One friend asked, Are you sure you know what youre doing? Well, we thought we did. We had read a book on how to drive campers, wed studied our maps. We had extra water and extra fuel and spare tires. The car rental man had a shiny new camper. It slept six, that was four too many, but we took it.

He taught us to relight the pilot on the refrigerator and manage the three-burner stove and water pump. So we tossed our gear inside, including enough books and games for a month. Judith had planned meals for three days. She had found bedding that fit, and even learned to climb up to make the bed while in the middle of it.

We had everything we needed, except bug spray so we paused in the alley behind Saks to dash into Safeway. How high are we? she asked. Do we have low bridges or anything? I hardly heard her. I was busy bouncing over those traffic bumps. And thats when we hit!

The insurance report notes that our speed was three to five miles an hour, and that the top of the camper failed by three inches to clear Saks fancy porte-cochere.

When we travel I carry a small tape recorder and use it for a diary. Well, the recorder became famous that trip when it slid off the seat at the impact. It turned itself on when it hit the floor.Our recorder plays back everything anybody said, including the alibis and recriminations throughout the next thirty minutes.

The tape opens with a dull thud over the drivers seat and then it becomes a ripping, screeching wail. That was the aluminum roof peeling back over the queen bed, the front window cracking, and the fiberglass giving away. It launched pinkish insulation flapping into the sky.

The next sound was the plywood walls and shelves tearing loose. Well, everyone in the neighborhood was kind. The coca cola delivery man asked if anybody had been in bed. A Saks saleslady offered coffee.

In Mission Valley, when I turned in what had been a new camper still, with less than 30 miles on it, the manager shook his head. He said, We had another fellow from your newspaper who rented one of these and made it all the way to Yellowstone and back. An astonished crowd gathered to stare at the gaping wound.

Well, we had an old Mercedes at home, and eventually it got us down to Baja and home again. And the answer to your question is absolutely not! We have never again tried to drive a camper.

This has been a navy city since President Teddy Roosevelt visited San Diego on the eve of the first world war. Looking out from San Diego Bay at North Island, he wondered out loud if some day our nation might need navy bases even way out west, here on the Pacific side of America.

It probably sounded crazy at first. Americans knew from experience that wars came from the Atlantic side, not the Pacific.

It was part of the old military bible that the Pacific was far to wide for an enemy to mount a sustained attack along America's California coast.

The problem was in our own perspective. Our world was already smaller than we knew.

But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. Tens of thousands of American sailors and soldiers came trooping into San Diego, assigned to bases grouped along San Diego bay and soon other bases, as distant as the desert. They changed the face and future of San Diego.

The base we call Miramar today had been an Army base had been an Army base in World War One. Relics of army life were everywhere at Miramar at the start of World War II. Qickly it became a Navy air base leaving behind a strange array of Army and Navy buildings, roads, and signs.

ITS battered concrete water resevoir, built in World War One, became the residence of an old convair B - 24 that was used as a training pool for naval air pilots making their first flights across the Pacific, facing the danger of being forced down to ditch their planes in the Pacific.

I came west from North Carolina to North Island, a wide-eyed ensign who was meant to be on the way out to the Western Pacific.

Seeing the world of California opened my own world, as it did for many of my generation changing our geography, our history and our future.

I had grown up in Carolina, and it was back there, on a dark, overcase Sunday at about two in the afternoon when my radio erupted with news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Like many college kids, I wondered if it could all be a dreadful joke. Instead, it was a swing of history that wrenched America's concept of national defense from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

For two centuries now almost since the beginnings of San Diego this city has seen more than its share of military life and death. We sense that sad aspect of San Diego history when we visit Camp Pendelton, or Point Loma or our military hospitals.

Nothing can teach us more just now, in this mad world, than seeing the sacrifices of those who risk their lives for America and for each of us.

