Amber Investigates Rio Vista's Drouin Park

SUNDAY SCENES

It's not just me thinking so: Amber really is beautiful. Today as we were getting into the car a young man pulled up next to us. "What kind of dog is that?" he asked. "It's beautiful." And yesterday a lady came running out of her office on main street with a treat for Amber. "I saw you go by," she said, "and wanted to catch you when you came back."

After leaving Amber's fan club behind today, we went out to the jack rabbits. It was hot, and for a change there wasn't much wind. Even so I had to tack like a small sailboat when heading into the wind on my bicycle. The sloughs are nearly dried up completely now--only a few mud wallows remain, in which Amber splashed and rolled to cool off, encasing herself in drying mud. There were a lot of rabbits running, and she was after them until exhausted.

When we left the phantom development we drove out to Trilogy, which is a gated enclave for senior living, quite a large one, off Highway 12. The horror...the horror. It needs no picture. You have seen them everywhere, houses clustered around a golf course, manicured lawns and fairways and greens, ponds and fountains, golf carts carting old geezers and their bags. Not the sort of place I would go were it not that Trilogy is a division of Shea Homes, and I had been advised by the Chamber of Commerce that they might have information about the phantom development. As it turns out, they didn't. No one seems to want to discuss the matter. I'll try City Hall tomorrow.

I hate old people. They are wrinkled and saggy and slow. They clog doorways with their tentative steps, eyes blinking through the haze of light or shadow, depending on whether they are going in or out. On a crowded sidewalk one pair of tottering seniors can slow half a block of pedestrian traffic. At a checkout counter they dodder and dither, unable to find the coupon they are sure they had, realizing they picked up salted rather than unsalted butter so that someone has to be sent to get the right kind, baffled by the machine that records debit cards. And the menace old people provide when behind the wheel of a car is legendary. Why anyone would choose to live in a whole community of rotting flesh completely baffles me. But Trilogy is obviously thriving, a kind of monument to everything wrong with American culture. The age segregation, the self satisfied conspicuous consumption, the gatedness to cordon themselves off from the rest of the world.

They did have lovely clean ponds and fountains, however, which we found useful. As I said, Amber was caked with mud from the sloughs, so I threw a stick in a Trilogy pond for her and she cheerfully plunged in and swam out to fetch it a couple of times. Voila! Clean wet dog. Then we went into their sales office. We got no information about the abandoned houses, but we did walk around and look at some of the model homes. We went by ourselves, which surprised me. I don't think I would have allowed two such disreputable characters loose in those lavishly decorated interiors.

In the evening we found another of Rio Vista's parks, Drouin Park. It isn't as large as Val De Flores, and also is not completely secure since some sections of fence are missing. Still it is a pleasant place.