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219| CHAPter tHirteen Reshaping the Metropolis At Colorado Avenue she turned. It was the first through boulevard she had been on, and the traffic signals were off, with yellow blinkers showing. So she gave the car the gun, excitedly watching the needle swing past 30, 40, and 50. . . . The car was pumping something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of regained self-respect. —James Cain, Mildred Pierce (1945) Now they lived in Mill Valley. . . . A tract house on the Sutton Manor flatlands; it was big enough, comfortable, and just barely affordable. Besides, the first time they’d seen it, a racing green ’63 TR-4 was parked in the driveway, a strong indication that the house’s owners were okay people. If they could live in a tract house, so could Kate and Harvey. . . . And it was still Mill Valley, though just barely; Kate still hated to tell people, when she gave directions, to stay on East Blithedale all the way out, as if they were heading for 101, turn left at the Chevron station, go past the Red Cart, and turn right at the carwash. —Cyra McFadden, The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (1977) Los Angeles is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces and not killed. . . . You get the impression that a mediumsized urban centre has schizogenetically reproduced itself twenty times. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955) | CHAPter tHirteen 220 Seventy years after emily French struggled to finish her small house near the South Platte River, another Denver family moved into a new, almost finished house—but this time in the absolutely new neighborhood of Hoffman Heights in the booming suburb of Aurora. their experience—dad, mom, Susan, tom, Bobby, and Bud—mirrored that of millions of other families, but we can revisit it through the memories and meditations of Robert Michael Pyle. His memoir The Thunder Tree relives his childhood and youth in the 1950s and early 1960s. Summer days along the High Line Canal, explorations of abandoned farmhouses, and trips to the public library (which kept getting a bigger building and following population eastward) all fed his fascination with wild nature in its losing contest with the suburban frontier. Aurora was booming in 1953, when the Pyles moved into their new fourbedroom home, yellow brick on a concrete slab. the kids woke to the “acrid odor of roofer’s tar . . . field marks of a new suburb still under construction .”1 their parents struggled to turn the bare dirt yard into lawn and garden with the help of the kids, who dug dandelions for a nickel a bucket. Chinese elms were the tree of choice, brittle but fast growing. the Cold War funded Aurora’s Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Lowry Field with its training jets and titan missile silos, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal to produce and store chemical weapons. Aurora’s 3,000 residents in 1940 grew to 30,000 in 1953 when Bobby Pyle and his family moved out from the city, to 50,000 in 1960 when he entered high school, and to 276,000 by the end of the century. in alliance with Colorado Springs, the city built its own transmountain water system to pump snowmelt across the Front Range independent of what suburban developers saw as the tyrannical Denver Water Board.2 Community leaders annexed undeveloped tracts of prairie, marketed the city as an office and industrial location, and envisioned Aurora as a new Minneapolis with Denver relegated to the role of St. Paul without Prairie Home Companion. Bobby Pyle fifty years later is a biologist and nature writer of international reputation. then he roamed the edges of Aurora with the eye of a nascent naturalist. He observed the transformation of the short-grass prairie, first by invasive species like cheatgrass, then by the Kentucky bluegrass of domestic lawns and city parks, then by the asphalt of church and shopping center parking lots. His family drove east into the prairie to see pronghorn antelope, a trip that grew longer with each year. His naturalist’s eye also spotted the changing species of housing: the old round barn, the rural house across from the new mall, the abandoned farmhouse from a vanished farm, the two new ranch-style houses built adjacent, “scouts for the suburb that was preparing to pounce.”3 Robert Pyle’s family were enlistees in the suburbanizing generation that remade the nation after 1945. the immediate postwar decades brought...

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