About five years ago, my wife began advocating that we move to the San Francisco Bay area. We were in our late 60s and had been in the Washington, DC area for nearly all of our adult lives. But my stepson and his wife and their two children – who function as my grandchildren – were well-established out there. Sooner or later, she argued, we’re likely to need help. Wouldn’t it be better to be closer to him now, while we still have our wits about us? Plus, the grandchildren are there – we can see them often, help out whenever their parents need a night out.
All of this made a kind of sense. My elderly mother, the last of our parents, had passed the year before. My wife had retired years earlier, and her generous pension and our savings gave us a bit of a cushion in case I couldn’t find work out there. “This is the time,” she whispered one night, as I lay in bed beside her, trying to imagine a life on the opposite coast. But it wasn’t just life on the west coast that taxed my imagination. I also strained to envision a life as an elder in an extended family, where my primary role would be babysitting on date night, a provider of backup and ballast.
In the end, I agreed to the plan, in theory. Unlike my wife, who immigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child, I am not a great embracer of change. I resisted passively, continuing to apply for jobs on the east coast, a part of me clinging to the possibility that she’d change her mind when the full meaning of the change hit home for her. But, of course, that had already happened. There was no going back.
So, we inventoried and packed our possessions, said our goodbyes, and made the cross-country road trip we’d talked about for years. At the gift shop at Zion National Park, I picked up the late Kevin Starr’s book “California: a History”. The process of reading and studying has sometimes comforted me in times of stress, so the heft of its 380 or so pages felt reassuring in my hand as my wife and I waited to pay, three-quarters of the way across the continent on our way to our new home. I’ll be coming back to this book a bit later.
We arrived in November to a bay area wreathed in the left-over smoke of the Camp fire, the one that had destroyed the town of Paradise a few weeks prior. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning.
Five years after our arrival, I’ve certainly come to embrace my role in our extended family, and I dearly love being a grandfather.
How I feel about the place where we find ourselves – the San Francisco Bay area in the northern province of the California mega-state – is a story still being written, a kind of work-in-progress
Like any immigrant, there’s much that I miss about the land of my origins: the verdure and gentle slopes of the Appalachians, the sharp change in the air on the first cool day of the fall. I miss being a day’s drive from New York, where I grew up, and I miss hearing the voices of New Yorkers, their nasal vowels and the nimble irony of their response to life’s vicissitudes.
But mourning is a part of any migration. Putting aside what I’ve lost, what has struck me about our new surroundings since our move?
On a physical level, you can’t help but notice that a lot of tangible stuff gets made out here. This observation may sound strange unless I point out that there is little or no industry in the DC area where we come from. Laws, policies, executive orders, legal decisions, and campaign themes are the city’s essential products. This means that DC-area residents get to breath air that’s relatively clean. The “hot air” in DC is almost entirely metaphorical, and therefore a lot less worrisome.
In contrast, the chimney stack of the National Gypsum company sends a thick, white plume of steam into the air not far from where we now live in the east bay city of Richmond. The plume comes from their furnace, where crushed gypsum rock is heated and dried so that it can be pressed into the 4 x 8-foot sheets of drywall you buy at Home Depot or Lowes. The company’s online information indicates that the gray-white plume is mostly steam, so not to worry.
A little further away lies the much larger Chevron oil refinery. Multiple white-gray plumes rise from various stacks of different heights and colors. From time to time, the towering, darker stacks send a sudden tongue of flame and a miasma of black smoke and heat refraction lines. We’ve learned that this is called “flaring” and that when the excess petroleum is burned off, the flares subside. Good to know.
On the hill above the refinery, a series of squat tanks painted the color of the Golden Gate bridge dot the hillside, and in the silvery bay beyond, tankers are cabled to the company’s oil pier while their crude oil is pumped to shore. When the wind is from due-North, it brings a petroleum-like odor to our apartment complex. Chevron engages a number of citizen-neighbors to collect air-quality samples and helpfully posts the data on its web site.
Here again, the message for us former residents of the DC area is “Welcome to the rest of the U.S. This is what making your gasoline, your drywall, all of your stuff means.” No matter how many of us manage to get electric cars, I suspect we’ll need to refine a certain amount of petroleum for some time to come. As long as we do, it will need to be done in someone’s backyard. Having lived in DC for so long, perhaps we’re due.
What about the distinct culture, the ethos of this place?
Of course, I carried my own interpretations of the California dream, much of them informed by experience as an adolescent growing up in the late 60s and early 70s on the more staid opposite cost. For me and much of my generation, California was an alluring, faintly glimpsed promised land, a place where we imagined an impossibly exciting new order and way of life might take hold.
And this brings me back to the Kevin Starr book I mentioned in the opening. As it turns out, the willingness to experiment with new ways of living that intrigued me as an adolescent hardly started in Haight Ashbury in 1967. Rather, it seems to have been something woven into the cultural DNA of the state from the days of the gold rush. Starr quotes from an essay by the turn-of-the century philosopher and historian Josiah Royce: “The Pacific Coast: A Psychological Study of the Relations of Climate and Civilization.” Royce, who grew up in the Sierra foothills and attended UC Berkeley, noted the “confident individualism” and “open simplicity of manner” of Californians. He saw these traits as byproducts of the coast’s gentle climate and stark, revelatory landscapes.
