Big Dreams (2 page)

But how to get there? It took a stroke of luck. After graduating from college, I joined the Peace Corps and was dispatched by dint of miracle to the University of California in Los Angeles for ten weeks of training before being shipped to Nigeria for a tour of duty.

Our group of volunteers was quartered at a rundown, pink-stucco apartment complex not far from the UCLA campus. We loved it beyond reason. Bougainvillea grew in jungles along the crumbling garden paths, while tiny hummingbirds sipped nectar from the scarlet bristles of some bottlebrush trees. In the unaccustomed February heat, we swam laps in a decrepit pool and reclined on ratty loungers to elaborate our tans.

Every letter we wrote to our families struck the same chord. “Dear Folks,” we bragged. “It’s February, and I’m sitting by the swimming pool.…”

Paradise, we thought.

In L.A., the sun really did shine every day. It lent an elevated status to our lives that we preserved by snapping photos. We posed on ocean bluffs, flexed our biceps at Muscle Beach, and stood with our toes touching the stars embedded in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The city itself was held in an eternal soft focus—hazy, loose, and easy on the senses.

On Alvarado Street, we discovered Mexican food and fell to
worshiping the avocado, an exotic fruit none of us had tasted before. Avocados became an emblem of what we were experiencing, the rough skin of existence peeled back to reveal the succulent, green flesh hidden within.

For our Saturday night gatherings, we fixed guacamole in big bowls and licked the pulp from each other’s fingers. Music blared from radios, and the gentle air caressed us. Our seduction was complete. Late in the beery evening, I would retire to a corner and take a private vow to return to California someday, buoyed up on the usual pilgrim’s dream, the seed dream of all westward migration, a dream of starting over.

In 1969, at the age of twenty-five, I did start over, forsaking a hapless career as a teacher of New Jersey seventh-graders to cast my lot with the hippie tribe in the Haight-Ashbury. I had no job or profession in mind, but in an intuitive, quasi-mystical way I believed that something was waiting for me in San Francisco, a new self whose shape I could barely discern. Everyone in Levittown thought I was crazy.

Then came the spectacular drive across America. Cut loose from my roots, I felt both guilty and thrilled, scared and ultra-confident. The industrial ravages of the East dropped away behind me, followed by the countless farms of the Midwest, cow after cow after cornfield, but in Wyoming the scenery turned panoramic and filled me with optimism. I swallowed the broad vistas whole, in great gulps, simultaneously expanding my lungs and my consciousness.

Outside Cheyenne, I picked up two hitchhikers from Nebraska. They had infant beards and pretended to be older than they were. I guessed that they were runaways, and they owned up to it in Utah. They were escaping from pigs and haystacks, they said, and aiming themselves toward salvation in their own personal Eldorado.

Nevada was a blur of sagebrush and desert scrub. At dawn on a pearly August morning, tired but elated, we crossed over into California shouting
Yes! Yes!
and ascended into the Sierra Nevada.
As we approached Donner Pass, at an altitude of about 7,200 feet, one of the hitchhikers brought forth a recollected grade-school lesson about the emigrants from Illinois who had got trapped in the mountains during the winter of 1847–48. Those who’d survived had cannibalized their comrades.

“I’d never eat anybody,” the other hitchhiker said.

“Then you’d be eaten,” his partner grimly replied.

The tale of Donner Pass put a damper on our mood. Its moral appeared to be that not every trip to California would ultimately be rewarded.

So we rode on in silence and brooded about our fate until the vegetarian hitchhiker pulled out a harmonica and noodled a back-woodsy rendition of a dumb pop song about going to San Francisco and wearing flowers in your hair. We couldn’t help singing along, and soon we were laughing as we winged our way over a bridge into a magical city cloaked in a dense summer fog.

