WELCOME TO THE ELUSIVE STATE

California was his dream

A paradise

He had seen

Pictures in magazines

That told him so.

*

- Merle Haggard, “California Cottonfields”

*

CALIFORNIA IS A WONDERFUL FRAUD, AND I WOULD NOT LIVE ANYWHERE ELSE. IT IS A FICKLE land, capable of serving up displays of great natural beauty one day and scenes of brutal ugliness the next. California is barbecue smoke swirling through downtown San Luis Obispo on Thursday night, farmers market night, and the oddly beautiful way late summer sunsets filter fiery red through the smog band above Los Angeles.

California is October light splashing over the pastel apartments of San Francisco’s North Beach. It is the voice of Neil Young warbling from a pickup truck speaker on a Saturday morning in the fall, California’s most delicious season: I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood, I’d crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . . And it is flies swarming over a slick spot of curbside lawn, on the day after a deadly ambush of trick-or-treaters, in a district of Pasadena where I lived for a while, a neighborhood known as Bungalow Heaven.

“Look at the blood on the grass,” a morbidly fascinated passer-by kept saying to me on that November morning in 1993.

“Look at the flies.”

California could well be the most written-about state in the land. In the past decade alone, the California Historical Society’s quarterly magazine has listed nearly 1,000 titles of new or reissued books that address California topics and themes, titles such as “Contested Eden” and “Paradise Lost” and “The Dream Endures” and so on down the line to “Remembering Muscle Beach: Where Hard Bodies Began.”

Yet for all this literary exploration, California refuses to be nailed down. “California is elusive,” writer Gerald W. Haslam has noted. “That’s true largely because so many who look for it think they already know where and what it is. Outsiders are often more certain of their versions than are natives.”

I know something about this elusiveness. In 1991 I was assigned by the Los Angeles Times to write a twice-weekly column to be called, simply enough, “On California.” My mission, as one editor described it, was to “explain California to Californians.” I was foolish enough to believe this would be easy.

For nearly a decade, I obsessed on my native state as never before, thinking about the place, traveling through it, reading about it, listening to it, writing about it. Along the way, I’d alternately love it, loathe it and fall back in love with it, over and over again. One thing about California: It can for long stretches be both a boring and boorish place, too full of itself and its many gilded wonders. And then the ground starts to shake.

Somewhere in this process of attempting to “explain California to Californians,” I came to accept--no, I came to embrace--the possibility that California cannot be explained, at least not in any lasting sense. It is not only a matter of its enormous size or much-ballyhooed diversity, the conundrum posed by Bakersfield and Berkeley existing under the same bear flag. It’s also a question of volatility, of movement.

California runs like water through the fingers of those who would capture it with words. It is a riddle that refuses to be solved, and this makes it irresistible to those who would try. Perhaps this explains why, having written in the past decade roughly 800 columns and 600,000 words about the state, I feel compelled to take one more crack at it here.

What follows is a sketch of the California that I found out there in my tour of duty on the tawny-hills-and-gilded-land beat. It is offered not with any pretense of expertise or promise of epiphany, but rather in the spirit of a note of left-handed encouragement I received a few years back from a wiseacre reader:

“Keep shootin’,” my correspondent advised. “You might hit something yet.”

*

CALIFORNIA, THE MOTHER OF A MILLION CLICHES, IS OFTEN SAID TO be where the future begins, the state that gave a grateful nation the Hula Hoop, Howard Jarvis and fish tacos. California, Wallace Stegner observed, is “America--only more so.” In California, Joan Didion wrote, “the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

There are days when California indeed can feel like the forward edge of something important, like destiny. There are other days when it seems far removed from the main action of America--adrift, irrelevant, silly. I go back to something William Saroyan wrote a long time ago about Fresno, where he and I both grew up, albeit about 50 years apart:

“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness and loneliness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing . . . . Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of jackrabbits. Or a man could have one viewpoint in the morning and another in the evening.”

In my view, Saroyan might as well have been writing about all of California and, for that matter, maybe he was.

