Scribbling Toward Bethlehem

Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near the Terrestrial Paradise and inhabited by black women without a single man among them and living in the manner of Amazons. . . . Their arms are all of gold, as is the harness of the wild beasts which, after taming, they ride. In all the island there is no other metal.

--Garci Rodriguez Ordonez de Montalvo, circa 1510

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And so from the 16th century forward they have come to take their crack at California. Historians. Novelists. Fabulists. Diarists. Journalists (see fabulists). Poets. Railroad boosters. Scribblers by the trainload; too many to count. All have worked the Golden Dream beat, have strained to make some larger sense out of a 158,693-square-mile crescent that Wallace Stegner described as “America, only more so.”

The bookshelf in my office is crammed with the dogeared fruits of their labors. Many of the books are landmarks in the evolution of what might be called Literary California, as opposed to that more prosaic place where most of us live, sweat, pay taxes and die.

There on the top shelf, for instance, is “Up and Down California,” the journals of professor William H. Brewer, who explored the state in the 1860s with the Whitney expedition. It is squeezed next to “California, for Travellers and Settlers,” New York journalist Charles Nordhoff’s seminal piece of 1870s boosterism underwritten by the railroads.

Kevin Starr with his ongoing series of “California Dream” histories is represented, along with Carey McWilliams (“California, the Great Exception”), and John McKinney (“A Walk along Land’s End”), and Curt Gentry (“The Last Days of the Great State of California”), and Twain and Harte and Steinbeck and Didion (“Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” of course), and Gary Snyder and so on down the line to one Wishar S. Cerve, author of a strange little book called “Lemuria--the Lost Continent of the Pacific.”

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This last volume takes a mystical approach to the California riddle, linking the current cradle of medicinal marijuana and fish tacos to a long-lost Atlantis-like continent known as Lemuria. I bought the book at a New Age store in Mount Shasta--where, Cerve reports, the last of the Lemurians can be found on its spooky flanks. I had been drawn there by what has become, post-Lemuria, an all too typical California tale: A public donnybrook over where to stick the next state prison. . . . Sigh.

Many of the writers approach their subject in the same way a high school auto shop class is made to comprehend the internal combustion engine: They break it into tiny pieces, and spread the parts across the floor. There’s Philip L. Fradkin’s “The Seven States of California,” sharing space with “The Three Californias,” which rides next to “Two Californias,” followed by “The Other California” and “Many Californias” and finally a newspaper series headlined: “The Six Californias.”

In general, all make the point that there’s more to California than surfers and roller skaters, that the state cannot be painted with a single golden stroke. And they are correct. The land of the Lotus Eater is also the land of the Lamont oil roughneck. At the same time, what is more interesting--at least to this one traveler of the beat--is not so much the pieces of California, but rather how remarkably, how subtly, they fit together.

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It is fascinating, for example, to observe how closely timber executives in the north track housing starts in Riverside County. It is oddly inspiring to visit the sterile control rooms where, with flicks of a keyboard, short-sleeved operators move power and water up and down California. It is instructive to watch political consultants stitch together a campaign plan, sifting for common emotional ground between a Los Angeles canyon dweller and a Mendota melon packer.

In a similar way, the far-flung geography assembles itself. San Francisco would fade fast without the economic muscle supplied by Los Angeles, while the water that flows south chases away the desert. The farm belts that run down the state’s middle ground give breathing space to the coastal cities. Sacramento ensures full employment for government wonks. The Sierra foothills raise for everybody the hope of eventual escape.

Let me put this in a personal context: I have lived in Fresno, Porterville, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Pismo Beach, Newport Beach, Los Angeles, Pasadena and Orinda, but the way I see it, I have lived always in California. The way I see it, the many disparate parts still form--against all odds, and despite the tireless efforts of those who would divide--a delicately balanced and wonderful whole. Magically, mysteriously, the city-state lives on. How to convey this in 800 words is my own challenge. This is now my 464th crack at it. I’ll keep trying.