In the Haight-Ashbury, I rented a cheap flat and furnished it à la mode with a massive stereo and a mattress on the floor. Something new and exciting seemed to enter my orbit almost daily—seven-grain bread, Zen meditation, the pungent smell of eucalyptus leaves. There was an earthquake, 4.7 on the Richter scale. Objects broke and were never mended. And one night at the Fillmore Auditorium, while Janis Joplin was wailing on stage, a girl in a see-through blouse ran up and kissed me without any warning at all.

O, man. California.

T
HAT MAGICAL CITY VANISHED IN TIME
, of course blown away like a thistle, but I stayed on in San Francisco. I worked and married and bought a house. Always I harbored a naïve belief that I was only a temporary resident who would be going back to New York someday soon, but I never did.

Twenty years slipped by before I knew it. Slowly, without willing
it, I’d been transformed into that curious thing, a Californian, and on the brink of middle age, as the century was about to turn, it occurred to me to demand an accounting.

If I hoped to take stock of my life out West, I reckoned that I should also take stock of some other lives and visions, listening to my fellow dreamers while I explored our common bonds. So I decided on an ambitious journey, even a metaphysical investigation, allowing myself six months to wander from the Oregon border in the Far Northwest all the way down to Mexico.

Every true California story, I would learn, begins in yearning and ends in transformation.

At the public library, I found two writers to accompany me on the road, Edwin Bryant and William Brewer. They had embarked on similar journeys in the mid-nineteenth century, but the reports that they had compiled were different in tone and in kind and were separated by the yawning chasm of the Gold Rush. Whereas Bryant had traveled west from Kentucky in 1847 to a little-known territory still wreathed in myths, Brewer had made his tour after the first great cycle of boom-and-bust, and his writing was sometimes tinged with the initial stirrings of loss.

A stiff, formal, frontier portrait of the youthful William Brewer served as a frontispiece in his posthumous book,
Up and Down California in 1860–1864
. He was handsome and bearded and had a high-minded look.

Brewer had come to the West from Poughkeepsie, New York, to join Josiah Whitney’s geological survey team as its chief botanist. His wife and infant daughter had recently died, and he was starting over. He put in long hours in the field and was known for his honesty, his tact, and his genial good humor. At every opportunity, he wrote richly detailed letters to his brother Edgar back east—the clear-eyed letters of a naturalist—leaving behind the raw materials that would later be edited into a narrative.

Edwin Bryant had bequeathed us no picture in his
What I Saw
in California
. He was a journalist of bold temperament, and he couldn’t resist a trip to the Coast to examine all the curious rumors that he’d heard about “the countries bordering the Pacific.” He believed, too, that the milder climate along the ocean might help to improve his failing health.

Opinions about California were divided, Bryant noted. Some Kentuckians were certain that it sheltered “the condemned and abandoned of God and man,” while others claimed that its attractions were “scarcely inferior” to those of Eden. Gossip had it that five thousand Mormons were stationed in Kansas to prevent any emigrant parties from reaching “the reputed El Dorado.” Bloodthirsty bands of Indians were also supposed to be there, robbing and murdering innocent victims.

Bryant wasn’t sure what to think about such talk. As he saw it, his job was “to give a truthful and not an exaggerated and fanciful account of the occurrences of the journey, and of the scenery, capabilities, and general features of the countries through which we shall pass”—a worthwhile goal, I agreed, and one that I would try to live up to in my own report.

O
N THE MORNING OF MY DEPARTURE
, a Sunday in mid-April, an unexpected storm swept into San Francisco and began drumming against our bedroom windows at dawn. I heard thunder, saw streaks of lightning, and thought about omens as I slipped into my clothes and bent to kiss my sleeping wife good-bye, not knowing what a good-bye it would prove to be.

The night before, we had stayed up late over a bottle of wine, trying to convince ourselves that my impending absence would be good for our relationship. We had been happily married for almost fifteen years, but in the last few months we had foundered in a new place that baffled us—a distasteful place where our needs were in competition. We seemed to be growing in opposite directions, and the torque of it had left us drained and frightened.

