“But when the first settlers came to the Hill Country, no one was calling them ‘victims’, least of all themselves. If someone had told them the truth, in fact, they might not have listened. For the trap was baited well. Who, entering this land after a rainy April, when ‘the springs are flowing, the streams are rushing, the live oaks spread green canopies, and the field flowers wave in widespread beauty,’ would believe it was not in a ‘less humid’ but an ‘arid’ zone? Moreover, as to the adequacy of the rainfall, the evidence of the settlers’ own eyes was often misleading, for one aspect of the trap was especially convincing—and especially cruel. Meteorologists would later conclude that rainfall over the entire Edwards Plateau is characterized by the most irregular and dramatic cycles.
. . .
The first settlers did not realize they were crossing a significant line. They came into the new land blithely. After all those years in which they had feared their fate was poverty, they saw at last the glimmerings of a new hope. But in reality, from the moment they first decided to settle in this new land, their fate was sealed. Dreaming of cotton and cattle kingdoms, or merely of lush fields of corn and wheat, they went back for their families and brought them in, not knowing that they were bringing them into a land which would adequately support neither cattle nor cotton—nor even corn or wheat. Fleeing the crop lien and the furnishing merchant, hundreds of thousands of Southerners came to Texas. Of all those hundreds of thousands, few had come as far as these men who came to the Hill Country. And they had come too far.
. . .
And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian—almost exactly the border of the hill country. At the very moment in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.”—Robert. A. Caro. The Years Of Lyndon B. Johnson, Vol. 1, The Path To Power.
This is how I’ve felt about the Bay Area for a while, and can independently confirm the sudden disappearance into the ether of anyone who moves there.
It seems like there are a lot of noncreepy explanations for why Berkeley residents might post less online, most notably that they might be using their social energy on more fulfilling in-person interactions.
“But when the first settlers came to the Hill Country, no one was calling them ‘victims’, least of all themselves. If someone had told them the truth, in fact, they might not have listened. For the trap was baited well. Who, entering this land after a rainy April, when ‘the springs are flowing, the streams are rushing, the live oaks spread green canopies, and the field flowers wave in widespread beauty,’ would believe it was not in a ‘less humid’ but an ‘arid’ zone? Moreover, as to the adequacy of the rainfall, the evidence of the settlers’ own eyes was often misleading, for one aspect of the trap was especially convincing—and especially cruel. Meteorologists would later conclude that rainfall over the entire Edwards Plateau is characterized by the most irregular and dramatic cycles.
. . .
The first settlers did not realize they were crossing a significant line. They came into the new land blithely. After all those years in which they had feared their fate was poverty, they saw at last the glimmerings of a new hope. But in reality, from the moment they first decided to settle in this new land, their fate was sealed. Dreaming of cotton and cattle kingdoms, or merely of lush fields of corn and wheat, they went back for their families and brought them in, not knowing that they were bringing them into a land which would adequately support neither cattle nor cotton—nor even corn or wheat. Fleeing the crop lien and the furnishing merchant, hundreds of thousands of Southerners came to Texas. Of all those hundreds of thousands, few had come as far as these men who came to the Hill Country. And they had come too far.
. . .
And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian—almost exactly the border of the hill country. At the very moment in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.”—Robert. A. Caro. The Years Of Lyndon B. Johnson, Vol. 1, The Path To Power.
This is how I’ve felt about the Bay Area for a while, and can independently confirm the sudden disappearance into the ether of anyone who moves there.
It seems like there are a lot of noncreepy explanations for why Berkeley residents might post less online, most notably that they might be using their social energy on more fulfilling in-person interactions.