THE CENTRAL CALIFORNIA COAST
( Phase III, October, 2001 )
This trip was really different. First there was no RV to maneuver up Hwy 1, in and out of delicate little turnouts. Instead, a beautiful new Lexus smooth as silk and glowing with glamour. Second, no Truman! He was being cared for back home, sunk in a little pout and pining for the road. My companion was a life-long friend, also named Barbara…not only a good sport and fun to be with but also up for adventure. The ultimate destination was our high-school reunion in a Sacramento suburb a week away and we were determined to probe as many wonders as we could along a 500-mile stretch of coastal road, from Ventura to Sonoma and beyond. But first we sing: (fortissimo con brio)
I
love you, California, - California State Song |
THE
STATE OF STATES
This, our theme song, one we had sung with our classmates since milk
break and recess, had always firmly let us know who and where we were
privileged to be in the world and to be extremely proud of it. California,
sparkling land of extremes, from live volcanoes, two-thousand- year-old
redwood forests, the solid granite Sierra Nevada, fertile breadbasket
valleys, salt flats, 8,000 lakes, the mighty Death Valley, beautiful
rivers, Hollywood, the San Andreas fault, gold towns, world-famous
cities, Spanish missions, climate to dream of, close to a thousand
miles of beaches and rocky surf and some of the planet’s most magnificent
scenery. There is payback for all that, of course. California is also
crowded with people, some you just wouldn’t want to know, and overpriced
to the point of ludicrous. It can be the wrong kind of prideful, shallow
and silly, politically schizophrenic and often extremely unkind and
just plain weird, not to mention that hearing the true story of California
history would set your hair on fire. But…
This was the state you came to if you had a dream and it would take care of that dream, understand it, nurture it, help it grow a million different ways, bear fruit in your children’s lives. That’s what it did for our young parents coming over the mountains from states with fewer resources, less possibility, a more grounded reality. Besides being cool, there were jobs here, in defense plants, aerospace, croplands, industry, endless construction of roads, houses, cities plus an abundance of service opportunities in real estate, medicine, education, commerce. Boy, they loved every minute of it, especially when they could compare this new liberty with something a lot less free and much more stultifying back at the old home place. And so they embraced being the new generation of Californians with gusto. They tended to be imaginative, redefining themselves, breaking out of old cultural patterns easily. This could be a reason why California is always a leader in innovative ideas, a giant-step trendsetter. And it was ever thus.
Barbara and I blew into the subtropical and totally upscale Santa Barbara, home of some very fancy people who know a good location when they see it. Full of art, music, theater and odd little California ways, it treasures vestiges of its old Spanish mission past established by the indefatigable Father Junipero Serra who became a candidate for sainthood when he and his Franciscans marched north from Mexico in 1769. They ordered built a chain of 21 missions a day apart along El Camino Real from San Diego north to Sonoma and enslaved many of today’s eleven native American tribes like the Chumash, Salina and Costanoan to make and lay every single brick in every single mission house in the state. Of course the Indians also did all the work: building, plowing, planting, serving, tending livestock, cleaning, weaving, running distilleries, tanneries, hotels and all food production. In Santa Barbara, “The Queen of Missions,” founded in 1786 and tenderly cared for all these years forgets to give full credit to the thousands of true Native American heroes of the Catholic Diaspora.
In fact, further north, old John Augustus Sutter protected his 76-square-mile Mexican land grant in Sacramento with a 200-man Indian militia used to seize children from distant tribes to maintain his captive labor force…and, even more darkly, to sell children into eager San Francisco slave markets. Your hair starting to sizzle yet?
CALIFORNIA
MOVIES
Everything I know about life I learned at the movies: manners, mores,
style and the light and dark sides of human nature. Then life-as-really-lived
simply confirmed all this information. In California history think
of “Chinatown,” incest and corruption; “The Grapes of Wrath,” price
controls, prejudice (and the importance of a good education), “One-Eyed
Jacks,” more prejudice and sexism; “Rebel Without a Cause”& “American
Graffiti,” teen angst; countless gold rush movies like “McCabe and
Mrs. Miller” (Pacific Northwest) for greed and violence; “Vertigo,”
for obsession and control; “The Player,” more corruption and dumb
luck; “Birdman of Alcatraz,” for patience and perseverance; “Mildred
Pierce,” for glamour, disloyal children and vengeance; “East of Eden,”
for unloving parents and the art of making money; “The Postman Always
Rings Twice,” for sexuality and folly; “Mommy Dearest,” for the neurosis
of fame, “Blade Runner,” portent of the future…and you can name a
few dozen more.