My father a beloved Southern Baptist minister who lived to be a hundred and one -- carried a yellowed clipping in his wallet with my mug shot and the headline: "Lone Boy Beats Nine Girls. When he met my bride-to-be Judith, he took her aside for a walk in the piney woods of Carolina and said:

There are two things you should know about my son that he probably has not told you. (Judith recalls shuddering at his ominous, confiding tone).

One thing was that he could read store signs from the back of his bicycle when he was only three. The other was winning the state wide spelling bee in which he had represented Fred A. Olds School in Raleigh.

Those nail biting finals crossed my mind as I read about preparations for the 2007 contest in Washington D. C. --- Youngsters preparing like gladiators for this annual televised showdown of smarts, instinct and nerve.

The national spelling bee was launched with nine contestants in 1925 and the winning word was Gladiolus. In the 1930s while I was mastering parallel the championship words included: fracas, knack and promiscuous. --a word that my southern Baptist mother would never have allowed to cross my lips.

In the 21st century, the finals word lists are devilishly tricky hard to pronounce, hard to spell and not heard in many households. pococurante (PO-co-coo-RAN-te) in 2003; autochthonous ( Oh- TAK-then-ous) in 2004; appoggiatura (a-PAJ-eh-TOOR-a) in 2005 and, last year, ursprache ( OOR-SHPRA-ke) . (Having been to the dictionary, I can tell you they mean apathetic, aboriginal", a rhythmically strong, dissonant grace note resolving to a principal harmonic tone and a reconstructed, hypothetical parent language such as Proto-Germanic.

Spelling parallel earned me a dictionary and my Fathers Pride. These days contestants vie for $42,000 and a lot of attention.

My father appreciated words he read the Bible in English , Greek and Hebrew. Besides writing weekly sermons, he put four of us kids through college by writing for the Raleigh News and Observer for 10 cents a column inch. And then there were his diaries fierce, gossipy, newsy journals that covered small town North Carolina life and family revelations for more than 70 years.

It was in reading those diaries that I learned the pride of the spelling bees. And other astounding tidbits, such as the fact that I was conceived during a month in which my mother was confined to bed with chicken pox.

Well, what really goes on down there? Where do we go to find the heart of San Diego? Why do other cities long to be more like our city?

We argue, here in the southwest corner of America that we dont' need to behave quite like other people. We expect to do it better, and get on to more important things.

Such self-centered logic is the kind that America has come to expect of our region. Our casual style is convenient, but its really not great at solving problems.

We flatter ourselves when we call San Diego a twenty-first century city. We hope we are the ones setting the pace.

Out here on the left coast, in what Americans long considered an eccentric playground, we now inhabit a frontier of high tech and higher education.

We're at the edge, and this is as far west as Americans can go -- without getting wet. Yet even for this coast, San Diego is its own curious, lovely creature.

We are more campus and resort town than factory town. We are more a leisure world than a navy city.

Ours is a soft hearted, informal, midwestern kind of town that has soared with its familiar attraction for families involved in scientific research and advanced education, and certainly for families in the military.

The heart of San Diego still sort of bounces around the beach. Wherever it is, it doesn't seem ready to settle down for life. For the longer we seek to explain the shallow mood swings of this diverse and pampered city, the more difficult the task becomes.

Setting out to change San Diego has always been awkward, because so many OF us seem content with the way life drifts on. Our steady, gradual growth is increasingly in vital higher education, in technology and research.

Its not only the climate that these newcomers envy. Since gold rush times, many have understood that this southwest corner offered a different world, a different style of living. It attracts those who tend to protect its character.

In such a pioneer group as that, we place founders of our colleges and schools, UCSD and Salk Institute, and now scores of research AND high-tech schools, large and small.

It is no coincidence that higher education and research laboratories seized on sites in Torrey Pines as their home base, creating AN instant science community. Other regions are copying San Diego innovations in independent schools.

Most of us are sensitive enough to know when things don't go well in this civic hideaway. For instance, the recent scandals of city hall. More of us are working harder at doing our own civic duties.

