THOMAS LARSON

(First Published San Diego Reader as "California, Here I Come" February 24, 2000)

During "pledge week," KPBS usually broadcasts a travelogue video, San Diego: Above All, which you receive for donating $120 per year. The program features helicopter flyby views of San Diego’s neighborhoods, parks, shorelines, buildings, monuments, outlying towns, Indian reservations, and more. It’s lustful geography: Even the snaky freeways appear to have more purpose than what we experience racing along at 70 mph. The motion picture camera sweeps across golf courses and reservoirs, carriers docked at Coronado, eroded coastal cliffs, tranquil tracts of suburbia. And the Alexander Scourby-like narrator insists (as does the welling new-age music) that we’re all San Diegans. This "postcard come to life" is our home; its canyons and caminos, its beaches and bays, its mercados and multiculturalism—all of it, every last phosphorescent drop, utterly serene and reposed.

Sure, I feel it. But I don’t buy it. Any scenery appears uncomplicated, photographed from above on a clear August day. The helicopter, enraptured with its passerby nature, sees nothing of individual lives, histories, desires. The whiskey-coated voice can only adorn. "It is this sense of peace and the beauty of paradise that makes San Diego unlike any other place. It is what makes us love living here. It is what makes us San Diegans." Yes, but lots of other places have sun and ocean, pleasant days and nights, golf courses and suburban tracts. What exactly is our unlikeness to "any other place" that "makes us love living here"? To distinguish this locale requires much more than flying over. It requires listening in on the private thoughts of those troubled and contented souls below, in the eucalyptus-fringed enclaves.

Eureka! is the state motto: "I have found it." A phrase perfect for Californians, it testifies to the search for something personal, whether one is born here or motors in on Interstate 8. But what is that it we found? Was it something already here? Something we brought with us? Something entirely different from what we expected to find? I have always wanted to ask these questions of myself and of other writers for whom Southern California was home or destination. Perhaps our answers, displayed like gems under glass, will uncover a greater understanding of this place than I have been able to find.

In his 1996 memoir, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, David Beers writes of growing up the son of a Lockheed engineer in California and his parents’ pivotal purchase of a home in a new housing tract in the early 1960s. There, the father, Hal Beers, helps create what his son, the author, calls a "tribe" of postwar aerospace pioneers whose growth and decline has epitomized California’s recent past. These people are attracted by the homes, schools, services, and lifetime jobs orchestrated for them and their loyalty. They also come because such ready-made cohesion means joining a community of self-interests. For the men, engineering, for the women, raising families.

Beers recalls his father taking him up in an airplane to look down at their new home.

My father had made a down payment on a newly built four-bedroom tract house with enough yard, enough land, to be visible from the sky, and so today he naturally thought I’d be excited to come along with him for an aerial view of where we’d made a place for ourselves. But now I am looking hard and I cannot locate our lives amidst all the sameness below, and that is what terrifies me. . . .

That is what terrifies, and instructs. A child absorbs such a vision and begins to sense, at some level, the imperative of making a bigger meaning of things. I wonder whether all these people living just like me might be my people—all of us, perhaps, with some shared story. I wonder whether the pattern below might be a mass of connections joining me to some whole.

Indeed, the theme of Beers’ book is "joining . . . to some whole." But first, the image of home, in its larger context, must be instilled. So, at the appointed hour, Beers’ mother is waiting to wave at her husband and son as they fly over.

"See the church there? The cross?" Yes, I saw it. "And over there, those big letters, that’s Shopwell." Yes, I saw our supermarket now. "There it is, Dave, there’s the house, juuuuuust about right below us." Yes, I was happily relieved to say, I could see the house—our house, our station wagon parked out front, our cul-de-sac, our backyard. I could see my mother, too, a speck marking our spot in the pattern of the whole, waving to us in the sky.

The aerospace workers arrive in droves, in the age of Sputnik and U-2, so that America might answer the Russian threat missile-a-missile. They work for

Aerojet and Convair and Ford Aerospace and Hughes and Litton and Lear Siegler and McDonnell-Douglas and Northrop and Rockwell and RAND and TRW and the United States Air Force Space Division and all the hundreds of subcontractors that serve them as well as many key military bases and universities.

Drawing them in further is an ad blitz that runs regularly in popular magazines and shows "pictures of blossoming orchards in 'California's All-Year Garden,'" or brochures that claim "‘[p]eople here feel more fit because they live more healthful lives . . . and the average youngster is a few inches taller and a few pounds heavier than his counterpart in most other sections of the country."

