Golden rush

To make his crash course on California culture as realistic as possible, Minnesota professor Michael Kowalewski requires his students to lead police on a high-speed chase, organize a recall campaign, receive silicone implants and try to find affordable real estate in San Francisco.

Just kidding.

In reality, he loads the group into three rental vans for a two-month, 6,000-mile odyssey up and down the Golden State, from Mt. Shasta to the Mexican border. Along the way, students hang out with surfers and screenwriters, ex-Black Panthers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, winemakers and marine biologists.

They pore over classic novels, analyze films and gaze at artwork ranging from ancient petroglyphs in Northern California to modern murals in East L.A.

The goal is to understand what makes the Golden State tick and how it influences the rest of the nation.

“California is where America is trying to re-imagine itself,” says Kowalewski, a bearded 47-year-old who was born in San Francisco, raised in Redding, engaged under a palm tree at the Rose Parade and married in a restored Gold Rush courtroom in Old Shasta with a view of a gallows. He also edited a companion book to a PBS special on the Gold Rush.

In 1988, he began teaching “Visions of California” at Princeton University. After jumping to Minnesota’s Carleton College, he took his show on the road, launching a 10-week “study-abroad” version of the course.

The program isn’t cheap. The 14 students enrolled in this year’s class coughed up $12,000 apiece to cover lodging, meals, in-state transportation and 18 units of college credit. Most of the group is from the East or Midwest, but two are from California. In mid-June, they converged in Sonoma to kick off the trip. Kowalewski likes to start in Northern California so he can “dismantle all the preconceptions about the state” that students pick up from the media. Such images are typically “generalizations taken from Los Angeles,” he explains.

Louisiana resident Samara Winbush, 21, came to the class thinking California was “movie stars and beaches and people not working.” Seven weeks later, during the L.A. leg of the trip, “there’s no single idea I have anymore,” she says. “It’s like it should be three or four different states.”

California defies easy categorization, Kowalewski explains while zooming along the 605 Freeway, one hand on the steering wheel and one clutching a Radio Shack walkie-talkie to communicate with the rest of the caravan.

In some ways, the state is like another planet, he says. As Theodore Roosevelt observed a century ago, “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” But in other ways, the Bear Flag state is a metaphor for the entire nation, Kowalewski says: “If you want to understand something about the American nervous system, California is the place to go.”

And so he does.

In Santa Cruz, Kowalewski and his troop listened to a surfer explain the physics of ocean waves. In Oakland, they toured old Black Panther haunts with former party leader David Dilliard. In Tijuana, they learned that part of the border fence is constructed of old landing-strip material from Vietnam.

It’s quite a departure from Carleton College’s pastoral setting in Northfield, Minn. (town motto: “Cows, colleges and contentment”).

Other stops on the itinerary include Catalina Island, Hearst Castle, Lake Tahoe and a lava cave near the Oregon border that “looks like a docking station for alien spaceships.”

“We get to do a lot of things most Californians never get to do,” says Kowalewski’s wife, Cathy, who teaches the art history portion of the program, covering such topics as orange-crate labels, Ansel Adams photography and Greene brothers architecture.

Watts Towers, murals

Last week, the group rolled into Los Angeles. Day 1 was a bust. Griffith Park Observatory was under scaffolding when the class tried to visit, they couldn’t get into the Rose Bowl and the Huntington Library closed 20 minutes before they arrived at the gate.

On Day 2, Wednesday, the group toured the Getty Museum, a crown jewel that Kowalewski insists will put to rest Woody Allen’s claim that the only cultural advantage of L.A. is being able to turn right on a red light.

Thursday’s lesson began with a discussion of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel “The Big Sleep,” said to symbolize the corruption beneath L.A.’s glossy surface. When one student raved about a passage from the book being “the greatest line ever,” Kowalewski interjected: “One of the greatest lines ever. There is Shakespeare, after all.” Then everyone piled into the vans.

At the first stop, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, they snapped photos, tossed a Frisbee and raised their eyebrows at a plaque describing the area’s notorious riots as “the great civil unrest of 1965.”

Next up was Lakewood (motto: “Tomorrow’s city today”), where the group filed past an ad for a “blowout sale” of the game Lakewoodopoly on the way to hear author and Lakewood public information officer D.J. Waldie present a lecture on suburbia. Among Waldie’s revelations: Lakewood’s cookie-cutter houses, built on former lima bean fields, were constructed at a rate of 500 per week during the Korean War. A quarter of the city’s 83,000 residents have lived in town at least 20 years.

On Friday, muralist Paul Botello explained the ins and outs of his work in East L.A., which includes a depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe that has appeared in a movie.

Back in the van, Kowalewski fields a few questions about California’s past, present and future.

In the nine years since he began leading field trips to the state, has he noticed any changes? “It’s gotten more crowded,” he says. “And San Francisco used to be a much more bohemian, artistic town. It’s becoming more corporate.”

So what does make California tick?

“It’s a newcomer state. There has never been a point in its history where the majority of people in the state are natives. California gets a lot of its energy and dynamism from that.”

What’s his take on Los Angeles? “It’s an oasis civilization. Water and power are not here naturally on the scale needed to support the population. Historically, oasis civilizations have never lasted.”

That’s one reason disaster is a recurring theme in movies and literature about L.A., he adds. One of the required films in the class is 1982’s “Blade Runner,” chosen for its “dystopian vision of L.A.’s nightmare future.” Kowalewski says such visions can offer telling insights: “It’s the future you imagine from the bad tendencies you see in the present.”

Will Kowalewski ever teach a class called, say, “Visions of Nebraska”?

“I don’t think there’s any other state that could support a full-blown off-campus course,” he says. “New Yorkers probably think their state could, but I don’t.” Texas has promise, but “it doesn’t have the same place in the American imagination that California does.”

He adds: “I’ve spent a lot of time living outside of California now, and I know the mixture of attraction, envy and resentment that characterizes other Americans’ views of the Golden State. Whether people in other states like it or not, as California goes, so goes America.”

This week, the class will tour Paramount Studios, explore Malibu and watch a sitcom taping. But a trip to Disneyland is optional. It was too expensive to do two theme parks, says Kowalewski, who deemed the tram tour at Universal Studios more informative.

Then it’s on to Mono Lake, Yosemite and Manzanar, the World War II Japanese internment camp. The program ends Aug. 20 with a banquet in Sacramento.

Popeye’s or In-N-Out?

Living in such close quarters for two months has its ups and downs.

On the plus side, romances have blossomed, including one marriage between a couple who got together during the 1995 class. And bonds of friendship are tight. When the class returned to California from a day trip to Tijuana and Mexican-born student Adalinda Sanchez of Chicago was told by border agents she would have to pay $250 for a permit to reenter the U.S., her classmates quietly passed the hat to cover the fee.

But conflicts do occur. “We have this joke about voting people off the program, like ‘Survivor,’ ” says Cathy Kowalewski.

The biggest squabbles are over where to eat. “There’s a Popeye’s faction and an In-N-Out burger faction,” Michael Kowalewski notes. “So we try to stop at places that have a lot of options.”

Another secret to maintaining the peace: “You’ve got to give them places to let off steam.” On this trip, that was Catalina Island. Coming off the ferry, Kowalewski noticed his young charges were way more interested in the bikini-clad flesh on the island than his lecture. So he cut them loose. “I knew studying the history of the island wasn’t going to happen that day.”