Whenever we had hit a rough patch in the past, we’d been able to wait it out. Always the confusion and the negative emotions would dissipate after a while. This time it felt different, but I left the house still clinging to the hope that being apart for a few weeks might break the deadlock between us. Things would be back to normal, I told myself, when I came home for a rest at the midpoint of my journey, in early July.

Midpoint, midlife, middle age: I walked blindly into the future and boarded a little United jet to Eureka, a port city on the North Coast about three hundred miles away. The pilot took us up through some bruised-looking thunderheads, and soon we were suspended in that up-in-heaven space, where the world appears to be made of pure light and every trouble is insubstantial.

An hour later, we dropped toward some spring-green fields that were strewn with yellow mustard flowers and sloped toward the sparkling scallop of Humboldt Bay. The earth was keenly alive after the rain, refreshed and replenished and vibrant with energy.

At the airport in Eureka, I claimed a rental car and drove straight to Brookings, the first town on the Oregon side, where I checked into a motel and provoked a small commotion. The old man behind the motel desk eyed me with suspicion, as though he were making a mental inventory of my person to describe me to the police. I couldn’t figure out why, but then I caught him staring at my license plate—at the blue letters on a white background that spelled
California
.

The old man was suffering from a peculiar anxiety that I’d witnessed before in Oregonians. Those afflicted with it were nervous about the empire to their south, worried about the nearness of sushi and acupuncture, and downright phobic about the prospect that Californians might someday take over their state and ban the use of chain saws and the wearing of flannel shirts.

Brookings was a fishing town that was turning into a retirement colony. Perkiness was rampant in the streets as the elderly swapped bowling scores and funny anecdotes from sermons. At a central
grocery store, they stocked up on generic goods in feedlot sacks, fifty pounds of dog kibble or oat bran, and I began to wonder if the millennium might be even closer than I imagined.

O
N THE CHETCO RIVER IN BROOKINGS
, with a light fog burning off and a smell of sun-warmed bay leaves rising, I stood knee-deep in the stream casting flies to invisible steelhead, the big, sea-run rainbow trout that return to their natal waters to spawn. The stream had a flat, neutral color from the rocks and pebbles lining its bed, and I looked across it to a ridge where some silvery-green Douglas firs arched toward the sky.

No fish, the meditative motion of casting, the sun roaring in my bones. Happiness, for a moment.

Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll cross the border.

Daydreaming, I imagined Edwin Bryant and his party getting ready to leave for California. I could see his ox team pawing the ground and sending clouds of breath into the air, could see Bryant tightening the cinches and wondering if he were about to make a foolish mistake or a glorious one.

A contingent of his fellow Masons gave him a send-off. Grandmaster Reese, their potentate, delivered a joking speech that consigned him to the grave or to perpetual exile. Bryant found it “rather overstrained in pathos” and much preferred an original hymn that the Masons and their wives sang with great vigor to the tune of “Old Rosin the Beau.” Prayers were offered, and a benediction.

Then Bryant mounted his horse in the full bloom of spring. He must have felt the adrenaline racing through him. He must have felt his heart beating for fair as he set out to address the continent in its ceaseless variety. On horseback he rode away from the Midwest toward the Rocky Mountains, scribbling notes on scraps of paper and reducing the broad beauty of the moment to electric syllables, a poetry of the actual:

C
OMING INTO CALIFORNIA
, I passed a sign that welcomed visitors to the state while issuing no warning of its perils, and then an agricultural inspection station where uniformed agents were on the lookout for criminal bugs, the medflies and the gypsy moths trying to hitch a free ride to paradise on an Oregon apple or a Washington pear. Less than a mile away, I saw another sign that laid out some particulars.

The landscape hadn’t changed much since Brookings. To the west, in fenced pastures along the ocean, herds of dairy cattle were grazing. Blackbirds and starlings fluttered about them in nervous arcs. There were yellow acacias in farmhouse yards, clapboard barns covered with a yellowish moss, and some wilted plumes of pampas grass that had once been ornamental but now seemed merely tired.