But this is Chico, too

Google Earth is one of the marvels of the postmodern world. This Web toy — I mean Web tool — allows desktop travelers to swoop and soar as they make their way across the home planet. Zoom out and Earth is a tiny orb in the star-studded sky. Zoom in and I can see the roof of the house on the street where I live. If I had enough time, I’d glide across every continent and look down on 100 million rooftops.

In my recent journeys, I’ve been above Mexico City, London, Venice, Jerusalem and Istanbul. This is one instance when Google literally lives up to its name. Google is a number so huge it might as well signify infinity. It’s a one followed by a hundred zeroes. With Google Earth as my navigation system, I could travel for a thousand years gazing at satellite images and still not see everything.

I’ve been using the system to check up on my old haunts. Some of the little houses on big lots in my boyhood Silicon Valley neighborhood have been torn down and replaced with huge houses. Two blocks from the house that my wife, son and I rented in Lompoc on the Central Coast, where we lived before we moved to Chico, ground has been broken for a new subdivision. The old house I rented in Whittier in Southern California, where I had my first newspaper job, is still standing, a holdout among row after row of apartment buildings.

Most of the satellite images don’t resolve well enough to offer a view of rooftops. You can see Chico from just a few hundred feet up, but you have to be a few thousand feet above Biggs before the image becomes sharp and clear.

I’ve always wanted to charter an airplane and a pilot and spend an hour or two flying over Chico, but I’m sure it would be expensive. Google Earth comes close to granting my wish. The only drawback is that you are obliged to look at an image that’s frozen in time. Google Earth’s overhead view of Chico appears to have been taken three or four years ago during the dry season. The fields around the city are brown. At North Valley Plaza, the Cinemark Theater has already been built and Montgomery Ward has already been torn down. The lot where the Garden Villa Complex is to be built on Cohasset Road has been cleared, but construction hasn’t started yet. The City Plaza elm trees are still standing. The Sorrento housing development is still an orchard.

From the air, Chico is diamond-shaped. The southern edge still has a long ways to go before it is filled in, but everywhere else the urban landscape is boldly asserting itself. It’s only when you zoom in a little closer that you see dozens of modest-sized pockets of open land waiting their turn to be gobbled up. There are a surprising number of them just north of Bidwell Park in an area that was developed several decades ago. On the city’s northern edge, the triangular parcel that is proposed to become Tuscan Village — neighbors have nicknamed it Sorrento North — is surrounded by block after block of single-family homes. The square patch of land south of Lindo Channel and east of the Longfellow Shopping Center that is destined be left mainly in its natural state is one of the largest islands of open space. Another big green oasis is the orchard that straddles West Eighth Avenue.

In the older parts of Chico, it’s hard to see the rooftops. Over many decades, the trees have created a dense canopy. The urban forest is a distinct part of the diamond’s appearance from above. The only barren parts of Chico are North Valley Plaza and Big Box-land.

Bidwell Park and the Chico State University campus cut a long, lush swath of greenery from east to west across the center of the diamond.

Zoom out and the diamond is surrounded by vast stretches of open space, both flat and mountainous. In California, where cities have spread so far that their edges touch each other, this is a sight for sore eyes.