Eureka! is the California motto, but for everything found, for every new “gold rush,” as each boom inevitably is described, something else always seems to be discarded, overrun. California is where the wonders of the Silicon Valley are celebrated today with an almost nauseating self-satisfaction, while on the other side of the coast range the earlier wonder of San Joaquin Valley agriculture is under assault--orchards uprooted and good land paved over to make room for more “ranch-style” houses.

California can be a forgetful place, where lessons of the past are buried in the shallow graves of opportunistic politics and drive-by journalism--to be dug up and relived, if not relearned, again and again. California in a boom, for example, seems incapable of remembering the last bust. The opposite is also true.

At the time I began writing the column, the state was mired in economic malaise and low-grade panic. In sometimes gleeful tones, the national press reported that an exodus was on, that Californians were flocking to Idaho and Oregon and other states with many trees. A commission convened by then-Gov. Pete Wilson called California a “job-killing machine.” The governor himself derided the state as “a bad product.” The Dream, the magazine covers declared, was dead. Paradise had been lost.

Well, just this fall it was reported in a scattering of newspapers that California, if a separate nation, would boast the sixth-largest economy in the world, having moved past Italy. Moreover, if trends continued, it could soon overtake the United Kingdom. Amusingly enough, given the dire headlines of a decade before, this statistical triumph received only minimal treatment. Most California newspapers confined it to a few paragraphs, planted way back in the business section briefs where new corporate vice presidents are announced.

There was no mention of job-killing machinery, no discussion of an exodus to Idaho. These were artifacts of another California, one long gone, at least for now.

*

CALIFORNIA DEFIES OBJECTIVITY. THERE ARE 33 MILLION OR SO Californians, and thus there are 33 million or so versions of California. There is Merle Haggard’s California: Tulare dust in a farm boy’s nose, wondering where the freight train goes. And there is Randy Newman’s California: Look at that mountain, look at that tree, look at that bum over there, man, he’s down on his knees. There is the California of the Central American refugee taking the bus to a domestic job in Beverly Hills, a California informed by everything in her past that brought her to that part of the world, that position in life, that seat on the bus, and there is the California of the matron who hired her.

My California begins in the era of Gov. Pat Brown, a time of big and audacious state projects. Cloverleaf freeways, the “Master Plan” for public education, the California aqueduct--these were the still-shining totems of that California, and, naturally, my perspective on what California is, or ought to be, today is colored by what it was then.

Many of the political movements I encountered as a columnist seemed foreign to the California I knew as a kid. It seemed somehow un-Californian, somehow off-key, to build prisons faster than college campuses, or to wring hands over the departure of a relatively few dissatisfied citizens and CEOs to Pocatello, Idaho, or to take a national lead in a retreat from the struggle for racial integration.

My notion of California is also a product, not just of time, but also of a particular place. Growing up amid the figs and grapes and subdivisions of the San Joaquin Valley, I never gave much thought to the “California dream,” and even now I grow suspicious whenever I come across straight-faced references to a Golden Land, to The Dream. Oh, we Fresnans might talk grandly about making a desert bloom and all that, but the California that the rest of the nation perceived existed somewhere else. That California was located on the other side of the Altamont Pass, across the Tehachapis. That California was over by the beach.

Not until I left college and started working as a reporter in San Francisco did I begin to bump into people who would speak of California as a promised land. They tended to be fresh arrivals from New York City and Chicago, and it took some time for me to grasp that they were just as much Californians, if not more so, than those of us who had been dropped into it by natural accident. It took some time for me to recognize that, in fact, there would be no California--in the larger sense of the word--without a steady infusion of these new Californians, whom Curt Gentry described so well 30 years ago in “The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California” with this riff:

They came from almost every place.

For almost every reason.

They came out of loneliness and love and desire and hate.

They came because the company had diversified or Hughes was

hiring or Litton expanding or UC had a cyclotron or there were crops to pick.

They came because it was a new beginning or a last chance or because there was nowhere else left to go.

They came because they could never forget the look of the city as the troopship sailed under the Golden Gate.

They came because the children were here or because the schools were better or because the old neighborhood frightened them or because the wife nagged.

They came because they believed that south of the Tehachapis they could find God, or a part in a movie. . . .

They came to sin or to soak old arthritic bones in the perpetual sun. . . .

