Palo Alto explorer

I went to see the birthplace of Menlo Park on a walk during my lunch break the other day, from my work's new Palo Alto wasteland-area office. The city of Palo Alto was born near downtown, by my work's former office, when a passing Spanish explorer camped by the creek at a tree they called El Palo Alto. Spaniards soon decided against settling there and abandoned it for the Presidio. But Menlo Park was born in 1850 when Irish sea captain John Greer sailed into Palo Alto harbor, just a 5-minute walk from my work. He and his brother-in-law fell in love with the landscape and built homes and a gate that read "Menlo Park."
"The men named their new homes after their old, in Menlough on Lough Corib, County Galway, Ireland. No one knows whether they abbreviated the name to "Menlo" because the space on the arch precluded the longer version, because it was their way of Americanizing the name or because they just couldn't spell."
San Franciscan aristocrats began building vacation homes in the area, attracting then more aristocrats, who attracted more aristocrats who make up the present-day demographic of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The area by the former harbor, past 101, remains the desolate and depressing home of soulless gray business parks, the Municipal golf course, the Palo Alto airport and the semi-restored wetlands.
I started walking past the airport. The sidewalk disappeared and left me to walk in the bike lane while cars crawled back from the bayside road. The marsh was surrounded with that yellow grass that grows everywhere in the South Bay in summer months. An egret and some seagulls were standing in the stagnant water. The sound of loud, small planes taking off was constant. It smelled of fennel, except when the wind blew a certain way smelling vaguely of sulfur, probably from the nearby recycling center. There were dull green reeds everywhere, the occasional green shrub. I followed the path past the abandoned harbor building, now surrounded with dirt and reeds grown over the carved wetlands. Around the bend was a duck pond, and a sign that read Duck Pond, where sad gray geese and ducks were dragging their feet, looking stupidly at this awful fountain that looked like an upside-down pyramid throwing slaps onto the surface of the gray-blue water. Everything had that gray, humid-looking color that parks in the South Bay suburbs have, which you have to be completely numb to in order to live there without becoming inordinately depressed. The benches along the trail where no one sat, the industrial towers in the distance by the bay, the electricity pylons and the rows of masts on the hill all colored by a clear film of dull, the kind that tells you you have to get out someday and do something big to keep from wasting away here.
I totally mythologize the Silicon Valley, its engineers and dreams and bright ideas. But it makes more sense than anything - this is how the Silicon Valley was born.