Flowers spring up in the dust

This story has been modified since its original posting.

By JOHN VAN DOORN - Staff Writer | Wednesday, September 24, 2008 3:13 PM PDT ∞

Driving around paradise, aka North County in the sunshine against blue sky over wine-born waters near mountains standing guard by the stunning tan land, you can't help but notice: Paradise ain't perfect.

There are blotches.

Call them slums, call them projects, call them barrios, call them tin or cardboard or packing box, call them gangland, call them illegal, call them poor; they are there, here, and in the next block.

They're not so pretty as your million-dollar tracts, or as comforting as a trust fund, but they're North County, too, and you can't walk away, or drive by, without looking.

I know about a hardscrabble neighborhood in Vista. Its main intersection is, I believe, South Santa Fe and Palmyra, and I say I "believe" because I only know what I read and what others tell me about the intersection. They say gangs and crime, and I say, oh.

Much as the world loves generalizations, they tend to have holes you could drive truisms through. And so you have to figure that for all the bad or sad, angry or wounded people in the neighborhood, there are good, happy, content and whole men and women who accept their world as it is, and manage to like it.

Still, it's pretty rough around there, that much is for sure. You can't often pass by without a scowl or a sneer slithering through the (closed) window, or, more devastating than these, a look of despair that cuts to wherever the soul hides out, next to the chamber of guilt.

Kids look like that, and so do too many of the moms who walk and walk in the dust to a store where they can't buy much because there is no money, and their kids straggle along, learning what it means to be, to be ---- what?

Broke? Lost? Alone? Unwanted? Unseen?

When did hope leave that place?

Well, I don't know, but I know that not all of it did. Some children smile, some mamas hum, some hope stayed in the nabe.

A couple of weeks ago at that corner, where graffiti is about the only successful crop, flowers were planted and other pots of flowers set out on the southeast and northwest corners. I saw it happen.

That was, and if beauty means anything at all, it remains, hope of the highest order, or, perhaps, a clear, clear sign of hope.

Remember: South Santa Fe and Palmyra, in Vista. It is not the Vista version of the Quail Botanical Gardens, but it's a start and somebody had to do it.

Who it was, was the manager of the two apartment buildings at that intersection in Vista.

All in all, if you count both corners, she and a teen-aged helper (it beats the gang) put in 100 or more plants. And arranged some large pots.

On planting day, a driver stopped to remark on what a, well, wonderful thing they were doing. Patronizing, to be sure. But heartfelt.

The manager was shy. She didn't say much. Neither did the helper.

Can't last, the motorist said to his wife as they drove away. Too tough around here.

But he was wrong. Two weeks later, last Monday, he drove through again. And saw that on both corners, the flowers were growing strong and bright, reaching for the same sky that smiles on lavish castle and barren shack, trying for a glimpse of the mountain stalwarts to the east, perhaps to sign up for long-term protection.

I oughtn't make too much of it, and perhaps you shouldn't, either. It's not as if a palm tree were spotted on Mars at the Sea of Tranquillity, or a single lily sprang up in a forlorn swamp.

It's just that drive-by critics have expectations, a certainness, that what is poor and drab, dusty and unpainted is lost to a pitiless world, and that it probably will remain so, ugly and on the vaguely threatening side of life.

It's not true. Check out the flowers at South Santa Fe and Palmyra, Vista. They're hope's markers, they're the color of human spirits that won't let a little despair get them down.

Contact columnist John Van Doorn at (760)739-6647 or jvandoorn@nctimes.com.

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