My Own California

October 01, 2013

By Wally Gordon

Long before the Mamas and the Papas recorded their famous song 48 years ago, “California dreaming” was a national preoccupation, and it still is: the land of eternal spring, endless beaches, waving palms, bare sensuality, and men and women—in the title of another famous song by Bob Dylan—“Forever Young.”

These days I am spending a long bit of time in another California, where the mornings are foggy, the ocean is bitterly cold, and many of my neighbors are elderly and not at all rich. The roads are narrow and hilly, and most people, while polite, prefer to ignore their neighbors rather than socialize with them in suburban style. In such respects it is not much different from the East Mountains in New Mexico.

And like New Mexico in the past few years, not many people move to California anymore. In fact, Californians sometimes cast an envious eye at cheaper and less developed places like New Mexico. Even the unemployment rate is higher here than in New Mexico, although here, unlike in New Mexico, there is a sense of optimism, a feeling that the state is riding the tide of history rather than drifting in a receding current.

When I informed the local librarian that I live in New Mexico, however, he stared hard at me and asked incredulously, “Then why are you here?”

The librarian’s question is hard to answer meaningfully. Superficially, it is because a professional colleague, another writer, needed a house sitter and my wife and I relished a change of scene and an extended opportunity to discover an exotic and beautiful part of Northern California. At a deeper layer, however, the answer lies in the extant remnants of the California dream that is so embedded in American culture that earthquakes, wildfires and multi-billion-dollar budget deficits can’t extirpate it.

There is not one but many Californias, however. Where I am at present, in rural Sonoma County, 50 miles north of San Francisco and 4 miles from the nearest village, my neighbors on the narrow, winding, hilly back roads are mostly working class farmers and construction workers. They own small weatherbeaten houses on a few acres of land with tiny apple and pear orchards, a plot of grapes, a vegetable garden and a little yard with a barbecue and a few chairs. Here and there, herds of goats and sheep or a few milk cows seek pasturage in fields awaiting the onset of annual rains in November. Although this is the heart of the dry season, the air is so humid that moss grows in the interstices of our roof.

These neighbors often live in clusters of extended families, several generations with their own private road and supported by a house or two they rent out.

This is not the California you will ever read about. It is not the never-never land of Southern California surfers or the wealth of high-tech executives in their mansions in Marin County just to the south, nor is it the California of the custodians of marijuana plantations in Mendocino County just to the north, nor even that of the vintners who have erected castles in the valleys east of us.

Here life can be hard for ordinary people. A musician, a highly skilled guitarist, spent part of a free concert in Sebastopol pleading for her audience to help her find a house to rent.

My neighbors, however, do share with other Californians a bit of original humor. A sign along my jogging route reads, “Please go slow. Our squirrels can’t tell one nut from another.” The same neighborhood boasts a “Cat Crossing” sign, while another neighborhood sign closer to the coast warned, “Swallow Crossing.”

And a woman jogger gave me these directions to her favorite route: “Turn right where there is always a cute little donkey grazing, go through the fence that has the ’No Trespassing’ sign and cross the field on the path that the owner has mowed for us.” I can’t think of anywhere else in the world that has a similar route, with a nicely cropped path behind a no-trespassing sign for the benefit of trespassers. (I never found the donkey, but otherwise followed her directions for a pleasant run.)

It all reminds me of my favorite line from the 1978 comedy “Auntie Mame”: “I am from Brazil where the nuts come from.” Not that there is anything nutty about my neighbors, except, of course, for the squirrels.

I attended a brilliant production of Shakespeare’s rarely performed “All’s Well that Ends Well” in San Rafael, the Marin County seat. There I met a county resident who had little good to say about Marin, California’s wealthiest county. With an average age of 47, it’s also the oldest county in the state. But he went on to make his main point: “Even young doctors and lawyers can’t afford to live here anymore although the county is desperately seeking them. Buying an average house and setting up a professional practice in San Rafael costs nearly $2 million.”

California is a kind of ink blot test: you can see in it whatever you wish to imagine.

All the diverse Californias are real, but none more so than my own California, which is simultaneously so like and unlike New Mexico. Although my wife and I have spent quite a lot of time in California over the years, we still find this place in this time full of surprises. It is at once more and less than we had expected, a land that defies generalities. But more of that in later columns.

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.