Many of us remember more conservative regions where we grew up without the freedoms we find in California.

But one bad habit, its time to recognize and control: our city seems still at the awkward adolescent age of trying to make excuses for dumb mistakes, but then forgiving itself and forgetting.

This easy mode has too long been in style for this laidback city. There are so many ways to make our city better, that Mayor Sanders should be assigning eager committees all over the city.

On weekends, the coastal highway dazzled with sporty open roadsters. The very last word for the Hollywood crowd they allowed daring border weekends.

They drove down Highway 101 through 50-mile speed limits and a handful of stoplights, on through the villages of National City and Chula Vista.

Prohibition helped build at least a dozen Tijuana saloons, and a jai alai court and lots of little houses with red lights in their windows.

San Diegans gawked at the surge of film stars in those open convertibles .

During Prohibition north of the border, Baja California offered dozens of bars and houses of prostitution. It was the movie colonys early version of Las Vegas.

So the Agua Caliente spa became as chic with the movie crowd of that era as Las Vegas strives to be today. Rita Hayworth was the first star to play Tijuana night clubs.

Calientes raucous attractions quickly spilled down the coast to Ensenada. Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe became commonplace attractions in night clubs and casinos. They made two-dollar bets at the racetrack, screamed at the bullfights, and stayed up till dawn in the casinos.

The border was still flagrant and primitive. Simply crossing it could seem a renunciation of the Depression years.

Rex Smith, an author friend from New York, flew in on weekends to attend Tijuana bullfights, and published a scholarly book about bullfights.

I even convinced my minister father, during a visit from North Carolina, that he could not gauge the depths of border depravity until he attended a bullfight with me. For tourists, they were the essence of Mexico. Bull fights to the death were so popular that they supported two rings in Tijuana.

Anything might sell to the unrestrained Yanqui visitor, under the illusion that was flagrant in Prohibition years: that one was far away from everything.

On the walls of La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, which became the chic overnight stop of those early Hollywood commutes, you still find faded images of film stars beside their open cabriolets. And in registration books there you find trails of the early movie generations, en route to the hot waters of the Agua Caliente spa and the croupiers of ballrooms sparkling with crystal chandeliers.

Los Angeles had not yet become a great weekend town. As long as Prohibition prevailed north of the border, Baja California served as the movie colonys Las Vegas.

We Californians are assumed to be wilder than those more traditional relatives we left behind in the south, the Midwest, and especially perhaps in New England. Different things bother us, or make us happy. We have widely varying concerns and different expectations from life.

Way back after World War II, when I decided to settle (not in my native North Carolina, but in California), it was a minor breach of family expectations. My father explained to his wide circles of friends with some embarrassment that I had gone west and stayed west. My move, and that of several million young Americans leaving the military, was not in the historically acceptable way that my grandfather had emigrated from Wales. His family in Wales was hungry! My move was seen in my North Carolina hometown as another abandonment, even an abdication of family honor. But my grandfather had been loyally trying to feed his family.

In the migratory sense, we in California are more tolerant that those we left behind in small towns and on farms that were passed down by generations. We still choose to believe that we came west with open minds, ready to accept whatever we found, and anything we chose to believe, and to set aside all the rest.

My father was a minister and my move alarmed him. But he never chided me. He flew out to California on visits; they were his first by jet. His glimpses of our carefree wild west, the homeland of secular Hollywood, brought forth both frowns of concern and smiles of astonishment.

He approved of some of my friends but not of others. In California, he warned, we seem prepared to believe in any God or in any cult that appeals.

Fathers wisdom still guides me. When a university research team announced its recent conclusions that one million Californians are now compulsive gamblers, I imagined the furrows of alarm that such news would have carved in his wise and patient face.

My visit to the old guard Wednesday Club leaves chills in their memories and mine. As their luncheon speaker that day, I had ill fortune of bringing with me their first news of federal indictments that would quickly scandalize City Hall and convert more than one honorable into a prisoner.

