California Dreamin’

If there’s one genre of writing that will never die, it’s that of California as a paradise lost and found, found and lost, desired and disgusted. Daniel Duane, with Exhibit A:

But that’s my point. Wallace Stegner, the great 20th-century novelist and environmentalist, in a mood similar to the one I’m feeling — he hated hippies, worried they might foretell the impending collapse of Western civilization — wrote that “Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic — only more so.” Put all those qualities together and you get a place that always belongs to somebody else, before you even know it’s for sale.

Back in my 20s, I thought I’d grown up in California too late — after all the mountains had been climbed and all the good surf breaks discovered. Right on schedule, in middle age — as the state’s population reaches 40 million — I am now tempted to think that I lived through the end of a golden era. But maybe the better way to say it is that just like every other Californian for as long as anybody can remember, I have merely witnessed a fleeting chapter in a centuries-long human story in which the lost Eden we all heard about from our parents is eternally changing into the pretty damn nice place we found — and then, much too soon for comfort, into the next bewildering mixture of good and bad that we scarcely recognize.

And more interestingly, Julia Frankenbach:

California has come together more than once. In multiple histories—in matter and in mind—the massive swath of land on the western cusp of North America assembled and assumed a place on the continent. My efforts to assemble memories of California—my original home—grow from the layers of these histories.

California grips the imagination. Its various monikers—Eden, Arcadia, the Land of Milk and Honey—express the hopes of those who dreamed it. Its symbols—rugged granite-lands, perfumed orange orchards, the glittering Hollywood metropolis—reveal the fixations of those who lived it. Even for me, a long youth spent familiarizing myself with the landscape’s many banalities belies a lasting intrigue. California dreams rekindle in my Colorado outpost. They grow brighter each month I remain away from home. While away, I forget my disillusionment with the Sacramento Valley’s dusty expanses, crushing heat, and the indolent wrinkle of foothill on its western horizon. I forget my anger about the steady anonymization of township as endless conurbation folds once-distinct communities into homogeneous grids that cover the plains. California constantly renews. Its Great Valley sits perched above sharp coastal edges that are dynamic processes. They rise jagged and salted from the ever-churning active edge of the North American continental shelf. Things happen at this tectonic seam. Pillow basalts cut into consciousness. The lands that roll away from it develop sequentially, like waves: coastal foothills empty onto the farmed plains of the Central Valley. Still further east, the valley’s edges rise to wooded slopes, which crest in the aerial granite of the Sierra Nevada. California regenerates tectonically and perceptually. As its beaches churn and build, so does its memory. Hindsight hones its contours. I always find myself wishing to return.

For me, California’s successive terrains are the landscape of home. Yet, however familiar, they remain evocative. This home is tantalizing. There is something about the variety of the landscape—the ease with which one travels from coastal cliffs to redwood inlets, from orchard to mountainside to the pinnacles of the Range of Light. Each locale feels exotic to every other. A sense of un-relation fragments the landscape. Over time, after many traverses through the wild palette of its surfaces, one begins to intuit a process of accretion—of lithic buildup, terrain after terrain. One senses a melding of distinct territories into a whole.