Hal Beers works on a host of satellite programs, all hush-hush, never discussed with the family. To talk of it (he is given frequent lie detector tests) would mean losing his job. Hal Beers survives the downturn in aggressive military expenditures after Vietnam by building satellites, which the son believes "take pictures that make it possible to verify nuclear treaties" and, in effect, "prevent nuclear war." To which his father replies, "Have you ever considered that the same satellite used to verify a treaty might also be used to pinpoint enemy targets for an all-out first strike? With the aid of satellites, those targets were picked long ago and they are constantly being updated. Insane, I know. But you can bet on it." David’s response to such antitheticals in the weapon makers’ psyche—"I was out of my depth."

As a young man, David revolts against the father and the corporate culture that raised him. He goes to work for any social justice cause he can find—civil rights, Appalachian poverty, the degradation of poor people’s environments. (In this we find "America’s fall from grace," as the subtitle indicates.) When Reagan announces his Star Wars’ initiative in 1983, again engaging the expertise of Hal Beers, David believes such spending will bankrupt the United States while refueling the Cold War. He responds by leaving for Central America where he hopes to join others and, in a small way, foil Reagan’s "low-intensity" conflicts.

But eventually Beers comes home, unable to keep raging against the machine. Curiously, he misses home, its contradictions and its privileges.

As a child of aerospace I had grown up favored by every Congress and presidents Democratic and Republican alike, had been designated a winner in America’s militarized economy from the day I was born, had traded on that privilege all through my young adult life, which happened to coincide with the era of Ronald Reagan. As one of the favored I had been free to slip in and out of the worlds of ghetto students and Maya refugees and Caribbean dirt farmers and soot-inhaling foundry workers, free to wander that landscape of misfortune and then step away, whenever I wished, for a Zen Buddhist brunch by the bay or a coffee with my family in a Santa Barbara cafe.

Beers discovers that his choice to help the dispossessed was never inhibited by his father’s career in the defense industry. On the contrary. Hal Beers’ secrecy and conformity paved the way for his children to value openness and individual freedom. In the end, David, his brother, and his sister see themselves as "variations on who you might be if you had ‘flourished’ as a boy or girl in blue sky suburbia but had been given no encouragement to replicate life within the tribe. None of us was ever given cause to imagine a desk for [ourselves] within the windowless walls of Lockheed."

Beers’ memoir marks California as a portal of dreams, whose latest grand opening comes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since 1990, most of the moribund aerospace manufacturers have reinvented themselves as information-based technologies. Today most people believe the old-world economy can be recycled into a new one with less pain than we imagined. And, if one industrial template can change, surely the individual can do likewise. This culture of renewal is what keeps drawing people to Southern California. For those of us who migrated here in recent decades, we, too, believed that the Golden State would grant us its agency to make changes if, for no other reason, than we were here, where Hal Beers had once flown over with his son and decreed the place home.

***

While David Beers and his father were watching over the incorrupt suburbs, Joan Didion had already begun analyzing what would be her lifelong theme, California's changing self-image. In her books Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and After Henry (1992) (this last work written after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne left California to reside full-time in New York City), collections of essays and articles which first appeared in Life, New West, The New Yorker, and other publications, Didion has laid bare how Californians have reinvented their identity, especially as development has buried history during the last 40 years. New west-coast versions of memory, progress, community, family, marriage, and the dream itself have needed rewriting, and Didion has been their unsentimental chronicler.

A Sacramento native, now 65, she has centered her explorations on Los Angeles and its illusion-riddled culture, politics, celebrity, criminal trials, and news organizations. She writes with reserve, a dry wit, a meditative self-absorption, and an insider’s authority about some of the most notorious headliners—Charlie Manson, Patty Hearst, John Wayne, Joan Baez, Lakewood’s "Spur Posse," and the several generations of the Chandlers, publishers of the Los Angeles Times. In her California writing, she is, what critic Barbara Lounsberry calls, "an angelic rattlesnake in our blighted Eden." "Didion repeatedly insists that California’s history and geography instill a specific perspective in Californians widely misunderstood by those not native to the terrain."

Didion’s self-dramatizing prose style seems to have sprung fully-formed in her first essays, among them "Notes from a Native Daughter" (1965). Here she speaks directly to readers through the conflicted sensibility of the person she knows best, herself. Of growing up the fifth-generation daughter of Sacramento ranchers, she writes,

my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a 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 run out of continent.

When Didion moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, she spotlighted the avidity with which newcomers lugged in their happiness-at-any-cost "lifestyles." In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (1966) Didion profiles a seedy murder—a wife cheats on a deeply-in-debt husband and is then convicted of burning him alive in a staged car wreck for a life-insurance payoff—which the author terms a "literal interpretation of Double Indemnity." She suggests that California’s dreamy expansiveness is as liable for the crime as the female killer.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average [1966] and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspaper.

