until... gully, canyon, and sometimes arroyo with water.  Meanwhile, our backsides push against a mountain wall grasping the east, yes, the cities of these coast valleys are surrounded by racks of peninsular mountains broken off from America, slowly, slowly, one two three inches a year, slowly slowly creating the peninsula and later so much later after I return from the galactic core, the islands of California.

To get the superhighway through one of those smaller walls, a mere foothill beside Mount Helix and La Mesa, the state of California blew up ancient granite from Jurassic or who knows when, slicing a curving path between ancient islands that humped up when all the rest of San Diego was still layering sandstone under the shallow western sea, down in front of Sonora.  LINK to Tectonic History of Baja California.

Beyond those flat mesa lands (who rose up from the ocean and were cut by cute little canyons of San Diego), the foothills rise like boundary lumps in front of the back-country mountains.  To get the superhighways through these foothills, granite must be blasted.  And blasted again, I repeat myself, one paragraph after another blown away, until huge bulldozers and graders come in to crush and carry away all the debris, or pile it up into a long embankment leaping the valley next to ex-egg ranch and garden nursery, right after cutting halfway through the hill.

These were the foothills in the suburb where I grew up, on the edges of ancient yellow and white granite.

The thunder of the dynamite rumbled over the hillsides, down into my back yard on Woodland Drive where we played, Julie Ann and Douglas and I.  A huge cloud of dust rose up into the sky beyond Mariposa Drive (Avenue?)  Connie's mom's clothes got all dirty on the line from the smoke.  Dust.

Mexico was waiting, twenty something miles due south.  Maybe we would go shopping there in a week or two.  My mom was already studying Spanish and I was about to discover that the world was very different than one language can ever portray or distort.