(5 of 8)
Zap—the green farmland changes to brown, fields of burned grass roll gleaming up the mountains from the sea. If someone turned off the irrigation faucet for a week, green Southern California would be a dust bowl. I switch to an inland freeway heading north. The concrete knifes through raw-earth hills with drainage pipes running down the sides to keep the hills from washing away. A hundred miles north, the land is flat and planted in cotton and grapes and fruit trees. I head for Yosemite, and make it by dusk, 7 o'clock.
Joe Cody, who's camping next to me under the tall cedars, has driven here with his wife and child in a Camper bus all the way from New Hampshire, just to climb around on these rocks. He has degrees in chemistry, biochemistry and physics that could be bringing him at least $15,000 if he worked—but he would rather climb mountains. "Every climber in the world aspires to come to this valley," he says. "This is the best. El Capitan, the high rock with the sharp nose that you passed on your way in, is the most famous climbing rock in the world. We may try to find a house somewhere near Yosemite. Every kid who climbs dreams of coming here."
Cut to: The Think Tank
I head out to the Rand Corp., dominant think tank of Southern California—and probably of the world. Here at Santa Monica, with the glittering Pacific in view, everything is in the future tense—very tense. Nobody bothers me when I park in the lot, but when I enter the sun-washed flowerpot-pink cement two-story building, I am met by a uniformed guard. Employees no longer have to wear badges; but visitors do. The atmosphere seems antiseptic, full of right angles, and suffocatingly quiet. But it's not quite as uptight as it appears. This is, after all, California and the deep-thinkers are dressed in California motley—everything from shirtsleeves to Brooks Bros, suits. One man, an administrator no less, has been known to pull into the parking lot on a motorcycle and in a black leather jacket. The guard leaves me, and all formality falls away as I greet Anthony Pascal, a 36-year-old mental machine with a great, comical handlebar moustache and electric curls shooting out all over his head. He sits down and says, "Name the topic, and I'll tell you what'll happen."
I think, and say "Riots." He shoots back: "Rioting could well reemerge. In the '70s, with fewer jobs available, employers will exercise their prejudice more; there will be more minority unrest, and more trouble."
"Education," I say, warming to this cosmic one-sided game of pingpong, and he says: "There will be more and more private money in education in the '70s, because education is getting too expensive for the taxpayers to bear any more of the burden. You may see the Government issue vouchers to people, worth so much for private education. This system would spawn a whole new generation of private schools, which in turn will leave the way open for far more innovative teaching methods than we've seen."
Guaranteed wage? "It will come. And when it does, it will pull the poor and the lower-middle class back together, because it will help remove the stigma of unemployment."