Newcomer Finds Lots of Silver Linings in Golden State

We’re sipping our breakfast drinks at a sidewalk cafe in Laguna Beach, awaiting the imminent arrival of another sun-splashed California day on the coast. Pretty people are ordering espressos and small baguettes, and the sheer beauty and serenity of this village by the sea has its massaging hands all over us.

It’s moments just like this that have Kevin Hubbard wondering why anyone in his or her right mind would knock the great state of California.

Lost her appeal? No longer able to attract bright, young people? Doing her swan song?

No way, Hubbard said.

Hubbard had sought me out after reading about my conversation with a middle-aged guy from Philadelphia, who suggested that California had lost its luster to the outside world. California had always mattered to the rest of the country--regardless of whether people loved or hated the state--and so it was interesting to me how people viewed the Golden State these days.

Maybe, I mused, California had ceased being the magnet for people who still think this is the place where dreams come true.

If the state of California is losing its confidence, it ought to send a film crew to Hubbard’s home. He’s a 20-year-old lifelong Easterner just about to begin a career in the securities business, and he has every intention of earning all that income and spending it right here in California.

“When I heard about the opportunity out here, I didn’t bat an eyelash,” Hubbard said. He grew up in the Philly suburb of Yardley and has had his eye on California since he was a kid. When his uncle offered him a chance to study the business at his elbow, Hubbard said goodby to family and friends and moved here in early July.

All right, kid, give us the sales pitch.

“Everything is a lot more majestic out here,” Hubbard said. “The mountains are bigger. The ocean is bigger. Everything just seems bigger and better. The thing I always thought I’d like about California is the pace that people work at. People are a lot more laid back. On the East Coast, everyone seems to be on fast-forward, especially in the Northeast. They’re always going a mile a minute. In the Northeast, they’re always rushing, hurry up, hurry up. All they end up doing is hurrying up to wait. There’s only so fast you can get things done.”

OK, but you must feel alienated: After all, that’s the California psychological profile. “Not really. Not at all. There’s a lot of social life out here where it’s easy to meet people if you want to. I think people are more friendly out here than on the East Coast. You walk by, they give you a wave and a smile, ask how you’re doing. If you’re on the East Coast and if you’re not from their neighborhood and you drive down their street, they kind of give you a glare. They’re not nasty, but they’re very cold. Out here, everybody smiles, gives you a wave and asks, ‘How’s it going?’ ”

Aren’t people a little kooky here: “People come out here, they see that people think a little differently, and that’s kind of intimidating almost, that people can have that much of an open mind. People on the East Coast are kind of closed about the way they think.”

Surely, fears about the Big One sober you: “I would kind of like to experience an earthquake,” Hubbard said. “I’ve never been in one. I think it’d be neat. I’ve seen some pretty big hurricanes, I’ve seen tornadoes rip roofs off houses. Natural disasters kind of hold an attraction for me. It’s neat what kind of power the earth holds.”

How about the myth of the California girl: “Before I came out, you hear about them, you see them on TV and in the movies. You think it can’t be like that, there’s no place like that. But the number of good-looking girls is just amazing. There are a lot of them, and I guess it has something to do with the weather, but they’ve all got clear complexions and blond hair. It’s everything it’s been made out to be and then some.”

Locals complain about immigration, I told him. “It’s created such a unique culture of its own. A lot of Spanish-Mexican culture mixed in with people moving out from the Midwest and the East Coast. That’s what it started out to be--people wanted to move west, discover what was out here. That’s how it started, and it’s just going to keep going on.”

How do your buddies at home picture California: “It seems like a strange place but with an attractive lure to it. People I know talk about it with some sort of inquisitiveness, they want to know what it’s all about. It seems like it’s its own country out here . . . and when you see it on TV it’s a world completely different from the East Coast.”

Try as I might, he can’t be shaken. Nothing he’s seen, he says, has turned him off to our fair state, although he confesses to the weird trait of missing the high humidity of the East.

Wow. A California resident who isn’t alienated by the size, put off by everybody’s lifestyles, spooked by the Big One, fearful about immigration or disappointed by the opposite sex.

Better be careful, Kevin. You keep praising California like this and somebody’s going to think you’re a little nutty.