That scandal is not ended and Im not been invited back to the Wednesday Club. Neither they nor I would wish to risk it.

My alternative source of such memories is a strangely cluttered farmland, a mile or so to the west, off Midway Drive and Pacific Highway. It is the Walter Andersen Nursery. One drives past a nearly inaccessible huddle of redwood slats and terra cotta pots of sparkling flower beds and adolescent trees that beg to go home with you.

A main San Diego post office was once on some part of this nursery and used car lot and visitors parked there to cross Midway Drive to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. Thousands went to work in that neighborhood each morning, and most of them disappeared inside the metal shelters where shiny signs read: Convair Plant Two.

But these days, the Walter Andersen Nursery almost seems to draw more traffic to this neighborhood than Convair. For those of us drawn to the joy of growing things, it is a place to drop by to see whats new, to see whats in bloomstately, camellias, rows of primroseand whats out of the question.

Cars drive away from the front gate of that nursery loaded heavy with greenery, protruding from windows, with pots and flats and with sacks of soil and fertilizers. Grown men who duck out early on business lunches stop off at Walter Andersen and make unlikely excuses for getting back to the office late.

The nursery is managed now by fourth-generation Andersens, and it has grown thick with community history. It opened in 1928 in Old Town. A store twice as large operates now in Poway. And there are usually strong young guys to lay out paper seat covers and hoist your prizes into the back seat and trunk of your car.

Getting those heavy buckets out at home is another matter. We gardeners never suffer buyers remorse, except when unloading.

The gamblers come-on has worked for over a century in the golden state of California ever since the Gold Rush transplanted gambling into the mother lode history. And that was way back when we first learned to glorify gambling and blazed trails for todays Indian casinos.

I remain an ardent disbeliever in the whole thing. Californias legalized gambling, the wrong people lose like those wicked moms and pops lose their kids lunch money in the deep of night as they stand unsteadily at the crap tables.

Ten years ago, the anti-gambling lobby in California was far stronger than it is today. Tribes have taught our legislators an easy way to balance budgets. Legislators have found gambling money comes easier with each casino they authorize.

Its astonishing that Indian tribes waited as long as they did to convert their reservations into come-on islands freed of federal guidelines. As theyve found the legislature a loyal partner in profits, theyve mad their deal with California, and with us taxpayers.

So why let gambling money escape? I asked that question when Esquire Magazine sent me to Las Vegas to write about its gambling industry.

As a ministers son, I was astonished to be present when the first national conventions of church women were conveying boldly in the world gambling capital of Las Vegas. Their arrival was the breakthrough that seemed to sanction the Las Vegas gambling industry. I couldnt imagine how even the Las Vegas guns had lured the ladies into town.

Then I learned their nightly room rate in a lavish new hotel was ten dollars. When that early experiment in come-ins brought grateful letters of thanks, Vegas hoteliers became generous patrons of church groups. They might oppose legal gambling, but they could put their share into missionary work.

My visit as a reporter was a chance to see the ugly backside of a gambling town. The showgirl prostitutes assigned with suave smiles to big gamblers, the collisions of the carelessly rich and the painfully poor.

Wilbur Clark was the prince of Las Vegas casino hotel proprietors then. Id known his brother Harold, who ran a caf on E Street near the newspaper where I worked then in San Diego.

On my weekend in Las Vegas, Wilbur took me aside and, with all the appearance of a Brinks truck driver guarding secret riches, he showed me some of the tricks of the croupiers, the hazards of the crap tables and the house cops who watched everything through the upstairs glass floors from their stations over those tables.

He introduced me to pretty girls and invited me as his guest to choose one. I shook my head. By the weekends end, I understood that for Harold or Wilbur, the brothers from San Diegos E Street, it would have taken only a nod to see to it that I won or lost.

Starting back in 1907, my father wrote in his diary twice each week about what was happening in his world with his family and his work as a relatively liberal minister in small North Carolina towns. He didnt hold anything back from his diaries, and so he kept them in a locked desk drawer.

