by Bill Barich
I say that flatly now, but then I was sick at heart. I cursed and railed and kicked at any handy object, wandering around in the evenings and looking for solace in useless bars from which every stitch of solace had vanished long ago. I felt as though I had joined a fallen world and was now obliged to hear the confessions of friends and acquaintances who were newly eager to share with me the details of their own season of pain.
Mostly, though, I was sad, deathly sad. Love is as scarce in California as it is everywhere else, and to have forfeited a portion of any that might have accrued was a tragedy.
The therapist, a Jungian, understood my blues. The soul, he said, rose up in middle age and tried to throw off its shackles, even if the shackles were self-imposed. The soul had its own irrepressible urges, and that could lead to unacceptable emotions that were in conflict with the feelings that you were supposed to have—wise, good feelings—and ultimately to despair.
In time, my wife and I spruced up our house and put it on the market. It sold on the very day that it was listed, an April Fool’s Day, for double the money that we’d paid for it. In our seven years of tenancy, we had struck it rich backhandedly, losing in the process something far more precious to us.
For months, I walked around with my pockets full of greenbacks, crying, “I’ll never buy another house! I’ll be a renter forever!,” until my potential tax liability sank in, and I began a hasty search for property. I thought that I would head for the country again, no doubt stirred by my memories of Alexander Valley, but I was on my own now and decided against the isolation. My head was still spinning, and my heart was still in shreds.
So, by chance, as a compromise, I wound up in the paradise of Marin County, buying a little, shingled cottage on a private tree-shaded lot in a small town. A young couple had built the cottage in 1906, to get away from San Francisco after the great earthquake and fire. Thick redwood timbers anchored it to an unbudgeable foundation, but I didn’t become aware of the aptness of my choice until I signed the closing papers.
I slept badly during my first weeks in the cottage, waking to the scurrying noises of animals, coons and skunks and possums on the prowl. I put in some tomatoes where the daisies used to grow and mulched them heavily against a trip to Real Foods, but some deer slipped through an open gate one night and ate the plants.
Winter came. There was a good old boy in San Rafael who chopped down sickly or unwanted trees and sold them off as firewood, so I stacked my porch with oak and eucalyptus logs and burned fires right through to March. Ashes drifted across the mantelpiece, and I would dampen a rag to wipe them from the books and the framed photos of my niece, our family’s first-born Californian, blond and blue-eyed Nora, a girl of the Golden West.
ANOTHER SPRING, and I laced on my boots and hiked around Mount Tamalpais, up over the trails by Phoenix Lake feeling the pull on leg muscles gone soft in winter and feeling, too, the strong beating of my blood. The mountain was alive with water, every creek and rill flowing, and again there was the seasonal gift of wildflowers, something so simple and elegant and yet so easily missed.
Often as I hiked I thought about all that I’d seen on my journey and about the future in California and what it would bring to my niece. The problems in the state were immense but not unsolvable, although the solutions might require a fundamental change in the human heart. I looked at the tall trees and the birds and passed blacktail deer and once a little red fox, hoping that some of what I loved about California, its fast-fading natural bounty, could still be preserved for her.
I sensed a fear upon land. As our resources became smaller, Californians were reaching and grabbing for what they could get, damning the consequences. Sometimes I pictured a future California where there were places as impoverished as the colonias in Tijuana, where the schools were even shabbier and all pretense of democratic caring had fallen by the boards. At other times, in a better mood, I believed that we might yet learn from our errors and begin assembling a vital, dynamic community whose potential was unlimited.
All the reimaginings and the reformulations, the infinite attempts at transformation, they were the psychic capital of California. As my accuser in Buttonwillow had known, we were all fly-by-nighters in the end, making ourselves up as we went along, simultaneously tolerant and intolerant of our mutual acts of self-invention.
Among certain Indian tribes in California, it used to happen that a man might rise up without a word and go off to wander for a while in the world, not knowing what he was looking for, or maybe not looking for anything in particular. Nobody could predict whether or not the man would return, or what he would have to say if he did return.
In many respects, I felt like such a man—somebody who had wandered in the world—and what I brought back with me from my grand tour of California were the most basic of truths, things so elementary that to utter them in public was to risk being handed a cap and bells. Love the earth, I would say. Find the beauty and protect it. Care for the sick and the outcast. Build schools to teach your children. Be gentle. Dream.
NOTES AND SOURCES
The essential map of the territory is James D. Hart’s A Companion to California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), an indispensable guide that I relied on frequently to point me in the right direction. My primary source for historical background was David Lavender’s California: Land of New Beginnings (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), although I consulted many other histories as well, such as the work of Kevin Starr. I was on the road from April to October of 1989, but I continued to follow the stories recounted herein after I got home and updated the figures cited in them whenever possible.
My main source for such data was California Statistical Abstract, which is published by the state’s Department of Finance. The median prices quoted for homes come from California Cities, Towns, and Counties (Palo Alto, CA: Information Publications, 1993).
For my assessment of the lives of certain prominent Californians past and present, I was fortunate to have at hand several books whose authors had preceded me and had done a fine job of research and interpretation. Anyone interested in a fuller treatment of the various subjects could study them profitably.
Vincent Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry, Helter-Skelter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), about Charles Manson.
Lou Cannon, President Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); and Anne Edwards, Early Reagan, (New York: William Morrow, 1987).
Steven Gaines, Heroes and Villains (New York: New American Library, 1976), about the Beach Boys.
Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976).
Bob Thomas, Walt Disney (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976); Leonard Mosley, Disney’s World (New York: Stein & Day, 1984); and Katherine and Richard Greene, The Man Behind the Magic (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991).
Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), about John Muir.
I am also indebted to the many local newspapers that I consulted along the way, most of them mentioned by name in the text. Surfer magazine was helpful in deciphering that subculture. For my treatment of the go-go years in Silicon Valley, I found much of use in The Computer Entrepreneurs by Robert Levering, Michael Katz, and Milton Moskowitz (New York: New American Library, 1984).
My edition of Edwin Bryant’s What I Saw in California was published by Ross & Haines, Inc., of Minneapolis as part of its Western Americana series in 1967. William Brewer’s Up and Down California in 1860–1864 was first published by Yale University Press in 1930, but my copy was a paperback from the University of California Press, 1974.
Obviously, Big Dreams could not have been written without the kind participation of countless Californians who were willing to open themselves to a stranger and entrust him with their stories. I remain immensely grateful to them all. Luis Martinez in Sonoma County, Adam in Sacramento, and Rudy in Palm Springs are pseudonyms for those who did not want their real names used. The agent in Hollywood is a composite of two such agents of my acqu
aintance.
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