California

We didn’t have long to settle into the cabin. A week later the kids and I flew out to California to visit my parents, trading the last of fall for some warmth and extra sunshine at the beach.

I am a stranger in my hometown. The California of my youth is gone. Everything paved over, open spaces enclosed, old hangouts long since shuttered, streets rearranged, more houses added, always more in progress. A couple restaurants I used to frequent remain, but the neighborhoods and local hills are unrecognizable. The beach is the only thing that looks mostly the same. The ocean eternal.

The thing I notice most when I return is the traffic. Not the dead stop, freeway-as-parking-lot traffic, that was always there, but you can avoid it if you stick to the coastal cities. What I notice now is the insane number of cars. Driving down suburban streets, on the roads to the grocery store, even when there is no “traffic,” you feel crowded, harried, and vaguely harassed having to navigate it all. It’s a constant low-level background stress that I am unaccustomed to — was it always this way and I only notice it now? Or has it become worse?

We’ve spent the majority of the past eight years in the wilderness and small towns. What we think of as cities — Pensacola, Kill Devil Hills, Ashland — most people think of as small towns. It’s only when I go to a city like the sprawling metropolis of southern California that I realize how out of touch I am with such places. The people here are different, live differently. I feel acutely out of place. Like being in a foreign country.

Joan Didion, self-appointed spokesperson for a certain type of Californian, wrote that “California is a place where the boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we ran out of continent.”

Americans first came to California like a flood[^1], like an icy spring river people built up in the east until they finally broke free in 1849. When all that ice from a spring flood rushes downstream it inevitably hits obstructions. The ice gets stuck and forms a temporary dam. If the sidewalls don’t give, then the flood water will actually reverse course and rush back the way it came.

California is the temporary ice dam on which the entire history of western civilization piled up and then reversed course. California isn’t where we ran out of continent. California is where we ran out of civilization and all our ideas were forced back the way they came, which is why, whatever happens in California today, happens everywhere else in the coming weeks, months, and years as those ideas continue to wash back across the rest of the country.

So what is left after all of western civilization recedes? Traffic. Cars and cars and more cars.

Places called The Fun Zone. While most of this area is intent on redoing itself every 10 years, there are pockets of things that are unchanged here. The Fun Zone is one of those rare places in the Newport Beach area that hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. Things have been cleaned up, repainted some, but it’s mostly the same. The minute I mentioned it to the kids, they were all in.

Arcades aren’t what they used to be. There’s no dropping quarters in the slot anymore. Everything is by card these days. I would complain, but honestly, I thought it would require a cellphone to pay for it so at least that’s not the case. The games are still pretty fun, and they still end all too soon. As does your money. They’ve retained the essentials.

For all the cars, and more cars, it’s still surprisingly easy to slip away from all the traffic and people in Orange County, which makes it all the more mysterious to me why everyone is packed in one spot. We hopped in the car one Saturday morning and headed out to Modjeska Canyon, home of the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary and the namesake home of the 19th-century Polish stage actress, Helena Modjeska.

Modjeska Canyon is only about 30 minutes from my parent’s house, but it’s a completely different world. Instead of cars and traffic there’s scrub oaks and riverbeds. And birds. The wildlife sanctuary is usually a good spot for birding, but there weren’t many the day we went. The trails were closed for fire season so we didn’t get to hike either.

Like the Fun Zone, not much appears to have changed out in Modjeska Canyon since the last time I was there, thirty or so years ago. That’s impressive in these parts. Anywhere really. I’m not sure how the community out there has managed it, but good for them.

I’d never been to the Modjeska house site. I’m not even sure it was open to the public the last time I was in the area. To me the highlight was seeing a palm tree right next to a redwood. Granted, it was planted by Modjeska, but somehow it grew and has survived over 100 years now not more than a few meters from a palm, some scrub oaks, and other proper dry country trees. A thing out of place. I can relate.

And then next thing we knew, we were back at the airport, surrounded again by strangers so conversant with things that confuse me, like paying for stuff with your phone, wearing pajamas in public, and coffee that taste like sugary milk.