Silicon Valley is a land of suburbs. Concrete, sprinkler fed lawns, and asphalt. The money doesn’t let things grow old very easily. If things fall apart, they are replaced. This culture of the ever present now permeates the valley– school children picture history as an abstract set of stories set in a far away land. Silicon Valley is a land of the Now, and increasingly, the land of Tomorrow.

When you ask someone living in Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Cupertino, what the history of their city is, they might mutter something about orchards and the gold rush, but for all application to the present, everything sprang into being, Athena like, in the fifties, sixties.

Even the most local history taught to children in schools, the gold rush, is something that is hours of driving away in most people’s minds. How many people, when asked the history of where they live, mention the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, the ranches of the Coast Range foothills, the Tamyen Tribes on the Guadalupe River? Growing up in the area, I felt the absence of this legacy. If only someone had told me of the implacable Mountain Charley of the Los Gatos–Santa Cruz Gap, a hero of epic proportions, of his legendary fight with a bear in the Red Wood forests. History is a story about the rest of the world to Silicon Valley; we have forgotten our place in it.

With all this in mind, one of my favorite pieces of good news, when telling a friend where I was last Sunday, when I should have been locked in my room listening to music and doing math homework, is that in The Valley, or at least the rough area, there are nine ghost towns!*

Being a writer, I carefully ration my exclamation marks, with the result being few and far between (I believe the official figure is around one every two thousand words, but I digress.) however, ghost towns invariably warrant one. History is too often boring– unreal, virtually fiction. A doubt always lingers over whether these things actually happened. In the case of a ghost town, history is preserved in situ, perfectly set amongst nature. In my opinion, viewing the natural decay of the works of man amongst the environment in which man had decided to create his works, adds an intangible value to the whole. Give me a ghost town over a museum any day.

The way to teach world history is through books, where events are the most important. However, local history is so much more ingrained in the culture, that simply reading about it is not enough. To learn your history, you need to get your feet muddy.

*This number I arrived at through a combination of research and actual footwork. By varying definitions of ‘the area’ and what constitutes a ghost town, you may arrive at a slightly higher or lower number.