Movies have changed now, as children have changed, less wholesome, more spoiled, probably lots more savvy. But count on film to continue giving lessons and making pungent comments about what’s important, what’s beautiful, what’s happening and what’s worthy of our attention.
We dipped into Solvang overnight and discovered a curious little commercial town--like many across America--relying heavily on an ethnic past to bring in the bucks. Windmills spun, Danish pastries baked, commerce flourished amid the candles and Tomtens for sale. The best thing was the glory of the Santa Ynez Mountains and the single glimpse of miles of cultivated black earth in the valley below.
California is a wonderful place to live—if you happen to be an orange. - Fred Allen |
THE GREAT
CENTRAL VALLEY
We wouldn’t be visiting the great Central Valley, over the coastal
mountains to the east. A Shangri-La 400 miles long, stretching from
the little hippy town at the foot of Mount Shasta all the way down
to honky-tonk Bakersfield. Isolated for centuries from the rest of
the world by vast distances and natural barriers like its two massive
flanking mountain ranges, the Valley penetrates central California
like a huge Central Park. It was just waiting for water; these thousands
of acres – a combination of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valleys
-- sprang to life under the Bureau of Reclamation’s 1937 gigantic
irrigation project that impounded 12 million acre-feet of northern
California waters so that the Central Valley’s farmlands could be
watered through 500 miles of aqueducts and canals and their sprinklers.
We pay for that, of course, the growers don’t beyond a pittance, through
huge federal subsidies and through the massive destruction of river
fisheries. There are grotesque pesticide problems including “cancer
clusters” in children poisoned by contaminated well water. Deftly
sidestepped by the state authorities, these incidences—a la “Erin
Brockovich” have been duly noted by farmers who have tried to make
a clean break with chemical dependence for their crops moving toward
“natural” farming with aid from advancements offered by the University
of California agricultural and environmental science system.
What a valley! This is where the so-called "Okies" came after the Midwestern dustbowl drove them onto the westward highways by the thousands.
"And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment." -
John Steinbeck |
They did find work at last and still live there in the great valley. Some still pick but most had children who are now the sheriffs, the pharmacists, the librarians and the teachers.
"Okie use’ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it." - Ibid. |
This is where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers struggled to organize agricultural workers, all trampling out the vintage where those grapes of wrath were stored…Viva la huelga!
And so wave after wave of Okies have entered our country since 1492,
from Russia, Japan, Israel, Norway, France, China, Ireland, Italy,
England, Vietnam, Australia, Iraq, Mexico and more. Each group faced
daunting discrimination and violence. Many, many (currently 34 million,
up from 93 K in 1850) came to the Golden State, enticed by its glamour
and magnetism, to partake of its riches: pure air and water, gold,
oil, borax, work of all kinds, an unfailing sunny climate, beauty
beyond description and abundant food.
Oh the food! There are 250 agricultural commodities grown there, accounting for 2/3 of the state’s 17.5 billion-dollar annual business in agriculture. Hungry? Let’s name some: peaches, grapes, almonds, walnuts, tomatoes, citrus, pomegranates, melons, rice, figs, asparagus, plums, cherries, artichokes, avocados, olives, potatoes, beans, celery, broccoli, sugar beets, dates and lettuces, not to mention thousands of acres of roses, turkeys, cattle, sheep, cotton, barley, chickens, eggs and pears, to name a few. You can see all these displayed at the California State Fair in September, a not-to-be-missed celebration of all that is good in this beautiful state.
We sail up the coast past remnants of a romantic pre-Anglo period when huge Mexican ranchos, covered in lupine, violas and poppies, were known for hospitality and gentility. They sat on vast Spanish land grants given by kings who had no idea they even existed and periodically sold their cattle for tallow and hides only. Once gold was discovered in the Sierra though, everything changed. By 1850 the United States had stolen the state by the non-virtue of the Mexican-American War and the Anglo-American social pattern had begun in earnest.
