State by State

by Matt Weiland

  The bumper sticker could be put to other uses, and I had seen that done many times before: the bumper sticker as advertisement (“Support Rice-Growers”), the bumper sticker as inside joke (“No Roger, No Rerun, No Rent”), the bumper sticker as boast (“My Child Is an Honor Student at Carver Elementary”), the bumper sticker as a token of personality (“I’d Rather Be Fishing”), the bumper sticker as self-amused kiss-off (“Yes, as a Matter of Fact, I Do Own the Whole Damn Road”). It took a particular kind of person to politicize the bumper sticker, though it’s possible that the Decency stickers had only been retroactively politicized by the Liberty stickers; I’m sure that at least some of the people who displayed them had failed to realize they were choosing sides in a debate.

  For a while, I thought the stickers might be part of a national campaign, like the ones that appeared every four years just before a presidential race. I had owned such a sticker when I was eleven, a black “Fritz Busters” sticker with a caricature of Walter Mondale inside the Ghostbusters logo, which I liked not because I was a Ronald Reagan fan but because I was a Ghostbusters fan. It turned out, though, that the Decency stickers were a purely local phenomenon, the Liberty stickers a purely local response.

  As the weeks went by, the dispute showed no signs of abating. More and more stickers appeared on the backs of Little Rock’s cars. Fewer and fewer people were unaware of them. The letters in the editorial pages of the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette (respectively—and, once more, symbolically if not actually—Little Rock’s Decency paper and Little Rock’s Liberty paper) became more frequent and more vociferous:

  Some religious leaders use censorship to keep the truth from their followers and others. Teachers cannot teach if they must try to please the censors. Some censors even try to change history.

  —A. W. Taylor, Arkansas Democrat, January 5, 1991

  Look at us in 1991. Pornography allowed under the guise of free speech. The big three TV bigmouths busy presenting mind-boggling bias as news.

  —Rod A. Porter, Arkansas Democrat, January 31, 1991

  Wake up! There was and is no Jesus, just as there was no Adam, no Moses, no Apostles. Human beings created the gods of religion, not the other way around, and if they did not, if there is a God like the Jews and Christians believe, then every sin and everything evil is his crime, not ours, because he invented them! So don’t try to save me, I’m not lost!

  —Pablo Rodriguez-Santiago, Arkansas Gazette, March 10, 1991

  We are so deceived and desensitized to demonic array that we’re turning into another Sodom and Gomorrah. … There’s a new television show called “Dinosaur.” It shows children talking back to parents and has sex and crime. It’s something Satan has thrown into the eyes of our children and we parents are responsible for our children’s time.

  —Sonny Tobin, Arkansas Gazette, May 25, 1991

  It continued like this for months, the two factions shouting each other down on the letters pages as their bumper stickers fought for supremacy over the tails of the city’s cars. Back and forth they went, through the summer and into the fall.

  There was an incursion of Liberty.

  There was a backlash of Decency.

  There was a counterstroke of Liberty.

  There was a retaliation of Decency.

  There was a brief hiccup of Tolerance, I am told, but I was away from home and I missed it.

  In August of 1991, when I left Little Rock for college, both Decency and Liberty were nearly ubiquitous. By 1997, when I returned home, they had begun to vanish from the automotive landscape. The Liberties lingered a bit longer than the Decencies—not, I would guess, out of any particular depth of conviction, but simply because the class of drivers likely to advertise Liberty on their bumpers were not as wealthy and therefore more apt to own six-year-old cars than the class of drivers likely to advertise Decency. This was recently made plain to me when, in an effort to remind myself what the original “Speak Up for Decency” stickers looked like, I spent a few minutes coasting through the parking lot of Fellowship Bible Church during Sunday services and was greeted by row after row of Saturn Skys, Mitsubishi Eclipses, and Land Rover LR2s, all with wet-looking factory glosses of color. I tried a few other churches in the same neighborhood, the Church of Christ on Rodney Parham, the Immanuel Baptist on Shackleford, and the First Baptist on Pleasant Valley, all without success. Finally I was able to track one of the stickers down outside a Wal-Mart in Southwest Little Rock, where used cars go to live out their retirement years. Could it be, I wondered, that all our disagreements are destined to end this way, blanching out and wearing away at the edges, handed along from one generation to the next until their original meaning has been all but lost and they have been replaced by new disagreements, or by the old disagreements in new guises, each in its turn following the slow passage from faith to commerce?

