Not Too Late to Be Great

One of the saddest things in life--and the California story--is what might have been.

--Curt Gentry, “The Last Days of the Late Great, State of California.”

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A little trail within this coastal park leads to the precise point where the great 1906 earthquake began. A line of wooden posts marks the rift. Signboard displays describe the geology, explaining how on that infamous April day one great crustal plate, the Pacific, lurched some 20 feet past another, the American.

This jarring movement along the San Andreas fault was part of a migratory process that has gone on across the ages. At a pace of two inches a year, Los Angeles rides its piece of the planet north. Geologists believe, as another trail-side sign noted, that within another 20 million years it will reach San Francisco.

It’s an intriguing image. Upon reflection, however, the geologists probably were too conservative in their prediction. The spread of Los Angeles northward across California is not 20 million years distant. It already is well underway. Every year a couple hundred thousand migrants from Greater Los Angeles are absorbed by other California counties. Every year once distinct little towns north of the Tehachapi start to look more and more like Reseda.

There is, in fact, a Bakersfield subdivision that has come to be called, unofficially, L.A. North. I know Fresnans who keep close count of the Southern California transplants filling their blocks. And everywhere, up and down the coast, across the valleys and foothills, worried talk abounds of this old hometown or that becoming, as it so often is put, “another Los Angeles.”

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Angelenos should not be wounded by this. It most often simply is code-talk, offered by people whose only grasp of L.A. is what they’ve seen through a car window as they race toward Disneyland. What they fear is not “another Los Angeles.” What they fear is inevitable growth and change: The paving over of the California of their past. They fear the future.

They find it impossible to envision a workable California with 50 million crammed between its borders. They see it all slipping away, devoured in a sea of sprawl, and it makes them restless, angry, even mean. It is an anger they misdirect toward Los Angeles, or poor people, or immigrants. It might be aimed more appropriately at themselves, at the state’s collective inability to come together and conjure up a California future as golden as its past.

Last week PBS re-created the saga of Lewis and Clark, and one point made by the documentary seemed especially relevant to California today. In contrast to when the explorers were pushing West into the unknown, the documentary reported, the expedition’s trip back was marked by flashes of temper, conflicts with the natives and sullen spirits. The adventure was over. What was before the party was just a long walk backward.

And so it can seem now for California. The adventure of settling a wild state, looting its natural wealth, inventing grand institutions, it all has come to a close. There are no more great dams to build, no more deserts to flower, no more mother lodes to discover. The freeway booms and public university booms are over. The heavy lifting, the glory work, is done.

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What’s left is mostly a maintenance job, a holding action. Throw up flimsy fences at the border to hold back the demographic future. Hold on to the remnants of a once great public school system. Hold on to the farmland fast disappearing under subdivisions. Hold on to the last pieces of open coast, the last stands of ancient trees.

In his 1968 profile of California, disguised as a novel about an apocalyptic earthquake, Curt Gentry saw this passage coming. I reread the book last week after my walk here on the so-called Earthquake Trail. Toward the tale’s end, after California has sunk into the sea, Gentry laments the unfinished business of the late, great state:

It could well have been that before any of these disasters occurred, a California engineer might have devised a means of transportation which did not pollute the atmosphere. A California community might have proven by example that the races can live together. The California Legislature might have passed a zoning law to preserve the state’s farmland. . . . One of the saddest things in life--and the California story--is what might have been.

Thirty years later, Gentry’s moral still applies: The greatest threat to California is not a killer earthquake, or even a lack of open land or water. Rather, it is a lack of imagination and will--a general reluctance to forget what might have been and instead see what can still be, to jettison the nostalgia for a golden past and instead wade into the hard but less glorious work of figuring out how to make it all fit together in the future. Walking backward won’t get it done.