Day 279 on the Monterey Peninsula
Wild Goose Cafe, Carmel Valley

I'm packed and ready to go, and spending today saying good-bye and resting up for the road ahead that will lead me to Las Vegas. I'll be leaving in the morning, after exactly 280 days on the Monterey Peninsula. I'm sure I'll be back some day. The area is just too beautiful to ignore.

The beach at Carmel is among the most amazing sites in the country. Ed Weston and Ansel Adams lived here, as did hundreds of other artists and photographers caught up in the sheer beauty of the ragged coast and mountains. As an artist colony settled after the San Francisco fire at the turn of the last century, Carmel has now become a tourist destination for art lovers and beach-walkers. Of course Monterey is only a couple of miles from Carmel and is home to Fisherman's Wharf and Cannery Row. I love the area, but would have been more happy had I lived here in the early days when the peninsula was first being settled. Commercialization, over population, traffic, tourism, a state government gone wild burdening its citizens with taxes and restrictions, and a sense that an underlying class warfare is waging beneath the surface of paradise has made me long for simpler times.

The cost of housing and food is so severe, that the workers who support the economy of the Peninsula can 't afford to live there. Most laborers and medium-wage workers must drive or bus miles into the area in order to work. With most modest housing starting at $900 a month or more for a small apartment, no one making $10 an hour can afford to live within 15 miles of this paradise.

With all its beauty and offer of a wonderful lifestyle, Carmel and Monterey remains basically off limits to middle America.

I suppose it's the same across the country as the shrinking middle class gives way to the two-prong system of the Haves and the Have-nots. The widening of the classes between the rich and poor is becoming more pronounced. When a new resale shop opened near my studio I was amused at the name for the new business: "Rich Man, Poor Man." That pretty well sums it up. Resale shops are doing bang-up business during this economic crisis as middle America discovers how poor they are. The rich, of course, keep getting richer. They have their buyouts and government subsidies.

So it appears Paradise will remain the home of the rich. Middle America will discover there is no middle, only those who have money and those who do not.

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Speaking of the "Haves", it seems Facebook is having a wonderful year. They claim to have 200 million users now, doubling its userbase in the last seven months. Speculation is rampant about an IPO coming soon, perhaps by summer. But Mark Zuckerberg has stated "not so fast." Zuckerberg began Facebook in his college dorm and is another billionaire trying to figure out what to do with a company growing too fast. With 800 current employees, the Palo Alto juggernaut's worst case scenario is to be gobbled up by another company like Google for a few billion dollars. If I were Zuckerberg, I'd cash out and buy a house in Carmel.