Didion’s spookiest prose comes from the essay "The White Album" (1968-1978), a near-levitating reminiscence of a darkly hip L.A. during the summer of the Manson family. To read this piece (made eerily flat by the passivity of the sentences) is to feel the lethargy of an already jaded paradise.

Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of "sin"—this sense that it was possible to go "too far," and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

Didion has painted the new California of the 1990s as a place of wholesale changes accompanied by fresh paradoxical effects: The new alienation that young people embraced after defense-plant and military-base closures; the new cronyism between one-time adversaries, the media and local politicians. She notes that the main effect of a population doubling in one generation has meant more development which, surprise, has attracted more people and, surprise, more development. New prisons, freeways, freeway-close condos, neighboring strip malls, and theme parks, put up, in part, to alleviate the pressure of over-building, instead end up cramming more of us into less space. In sum, Didion renders the backlash against such seeming indiscriminate deterioration as a new icon: an "aggressive disidentification with Los Angeles," where L.A. is "fragmenting more than coalescing." She writes,

The logic here was based on the declared imperative of unlimited opportunity, which in turn dictated unlimited growth. What was construed by people in the rest of the country as accidental—the sprawl of the city, the apparent absence of a cohesive center—was in fact purposeful, the scheme itself: this would be a new kind of city, one that would seem to have no finite limits, a literal cloud on the land that would eventually touch the Tehachapi range to the north and the Mexican border to the south, the San Bernardino Mountains to the east and the Pacific to the west; not just a city finally but its own nation, The Southland.

One notes that an unidentified San Diego is grouped with those "to the south." Still, I suspect most San Diegans experience the purposeful scheme in our locale as well: We are sprawl, no different from L.A. We’d like to think—as Los Angelenos do—that our sprawls are separate. In fact, as recent as 1989 Didion noted 50 percent of those polled by the Los Angeles Times said they thought of leaving Los Angeles, "mainly for San Diego." Maybe lots of them did "drop everything" and move south. Perhaps a few found a garden less spoiled. For a time. But any meaningful distinction between here and there is, anymore, superfluous.

While journalist-historians like Barry Farrell, Mike Davis, and Richard Rodriguez have forcibly critiqued Southern California’s rabid growth, none of them has pushed the personal envelope as strongly as Didion has. There is no truth, she seems to say, that reflects our region’s tribulations without a matching self-disclosing honesty. Indeed, Didion’s gift is her longevity, to be now in her sixth decade reporting and meditating on her responses to the Southland’s troubles. I would wager that far more people, even without reading her work, share her existential uncertainty about this, our home, than they assent to the more popular trends like union rights, environmentalism, tax-revolt, or utopian belief. What Didion finds ongoing in our So Cal sense of community is that her own ambiguities about living here have solidity and purpose, even as the enigmas of L.A. and beyond grow thornier. She signs off on the memo that says to survive here one needs a healthy cynicism, a cautious ambivalence, traits that most Californians embody and value.

***

D. J. Waldie is an award-winning writer, a city planner for the city of Lakewood (south of Los Angeles), and a devotee of the suburbs. Philosophically, he’s a contrarian. He believes Southern Californians’ identity arises less from our westering or western-bred individuation than from the actual site plans of the communities we inhabit. For him So Cal is a mass: Suburban connectivity defines us, for good and ill. Waldie’s ideas are complex and take careful explanation. One place to start is to reflect on his recent review of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream by Gray Brechin and Robert Dawson. Waldie writes that the California dream of limitless personal and territorial advancement, from the Gold Rush to the New Age, has been the most wrong-headed notion ever foisted upon a people, most of whom have arrived because of the P.R.

"For nearly 150 years," Waldie says, "California has produced sublime and misleading nature photography, from William Henry Jackson in the 1870s, through Ansel Adams in the 1950s, to the latest Sierra Club calendar. Beautifully composed photographs of the Yosemite Valley hang over the state like a glowing billboard, promoting the view that an untouched and redemptive wildness is the real California." The "real" California is, in Waldie’s words, not this "aesthetic privilege that leaves no room for the rest of us," but "our tangled lack of abstraction and our resistance to the grid of ideology." What does he mean? I think he means that what is real about "the rest of us" has never conformed to the salesman’s image. Rather, the "real" is "tangled," and, thus, unbeknownst to us, something no alluring image can represent: "It’s possible to change your faith, your community and your family in California whenever you want. You can’t so easily change the location of a flood control channel, a landfill, a freeway or a suburb."

