It was among the fastest-growing towns in the Bay Area, and its appeal could be simply described. The houses there, mostly new in construction, were deemed affordable, and Californians, like Americans everywhere, were slaves to the long-simmering national dream of owning a single-family home, no matter what the psychological cost. In Hercules, you paid for your pleasures in accrued freeway time, all the lost minutes squandered on the commuter meatrack. Highway 80, the main arterial to San Francisco and Oakland, backed up by seven o’clock on a weekday morning, and a trip of twenty-five miles or so to work could take up to two hours in a worst-case scenario. Every single weekday morning, fifty weeks a year, the same old grind. As I drove to Hercules, I was awed by the stalled line of cars trying to move in the other direction, creeping forward by inches in a cloud of spent fossil fuels at 7:14 A.M. The drivers did not look the least bit content. Instead, they looked angry, anxious, bored, or miserable.
