Peeling Away the Outer Layers of San Diego

If you were not born in a place, you have to look for it. You have to hunt for its heart. I was not born in California, and I am constantly looking for it. This is why I have developed crow’s feet in the 10 years I’ve lived here--peering, disbelieving, peering disbelieving. I think I’ve found it, from time to time, in the darnedest places: the desert drawl of an octogenarian writer, the joys and frustrations of light, the leftover architectures of bygone eras, the decaying things--like that stretch of Central Valley so corroded by pesticides.

Just as cabdrivers in Manhattan reveal much about survival in the city with their irony, so do signs and bumper stickers reveal something about how Californians feel when they lose a piece of California. Last weekend, for example, I passed a sign in Oxnard that read: “Thanks, Oxnard city officials, for ruining this beautiful field.” You find a place, it seems, in the disappointments of memory as well as in its glories: the empty blinking crossroads in badly planned downtowns, the unused office towers with the out-of-scale for-sale signs, the best intentions of urban planners, flummoxed by the slippery dream, who were probably not born here, either.

San Diego has always seemed to me like one big fraternity party where everyone’s having a good time and everyone seems wealthy. But there’s a bit of a beefy, overfed look to the natives. Everything, in fact, is a little too big: the malls, the parking lots, the churches. Still, there is no denying that there are more things to do with children per square inch in San Diego than just about anywhere else in the world.

Back in college, if, heaven forbid, you ever fell for a frat boy, the only way to make sense of him was to peel him down layer by layer, dig from one neurosis to the next until you found his smallest divisible part: homesickness or fear of women or insecurity in sports or you name it. Then there was a glimmer of hope: You might get to know the boy.

With this in mind, and dragging three children who had been promised SeaWorld and Legoland and the Wild Animal Park (none of which I had any intention of delivering), I went looking for San Diego.

We pulled into town at about midnight, driving through the Gaslamp District toward the Hilton Hotel. This was not San Diego; this was Liverpool, England. Here were pawn shops with blinking red lights and a USO office and adult video stores. Here was the old Los Flores Hotel and the Sing Sing Club, where the police had lined up a couple of kids, their hands on the wall. This was like a sailor’s port, full of people, their faces lit by the gas lamps, horses clopping up the avenues, rickshaws pulled by, ohmygod, frat boys!

I tried to wake the children, then thought better of it. What would I say? Darlings, we’re not in SeaWorld anymore?

This is the neighborhood where Wyatt Earp owned three saloons back in the late 1800s. We pulled into the new Hilton Gaslamp. Designed to look like a city loft, it sits smack on the railroad tracks. The little red train can take you straight to Tijuana in 20 minutes. This sounded like fun to me, but the next morning we met a healthy looking couple with children who said that native San Diegans didn’t cross the border too much. “They have a different constitution down there,” the man of the house said ominously. That took awhile to explain to my children, ages 3, 5 and 9. They suggested pedal bikes in nearby Seaport Village (which kind of made me gag).

In the harsh light of day, I agreed to try SeaWorld. Once we had crossed the thousand-mile parking lot and seen the absurd admission prices, I made an executive decision. We were going to find the real San Diego, the digestible, essential San Diego, even if it meant blinking lights and stiletto heels. We would start with nature, but on a smaller scale than SeaWorld or Wild Animal Park.

We went to the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, small, but a jewel with fantastic fish and a story-high window onto a kelp bed that had the four of us swaying back and forth, stopping only to gasp at smooth spotted sharks and eels and starfish. We learned about waves and saw a map of the sea floor along the coast of California.

Back in the city, we ambled into the Chinese Historical Society on 3rd Avenue (the Gaslamp District was once the Chinese district as well), a bite-sized museum with a beautiful exhibit of gu-qin, a stringed instrument more than 2,000 years old. The museum has a little outdoor courtyard with a koi pond where Chinese elders still come to sit and tell stories. There was a gilded bed that once belonged to a famous warlord, decorated with dragons and phoenixes, covered in blue and yellow silk.

Out on 5th Avenue, the women wear high heels and tight skirts. We stopped in the wig shop and the shop that sells used sequined dresses. We had ice cream cones as long as my daughter’s arm at Ghirardelli. We did not drive. We walked. We could have gone to any one of a number of theaters, including the Shakespeare in the Globe in Balboa Park, but instead we went back to the hotel and watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” At one point Li Mu Bai, the master swordsman, says to the young aristocrat he hopes to teach: “Lose yourself and find yourself again.”

“What does he mean?” my son asked me.

I thought for a moment. “It’s like when you pull into SeaWorld and you feel lost, like, ‘This is so big, where do I go first?’ Then you get in the car and wander a bit, not knowing where you’re going, and you end up at that beautiful koi pond.” Sam nods.

We stayed up until 1 in the morning watching “Cast Away” after “Crouching Tiger.” Every so often we could hear a train pass by the hotel.

The next morning we decided to take a little walk to Seaport Village, which was touristy and not very appealing. To get back to the hotel, we had to cross through the new Convention Center, which has the proportions of the old San Diego, as if the architect wanted to enclose a piece of the planet and send it airless into space. Between escalators and empty meeting rooms, my heart sank. Human beings, like all animals, have a scale in which they are comfortable, and this was not it. Who dreamed these strange dreams?

Friends in New York often refer to the space in California, the wide-aisled supermarkets and the boulevards, as if these were ingredients of paradise. In “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks must find a cave from which he can venture out. That’s what I was looking for in San Diego. The Gaslamp District was a kind of human-scale city within a city from which we could scamper out, learn stuff, have fun and climb back in. It is a neighborhood where people actually talk in cafes and walk and talk to strangers on the street. In olden days we might all have run down to the water when the ships came in to welcome exotic goods and foreign sailors. If it weren’t for Seaport Village and the oversized Convention Center, we might still be able to do that.

Looking down 3rd Avenue outside the Chinese Historical Society, I thought I saw San Diego. Storefronts were sun-bleached white and weathered wood with a touch of green paint on the balconies. The street was empty. There was the sound of horses’ hooves and trains. The afternoon sun was hot and high.