Our lack of abstraction, our resistance to the grid. Who we are is the very thing we lack: an understanding of the grid and why we resist it. Waldie’s acclaimed 1996 book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, examines how his own life embodies resistance to and acceptance of his parents’ suburban life while also delineating (helped by the graphic composition of the book) the grid itself, that is, the construction of the subdivision. Lakewood is his grid—a postwar community near the defense plants in Long Beach and Waldie’s lifelong home. For years, Lakewood has seemed to some a prison of conformity. A bad thing for outsiders, apparently. But not for Waldie. He leisurely walks its safe straight blocks every day. He revels at the hardy trees, the storm drain’s efficiency, the noisy boulevards that send non-residents past. He feels at home in a mass seen by passersby as soulless. Most agree with him, for few move away. If they do, their houses sell for premium prices. "In the city’s most recent opinion survey [1995]," Waldie notes, "92 percent of the residents believe this suburb is a desirable place in which to live."

Waldie’s 180-page book is divided into 316 segments; its very brief sections narrate a factual report and a personal tale. Many segments merely list—water tables, purchase prices, soil mixtures, developer-profiles, the layout of the streets designed in Seville 500 years ago and carried o’er the bounding main by Spanish city planners. There are also photographs, marking Lakewood’s home-building history. All were sold, sometimes several thousand in one day, before they were erected. For Waldie, Lakewood is an organic system, so efficacious that it almost doesn’t matter who lives there.

Holy Land is also a testament to subdivisional ideology. The author relishes the city’s lack of change, the fact that structurally it hasn’t changed since its inception. He wants Lakewood to possess the placeness of, say, a Midwestern small town, fabled for its enduring simplicity. Most of all Waldie wants not to apologize for Lakewood. An example:

The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives.

I agree. My life is narrow.

From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger.

This is section 172. Its own thought, in its own segment—a 50-by-100-foot lot, an 1100-square-foot house, a street address, which is no better and no worse, no more and no less valuable than its neighbor. Commonality is a good thing. The people in Lakewood, California, and, by extension, those in thousands of similar suburbs, like their lives, like their yards, like the repeatability, the close-yet-distant proximity to neighbors and shopping centers, the sun-drenched calm, all of which Waldie reiterates is "holy" because it comprises "little that distinguish[es] any of us living here."

But it does matter who lives in these communities. Central planning rarely ameliorates the personal struggle, certainly not Waldie’s: This town crier can’t quite understand why Lakewood has him. His fragmentary personal story seems to hold the reason. He has lived there all his life and is not moving; he’s a somewhat devoted Catholic; he has much unexpressed rage with his dad, first as a father, second as a more stringent Catholic than he himself has been; he lives alone after the death of his parents in their home; and, besides (or because of) all that, he, a city planner, keeps Lakewood running smoothly. Yet, despite his loyalty, he seems to have gone in his life as far as he can go. A latter-day pilgrim lodged in the settlement of his family’s crusade. Indicative of his "condition," Waldie writes about himself sometimes in first person, other times, as in this passage (Section 60), in third.

He could not choose to deny his father, even less his father’s beliefs. These have become as material to him as the stucco-over-chicken-wire from which these houses are made.

It is not a question of denying the city in which he lives, though he doubts his father cared much for living in it. He doubts if his father cared for much of anything you would find familiar at all.

"I am still here," he often tells himself. This is how he has resurrected his father’s obligations, which he sometimes mistakes for his father’s faith.

"I will never go away," he once told the girl he loved, because it suited her desperation and his notion of the absurd.

Loving Christ badly was finally the best he could do.

There’s a self-punishing wound here, which, in my mind, the orderly subdivision continues to pathologize. For Waldie to leave might mean giving up his fascination with—and bondage to—his aloneness. Otherwise, he returns to shoring up the seawall of abstraction.

Section 215.

The grid limited our choices, exactly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyzing.

The design of this suburb compelled a conviviality that people got used to and made into a substitute for choices, including not choosing at all.

There are an indefinite number of beginnings and endings on the grid, but you are always somewhere.

I’m not sure what’s being said. Is there the implication that humans need a grid in order to humanize (i.e. not kill) each other? Do our communities exist only to harness comfort and security, then merely teach each new generation how to acquire more? Wade deep into Waldie’s memoir and you feel him resisting and desiring sameness, ultimately, digging himself a deeper reductivist hole. The book is radically original, fragmenting thought into mini-episodes and sound bites to capture our present one-person-per-car existence. And yet, because of these multiple abstract snippets, the result never quite develops the author’s difference, as one outside the many. Which may be the point.