  Today Fellowship Bible Church has grown out of its acreage, Spectrum has been replaced by the Little Rock Free Press, and very few of the stickers remain on the road. Most of those that do are peeling and barely legible. I saw no more than five or six, distributed as you might expect, in the spring of 2004, when Bush/Cheney and Kerry/Edwards stickers began appearing suddenly and in great numbers, like mushrooms feeding off a decaying forest, in the back windshields of the city’s cars and SUVs. (It’s almost always windshields these days rather than bumpers, though I don’t know why; I suppose there are fashions in sticker placement, as in everything.)

  It has been several years since the last flickering trace of the dispute crossed my gaze. I was exiting the highway behind an old Plymouth K-car, its frame dented and its paint faded with age, a fixer-upper, I imagined, donated by some well-intentioned father to the cause of his son’s adolescence. The sticker below the license plate was a one-off letterpress creation, the kind you used to be able to design for yourself at the state fair in the days before cheap home laser printers. It read, “Speak Up for Puberty.”

  Here, finally, was a cause we could all support.

  CALIFORNIA

  CAPITAL Sacramento

  ENTERED UNION 1850 (31st)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From a book, Las Sergas de Esplandián, by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, c. 1500

  NICKNAME Golden State

  MOTTO Eureka! (“I Have Found It!”)

  RESIDENTS Californian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 53

  STATE BIRD California valley quail

  STATE FLOWER golden poppy

  STATE TREE California redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens and Sequoiadendron giganteum)

  STATE SONG “I Love You, California”

  LAND AREA 155,959 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Madera Co., 38 mi. E of Madera

  POPULATION 36,132,147

  WHITE 59.5%

  BLACK 6.7%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 1.0%

  ASIAN 10.9%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 32.4%

  UNDER 18 27.3%

  65 AND OVER 10.6%

  MEDIAN AGE 33.3

  CALIFORNIA

  William T. Vollmann

  It says something about our changing America that once upon a time, an art-friendly governmental organization commissioned one volume about each of our fifty states; whereas this book, inspired by the WPA’s example, has been commercially published and allows each state only a few thousand words. Fortunately, mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say anyhow. Of course the ambiance of Florida still varies from that of Montana, Hawaii’s from Alaska’s, but aren’t their television programs the same? Accordingly, I dare to hope that a generation or two from now, if a sequel to this sequel comes out, its writers will have life even easier.

  My home state has met its own losses during this ongoing destruction of differences. Who believes in the “California dream” anymore?

