All the leaves were brown and the sky was gray, the day we left Washington for California. Well, actually, it was July, so all the leaves were a sodden, wilting green, and the sky was that sullen, half-hazed blue you get in a smogged-over city with 90 percent humidity during the summer. But I was ready for a week of vacation with my wife and daughter in Northern California.
I felt dirty, somehow, with a winter grime that the endless spring rains in Washington hadn’t managed to rinse away. I was smoking packs and packs of cigarettes a day, with the green pallor of February still tingeing my face. The bags under my eyes, heavier than the luggage we checked at the airport, made me look like an aging jazz musician just back from six years on the road. I needed a haircut. I needed a shave. I needed a tonic. I needed a tan. I had reached that point only easterners know: where you are certain California actually is a garden of Eden, where you wish they all really could be California girls, where you catch yourself at work, staring out the window at the steaming city, California dreaming.
So off we flew. We visited family in Santa Clara. We stayed overnight with a poet in his impossibly beautiful house overlooking the vineyards of Sonoma County. We ate lunch with a literary critic-turned-theologian in Palo Alto and talked about French philosophers. We sat with a pair of writers in a bar across from the City Lights Bookstore and watched San Francisco’s mayor, Willie Brown, flirt with two young women who were breaking the law by smoking cigarettes in a public place.
The days were warm, and the nights were cool. We went down to see the ocean, and we drove up to taste the wine. And after a week I wanted only to get back East, away from that gorgeous landscape and home to a world I could understand.
There are places in this country that really do give you a sense of God — a sense that, though the terrain and weather are harsh, behind them stands a great benevolence that will reward those who work hard to till the soil and raise the herds.
But Northern California isn’t like that. It is instead a landscape filled with many gods: a whole pagan pantheon, some of whom want to cosset you with beautiful vistas and perfect weather, and some of whom want to smash you with earthquakes and the sea. You never get the feeling in the East, even on the bleakest seaboards of Maine, that the water actually hates the land. Off Carmel and Big Sur, Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, Point Reyes and Mendocino, the ocean wants the coast to cease to be.
Great waves looked over others coming in, Robert Frost wrote of his own visit to the Pacific, And thought of doing something to the shore / That water never did to land before. You can understand why visions of the apocalypse are what leapt first to Frost’s New Hampshire mind. To see that coastline is to grasp why the poet Robinson Jeffers sat grimly above it in the 1930s, dreaming of incest, mad stallions, and the rotting away of the republic: Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, he left as his advice. I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.
Even the beneficent California gods of scenery and climate are not good to live with too long. There’s something in the air that wants to produce the most unspoiled of children and the most spoiled of adults. The fruit from the trees goes bad too soon to eat.
It’s not that Californians are any more selfish than everyone else. It’s rather that the landscape itself makes them wish other people weren’t there to wreck the view. To drive around San Francisco Bay is to see the miles of strip malls crowding along El Camino Real, the dot-coms sprawling their corporate headquarters up and down Highway 101, the parking lots fanning out from Stanford, the fancy new tract houses soaring up in Sausalito. And all these signs of human dynamism and life begin, oddly, to seem a sacrilege. Like Portland and Seattle, Northern California constantly tempts you to imagine that other humans shouldn’t be here, to think that you should be the last person allowed to enter this paradise.
On the plane flight home I read the newspapers for the first time in a week to catch up on the latest stupidities from Congress and outrages from the Supreme Court. Back in the office, there would be phone calls waiting from disgruntled writers, letters from authors hurt by the reviews of their books, messages from young graduates pushing to break into magazine writing. Ambition, politics, jealousy, rage: all the clean, honest, human emotions in a hot, sticky world of other people. I couldn’t wait to get home.
J. BOTTUM