"The houses," Waldie writes, "are close enough so that you might hear, if you listened, a neighbor’s baby cry, a father arguing with a teenage son, or a television playing early on a summer night. . . . . Most things here are close enough for comfort." Oh, the comfort and sameness of our suburban life! And oh, that most of us don’t even know how encased in it we are! The housing tracts’ self-appointed favorite son proclaims the land holy, and, surely, one unintended consequence, is to draw even more minions to the golden land. And still they come. For Waldie they come to play anonymity off abundance. Maybe they’ll win big on a quiz show, maybe their e-commerce start-up will take off. If not, they’ll still have a radical similarity of home, block, and freeway on-ramp. Awareness and blindness in one’s aloneness may be the choicest creation of the grid.

***

Mary Morris’ memoir Angels & Aliens: A Journey West (1999) tells the tale of one year, in the late 1980s, when, as a new mother, Morris moves from Manhattan to teach fiction writing at UC Irvine. During the year, she cares for Kate, her one-year-old daughter, and is separated from her lover, Jeremy, Kate’s father. An internationally famous peace-activist lawyer who travels constantly, Jeremy takes no responsibility (including no monetary support) for the child—he claims it was Morris’s decision to have the baby against his wish for an abortion—while she, inexplicably, still hopes to marry him. Mary and Jeremy had planned to be together at UC Irvine. He was offered a distinguished professorship and, as part of the deal, she would be given work as well. In the end he turns the position down. Because she has no other prospect, she flies west with Kate. Settling in Laguna Beach, she can barely afford the necessities, though she arrives buoyant to start over.

[This] is what I want . . . [a] place where everything is different from what has been. Where I can forget what needs to be forgotten and begin again. Yet as the plane circles to land, suddenly I am not so certain. My mother’s words from decades ago come back to haunt me. "You take yourself with you," she said in 1967 as she put me aboard the SS France. And, of course, she was right.

Morris gets off to a good start. She "stretches before breakfast," eats "grainy foods, lots of fiber. If I’m in California, I may as well do the California thing." But quickly disorder intrudes upon her imagined stability: brushfires, mudslides, El Nino, traffic gridlock, the unavailability of neighbors, the expense, the buy-a-friend mentality of support groups. For a person like Morris, from Chicago, a Harvard graduate, a novelist and a travel writer (her excellent Nothing To Declare reveals a woman writer undaunted by adventures traveling alone in Mexico), you wonder where her savvy has fled. It may be that with a careless love and a young child she’s been too easily deluded by "the California thing." Will she choose (and this is a woman who can) to be a self-sufficient single parent and accept an uncommitted relationship with Jeremy, twenty years her senior and a Royal User? Or will she slumber more deeply?

And then, mirabile visu, Morris gloms onto the New Age—not hardcore cults, but crystal healers, UFO channelers, and masseuses, who place stones in the hands of their patients to "move the energy around." Morris is even seduced (spiritually speaking) by Reverend Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and his "Hour of Power" ministry in Garden Grove. In a memorable Christmas-pageant scene, she watches six lithe women who as angels sail above and across the Cathedral’s huge hall (which seats 2,890 people) in amazing cabled apparatuses. Posing as a reporter, Morris herself gets the chance to fly. "My wings beat, my heart pounds as I glide back and forth above the nave, now it seems without wire but screaming still, eighty feet in the air. . . . I soar and dive, catch the wind, my wings flapping, hands flowing. I dip and climb, hurtling through the cathedral, . . . as close as I’ve ever come to God."

Morris clearly grasps the turbulent nature of California’s history. "Everything in California comes from somewhere else. The plants, the animals, the people, even the snails." She’s right to say, "only the climate is indigenous, and it is the climate that accounts for everything else: the hot, dry weather at the edge of a roiling sea." She’s right again when she intones that

the Idea of the West is nothing new. It was carried from Europe across the Atlantic, and then across the whole continent. The movement went by many names—Manifest Destiny, California Dreaming—but it boiled down to a belief that natural right had precedence over birth rights, that man must rule his environment, impose his will upon nature and the land and transform it into wealth.

She cites Los Angeles, reared on water diverted from Owens Valley, as "perhaps more than any other American city one that invented itself."

Yes, yes. She’s assembling the Golden State.

