The Song We Forget to Sing

She stood posed against a fence post in her straw hat and khaki sun dress. He was dressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and he peered through a camera that was set on a tripod in the middle of a country road. Behind her ran a wide pasture covered with a yellow wildflower known as fiddleneck. And behind the pasture rose the Sierra foothills, lit up with new grass.

Phil Toy and Cindy Amery had come to this setting on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley from San Francisco. They had traveled in style, making the trip on a warm Sunday in March in his 1959 pearl white Cadillac convertible, top down.

It was their first encounter with the so-called Blossom Trail, a 67-mile scenic tour concocted by boosters as a way to attract spring visitors to the valley. The route runs along the back roads, cutting through orchards of almonds, nectarines, peaches and pears. Around this time each year, the trees for a couple of weeks or so will sprout blossoms of pink and white, while the neighboring pastures and foothills come alive with wildflowers--golden poppies, blue lupine, fiddlenecks. It’s quite a sight, laid out against a backdrop of snowy Sierra mountains and, higher above, deep blue skies. The newcomers struggled to find words to match the beauty.

“Gorgeous,” she said.

“Incredible,” he said.

“Breathtaking,” she said.

“What was it we called it earlier?” he said, groping for a phrase. “Simple splendor. That’s what this is.”

*

That’s the way it is all over this California in this season, and in most seasons: beautiful. The point seems obvious, banal even. And yet it also seems so easily overlooked. Sometimes, it takes outsiders to remind us. A few weeks ago, as the first taste of spring was warming California, a friend came out from New York. We walked through San Francisco’s North Beach in the late afternoon. He had lived in the city before, but had forgotten how good it can look on certain days, at certain hours.

“It’s the light,” he said, studying how the cream and pastel walls of the apartment houses glowed in the late afternoon sun. “There is no light like that anywhere but California.”

Even amid the worst disasters the beauty can prove irresistible. I remember after the big fires above Laguna Beach watching a clutch of out-of-town reporters stand beside a burned-out canyon house and marvel at the panoramic view of the sparkling coastline below. “I guess that’s why people live here,” one said, belaboring, again, what should be obvious.

Lately, though, California’s simple splendor seems to have been lost on many Californians. No longer do we sing of bowers of flowers blooming in the sun, and all the rest. To do so would be to expose ourselves as saps or hucksters, to miss the point, to not get it. Instead, the smart talk is of problems. Murder and mayhem, faltering schools and bumbling government, the invasion of immigrants, the exodus of “jobs,” disasters of every kind, bankruptcy in every form--this is California in current context.

*

That this is a political year will only add volume to the chorus of despair. For the next several months, would-be governors and legislators and the rest will preach to us of problems, and only problems. They will pose for photo ops at murder scenes and oil spills and overcrowded classrooms. They will rant and whine and browbeat and blame and do their best to persuade everyone that California is sinking, fast.

And certainly California has its share of problems. And certainly it makes political sense to harp on them. The governing rule of modern politics seems to be that everybody has a pet gripe, or a particular fear, and to define the correct set of problems, to give voice to the right combination of fears, is to build a winning coalition of complainants.

Myself, though, I’m waiting for a candidate who will take media crews into a field of fiddlenecks and contemplate the perfect word to describe its beauty, a candidate who understands that California’s significant charms are not merely decoration, not trivial, but instead are fundamental to its purpose and a principal reason why 30 million or so of us remain here--and that, yes, while this beauty needs to be preserved, it also ought to be celebrated, and there is a difference.

I am waiting for the candidate who sees the state through the lens of Phil Toy, out here in the middle of nowhere, on the Blossom Trail. “Everybody should see this,” he said, squinting into the viewfinder. “It gives you balance.” Balance. Now there’s a word.