Notes on a Dream State

Growing up in Fresno, surrounded by grapes, figs and tract houses, I missed out on the California dream. The trappings were there. We would barbecue and ride skateboards, take trips to Disneyland and spend summer nights at poolside, and everyone agreed that California was a great place to live.

But it was just that--a place, not a promised land.

Only later, when I moved to San Francisco, did I discover that this was not a universal outlook. There, I met snow-weary Chicagoans who set up their families in fine sunny houses overlooking the Bay and, when that came up short, joined est. I met Georgia-born gays seeking tolerance not available in the South. I met New Yorkers for whom a stint in California was a rite of age, a last, youthful lark before getting real in Manhattan.

In short, I encountered the California dream. Like most dreams, this one was not altogether realistic. It overburdened a piece of geography, requiring California to be, as the saying went, not just a state but a state of mind.

Of course, that was too much to ask. Reality caught up with us. And today we are told, incessantly, that the California dream is dying.

Newsweek began the deathwatch with a 1989 cover entitled “California: American Dream, American Nightmare.” Since then, the dirges haven’t stopped. The Wall Street Journal charts our slipping economic vital signs, the London Economist clucks about “too much of a good thing.” The New York Times, noting the ravages of quake and fire, concludes it was folly to populate a natural desert in the first place. And just this week, Time devotes a special issue to “California, the Endangered Dream.”

Much of this blurs the distinction between Los Angeles and California; the city’s miseries are offered as evidence that the whole state has failed. Some of it feeds on fuzzy recollections about the way California used to be. All sorts of statistics are offered. For instance, some reports seized on new motor vehicle records showing that, in certain age groups, more Californians moved to other states last year than the other way around. From this single thread, great theories of decline were spun.

“People used to come out here with dreams of a whole new life in Southern California,” Cal State Northridge professor James P. Allen said, assessing the numbers. “I don’t think there are many people who think that way now. . . . Very few are dreaming they can renew their life in a nearly magical way, the way Los Angeles used to be a destination for people who had dreams.”

The California obituaries are padded with obligatory tales from refugees tracked down in places like Oregon or Montana. “When I told people that I was leaving,” one Los Angeles evacuee told the New York Times, “the typical comment was, ‘Congratulations, you’ve got a lot of guts.’ . . . At least 100 people told me that.”

According to the numbers, this 44-year-old lawyer was part of a net loss of 2,000 people in his age group--still leaving about 30 million of us cowards back in California.

Anyone can see the place is changing. In Fresno, housing tracts have gobbled up the fig orchards that once were our playgrounds. To walk San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is to be amazed at the Southeast Asian presence. And Los Angeles, well, everyone knows what has happened to Los Angeles. There are more people, more cars, more crime, more everything.

What will finally emerge from all this tumult won’t be the California that brought the Gold Rush settlers, or my Oklahoma ancestors, or even my friends who came from so many other cities to pursue a dream. But don’t schedule the funeral.

Even the gloomiest accounts concede that our economy is certain to rebound, that the quake and fire victims will rebuild and, most important, that the number of Californians moving out will prove to be an insignificant trickle compared to the incoming tide of foreign immigrants.

These immigrants come with dreams of their own, a possibility overlooked in the doomsday reports. The oversight is unfortunate--because what is really going on here is not a death, but a revision.

As California is remade, so is the dream.