And yet, soon after, it’s back to the channeler, Wanda, who, in the voice of Ashtar, an "intergalactic commando" extraterrestrial currently circling the earth with a "fleet of starships," tells Morris that she is a very special "light being" whose "head is filled with shoulds and should-nots" and is "listening to everyone but yourself." Ashtar’s "advice" is particularly juicy in the days just before the May 10, 1988, "end of the world" for which the "light workers" (Morris included) must ready their energies in order to be spirited away and escape earth’s demise. Shades of Heaven’s Gate! Through it all, Ashtar recites in a high squeaky robotic voice, such profoundly obvious things that one has to ask how anyone finds this helpful. "You do not know how free you are. You do not know what you are capable of. You have not begun to tap into your potential." Morris, at times moved, at times laughing out loud, keeps seeking the E.T.’s guidance, with her usual comment, "I wish Ashtar could understand what I am feeling."

Throughout Angels & Aliens, I wondered why Morris fails to see the New Agers’ apocalyptically manipulative and ridiculously overstated wishes. For that matter, why does she fail to see Jeremy’s intentions. Even after refusing to send her a measly $50 a month, she still wants to be with him. Like an Edith Piaf song, love and the lost self become so intensified in Morris’s consciousness that she actually believes some spiritual intercession will save her. But it doesn’t matter what she believes. Belief liberates, and, lest we forget, liberation is the reason for being here. Though I still feel some irresolution with Morris's ending, she has dumped Jeremy for good, and the spell which she brought with her has loosened and begun falling away.

There will be no easy answers, no simple solutions. But perhaps in the end there are miracles. All my time with channelers and New Age practitioners has led me to believe I can reinvent myself; I can begin again yet one more time.

In the end I know what I’ve come to believe in. It’s another California cliche, but I’ve come to believe in myself.

Such transformations are as common as sunbeams. For those seeking radical individual change, California is a place of practical miracles. Part of me resists this for it makes a religion of place—rent a condo in Laguna Beach and your guru will appear. When a region becomes a tabernacle, we know what to expect: The crutches, canes, and walkers are left behind, lofted on pegs for the next busload of afflicted souls to worship. At the sight of which even wackier redeemers go public and jokes about la-la land abound. Sadly, our locale becomes marked by the conversion of a few. But then, as Waldie reminds me, if I dispute this end, I lack the very abstraction that is essential to Southern Californians’ identity. That identity is abstract; unlike a sewer system or a shopping mall, you indeed have the power to become any number of "you"s. What each person eventually finds by migrating to California can be whatever that person says she’s found, especially, as Morris shows, after losing the initial idea of what it was she thought she’d find when she got here.

***

When I thought to write about California memoirists, I believed there’d be a surfeit of books about growing up or coming here, an abundance, like the land and the sun, spilling forth from our dynamic recent history. I thought I’d find tales of other ethnic groups, too, (beside whitey), who regarded California not as a westering destination but El Norte (for the Mexicans) or the East (for Asians). I thought I’d at least uncover a fine new autobiography to rival a journeyman history like Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land or a grand California tale like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. But I found no recent stories centered in San Diego, and very few from the immediate north. Why?

Something about the image, the magnetism, the enigma, the hugeness of Southern California overwhelms the writer. It’s too much—to behold, let alone be. An author is overrun by its imaginative excesses until, repeatedly plunged into paradox, he wakes up as enlightened as he is humbled. Indeed, paradox is the common denominator. David Beers has understood how a community built on developing weapons could also provide him the moral sensibility to oppose them. Joan Didion has matched the ambiguities in herself to those in her locale, and often replicates in her work the penumbral complexities of Los Angeles she is so attracted to. D. J. Waldie, still aching for his father’s love, may or may not see how trapped he is by the ideology he has so brilliantly embodied in his book. And Mary Morris who, because she puts her faith in intergalactic communication, learns ultimately to put her faith in herself. Such is Southern California rapture.

But what about San Diego? Surely there must be a few writers who share broken expectations and unforeseen fulfillment with other California memoirists and who have worked to transport their experience into a literature good enough for this coastal corner to crow about.

And then I read "Writing San Diego: The Invisible City," an essay by University of San Diego English professor, Bart Thurber. Written for a Carlsbad Library publication in 1993, Thurber goes searching for San Diego’s literary heritage, in fiction and nonfiction, and comes up empty.

He cites Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, from an 1835 visit, in which Dana describes his day spent on the beach reading a joke book and reporting on little of San Diego’s natural beauty. Indicative of the emptiness, Thurber says Dana was here so as not to be somewhere else. He cites Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a fantasy of the Spanish past set in Southern California, once part of northern Mexico. Jackson’s vision of the natives and the Spanish, he calls, romantic fluff. He cites a letter of Henry James, who details the lovely climate, then adds, "there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter." James left in a hurry. If he was suggesting that the "inane" was "shining," then things cultural here must have been awful.

