Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  “We had all shared in the glamour of immense, privately owned land,” one of William Welles Hollister’s seven grandchildren, Jane Hollister Wheelwright, wrote in The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir, the book she published in 1988, some twenty years after the sale of the Hollister ranch. “We lived in a fantastic but real world of our own discovery: square miles of impassable terrain, wild cattle threatening on the trail, single coyotes caterwauling like a pack, pumas screaming, storms felling giant oaks, washouts that marooned us for days, wildfires that lasted weeks and scorched whole mountain ranges.” Her father, she tells us, “rarely wore his chapaderos,” and did not use his silver-inlaid saddle, “but our Mexican ranch hands knew him for what he was. They called him ‘El Patrón.’ ” In 1961, after the death of the father, the daughter returns alone to the ranch, the point at which there appears in her memoir the first shadow on the glamour: “No one was there to meet me—not even the ranch hands,” she writes. “I had none of the honor and recognition given automatically to El Patrón. The ranch seemed deserted. I was being deliberately avoided. Wandering aimlessly, I found myself walking into the canyon that stretched in back of the old family home.… The disappointment at seeing no one quickly faded. At least the land was there to greet me.”

  Jane Hollister Wheelwright’s sense of her entitlement seems, in The Ranch Papers, more layered than that of many inheritors, more complicated, even tortured. The Hollisters, she concludes, “had been given a chance to live a part of history, to experience an era virtually extinct elsewhere in California.” She remains reluctant to confront the contradictions in that history. Her idea of what the land meant remains heightened, and in the familiar way. She mentions in passing that the ranch supported “a large herd of white-faced Hereford cattle,” but offers no sense of a working cattle operation. She sees her father as “one of the last of the gentlemen cattlemen of the era of large family ranches in California.” She tells us that she and her twin brother “had grown up in a trance, like sleepwalkers, muffled by the land’s huge embrace,” and accompanies a photograph of herself at twenty with an apparently meaningful quotation from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac: “There are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things and those who cannot.”

  Yet she seems to have quite deliberately chosen, at age twenty-four, to live without wild things: she married a psychiatrist, Joseph Wheelwright, was herself analyzed by Carl Jung, became a lay analyst, gave birth to a daughter in China and a son in London, and returned to California with her husband to found, in 1943 in San Francisco, the world’s first Jungian training center. The description she gives of her 1961 return to the ranch is suggestive. All such returns, she tells us, involved a learned process of “reaching into the mood of the place,” of shedding “city demands.” She had come to understand the necessity of cultivating “calming” through “the monotony of walking,” of encouraging the accelerated onset of what others might call by other names but she called “the big letdown”: “Our coast requires a descent always. For those new to the place the letdown is more often experienced as an unpleasant locked-in feeling, an immobilizing depression.”

  What we seem to have here, then, is a story of an acquisitive grandfather, a father who retreated into the huge holding that allowed him to play El Patrón (even the daughter who reveres him mentions, in the guise of a virtue, “his power of passivity”), and a daughter, Jane Hollister, who ran guiltily for daylight. It was nonetheless Jane Hollister Wheelwright, not her brothers or cousins, who inherited from the father in 1961 the power to vote more than half the shares in the ranches. “My father must have known that I was as stubborn as he and would try to tackle the problems; and as the only woman I would be outside male competition,” she wrote in The Ranch Papers. “But the outrage it caused only compounded the existing situation, and so the struggle began amongst the seven of us.” That the nature of this struggle is not described in The Ranch Papers is a telling lacuna. It would appear to have focused, since the need to sell was a given, on the terms of the sale: to whom, for how much, in return for what contingent agreements. One senses that the daughter may have favored, probably more than her brothers and cousins did, the ultimate buyer: a Los Angeles developer, described in The Ranch Papers, again ideally, as “an enterprising but environment-minded Los Angeles man,” whose plan was to rezone the property into hundred-acre parcels and present the whole as an exclusive planned retreat.

  In California as elsewhere, a buyer with a plan for this kind of low-density development signifies something quite specific: this is a buyer who means to pay less for the land than one with a plan for more intensive development. During the same years when the Hollisters were falling out over this issue, James Irvine’s great-granddaughter, Joan Irvine Smith, someone else who had “shared in the glamour of immensely, privately owned land,” was fighting the same kind of family fight, but from a different angle: it was Joan Irvine who successfully insisted, against the opposition of some in her own family, that the eighty-eight thousand acres that remained of the Irvine ranch in Orange County be intensively developed. Whether Jane Hollister’s decision to divide her grandfather’s ranch into hundred-acre parcels was in the end more intrinsically tuned to the spirit of the place than Joan Irvine’s quite different decision remains an unresolved question. I recall in the early seventies seeing advertising for what came to be called “Hollister Ranch,” emphasizing how very few select achievers could hope to live there. As it happens my father had been at Berkeley with one of the Hollisters, someone of an age to have been one of Jane Hollisters brothers or cousins; I do not remember his name and my father is dead. I remember this at all only because, every time we drove south and again at the time the ranch was sold, my father mentioned that the effort to keep their holding intact had left the Hollisters unable to afford, in the early 1930s, during the Depression, to let one of their children finish Berkeley. This was offered as a lesson, I am unsure to what point.