As he was dying, at the age of 100, he grinned at me and handed me the key to his diaries.

Among thousands of other observant details of life in America a century ago, I didn't know until now how much trouble Id caused him in his church at the age of 7.

It brought me my first formal summons to his study, where I found him in the midst of his daily correspondence, conducted with literally hundreds of old friends and relatives on the long forgotten penny postals that the post office sold us then for a penny each, already pre-stamped.

He put away his cards, waved me to a chair, and said he wished to discuss a matter brought to his attention by my Sunday school teacher.

She had phoned Father in some apprehension to report that I had caused confusion and some small trouble in her class with my questions about her collection of dimes and quarters to contribute to Christian missions in Africa.

She had announced that our coins would go to support the mission of the Southern Baptist Church in Kenya. She mentioned a close competition with rival missionary evangelists from the Northern Baptist Convention. She didnt want the Southerners to get beat out by the North. Many years had passed, but the Civil War had not been forgotten.

Unfortunately, I had asked our teacher if we were competing with the Baptists up above the Mason Dixon line, or if this was a missionary cause we were both trying to help, to bring God to the African people.

My teacher told my father she had found it awkward to discuss that question in front of the class, and she simply wanted her minister to understand her position.

That day in his study, my father fixed his steeliest look on me. He asked, tell me what you said, and what your teacher said.

I said I had told her I thought we were all the same church doing the same missionary work. And then I asked if it made a difference what kind of Baptist baptized them as Christians.

My father and I sat staring at each other for what seemed a terrible length of time. Then his face wrinkled, and the laugh began erupting from deep in his chest, the uncontrollable bellow that came rarely, but brought us all along with it.

He wiped away his tears of laughter and stared at me with what actually seemed to be affection.

"Bully for you, boy," he cried out. "Bully for you!!!!!"

With that, he returned to his typewriter and his postal cards. I didn't know then about genes, but I left his study with a new sense of camaraderie with my father.

In the view of the attorney Patrick Shea, who dealt with a similar crisis in Orange County, San Diego is lagging far back on the road to recovery.

He compares the moment with that of Orange County during his tenure there. Orange County filed for bankruptcy and set out on a tedious, years long course of financial recovery.

Shea says the difference between the situations in San Diego and Orange is this: In San Diego, we are still in the business of politics.

On a far different course, Orange County filed Chapter 9 bankruptcy and set about the business of financial recovery. Shea thinks our do-it-yourself political approach is not only less effective, it's actually more difficult.

He says the professionals brought in to restructure Orange County were, for the most part, not political.

They were in the financial adjustment business, and their success would measure only that. So the Orange County focus was on getting the numbers applying proven measures toward solvency. It took 18 months.

Comparing the Orange and San Diego approaches is like comparing science to dogma. Both can be the focus of very strong beliefs. The Orange approach was based upon evidence and proven results over time. In San Diego we heard the words of dogma, which can sound assuring. But they are false. They dont work."

Thats how he feels about what he calls our present obscurely prophetic description of a five year plan, which goes like this:

This plan will put us on track to addressing these problems over 20 years."

Shea thinks that sounds like a 25-year plan. It tells you that the problems will not be solved in any identified time. Being on track doesnt sound like solved, and the success of the process is so remote that todays government leaders will be out of office when the yardstick of measurement can be applied. Why is that an acceptable approach for the people of San Diego?

You don't buy a ball gown at home depot," he says. "If you want to solve the massive financial problems of this city and they are solvable its not impossibly hard to do. But you have to do it in the way, and in the place, that is designed to get it done.

What we are now doing is expensive, inefficient, and will be ultimately unsuccessful. And while we play this game, well sell off our city assets, which we will never again regain, and well cripple our ability to deal with more mundane problems like getting fresh water to our homes.

This comes from a wise attorney who went through the process that San Diego faces now. I hope we listen.