With such "non"-examples from the 19th century, Thurber contends that San Diego began as a

place that was not a place, quite, inhabited by legends that were not legends, quite, where imaginations could work relatively untroubled by indigestible fact—facts that were not facts, quite, given a developing cultural aesthetic that had never needlessly bothered with veracity. It was a city, a region, a culture of the possible, not the established.

Thurber next lists twentieth-century authors who have resided here—Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Scott O’Dell, Ben Hecht, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Terry Cole-Whittaker, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), and Sherley Anne Williams: most of them, he notes, have produced fantasy, children’s literature, or self-help books. And yet, despite their works, none have "turn[ed] their attention in any detail to San Diego itself." He declares that "San Diego remains and will continue to remain an especially mute, an invisible, region and culture, quietly dreaming itself to itself, psychically as well as physically remote from the clash and turmoil of ideas elsewhere. It is not necessarily unappealing; many of us are here . . . in order to avoid the turmoil of ideas elsewhere. San Diego is invisible because we have wanted it to be invisible."

In literature, I thought San Diego was Southern California, resonating to the truths and contradictions of all those who moved to or grew up south of Ventura. Apparently not. What happened? I emailed Thurber at once.

He greets me the next day at his University of San Diego office where he’s been teaching composition, theory, and Victorian writers for 21 years. He’s just returned from a sabbatical. A writing teacher also (I knew Thurber in the 1980s when I taught part-time at USD), I tell him I’ve lost the fire for instructing. This generation of students are uninspiring, uninspired and, worst of all, non-readers. "They’re a-literate," I complain. "They can read but don’t. You and I grew up when reading was a passion, something we did constantly, despite being young." Thurber agrees, but says he’s less jaded. He’s eager to get back. Besides, his students, he says, have to read if they’re going to pass.

On our way to lunch, in his one-day-old Hyundai, I ask what brought him here (waiting before I discuss my angle). A native, growing up in Bakersfield and receiving a B.A. at Stanford, Thurber sorely missed the west coast while earning a Ph.D. at Harvard. "In rural New England," he says, "there are these country lanes with trees on both sides. And the trees aren’t real high. What that means [is] the visual field you see are walls of green. My visual geometry was all screwed up because look what you see out the window here." From our brick-and-glass-enclosed patio at the Tecolote Cafe we see a golf course, Friars Road, a big blue sky. Thurber says he missed the relationship between trees and sky: "That’s why," he told himself, "I’ve got to get back to California, to exist in space—without knowing it—the way I had known it, especially in Bakersfield."

Arriving in San Diego, Thurber recalls a "tremendous sense of excitement. I had a job, after all." In Boston, he had consulted a road atlas and noted all the pink squares indicating Indian reservations, the highest concentration in the country. "I was astonished by that. That was a real mystery. That didn’t fit my mental picture." He says his wife, who’s from Oregon, had visited San Diego once and recalled "the absolute extravagant aromas of the flowers, the tropical ones."

Was it confirmed?

"It’s been a continual surprise, a visual surprise." Upon arrival he remembers driving down Sunset Boulevard in Mission Hills and seeing the giant palm trees, for the first time. "They looked like tufts of pubic hair on top of toothpicks." Living in North Park, he gawked at a neighbor’s banana tree. He says there’s no way to predict what he encountered. His experience has taught him that most newcomers don’t think about what San Diego might be. They come for the job. When they arrive, everything changes.

Thurber’s thoughtfulness belies his quiet voice and humility. "I’m talking too much," he says often and, when I assure him he’s not, he spins out further, at home in the wind. He’s a breathless talker, the sort who can’t wait for a lunch table to make a point. Going down a stairwell, he bends halfway around so he can keep a developing idea going.

I make the inevitable comparison between L.A. and San Diego, then describe some of the memoirs and essay collections I’ve been reading. Their theres, most located in or near Los Angeles, seem indistinguishable from here, I say. Thurber disagrees.

San Diegans, he says, "don’t want to get Los Angelized. But on the flip side we want to be a metropolis that is taken as seriously as Los Angeles. L.A. is a well-mythologized and a re-mythologized place. [It’s] been voicing itself for a long time."

Aren’t we a bit L.A.?

Thurber says that begs the question. Just because San Diego’s layout and mentality is like L.A. doesn’t mean much for him. He says in his reading he’s come upon no local voices who even "claim we’re like those" communities in "West L.A. or Lakewood or Santa Monica. There’s something about Los Angeles that calls upon its people to articulate" its identity—the noir of nocturnal L.A., for example. A similar mythological depth, unique to San Diego, is missing.