Wherever there was a trickle of water an Anglo farm developed and then every ten or so miles a little town would go up: a general store, a saloon, a church, a hotel and a blacksmith shop. Many of the coastal towns, like Morro Bay, relied on fishing for its living. They brought in boatloads of shoreline yields such as rockfish, striped bass and perch as well as off shore fish like shark, halibut, tuna, marlin, sea bass and red snapper. There’s a 576-foot volcanic monolith sticking picturesquely out of the bay there, sometimes called the Gibraltar of the Pacific…now the preserve of the peregrine falcon. We were headed not too far up the road for the exotic Mediterranean hilltop village, baroque grottoes and pergolas of San Simeon, the second most visited attraction in the state. Can you guess the first? (Rhymes with His-knee-band).
SAN
SIMEON
Well! Who hasn’t seen “Citizen Kane,” and isn’t aware of Orson Welles’
great performance, writing and direction of William Randolph Hearst’s
sad life story as the inheritor of a huge fortune in mining and real
estate, plus a radio and newspaper empire. Who doesn’t know about
“Rosebud?” Little Bill’s one and only friend, or about Marion Davies,
his would-be Hollywood starlet obsession and his manic acquisition
of thousands of rare and often beautiful objects for his 123-acre
estate and castle. Hearst, born in 1863, spent 30 years building it
atop La Cuesta Encantada overlooking the Pacific beginning in 1919.
His architect was Julia Morgan, justly famous in her own right, and
she stuck with him the entire way despite his many eccentricities…she
had a few of her own.
The fun was in the building; it was still incomplete when Hearst died, alone, in 1951. Together they designed the 115 rooms of the main house, “La Casa Grande,” and the three large guest houses that flank it. It had a little of the History Channel about it…the aqua Greco-Roman Neptune Pool with colonnades and mosaic floor…both inside and out…a little gothic here, a little renaissance there and lots of gorgeous landscaping, plenty of art and a little zoo. Its heyday was the decade of the thirties, when Hearst and Marion entertained the rich and famous from all over the world. It couldn’t and didn’t last. Marion left him and Hearst went on his ultra-conservative, outrageously warmongering way.
"You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war." -
William Randolph Hearst |
Hearst wasn’t the only biggie who made California a home. In “Men to Match My Mountains,” Irving Stone has written a big book about the wealthy men who made their fortunes there with the transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad, gained virtual control of the state government until 1910 and left their names and fortunes scattered around the state in museums, banks, universities and hotels. Known as “The Big Four,” they were Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins. They got the railroad through over the Sierra Nevada with the help of Theodore Judah, the founder, chief engineer and lobbyist who died early on, in 1863. But none of them could have done a thing without the thousands of Chinese laborers whose incredible skills, daring and discipline outshone every other railroad worker. By way of thanks, California shoved through the Exclusion Act of 1882, severely restricting Chinese immigration and refused to let them attend public schools. By 1900 Japanese laborers had begun to take the place of the Chinese in the labor market, so much so that the Alien Land Act to restrict Japanese landholdings was passed in 1913. The usual agitation against Asians continued to the federal Immigration Act of 1924, which nearly shut off the entrance of Japanese nationals into the United States, paving the way to war with hatred, resentment and fear.
BIG
SUR AND CARMEL
Deep inside the Los Padres National Forest we reached the rugged and
stunning stretch of coastline known as Big Sur. It sweeps around the
Santa Lucia Mountains which you must see catch on fire with the sun’s
rays just before dusk, turning the slopes a glowing caramel, russet,
burgundy and curry with shadows of navy blue and pansy violet. We
stopped and hiked trails that led to falls, groves, gorges and sandpiper-filled
sea caves and lagoons. Australian Eucalyptus, giant cypress, fir,
redwood, pine, hemlock and live oak lined the pathway, just a fraction
of California’s total forestland coverage of two-fifths of the state.
Big Sur and Carmel always had an awesome aura for we Central Valley
dwellers. We knew they were filled with interesting eccentrics, wealthy
hermits, talented writers and artists, old movie stars and piercing
intellectuals. Maybe even some fascinating commies like Eric Hoffer
could be found if we could ever borrow a car and get down there to
search. But we never did get much below San Francisco and precious
little of that and so missed many a humiliating moment in our endless
teenage lust for adventure. In the 1960s while the Bohemian and Beat
life-styles of the decades before changed somewhat to a hipper, more
politically aware, still-intellectual but angrier force to be reckoned,
Carmel-by-the-Sea remained a cozy village known for its civic independence
and artistic interests who elected a movie star mayor in the 80s and
enjoyed real estate escalation right through their cute thatched roofs.