They came because it was California.

CALIFORNIA IS PARADISE TO THE FRESHLY ARRIVED. IT IS PARADISE LOST to many of those who have been here a generation or two. And to someone standing in the concrete riverbed on its southern border, trying to sneak across, California is the Kmart banner that flutters, almost mockingly, over a San Ysidro discount mall, on the other side.

His name was Sergio. He had a young family to feed and--if only he could get across--a $6-an-hour job waiting at a carwash in Orange County. His timing was terrible. This was on a bright May morning in the mid-1990s. Gov. Wilson and many other political leaders were doing their best to blame a recession and anything else amiss in the state on undocumented workers, on gardeners, on fruit-pickers and carwash attendants, on nannies.

Their political noise had brought the reinforced federal patrols and iron fence of Operation Gatekeeper, forcing would-be border-crossers to try their luck to the east, where they must wind through treacherous canyon country and dash across desert bombing ranges. Sergio, though, had been attempting, without success, to cross the old way, straight into the clenched jaw of Operation Gatekeeper. He was frustrated, confused, exasperated.

Who over there, he demanded in halting English, would wax cars for $6 an hour?

Who would pick the grapes?

Who would change the hotel linen?

Who would do the work?

“They need we,” he kept muttering as he stared across the river, toward where that Kmart banner waved proudly in the soft breeze.

“They need we.”

He might have been referring, not just to grape growers and carwash operators, but to California politicians as well. An undercurrent of exploitable bitterness has always run beneath the surface of California public debate, and this was especially true through much of the 1990s. Somebody else is getting something, and you are not--this was the subtext that dominated California political discourse. Somebody else is enrolling in UC Berkeley, even though your child is just as qualified. Somebody else is receiving care in the overcrowded wards of County-USC, and you as a taxpayer are paying for it.

From the Chinese to the Armenians, from the “Okies” to, most recently, Mexican workers such as Sergio, California’s history has been stained repeatedly by attempts to rile the populace against the “other” of the moment. What amazes is how well this gambit always seems to work.

They forgot so easily, recited the poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, herself a daughter of the Dust Bowl.

*

The same road led

Everyone to this place.

*

I had asked her that day in her Tulare apartment what she made of the latest anti-immigrant movement washing through California, and she had answered with this poem.

“I think that still stands,” she said, “don’t you?”

This is only a theory, but I suspect that political appeals to California’s darker angels owe their effectiveness to the excessive expectations put on the place, to the gilded mythology. This idea of a dream, of a paradise--it’s simply too much of a burden to put on a unit of geography. A place alone cannot change a person, and those who believe it can are bound to wind up disappointed and looking for someone or something to blame.

And so Gov. Jerry Brown might have been on to something larger when he famously advised Californians in the 1970s to “lower their expectations.” In his Gov. Moonbeam mode, Brown was viewed around the country as the quintessential California politician, a little dreamy, a little soft. Richard Nixon, though, might have been the better model--at least in terms of the kind of California politics I am talking about here. When Nixon died, I went down to Yorba Linda, to the neighborhood of bungalows where he had been raised. And while I was there, I began to flip through the biographies, looking for Nixon’s California. It was, yes, the California of disappointment.

His father had come to California from the Midwest. Someone had told him citrus would be the next California Gold Rush. He planted lemon trees in land that had been promoted as “deep, rich loam,” and frost-less. Nixon was born during a freeze. His father’s trees never took in the soil, and while others found oil on their property, the Nixons did not. Later in his life, Nixon would return from time to time.

“The rancher,” he would tell the neighbors bitterly, if somewhat mysteriously, “was a liar.”

He never explained himself, but maybe it wasn’t necessary. The rancher (or miner or railroad booster or farm labor contractor or real estate agent or venture capitalist) was a liar--such a familiar California story.

*

CALIFORNIA IS A FIRE THAT RIPS THROUGH CANYON BRUSH DRIED BY drought and denudes the slopes that will break away in terrible chunks, mudslides, when the rains finally come, rains that in turn will help revive vegetation thick enough to feed the next fire. California is yellow police tape and Red Cross coffee and television trucks parked at the bottom of the smoldering hillside, or the edge of the overflowing river, or across the street from the apartment house that crumbled in the quake.

