Snapshots From the Campaign Roadshow

Images along the campaign trail 1990: Shady tree-lined streets on a balmy Indian summer day in Chico . . . A quiet dusk in the peaceful old downtown square of San Jose . . . Three thousand enthusiastic middle-school students in Fontana waiting patiently for an hour and then cheering Dianne Feinstein, candidate for governor . . . An eager biology student standing aside so Pete Wilson could peer into the microscope and witness, too, the miracle of nature’s micro-world.

With California now a nation-state of 30 million people, election campaigns are more disconnected from people than ever. Most of what passes for campaigning is candidates talking to batteries of television news cameras rather than to prospective voters.

Still, it was not much different 20 years ago when I first covered a California gubernatorial campaign full time. There were 20 million Californians then. Even with a near- constant autumn roadshow--from World Series to the end of daylight-saving time to Halloween--the candidates could see and communicate directly with only a fraction of the electorate.

The candidates still tour the state, but in bits and spurts and small caravans rather than the entourages that once barnstormed California.

This has been a commuter’s campaign, traversing largely in little prop-jet airliners and twin-engine charters when it was not traveling the freeways--Feinstein often in a Jeep Wagoneer and Wilson in a black sedan trailed by staff and press vans.

On the road again, I found myself spending more time alone in my own car on the Los Angeles freeways than anywhere else, a Thomas Bros. map book in my lap. There were staged press conferences at places like a sewer outfall (to announce a water plan), at sheriffs’ stations (to look and talk tough on drugs and gangs) and at schools statewide (to declare dedication to better education).

Still, over the last five months, I have managed to revisit much of California and to meet enough Californians to compile a mental scrapbook of new impressions of the state 20 years later.

Many came as no surprise: More people, more traffic on worse roads, more pollution, more crime and violence and more acres of California ripped up, filled in and leveled off for more houses, more malls and more industrial parks. There is more of almost everything except land and water. California’s hills are always brown this time of year, but in 1990, the fourth year of drought, there is a depressingly parched look to the land.

Still, there is an amazing amount of open space left untouched by development in California, even not counting the vast stretches of national parks, forests and other protected public lands. Even along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, not every acre is plowed and groomed with grapevines, orchards or puffy white rows of cotton. Cattle graze quietly along the rolling hills. Now and then a dust plume rises as a solitary pickup heads home after shopping chores in town.

There is, in particular, one fine little valley that slices back into the hills along the north side of Interstate 80 between Vallejo and Richmond. By now, I had feared the housing developments would have invaded this valley and its untouched neighbors. Not so, at least so far.

The people of California have changed, of course. The population is more diverse ethnically and perhaps more fearful and suspicious of outsiders than in a more innocent period of California life, and less happy about the quality of life.

Even so, when I traveled to places such as Redding or Woodside or Los Banos, people exhibited a friendliness and hospitality that was more typical of Norman Rockwell’s America. Want to use the bathroom? Why of course, it’s just down the hall there. The telephone? Use it as long as you want. Would you like a soda or some coffee? So you came all the way from Los Angeles? My goodness, you have such an interesting job.

Two school visits stand out, in part because they tended to defy the stereotypes of an education system in chaos and a generation held captive by MTV and the Simpsons.

One school was in a brand-new island of suburbia--hundreds of look-alike homes set down amid the grime of the old Kaiser Steel complex just off the San Bernardino Freeway. One moment I was driving tentatively down a narrow two-lane road lined with warehouses and dodging 18-wheelers. The next, I was smack in the middle of the tract of homes so new the fragrance of raw lumber was still in the air. The American Dream of three bedrooms and a back yard in the suburbs was being realized all over again in ever-widening ripples beyond the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Most of the 3,000-member student body waited with only a minimum of fidgeting for Dianne Feinstein’s visit. When she arrived, an hour late, they cheered and then sat in attentive respect while she delivered a stump speech altered only slightly for the younger audience. Student leaders asked pointed and intelligent questions. When the event was over, the students returned to class in orderly fashion.