  The lesson Jane Hollister Wheelwright took from the sale of her family’s ranch, proceeding as she did from within what amounts to a fable of confusion, concerned what she called the “debatable” questions: “whether land can belong to anyone, or whether one belongs to the land.” She concluded, unsurprisingly, that land belonged to no one. Yet it did: at the time the Hollister ranch was sold, in the late 1960s, according to a Ralph Nader Study Group report on land use in California, roughly two and a half million acres of California still belonged to the Southern Pacific. Almost half a million acres belonged to the Shasta Forest Company. A third of a million acres belonged to Tenneco, another third of a million each to the Tejon Ranch Company, Standard Oil, and Boise Cascade. Two hundred seventy-eight thousand acres belonged to Georgia Pacific. Two hundred and fifty thousand belonged to Pacific Gas & Electric. Two hundred thousand belonged to Occidental Petroleum, 192,000 to Sunkist, 171,062 to Pacific Lumber, 155,000 to Fibreboard Incorporated, and 152,000 to the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Another 1,350,045 acres belonged to, among them, American Forest Products, Times Mirror, the Penn Central, Hammond Lumber, Kaiser Industries, the Masonite Corporation, J. G. Boswell, International Paper, Diamond International Corporation, Vail, Miller & Lux, and the Irvine Ranch Company. Some of these were California companies; some were not. All played a role in determining which of California’s possibilities would be realized and which limited. Most were diversified, no more interested in what grew or grazed on their land than Jane Hollister had been, to another point, in what grew or grazed on hers, but quicker players, all of them, than the Hollisters had proved to be.

  Jane Hollisters mother, Lottie Steffens Hollister, was the sister of Lincoln Steffens, who wrote The Shame of the Cities and later said of the Soviet Union that he had seen the future and it worked. Lincoln Steffens was Jane Hollisters “Uncle Steffie,” and she his “Lady Jane.” The Steffens children had grown up in a house in Sacramento a few blocks from the house in which, in 1908, my father was born. The Steffens house later became the G
overnor’s Mansion, in which both Jerry Brown and his sister Kathleen lived during the years their father, Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, was the thirty-second governor of California. Jerry Brown was himself the thirty-fourth governor of California. Kathleen Brown, in 1994, tried and failed to become the thirty-seventh. I went to Berkeley with their sister Barbara. There are many connections in California life, and yet, like Charles Crocker’s Millet as the source for Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” not much connects: my mother’s father, who lived in Sacramento but grew up on the Georgetown Divide in El Dorado County, remained convinced to his death that Edwin Markham, who had been superintendent of schools in El Dorado County from 1882 until 1886, did not himself write “The Man with the Hoe,” but was given the poem by, in my grandfathers words, “an emigrant wayfarer from whom Markham purchased it for a small amount of money, and thereby helped the traveler along his way.” My grandfather seemed to have in his memory bank a fairly complete dossier on Edwin Markham (the names of his three wives, the dates of his and their arrivals in California, even the houses in which they had lived), and could be quite insistent about what he believed to be the true provenance of “The Man with the Hoe,” but his attitude toward the alleged appropriation was sufficiently opaque to encourage me, as a child, to ask my mother if my grandfather had in fact been the emigrant wayfarer. “He wasn’t an emigrant,” my mother said, settling at least that question.

  Jane Hollister Wheelwright, who was herself born in Sacramento, saw as a kind of death the intrusion onto the Hollister ranch of two Chevron pipelines (“I can only believe that their appearance on the ranch means just one thing: another expression of man’s historical arrogance and hatred of nature”) but, still operating within the fable of an ideal personal past, was untroubled, even comforted, by the presence of the Southern Pacific, which her grandfather had actively supported and to which he had given a sixty-foot right-of-way along the coast. On her farewell rides through the ranch she observed the daily appearance of The Daylight, the Southern Pacific’s principal passenger train to Los Angeles, and noted that it “seemed to belong there, and did not jar the feeling of the coast in the slightest. The noises it made recalled my childhood when we had no other way of telling time, and the sound of a whistle in the distance meant we were hopelessly late for lunch.”

  The eighth governor of California, Leland Stanford, was at the time of his election the president of the Central Pacific and later the president of the Southern Pacific. Hiram Johnson, the twenty-third governor of California, was elected as a reform candidate pledged to break the power of the Southern Pacific. Hiram Johnson’s father, Grove Johnson, had fled upstate New York under indictment for forgery in 1863, settled in Sacramento, become clerk of the county Swamp Land Board, been implicated in two vote-rigging scandals, and been elected, in 1877, to the California State Assembly. “The interests of the railroad and Sacramento are identical, and should always remain so,” the elder Johnson declared during this campaign. “They should labor together like man and wife, only to be divorced by death.”