When engulfed in a natural disaster, California becomes a parable for national pundits, a lesson in the vengeance that awaits those who live too well along the land’s end. There is nothing more comical than hearing these crows start to caw at Californians, as happened often during the ‘90s. Drought, earthquakes, floods, fires, frosts--the horses of the Apocalypse were in full stampede.

After a while, the catastrophes began to run together, each new calamity inspiring responses so familiar they seemed scripted. From the governor in his nylon jacket to the homeowners squirting at high flames with garden hoses, to the television newscasters booming on about shake roofs, or fault lines, or floodplains--everybody involved appeared to be operating by rote. Everybody knew the drill.

At my feet as I write this now is a box of notebooks, many of them filled with cryptic disaster notes. Some pages of these notebooks seem practically interchangeable. Here, for example, is what is scratched in my own sloppy hand in one pulled almost at random from the box:

Dumpsters

Salvation Army truck

Woman emerges from camper

“Dazed and confused” T-shirt

Easy chairs, velour

Christmas ribbons

Cottonwood limbs

Mattresses and box springs

“Sell it, if that’s what you have got to do.”

Sirens

Medicine bottle

“Welcome to River Bend.”

THIS LAST NOTATION IS THE BEST CLUE: WELCOME TO RIVER BEND. It takes a moment--Guerneville? Yuba City? Monterey County? Which fire? Which flood?--and then it comes back. River Bend was the name of a new housing tract south of Modesto, a tract announced by bright flags, new tile rooftops and a banner: Welcome to River Bend.

It was located a few hundred yards from the Tuolumne River. I had gone to a street called Crater Avenue on a January morning after the river had jumped its banks, putting the development under four feet of water. I walked the street, talking to residents as they mopped up. Many were new to the San Joaquin Valley, having moved from Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. River Bend, it was such a fetching name, but most confessed they had never given the river much thought.

“No one,” one woman said emphatically as she swamped out her garage, “ever told us it could flood.”

Four months later, I went back to River Bend and met a homeowner on Crater Avenue who had moved in after the flood. He didn’t care at all about the closeness of the river and was only vaguely aware of what horrors it had inflicted on his neighbors. He had different worries. It hadn’t rained in the four months since the flood. The ground had turned so dry and hard, this man complained, that his new lawn was dying. He said he was afraid a drought was coming on, and as he spoke he kept sprinkling the grass with water from a hose.

And that is California.

In the early days of the column, I often felt compelled to rise in defense of the battered Californians. I would point out the damage wrought by hurricanes and blizzards in other regions and wonder why no one ever seemed to blame these disasters on eating lotus flowers or making bad movies. In time, though, I came to regard what might be called the La La Land school of catastrophe commentary as a crude form of flattery. I adopted the attitude of Jim Farnsworth, a retired pilot whom I encountered a couple of years ago in Pacifica, a little town south of San Francisco.

It was raining lightly, and Farnsworth was holed up in a motor home parked in front of his house behind the yellow police tape. The street was closed to traffic while everyone waited to see if a block of houses, Farnsworth’s included, was going to tumble into the sea.

Farnsworth admitted right off that it probably seemed crazy, buying a house on a soft, sandy cliff at the edge of the ocean. Erosion was not exactly an unknown phenomenon, and, indeed, in the 20 years he’d owned the place he had watched his backyard steadily fall away. He sensed how the televised imagery of a row of California houses dangling over the Pacific would be received by, say, Iowans.

“I can very well imagine that people will wonder why we all lived here to begin with, right on the edge of the cliff,” he said. “I can almost hear them saying, ‘Those crazy nuts. Didn’t they know this was going to happen?’ ”

Ah, he said, but let them snicker. They had not taken in his back-porch view. They had not sat there day after day and watched--his blue eyes were sparkling now as he spoke--”the ocean come to life out there. Big fish chasing the smaller fish to the shallows. And the seabirds chasing the fish, with the pelicans diving into the water and the sea gulls trying to see what’s going on and steal a fish from pelicans. And the fishermen running down along the beach with their poles, trying to get in on the action, too. Oh, and the sunsets. . . .”