I am happy to tell you that I plan to stay a month there in the autumn
of 2006 with my artist sister-in-law, Myra Cotters Knapp, to paint,
look and listen; walk the beach and think about what I would have
done had I had this opportunity as a sixteen-year-old. I shudder to
imagine…
MONTEREY
Here’s an interesting town beloved of John Steinbeck and immortalized
in his books such as “Cannery Row,” “Sweet Thursday,” and “The Red
Pony.” Here he describes the return of the sardine fleet to port:
"The purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay…the whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty…when the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again—quiet and magical." -
John Steinbeck |
Now the canneries are all closed, the beaches clean, the town progressive and well run. Tourists are the favored commodity and to that end the city fathers and mothers have created one of the most justly famous aquariums in the world, built a Fisherman’s Wharf and feature history tours that review the colorful past of the city and its ever-fascinating characters. The night we were there a massive display of 1950s era automobiles appeared...sweet nostalgia.
We visited Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas where a state-of-the-art museum dedicated to his life and work has been built. Funny, because he was practically thrown out of the town long ago but I guess a Nobel Prize is nothing to sneeze at and Salinas could use a few heroes. Remember in “East of Eden” when 17-year-old Cal secretly grew that plot of beans to pay his father for his crop losses? He was trying to buy the father’s stunted love, what there was of it always so focused on Cal’s twin brother Aron. When the inevitable rejection came, Cal destroyed his brother’s illusions, contributed to his Army death, caused his mother’s suicide, burned the $15,000 dollars and whined his confession to the father—now paralyzed by a stroke brought on by the news. No heroes there, except for the Chinese cook, Lee…wise, steady, humble, loving, kind and strong.
Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness. And they will be the fabric of our last…A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill? -
John Steinbeck |
SAN FRANCISCO
And then there was the jewel of the coast, the lady herself, the beauteous,
delicate, inventive and unnerving focus of a million stories. All
of her 40 hills are covered with little neighborhoods, something for
everyone: Nob Hill for her zillionaires, Haight-Ashbury for her rebels,
Chinatown for the enterprising, the Castro District for the alternative
and politically astute life, Fisherman’s Wharf for her working men
and women, Alcatraz as it once was, a home for the restless…and more.
Large art and science museums beckon, cable cars clang, slender orange
bridges span royal blue bays in graceful arcs, restored old Victorian
homes called Painted Ladies lumber up and down gentrified streets.
Once she was burned to the ground, a hundred years ago, and much was
lost. When I think of the earthquake’s aftermath I think of Enrico
Caruso wandering the streets in his underwear moaning and swearing
he would never return to “thisa terrible place.” All that and more
are part of her ever-increasing fascination. Once I fantasized being
a mail carrier here, which at 12 seemed like the best job ever, second
only to being a detective.
MUIR
WOODS
We stayed with dear friend Becky up at the very top of Mt. Tamalpais.
The view of the city from there was poetic. She took us everywhere,
including the shady old growth and unlogged groves of Muir Woods,
a National Monument where thousand-year-old redwood trees soar 350
feet into the air. No echoes here, the deep layers of 12-inch bark
deposited for eons absorb sound and create a cathedral silence. These
coastal redwoods and their cousins, the giant Sequoia, are the last
remnants of flourishing woodland that covered four continents as far
back as the upper Jurassic period. But even these titans had enemies…they
were called glaciers. Some of them are a living link to the Age of
Dinosaurs, growing from a tiny seed the size of half a baby aspirin,
aided and abetted by cool morning fogs, one might take it upon itself
to grow to 500 tons and stand taller than the Statue of Liberty. John
Muir would justly serve as a hero…working his entire life to preserve,
protect and defend these magnificent creatures impervious to almost
everything except the biting edge of a chain saw and the soulless
mind directing it.
| Can
it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young
and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could
there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world
will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it? - John Steinbeck Travels With Charley, 1962 |
WINE
COUNTRY
We like a nice glass of wine, for sure…except Merlot, of course, now
that we’ve seen “Sideways.” But the 240 wineries located along the
Napa Valley’s Winery Row and Sonoma Valley’s three dozen were daunting
indeed. We really just wanted to see it…the fabled “Tuscany West”
where verdant valleys and mild, clear and steady weather have made
possible an industry known world-wide. Low, rolling hills sport endless
variations of grapevines all lined up like cornrows in a little girl’s
hair. Though there was much to see and learn here—about grapes and
winemaking, sure, but also plenty of dish about the winemaking families,
their feuds, power grabs, rivalries, intermarriage, personnel thefts,
great triumphs and tragedies…just humanity, folks, like any other
wealth-based bootstrap community.