Royce can seem rash and simplistic when talking about the element of causality in his theory. In fact, he seems at times to anticipate and defend himself from this criticism, remarking sniffily that the effect of the state’s sweeping, open vistas on its residents’ state of mind “cannot be doubted.” Despite these quibbles, Royce’s observations, made early in the state’s history, seem apt enough over 100 years later.
And how about that “confident individualism” and “open simplicity of manner”?
On a typically sun-drenched morning during our first year here, as I walked my bike back to our house after my morning ride, a young woman’s excited voice rang out suddenly. Startled, I looked around to see her leaning back against her car, smiling. Her small, very tanned face was grinning impishly. That face was framed by a mass of thick, frizzy brown hair, the outer edges of which seemed to glow a little. A surfboard was tied to her car’s short roof.
“Have you been riding,” she repeated, the pitch of her voice climbing upward toward the activity word. After a moment, I recognized her as the cousin of one of the young women who lived next door. She’d moved in a few weeks earlier, and we’d introduced ourselves once on trash day. For a moment, it was if some daydream from a slow workday years ago had become flesh. Was this the beginning of my very own California ingenue experience? I was 20 years old again, minus the tumescence.
We had a short, excited conversation about biking and surfing, in which we agreed wholeheartedly in the greatness of both. When the conversation had played itself out, I took my leave and resumed my short walk home. At the threshold of my garage, I turned back once more to look at her. She was still standing beside her car, hands on her hips watching me. A final wave.
I actually don’t think that my young neighbor had been flirting. I believe she was simply enjoying the sight of her 60ish neighbor taking a bike ride, finding a vicarious pleasure in my exertions on this beautiful morning.
“Simplicity of manner”? Check. “Confident individualism”? Check. My young neighbor seemed to embody so many of the qualities Royce ascribed to Californians: Guileless, straightforward, exuberant, and utterly disinterested in social convention.
And how did the climate and landforms work to foster these traits, according to Royce? Best to let him speak for himself:
“In the first place, as you see, such a climate permits one to be a great deal out of doors in the midst of nature. It permits wide views, where the outlines are vast and in general clear… Your dependence upon nature you feel in one sense more, and in another sense less, – more, because you are more constantly in touch with the natural changes of the moment; less, because you know that nature is less to be feared than under severer conditions. And this intimacy with nature means a certain change in your relations to your fellow-men. You get a sense of power from these wide views, a habit of personal independence from the contemplation of a world that the eye seems to own.”
From “The Pacific Coast – A Psychological Study of the Relations of Climate and Civilization.” an address prepared for the National Geographical Society, in 1898
Royce noticed that the state’s landscapes “give one an impression that the meaning of the whole can easily be comprehended.” Do Californians see themselves as all-powerful and all-knowing, looking out on a world “that the eye seems to own”? Is it fanciful to think that the state’s readily grasped landforms contribute to a certain way of thinking, to an appetite for experiences of transcendence, to a preference for comprehensive, wholistic views over the pedestrian, petty details of life? Perhaps Royce was onto something. My hiking guide, “California Hiking,” alludes to this desire when describing the view from the top of Mt. Tamalpais: “Witness this stunning sight even one time, and you will gain a new perspective about what might be possible in this world.” [For a different take on the meaning of views in California, see my essay “Admiring the View“]
Apart from the search for transcendence, the state’s individualism has led to several other outgrowths: the human potential movement, with its emphasis on individual self-actualization, the many alternative approaches to spirituality, and even the state’s somewhat exaggerated reputation for hedonism. After more than five years of living in the bay area, I can say that the idea of the state as an 800-mile-long crescent of booze, drugs and casual sex is at the very least greatly exaggerated. In general, I’d wager that most Californians are as sober, hard-working, and practical as citizens anywhere else in the U.S.
That said, we’ve observed some phenomena that seem to align the cliches the rest of the country attaches to the state. Not long after buying our house in Richmond, I met a talented poet, whose work I’d admired and continue to admire. During our first meetings at a local coffee shop, he explained he was in the midst of a career transition: he had left his position as an advertising copywriter and was moving on to a new role where he would be “helping people on their spiritual journey.” It took me some further conversation to understand that his new role would be that of a “psychedelic guide,” helping his clients use their experience with still-legal hallucinogens to maximize their personal and psychological growth. This poet is no wide-eyed flower child mumbling vague slogans about personal freedom; in fact, he seems as clear-eyed and compassionate as the best helping professionals ought to be. Whatever its implications are for mental health, the psychedelic movement and its mainstreaming is another aspect of that individualism.
If you read Royce carefully, you find notes of caution. “If you are morally careless, nature encourages your freedom…” I think of the recklessness of the 1960’s counterculture that blossomed here, of its gravity-defying promises of infinite freedom, of the late David Crosby, between songs at the Monterey Pop festival of 1967, effusing about the potential to be unlocked by administering LSD to every man, woman, and child in the U.S. If a sense of power can develop from contemplating “a world that the eye seems to own,” perhaps overconfidence is the flipside of that, one of the inherent risks. One can get pretty far off the rails here.
Getting to know our new home state will be a project for us for some time to come. The bonds of love within our family will keep me here, regardless of how I feel about the place itself. Moreover, there’s much about the ethos of California to appreciate and admire. In a sense, this place has given me a kind of cultural permission to experiment with my retirement, to take my writing and other unremunerative pastimes seriously. And whatever else I feel about the state, I’ve heard gardeners say that it’s best not to uproot a transplant.