He stopped and smiled serenely.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

And that, too, is California.

*

ON THE WALL OF THE OFFICE where I am writing, I’ve tacked up a few artifacts collected on my California rounds, trinkets that remind me of certain moments, stories. There is a memorial card from the funeral of Harriet Nelson and a pamphlet titled “A Sassy Sampler of Mining Camp Place Names.” There is a bright yellow card from the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce that cheerily suggests: “Say No to Panhandling.”

This was from a campaign to crack down on transients and street beggars in the mid-1990s. Several California cities were engaged in similar crusades, a trend that developed, not coincidentally, in the trough of a recession. While in Santa Barbara, I met a panhandler who introduced himself as “Fish” and asked me for a quarter.

“I’m saving up for swimming lessons,” he said, “so I can get out of here and go to Hawaii.”

He told a complicated story about losing his house and fishing boat in a divorce and landing on the streets, homeless and, eventually, toothless. He said, however, that there had been a court reversal in his favor, that he was expecting to receive a “big piece of change” any day now. I didn’t believe a word of it.

About a year or so later, I received a letter from a downtown merchant who had known the panhandler. He said Fish had disappeared from the streets for a while, and then one day drove back into town in a new car, all cleaned up and wearing new clothes. He had bought a new fishing boat, he announced, and was back in business. The check, it seems, had come in.

There is also on the wall a newspaper clipping with the dateline of Weed, a town at the base of Mt. Shasta: “Dying California Town Sees Future in a Prison.” There is a replica of the original May 1898 cover of Sunset magazine, illustrated with a picture of a sunset over the Golden Gate, before it was spanned with a bridge. And there is a hand-painted card from Rollin Pickford, a Fresno artist of note.

The 86-year-old painter had taken me on a tour of the town one afternoon, directing me toward favorite agrarian haunts that had appeared in his paintings--orchards, farmhouses, irrigation canals. More often than not, though, these places had been changed, buried beneath the suburban housing tracts that have marched out from Fresno at double-time, headed toward the Sierra foothills. It was the speed of it all that amazed Rollin the most.

“Everything is just faster and faster and faster,” he said. “When I was young, it was like a paradise here. You could always see the Sierra, nice blue mountains in the distance. Things were sort of stable. We had a downtown, and that was it. As it started to change, it just rolled faster and faster. Now I ride out to streets I painted on and I can’t believe it.

“Rows and rows of houses.

“I get lost.

“I have to look at the street signs to tell me where I am--in my own native country!”

On the back of the card, he’d written a kind note, quoting an unidentified author: “A boy leaves home because everything is too familiar. He returns for the same reason.”

In fact, by the time of our visit, I had returned to Fresno, or more accurately, to the valley. In 1998 I left The Times and started writing a California column for the Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto Bee newspapers. Among my reasons for making this change was a sense that something important was happening in the valley, the last agriculture stronghold in the state.

The California that in my youth had existed somewhere else had begun to pour over the hill. Subdivisions were spreading across farmland at a pace that reminded some people of how rapidly the Los Angeles basin had filled with houses after World War II. Demographic forecasts called for a tripling of the Central Valley population to 15 million in the next 40 years.

So for a couple of years I returned to the valley and wrote excessively about growth issues, about sprawl. To my horror, I became something of a wonk, if not a crank, on the subject. The growth machine did not seem to notice much. The houses just kept rolling on, and in the end I began to accept that the valley was going to change, for better or worse, with or without any nagging from me. I came to see more clearly the wisdom of Thomas Wolfe on the question of going home again.

*

I CAN PRETTY MUCH PINPOINT the moment I decided it might be a good idea to take a break from the business of trying to explain California to Californians twice a week--in 815 words or less. It was about a year ago, a windy day in early winter, and I was driving through Sacramento on my way to work.

Waiting at a stoplight, I spotted a city worker in an orange vest and hard hat. A leaf blower was strapped on her back. She was leaning into the wind, trying to push together piles of leaves with her machine. It was impossible. She’d herd together a small pile, and the wind would scatter it. She’d start another pile, and this one would blow away just as quickly. And all the while, more leaves kept falling in great flurries down from the trees.

