Excavating Calabazas Creek: An Inefficient Route Through Silicon Valley
By: Jenny Odell
Tags: Vallco, History, Ecology, Cupertino, Silicon Valley

What happens in these places? Some of them are electronics parts manufacturers, some of them make surveillance systems, and many of them are data centers. Watching the water flow through the concrete channel, I think about the flows happening inside these buildings, and how different they are: streams of requests and information coming in and out, unpredictably, from any place at any time. A data center is about as a close to a non-place as you can get — if it could do away with space and time, it would. The image that Terix Computer services uses on its website is not of its interior, but a stock photo of some data center somewhere, an image that it shares with countless other sites.

That said, some of these companies have became “grounded” in this place in at least one way. Right next to this section of Calabazas Creek are several EPA Superfund sites, where pollution from electronics manufacturing companies contaminated the groundwater with things like trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent originally made as an anesthetic for humans.

In stark contrast to the linear, hyper-logical character of this landscape, the EPA notes that groundwater pollution from the Sunnyvale sites has begun to run together underground, creating a “commingled plume” that extends more than a mile north toward the bay — a reminder that that the machinery that moves our data creates other flows as well.

adapted from illustration by Eurico Zimbres

The offending companies named in the Superfund reports are gone and forgotten, leaving only their contribution to the commingled plume. Somewhat ironically, one of those companies was named Monolithic Memories.

Part 2: Apple (and apricots)

From Sunnyvale, Calabazas Creek passes through some housing subdivisions before it cuts through a corner of the new Apple campus.

Renderings of the “spaceship” campus don’t include the creek. Sometimes there’s also a weird fog at the edges, a dismissive hand wave to the actual geographical site — as though the campus could actually be anywhere.

Like most places in Cupertino, there were once orchards here. In this case they were apricot orchards belonging to Scottish immigrants Robert and Margaret Glendenning, who established their farm in 1851. (Note the barn, which will come up again later.)

The Glendenning farm. (courtesy of History San José)

From then until the 1960s, much of the area was orchards. For high school students, “cutting cots” was a common way to spend one’s summer. When the orchards gave way to shopping centers, subdivisions, and tech companies, many people mourned the loss of a semi-rural feeling.

looking east from the foothills in 1955 (courtesy of History San José)

But while orchards and tech would seem to be opposed, fruit production in Cupertino was high tech in its own way — systematic and producing ever higher yields. On the Internet Archive, I found a strangely pleasing video of a local grower’s apricot processing machine, which almost reminds me of fruit as data. Before tech, industrial farming was in its own way an abstraction applied to the land.

apricot processing at the plant of John Leonard, a prominent Santa Clara Valley grower (courtesy of History San José)

apricots drying at J. Frost’s, a few miles from the Glendenning farm (courtesy of History San José)

Below you can see a scene typical of the 1970s, a weird mix of tech buildings and remaining orchards. The Glendenning farm was sold to Varian, which sold to it Hewlett Packard, where my mom would later work as a technical writer.

early Hewlett Packard buildings (courtesy of History San José)

I sometimes accompanied my mom to work, admiring her line drawings of printers or laminating membership cards for my mystery-solving club. Once, I visited the lobby and tried on an early version of a VR headset. The scene was a chessboard; all the chess pieces were bigger than me, and I couldn’t move — maybe an apt image of my relationship with technology these days.

casual teen Jenny at HP (courtesy of Gwen Odell)

Recently, I asked my mom whether she remembered a barn being on the campus. She said that she did, but that she never got to see the inside. People would have “beer busts” there, and sometimes she would go and get apricots from the few trees left standing around it.

Apple acquired the campus in 2010 and demolished it in 2013. My mom sent me this video, which somebody amazingly set to set to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.”

On the urging of the Cupertino Historical Society, Apple was compelled to keep the Glendenning barn, but it dismembered it plank by plank, promising to reassemble it near the fitness center where it could become “a hub for employees.” Many years later, the planks have indeed been reconvened (and painted black), but the barn does not seem to be a hub for anything except for landscaping vehicles.

the Glendenning barn in 2019 (courtesy of anonymous)

There’s another relic at the new campus, but it was created, not preserved. Inside the circle are a couple of orchards, which Steve Jobs hoped would “create a microcosm of old Silicon Valley, a landscape reenactment of the days when the cradle of digital disruption had more fruit trees than engineers.”

an Apple orchard, off season (courtesy of anonymous)

But given the surrounding circumstances, it feels like Baudrillard’s description of the simulacrum come to life. While it magically reconstitutes Steve Jobs’ childhood memory of the past, the campus dramatically cuts itself off from the physical fabric of the city surrounding it. What’s not necessarily evident in renderings of its campus is that it has built gradual hills around the spaceship so that it’s almost impossible to see even when you’re right next to it. Perhaps this explains this giant mountain of dirt that happened while the campus was being constructed.

the campus in 2015

In Sunnyvale, the creek is a flood threat; at Apple, it’s a security threat. An environmental impact report was supposed to require Apple to build a trail along the section of Calabazas Creek, but they objected, writing that “such a trail through a portion of the site would pose security risks because Apple has been the target of intense scrutiny regarding its future projects.” In an LA Times article, a Cupertino official is quoted comparing the campus design to a moat.

I was a bit apprehensive about visiting the creek at this site, since the LA Times reporters had been chased away by a security guard who believed (mistakenly) that Apple owned the road. When I visited, I parked a mile away at Main Street Cupertino — which I’ll get to in a minute — and bought a Philz coffee to make myself blend in. I strolled as casually as possible across existential landscape, over interstate 280 and down the road that Apple, in fact, does not own.