  When Hiram Johnson went to Berkeley in 1884 he lived in the Chi Phi house, as did, forty-five years later, my father and my uncle and the Hollister who had to drop out of school. When I went to Berkeley some years later I lived, as did Barbara Brown, at the Tri Delt house. Her father, not yet governor of California but its attorney general, spoke at our annual father-daughter dinners. When my brother went to Berkeley five years after I did he lived at the Phi Gamma Delta, or Fiji, house, as had, sixty-some years before, Frank Norris, who remained famous in the house for having initiated its annual celebratory “Pig Dinner.” This was a California, into the nineteen-fifties, so hermetic, so isolated by geography and by history and also by inclination, that when I first read The Octopus, at age twelve or thirteen, in Sacramento, I did not construe it to have a personal relevance, since the events described took place not in the Sacramento Valley but somewhere else, the San Joaquin.

  Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. The separation, of north from south—and even more acutely of west from east, of the urban coast from the agricultural valleys and of both the coast and the valleys from the mountain and desert regions to their east—was profound, fueled by the rancor of water wars and by less tangible but even more rancorous differences in attitude and culture. My mother made the trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1932, to see the Olympics, and did not find reason to make it again for thirty years. In the north we had San Francisco, with its Beaux Arts buildings and eucalyptus, its yearnings backward and westward, its resolutely anecdotal “color”; a place as remote and mannered as the melancholy colonial capitals of Latin America, and as isolated. When I was at Berkeley and had gone home to Sacramento for a weekend I would sometimes take the Southern Pacific’s transcontinental City of San Francisco back down, not the most convenient train (for one thing it was always late) but one that suggested, carrying as it did the glamour of having come across the mountains from the rest of America, that our isolation might not be an indefinite sentence.

  I see now that the life I was raised to admire was entirely the product of this isolation, infinitely romantic, but in a kind of vacuum, its only antecedent aesthetic, and the aesthetic only the determined “Bohemianism” of nineteenth-century San Francisco. The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black. I still have the black mantilla I was given to wear over my shoulders when I started to go to dances, not the kind of handkerchief triangle Catholic woman used to keep in their pockets and glove compartments but several yards of heavy black lace. It had been my great-grandmother’s, I have no idea why, since this particular great-grandmother was from Oregon, with no reason to have bought into a romance-of-the-ranchos scenario. We lived in dark houses and favored, a preference so definite that it passed as a test of character, copper and brass that had darkened and greened. We also let our silver darken, which was said to “bring out the pattern.” To this day I am put off by highly polished silver: it looks “new.” This predilection for the “old” extended into all areas of domestic life: dried flowers were seen to have a more subtle charm than fresh, prints should be faded, rugs worn, wallpaper streaked by the sun. Our highest moment in this area was the acquisition, in 1951, of a house in Sacramento in which the curtains on the stairs had not been changed since 1907. These curtains, which were of unlined (and faded, naturally) gold silk organza, hung almost two stories, billowed iridescent with every breath of air, and, if touched, crumbled.

  Stressing as it did an extreme if ungrounded individualism, this was not an ambiance that tended toward a view of life as defined or limited or controlled, or even in any way affected, by the social and economic structures of the larger world. To be a Californian was to see oneself, if one believed the lessons the place seemed most immediately to offer, as affected only by “nature,” which in turn was seen to exist simultaneously as a source of inspiration or renewal (“Born again!” John Muir noted in the journal of his first trip into Yosemite) and as the ultimate brute reckoning, the force that by guaranteeing destruction gave the place its perilous beauty. Much of the California landscape has tended to present itself as metaphor, even as litany: the redwoods (for a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday), the Mojave (in the midst of life we are in death), the coast at Big Sur, Mono Lake, the great vistas of the Sierra, especially those of the Yosemite Valley, which, Kevin Starr has pointed out, “offered Californians an objective correlative for their ideal sense of themselves: a people animated by heroic imperatives.” Thomas Starr King saw Yosemite in 1860 and went back to the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco determined to inspire “Yosemites in the soul.” Albert Bierstadt saw Yosemite in 1863 and came back to do the grandiose landscapes that made him for a dozen years the most popularly acclaimed painter in America. “Some of Mr. B
ierstadt’s mountains swim in a lustrous, pearly mist,” Mark Twain observed with some acerbity, “which is so enchantingly beautiful that I am sorry the Creator hadn’t made it instead of him, so that it would always remain there.”

  Lessons could be found even in less obviously histrionic features: climbing Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County at sunrise was seen, in my grandmother’s generation, as a convenient transformative experience, as was any contemplation of the opening to the Pacific that John C. Fremont, when he mapped the area in 1846, had named “Chrysopylae,” or Golden Gate, “on the same principle that the harbor of Byzantium (Constantinople afterwards) was called Chrysoceras (golden horn).” Josiah Royce, in his 1879 essay “Meditation Before the Gate,” reflected on the view of the Gate from Berkeley and pledged himself to pursue his philosophical inquiries “independently, because I am a Californian, as little bound to follow mere tradition as I am liable to find an audience by preaching in this wilderness; reverently, because I am thinking and writing face to face with a mighty and lovely Nature, by the side of whose greatness I am but as a worm.”