The other instance involved a Pete Wilson visit to an experimental science and mathematics high school on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills, not far from the Erector-set framework of the Wilmington refineries and the cranes of the Los Angeles Harbor. Again, keen, inquisitive young people glowed with pride as they showed Gayle and Pete Wilson the biology experiments they were conducting with specimens ranging from prehistoric-looking skeletons of contemporary animals to glutinous things floating in jars of syrupy fluid.

The most striking change in the last 20 years is, of course, the state’s phenomenal growth. It is evident everywhere: ugly and sprawling in some places; planned, compact and compatible with the environment in a few. Flying out of Burbank Airport the other day, I could see the tops of more hills shaved off along Mulholland Drive to make level places for million-dollar mansions with swimming pools and tennis courts.

The footprints of development are most striking in such places as the Sierra foothills, the towns in the San Joaquin Valley, and around San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria, where a relatively small influx can have a dramatic impact on the roads, schools, sewer systems, air quality and the sheer ability of local government to cope.

The major city centers in California have been transformed in the last two decades also, mostly for the better.

One pleasant surprise was the revitalized downtown of San Jose, with the new Fairmont Hotel across the street from the lawn and trees of the old plaza, the theater, concert hall and the just-restored Roman Catholic church. Two of my colleagues and I had an hour to kill the other Saturday evening. The stroll around the plaza provided a peaceful little interlude in a long, hectic day.

Another delight was a visit to Chico, one of those Central Valley towns that gets unfairly maligned by smug sophisticates as too hot, too boring and generally a place you wouldn’t want to live in, let alone visit. But Chico is a charming place, with its wide tree-lined streets and frame homes set far back from the sidewalks, reminiscent of some of the lazy river towns of Illinois or Missouri.

The Chico campus of the California State University system, with its brick bell tower and administration building, is a welcome relief from the stark government-issue CSU architecture of the 1950s and 1960s.

There are other snapshots of California from this campaign, images that will remain fresh long after the political rhetoric is forgotten:

* Taking off one evening out of Sacramento to Los Angeles, an orange-gold sun was dipping behind clouds on the western horizon. For a brief moment, when the light was just right, I could see two toothpick-size spires poking through the cloud layer: the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

* Even with the drought, the curlicue channels of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta provide a remarkable latticework scene from the air. This system of sloughs, bays, marshes, straits and man-made island tracts is the culmination of the two great river systems that drain an area more than 500 miles long. The Delta never loses its power as a symbol of nature’s ability to find a solution to a problem: In this case, how water reaches the sea.

* One of those sun-washed Mediterranean days that make San Francisco so famous, when the light is intense but soft, and the scene is like a photo out of a coffee-table book that makes you think the actual image simply cannot look that good. In San Francisco, it does, often.

* Flying over the agriculture patchwork of the San Joaquin Valley and marveling at the immensity of this great California garden land. Here, and in the Imperial Valley, there is no need to explain the words “making the desert bloom.”

* Always there is the great backbone of California, the Sierra Nevada, John Muir’s Range of Light. Around Fresno, the domes of Yosemite Valley come into view. Beyond are the glacier-carved high peaks and, on a particularly clear day, a glimpse of Mono Lake and the stark mountains of Nevada. Farther south, the great gash of the Kern River is an amazing work of nature--deep, straight as an arrow and running north-south in defiance of the usual Sierra pattern.

* Finally, the end of each trip, the vast sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin. At night, the lights seem to blink and glow forever to the east. The crawl of headlights along the freeway arteries speaks of a restless society, always on the move to somewhere. One election fall night, incredible fires flared up the canyons above the Malibu coast. After Malibu comes the big right turn over downtown and then the plane straightens out across the Harbor Freeway . . . Hollywood Park . . . the Forum . . . the San Diego Freeway and down.

Back home again.