  In conquistador times, the dream was that California was an island of Amazons. With
equal lust, missionaries envisioned it as an empire of saved souls and slave labor. Meanwhile vast ranches named themselves upon the land, their devout and secular respective owners dreaming Biblical dreams of cattle increase; at this time California’s principal export was hides. Seized by the United States of America, California now began to incarnate a dream of gold. Once Everyman’s surface deposits played out, the dream, disseminated in great measure by the railroads, took on a character of agrarian luxuriance. Los Angeles’s orange groves thickened; boosters began to speak of “Tropical California,” and citrus soon became a gorgeous golden infection. Other phrases of the day were “ease,” “salubriousness,” “reclamation,” meaning the transformation of the land from a supposedly waste state (you see, it had been wasted by Indians, who were rapidly dispossessed, enslaved, or exterminated for the greater good) into homesteads, and that epitome of Americanism, “self-sufficiency.” As a twentieth-century song insisted, it never rains in California; hence the inhabitants of that sunshiny paradise began to addict themselves to irrigation. In such audacious projects as the settlement of the Imperial Valley’s desert, self-sufficiency required reclamation at taxpayers’ expense; and the more people came to California, the more water was needed, whose financing required either more public money, as for instance in the construction of Hoover Dam, or else new land sales—which meant buyers, who needed more water. Meanwhile, oil wells came and mostly went in southern California, industrializing and urbanizing their surroundings. More jobs meant still more people. And always danced the dream that California was somehow special: the living would be gracious in the grapefruit-scented sea breezes of everlasting summer. Ever more homesteads became corporate farms; highways crawled with cars, so we built freeways and kept building them; city air turned brown. Although the poorly paid and often ghastly labor of migrant workers continued to be more or less hidden, at least until César Chávez commenced his marches, fasts, and boycotts, quite visibly enough the urban ghettos stood out on California’s flesh like sores. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, the dream had already become a nightmare parody, tricked out with the desperate lust of the masses to drug themselves with a glimpse of any Hollywood celebrity; spiced with the rage of those who had believed the brochures and now discovered that exchanging Pittsburgh or Cedar Rapids for a scrap of California real estate had not made their lives wonderful. The California I know is in part the land of long commutes, unaffordable homes, Superfund toxic waste sites, overburdened public services, bad schools (except for the rich), increasing crime—in short, the land of reality.

  All the same, it is still true that in California, one will find the highest number both of endemic species and of total species in the United States. And many subspecies of my own general sort of life form occupy interesting niches in the socioeconomic bio-region called California.

  I was born here, and I have lived most of my life here. I like the unassuming informality (when was the last time I had to wear a suit?), the tolerant, or, if you prefer, the blasé anonymity (who cares if that woman is sticking her tongue in another woman’s mouth?), and even the superficiality. Most of my fellow Californians seem to be from somewhere else. In the grimy old brick towns of the East, I sometimes feel that people have grown up history-stained. Boston, Providence, Salem, Rochester, these places are alien to me, for winters, rains, and ancient violence blotch their walls. In California, where the future promises continued sunniness, most of what I see is new: big box stores, mini-malls, armies of cookie-cutter houses where there used to be fields and wetlands. Drive-ins take too long; I order a drive-through’s burger, living the California dream.

  A certain California creek I know is a green secret, rich in willows and Atamarisks through which one must fight to see the white-foamed brown water spilling through the tender grass. Ants, flies, butterflies, and lizards live there. And if I take five steps back, past the rock with the petroglyphs on it, I’m once again in a desert, and before me runs the most unassuming G-string of green in a rocky gulley.

  Meanwhile, the 104,000 irrigated acres of Palo Verde have made green fields out of the Colorado River’s western shore for a span as narrow in time as is that desert creek in space—not much more than a century.

  And on a still larger scale is California itself, whose desert places have been made green in thousands of places—and whose marshes have been drained, whose lakes have been polluted, whose mountains and forests have been dynamited here and there, whose water table sinks and sinks.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, California was America’s number one cantaloupe producer (346,000 tons), and number two grapefruit producer (137,000 tons). The California of Steinbeck’s novels is fundamentally agricultural. In Dubious Battle revolves around a fruit pickers’ strike. East of Eden and Of Mice and Men are both set in the California ranch country. The Grapes of Wrath deals with Okies’ vision of California as a farmer’s paradise—and with the actuality, namely that they find themselves locked out of those farms. Just as Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy was named after an airless wasteland on the moon, so California’s abundance often appears in a disturbing arid perspective, should one only take a few steps back.

  Across the street from Los Angeles’s Central Library, descending from the vertically grooved Bank of America tower, is a winding staircase whose two lanes are divided by a high channel of silver-white water spilling down cement-walled rocky concretions. The water swivels gracefully down a canyon of skyscrapers, trees, and shrubs, ending in a fountain, a flower stand, and a café in number 633, some of whose windows boast tapering upside-down reflections of the Citigroup Building, which in turn offers from its horizontal black window-stripes a lovely basketworks, namely the concrete waffle-grid on the library reflected and distorted.