The futility of the task did not seem to bother her. She just kept blowing into the wind, assembling her temporary piles of leaves. Well, I said to myself, there it is, the perfect metaphor for what I have been doing for the past decade. Put together one pile of words, and watch it blow away. Round up another, and start on the next.

And so I came back to The Times with the idea of doing something else for a while. I thought I had grown tired of writing about California, of trying to capture running water with words. Old habits die hard, however, and a year later I can’t say my California obsession has diminished much. And not long ago, at a meeting with the paper’s new editors, I heard myself once again trying to explain California--or at least my version of it.

I was rattling on about how dots connect, struggling to find the right words to articulate the one firmly held belief about California that I had brought back from my hitch as columnist--that there is one. Much of the literary pursuit of California is built around the strategy of breaking it down into smaller, easier pieces. One quick glance at my office bookshelf finds these titles: “Many Californias,” “Two Californias,” “The Seven States of California,” “The Other California.” The same is true of California politics: Proposals to slice the state in half, for example, have percolated throughout most of its 150-year history.

The allure of California, though, the riddle of it, rests in the whole. It is the point of the place. There is a California; the dots do connect. The timber cut in the far north frames the houses spreading across the San Joaquin Valley, where people from the coast have begun to move to escape real estate prices inflated by the computer economy, and so forth. And the connective tissue involves more than geography and infrastructure and a few common icons.

Somewhere between community and nationality is the sense of identity that comes from being a Californian, and it has meaning. What meaning exactly? I can’t objectively say. I can say that in my 45 years I have lived in Fresno, Porterville, San Luis Obispo, Pismo Beach, San Francisco, Newport Beach, Los Angeles, Pasadena and in the Contra Costa County town of Orinda, and yet, in a larger sense, I have always lived in just one place, and that is California.

All of this I tried to explain to the editors, but I couldn’t get the words right. Unable to deliver the whole elephant, I might have at least put my hand on a few of its parts. What I might have said was that California is the quiet thrill of wearing short pants on New Year’s Day, when the Big 10 states are buried under snow. It is stepping into the voter’s booth and tackling an encyclopedic ballot, propositions that require judgments on the fly about everything from complicated tax policy to the consumption of horse flesh.

I might have said that California is the spellbinding clarity and scale of Los Angeles as viewed from Mt. Wilson early on a winter morning after the winds have blown the basin clean. It is also, from the same vantage point, the quite visible process of the briefly liberated lowlands becoming submerged again, within hours, under a gray-brown sea of smog.

It is this fellow I met named Rick Crowder, who, for 20 years, worked in Chico, driving for the United Parcel Service. And then one day he slipped on a checkered shirt, baggy woolen pants, cowboy vest, boots and giant hat and stepped before a mirror and took a look and said: Whoa! No longer was he Rick Crowder. He was Sourdough Slim, the Yodeling Cowboy Comic and Songster, who would go on to yodel at Carnegie Hall and buy himself a place outside the Sierra foothill town called Paradise.

I might have said that California is the corner of 3rd Street and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, where it is possible to watch the entire world shuffle by: Every kind of ethnic background, skin color and native costume seems to be on parade. So much for the power of the politics of exclusion.

And it is driving across the San Joaquin Valley on Highway 152, coming back from yet another conference on growth--oh, all those gains in population, all those housing starts--and looking off the highway and seeing it: A wide, open countryside, running all the way to the horizon, broken only by telephone poles, windmills, cattle and a barn here and there. And it is realizing that, for all of California that’s been spoiled in a century and a half, there is still plenty more left to save.

What I might have said is that California is the voice of Neil Young warbling from a pickup truck speaker on a Saturday morning in the fall: Keeps me searchin’ for a heart of gold. Or that it is October light splashing over the pastel apartments of San Francisco’s North Beach, or barbecue smoke swirling through downtown San Luis Obispo on Thursday night, farmers market night. . . .

What I might have said is that California is a fickle land and a wonderful fraud, and that California is the answer to its own riddle. It is a place that cannot be captured with 1,000 books or 600,000 newspaper words, but at the same time can be described with simply one word, and that word is this:

California.