by Mr. Jay L.

Created on: April 16, 2008

In my thirty-two years, I've lived in a variety of cities. I was born in Long Beach, California, during the '70s and, though I didn't live there, my life revolved around that city. My home was Garden Grove, a city in Orange County, and Disneyland could be seen from my back porch.

As a young boy I remember travelling to Long Beach for doctors appointments. Leaving suburbia, we would drive through broad tracts of undeveloped land between the cities of Orange County. As we got closer to Long Beach the density of the population grew, the quality of the buildings started to look dirty, and thre roads began to grow choked with refuse - largely of the homeless and poor. Being a coastal city, many of the streetlights held orange bulbs; this allowed for better vision on foggy nights, which were frequent and thick.

At five years old I knew I preferred suburbia. Sadly, suburbia in Orange County was soon to become extinct.

By the time I was ten years old I began to really notice the changes taking place around me. Crime had escalated, starting first as graffiti and then moving into gangs. The undeveloped gaps between the cities of Orange County vanished, replaced by bland track homes with Spanish shingle roofs and tan stucco walls. The orange groves - which gave Orange County its name - were slowly sold off, bulldozed, and more track homes were built.

When I turned fifteen, I noticed other changes. The weather patterns were starting to change, with less rain and hotter temperatures becoming the norm. The miles and miles of concrete and blacktop trapped the heat of the day and released them as shimmering waves in the evening, preventing the summer nights from cooling down. Fog, even in Long Beach, became a rarity; the orange lightbulbs of my youth were replaced with standard white florescent lights. Looking up in the night sky I could only see a handful of stars; there was so much ambient light that they could almost not be seen anymore.

At eighteen, the last of the traffic lights to flash yellow late at night was converted to a 24 hour red-yellow-green cycle. More and more traffic clogged the roads, spewing brown muck into the air. At three o'clock in the morning I could sit out on my front porch and listen to the crickets, but now they were drowned out by the constant rush of traffic on the nearby freeways.

I enlisted in the Army at twenty-three in a desperate attempt to escape the urban sprawl that was burying me in layer after layer of concrete. For the first year I wore

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