  Get in a car (since this is Los Angeles; this is California), and roll past the brown corduroy cube of the International School of Languages, the lovely white filigree of the Torah Center, then Pico Cleaners, Eliass Kosher Market, the detached single-story commercial cubes on the six-lane wideness of Pico Boulevard. Here as in so many California cities the evening “rush” of cars means that cars don’t move at all; cars wait so patiently and gleamingly to make the long gentle curve of Highway 71 and thereby enter the shade of olive-grassed hills.

  All this was desert once. Someday it will surely be desert again. Meanwhile, Los Angeles irrigates its concrete and asphalt garden at the expense of, among other places, the Owens Valley, which from Westgard Pass appears pale yellow-green, slightly lush. As one comes down into the Owens Valley it flattens out and so do its colors: pastel with dust, snow, clouds, and bluish-green veins of trees faded white and blue in an old Mediterranean travel poster. The grayish-green fields or desert (hard to distinguish from a distance) now begins to show white abrasions; and the greenish-gray gets grayer, resolving into sagebrush. The rich brown windings of Owens Creek once became Owens River, then Owens Lake. Owens Lake is a dust bowl now, thanks to the thirst of Los Angeles.

  But don’t say the past is gone in California! In Santa Monica, which of course belongs to Los Angeles, the old Packard showroom on Wilshire Boulevard (now a Mercedes-Benz dealership) reflects in its window the phony Spanish curvy red roof tiles of the bagel place; and above the huge panes in which this reflection appears, the elaborate metalwork resembles the frilly scales of the palm tree in front, and then there are flesh-colored wriggles around the white archway. Nowadays this edifice likewise possesses a faux Spanish roof, there on wide Wilshire Boulevard, seventeen-odd blocks from the sea.

  Drive on; so much more of California than I can tell you is about driving nowadays! You can roll from Los Angeles north to Sacramento on Interstate 5 (which, as a matter of fact, runs all the way from Mexico to Canada), seeing not much else but dry mountains, flat fields, and urban sprawl, glittering monster trucks and shining four-doors rolling down wide ways between narrow green strips. This route exaggerates the ruination of my home state. From the freeway it is especially easy to
believe that, say, Stockton stretches hideously east and west, like the worst of Los Angeles. But if you do turn, say, east, you will pass through vineyards, dark green fields of tall corn, rolling reddish-green fields speckled with dappled cows, walnut orchards, one of which is enclosed in a long white fence. Pass the Poppy Ranch, and here in yellow grass is a double-doored metal gate, with a rusty star inset in each door. Presently you will enter Calaveras County, which is literally the County of Skulls. In Wallace, I remember the beautiful California look of blond grass and live oaks; on Highway 29 I look down into live oak valleys fringed by blond grass and a few clouds. The grass now begins to be tinted with wetter olive hues. In place of that faux Spanish roof in Santa Monica I find the old two-story store façades of Angels Camp. Crossing the lake bridge into Tuolumne County (three vultures in the cloudy sky), I inspect the genuine original replica of Mark Twain’s cabin with its truly-o original chimney, the whole fenced off absurdly and surrounded, respectfully but noticeably, by houses. If I chose, I could take that as a metonym of my poor California. But in Sonora, once settled by Mexicans and named after their state, now the county seat of our American republic, California may still be called the evening sunlight on oak leaves, which are still green in mid-September, and down below me the amplified referee calls a football game. Meanwhile, the Tuolumne County Courthouse (cornerstone laid in 1898) stands silent, its copper double doors locked well and studded with copper stars. Looking inside, I can see inlaid marble tile. Atop the building’s pillared white crown rides a weathervane.

  Here in Sonora I will sleep; and in the morning, sitting on the balcony of the Gunn House Motor Lodge, which was built by Mexican laborers for, of all people, Dr. Gunn, I will look across the tiny pool and over the white roses, above the fence and across the parking lot to the steep, densely treed hill, some of whose leaves are finally going yellow. Two windows of an old house will peer out at me through the branches, like the eyes of a face with unkempt bangs.