When the Going Gets Weird . . .

Now stick with me. This might get weird. We are in Santa Cruz, a town where the ‘60s came but never went. This is a place where downtown it is possible to purchase vegetarian dog food but not men’s underwear; where some women prefer to be called gyno-Americans; where the college sports teams do battle, officially, as the Banana Slugs; where a central office structure is known in local shorthand as the Mo Bo Sushi building.

The politics of Santa Cruz persistently redefine the leftward edge of municipal interest and make national headlines. Last year, it was an ordinance banning discrimination against people based on physical appearance, the so-called ugly law. This year, it’s a movement to clamp down on bad street musicians, the transients who pick a little, warble a lot and drive merchants crazy with ceaseless renditions of two-song repertoires, usually “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Truckin’.”

“We make good copy,” Mayor Neal Coonerty conceded with a sigh, nodding to a bicyclist who pedaled by with what appeared to be a giant banana on his head. Coonerty is not keen on exploring the rich annals of Santa Cruz weirdness. He contends that most of what is written by outsiders about Santa Cruz is overblown and, in any case, “irrelevant.” He wanted to tell another story, the story of a community that, against long odds, has brought itself back from the brink.

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Santa Cruz (pop. 50,000) is 75 miles south of San Francisco. For a long time, it was run by conservatives, the descendants of early fishing families, the hotel owners and other merchants. The political underfooting shifted when U.C. Santa Cruz--home of the History of Consciousness major--opened in the 1960s, bringing with it a student body of voting liberals.

Since then, town liberals, who call themselves progressives, have come to dominate the conservatives, who call themselves moderates. The conservatives grieved when feminists chased away the Miss California pageant and cringed when the city banned U.S. Navy ships from local waters on the Fourth of July. “You’re driving away business” and “Everyone’s laughing at us” became the conservative battle cries. The progressives didn’t seem to mind. They seemed, in fact, to be having quite a few yuks themselves.

On Oct. 17, 1989, the laughing stopped. The Loma Prieta Earthquake drew its power from a faultline just eight miles away in the dark, spooky mountains that separate the town from the San Francisco Peninsula. Downtown Santa Cruz was destroyed. Something like 30 buildings came down, and those left standing were badly crippled. Three people died.

In the aftermath, a time when commerce was conducted out of tents and people slept in cars for fear of aftershocks, the town’s survival seemed a wide open question. Big banks turned their backs. Emergency money was spread thin across Northern California. Politicians came for their photo ops and then disappeared.

“The earthquake changed the politics of this town,” said Coonerty, who was elected mayor a year after the quake. As the owner of Book Shop Santa Cruz, and as an active progressive, Coonerty had long served as an unofficial mediator between political factions. “When things collapsed, they couldn’t keep fighting. They had to work together. They had to trust each other, to understand each other’s problems. They were in the same battle together. And no one else was going to help them.”

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Well, maybe it’s like Hunter Thompson, the gonzo journalist, once wrote: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. California’s most strident anti-development municipality passed a half-cent sales tax, raising $20 million to overhaul infrastructure. A rebuilding strategy was formed. Aware that Macy’s and the like would never come, it stitched together a different kind of shopping district, one boutique and coffeehouse at a time. Software firms were lured from over the mountain in Silicon Valley. A museum was built, and so was a parking garage.

The work’s not done. Vacant lots still are scattered about downtown. Jackhammers give the off-key minstrels stiff competition. But the short answer is that Santa Cruz has made it back, and while conservatives grumble that it took an earthquake to yank the hippy-dippy progressives out of the ozone, the analysis cuts both ways.

To pull off its comeback, Santa Cruz has needed to compete with other California cities recovering from all sorts of disasters, from recession to drought to riot. In this competition, the town’s main advantages are clean skies, an uncluttered coastline and a minimum of the fast-growth uglies. Despite all the zaniness, or perhaps because of it, Santa Cruz still has something to sell: resources that, more and more, are the ones that count most in California. Weird.