THE
BEST OF THE REST
This was where we turned right…heading east over the Mayacamas Mountains
into the rice fields and vibrating intelligence of Davis where the
University of California studies everything with a root. It was a
terrible thing in a way not to continue our coastal route along the
steep and craggy National Seashore of Point Reyes, Bodega Bay where
Hitchcock’s “The Birds” was filmed in 1963, up to the lovely Sea Ranch
and beyond to Point Arena’s crashing, dramatic surf forever lashing
the rugged shore we had sung about for so many years. One could go
further yet up to Ukiah, chosen #1 small town in California, picturesque
Mendocino and Fort Bragg on the shore where my mother painted some
of her best work, and up, up, up to the extraordinary Prairie Creek
State Park where bachelor elks gambol on gold beaches and fern canyons
tempt the traveler. There are parks to gladden the heart all along
the way; unique and so special you may find it difficult to remember
that home has its good points as well. But time was getting short
and so we finally pulled into our native city and environs where we
had been schooled, found our first apartments, jobs and husbands,
learned basic skills in “Womanhood 101,” survived our childhoods,
made our life-long friends and all in all had way too much fun.
SACRAMENTO
If you were to travel from Cape Cod, Massachusetts down to Charleston,
South Carolina, you would be traveling the same distance as the entire
coastal area of California. It has a funny little elbow where San
Francisco bay is located and the inner bend is occupied by Lake Tahoe.
The midpoint between the two holds our capitol and our hometown, Sacramento.
Earl Warren was governator when I was a girl…a far, far cry from Mr.
Schwartzenegger, though also a Republican. He and his entire family
were large white presences, something like Polar Bears all looking
alike, and one often might run into two or three at the local shopping
center. Warren eventually became the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court and legislated some of the most forward thinking laws of our
country, shocking his constituents out of their little red socks.
The city itself isn’t too big, around a half-million people, quadruple that for its metropolitan area--a good example of the skirt-like suburban circles spread out around cities throughout the state where 95 out of every 100 Californians live. No surprise there, jobs, fun and families being the key sticking points. California is close to the top among the states in total personal income, mainly from manufacturing but also from services, trade, banking and government. Attention focuses on state business there, the lovely capitol building a smaller version of the national one in the District of Columbia, its lawns decorated with trees from all over the world. It is so pastoral we are hard-put to sense the struggles going on inside over taxes, immigration, school funding, water rights, land use, price gouging and all the usual suspects that have concerned our legislators since 1850 statehood. They Proposition this and Proposition that, always under the magnifying glass of publicity by a mostly free press, thank goodness, and despite plagues of lobbyists, to present a somewhat balanced and newly fair government in a state with almost unmanageable problems.
Plenty of history here, as you can imagine. Old John Sutter's grandiose dreams came crashing down soon after one of his carpenters, John Marshall, who was peacefully building Sutter’s sawmill up at Coloma, just happened to stoop down to pick up a chunk of placer gold in the millrace thereby altering not only California, but also world, history. The stampede was on toward the “Mother Lode,” an area of 120 miles of gold-bearing source veins prospectors found along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. And what a story it was. Men came from all over the world to dig and a few struck it rich, but the ones who truly prospered were the merchants dealing in commodities needed by the miners. Also, the ones who invested in r-e-a-lTe-s-t-a-t-e (and why didn’t anyone tell us?) were eventually the real winners.
REUNION
Well, there they were at last, eyes alight, arms open with warm greetings,
bear hugs and laughing already. Our darling friends-for-life whom
we swore to take care of in old age, there with their dear old spouses,
their children and children’s children, and ready to sing the old
songs, share the troubles and to tell the old stories one more hilarious
time. My boon companion and I brought the big box of See’s candies,
the good wine and current photos of our lives (though no one is allowed
to eat chocolate or drink wine and can’t even see pictures any more).
And so the fusing began, reestablishing love, history and purpose
just as it has done for centuries of Californians – and maybe at your
homecomings, too. Until next time,
Love,
Barbara & Truman
