Franklin Crossing

By the time my career is over, by the time I'll be sipping pounding Mai Tai's on some foreign beach somewhere, I will reflect back on my life and silently cringe, knowing that I took part in the complete destruction of a small town on Franklin Blvd. -- the town of Franklin.

I've been reviewing the land acquisition for the future SMUD Franklin bulk substation, to be located just south of the town of Franklin on my Franklin Blvd. I also received a map of the future Franklin Crossing subdivision, a wholly wasteful, grossly proportioned, and energy intensive piece of shit that will surround the substation, and indeed, represents one of hundreds of other subdivisions scheduled to be constructed once our economy gets "back on track." Our economy -- you know, the one that is solely comprised of the building and accessorizing of low density suburban sprawl, the creation of retail and myriad service jobs necessary to support it, the re-assignment of manufacturing to Asia, while we financially engineer the whole thing from San Francisco, Charlotte, Seattle and New York.

Franklin Crossing. This is almost a correct name. It really should be called the Franklin Burial Grounds, because I will bet my house that someday that entire town will be razed to the ground and paved over for a corner strip mall/shopping complex (call it the Franklin Crossroads or Franklin Marketplace) to service the sixty thousand thru commuters from all those eastern subdivisions...all those commuters heading towards I-5 to get to their Bay Area or Sacramento jobs.

What a waste. A total waste. Someday I will set the protection on the transmission lines and the bulk transformer in the Franklin substation and instead of feeling a sense of worldly accomplishment I will sit on that beach and think about how I was one small cog in the gigantic wheel of progress that rolled over and obliterated that small town out of existence. This Franklin Crossing -- a perfect example of a living pattern wholly devoid of the notion of a community, the notion of connectedness, nowhere near jobs or natural resources, and will in fact destroy what value the land had for agriculture or open space or wetland habitat.

Franklin Crossing -- a living pattern that owes its whole existence to the acquisition and timely, consistent delivery of cheap gasoline. I am going to write future chapters in my Franklin Monologues devoted to what $3 dollar gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $4 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $5, $6, and $7 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing. It's development is predicated on the continuing cheapness of gasoline so you might understand my wholehearted desire for oil to climb in price so rapidly and so consistently such that we rethink our plans for this stupid development and rethink our plans for continued exurban sprawling madness. I cannot think of anything else other than energy depletion that would crimp this eighty year experiment of national waste, because cheap energy underwrites all of it. All of it. When I mentally envision a future of energy scarcity (or at a minimum, energy at a premium), I see a future worth living in, because we will finally build worthy urban arrangements.