Thurber says this may be so because San Diego is still very young. "I know it’s the oldest city in California. But it’s only forty or fifty years old. The real comparison is not with New York or Los Angeles or Chicago now. It’s with New York in 1710, it’s with Chicago in 1810, San Francisco in 1880." There are, he says, multiple reasons why people come here. Native Americans came for hunting and fishing; the Spanish for the conquest. These groups he calls the first "invisible" peoples because "their story" in San Diego "is also not told." The first reason Anglos came was "for health . . . especially for consumptives."

San Diego, naturally, has attracted those Thurber calls "charlatans and hucksters and shysters," who ended up here because they were thrown out of other places. One form of the settler mentality is those on the lam from responsibility, the law or internal problems, who find a home in this end-corner of America. They come to feel good in the sun. "It’s no accident that San Diego is the meth capital of the United States," he says. If you come here to be happy and you find that "maybe, you’re not so happy," then methamphetamine might be the answer.

An endless parade of people come here to tell us who we want to or who we should be. Thurber cites C. Arnholt Smith and J. David Dominelli. "Tell me a story, J. David Dominelli," a story that will "speak the story of ourselves to ourselves." He says it begins with Alonzo Horton who comes and says, "‘Here we’ll have a city from nothing, a city that will rise out of the salt flats.’ And it did—that’s what so ironic." I ask whether this is the problem some have with Padres’ owner John Moores, a rich carpetbagger who buys a team and then cleverly orchestrates its future toward a new ballpark, which will make him more money.

It doesn’t surprise Thurber one bit. "We’re always bringing these people in to tell us who we are. To answer yes, when we ask, ‘Are we a world-class city?’ The inferiority complex in San Diego is overwhelming. No more so than in that slogan ‘America’s Finest City.’" Another proof he adds is the Gaslamp district. "It’s such a made-up Chamber-of-Commerce name. Especially when we have a perfectly good name from the past, the Stingaree. What a great name! Come on down to the Stingaree. That was San Diego’s Barbary Coast. San Francisco is proud of their Barbary Coast. What are we hiding? That there used to be hookers and tattoo parlors downtown?"

People come to San Diego Thurber says "not for what is here, but for what isn’t. And what isn’t is [their] past, the failures they’ve had, the successes they’ve had. Anything. People come to San Diego in order to be placeless and voiceless. Because that is the ultimate freedom. It’s the whole idea of America. Come here and make of yourself what you will. It’s a city of tabula rasas, deliberately chosen. But what’s interesting is that it doesn’t work. Nobody’s really a tabula rasa. You can’t really not bring something with you to a new place."

Thurber advises I read Kevin Starr’s book, The Dream Endures, in which the State Librarian writes one chapter about San Diego while giving San Francisco and Los Angeles widespread coverage. Back on the subject of writers, Thurber wishes San Diego had a great newspaperman. "We don’t have a Jimmy Breslin," he says. "We don’t have a Mike Royko. We don’t have a Scottie Reston. We don’t have Dickens, a great urban storyteller. [But] I would be dismayed if we had a ‘voice’ of San Diego. It’s not that kind of place. It has to be the ‘voices’ of San Diego. But where are they?"

Though there are as many writers per square acre here as anywhere else, he says none are writing about San Diego. His conclusion? Writers don’t want to write about this place. "They come here because it’s a good place to work. The weather’s not a factor. Writers here are like people in San Diego. They come for that swan dive into possibility. It’s the very invisibility of the place that draws them. Not to tease out the reasons for that invisibility but to surround themselves with it. To get work done." Again he mentions such juvenile and fantasy writers in San Diego as Dr. Seuss or Frank Baum. "Those are the two most placeless kinds of writers. It’s your business to imagine places not where you are."

He says for every newcomer, the idea has always been to "get on your horse, ride into the sunset and stay in the sunset." If there were a writer who could tell this story, Thurber thinks he or she would have to be "an amazing person. You’d have to be both in that endless sunset and be away from it far enough to voice it. That’s not easy."

Out in the parking lot, we get back in his Hyundai, smoke-gray plastic dashboard and that new-car vinyl smell. He starts the car and it purrs. "One of my students," he says, "told me one day that he knew I was from Southern California by my accent. ‘Oh, really,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize I had an accent.’ ‘Yeah,’ the kid said. ‘You sound like one of the Beach Boys.’" Yet another flesh-and-blood San Diegan referenced elsewhere.

For months I ruminate on Thurber’s incisive and unsettling ideas. Because of him I’m willing to try one last throw of the lariat, then call it quits. There aren’t any San Diego memoirs, native or new-arrival, because you cannot tell how the place has changed your life when the place is invisible. You cannot tell your story when an invisible place wipes you clean, insists you begin anew. You cannot tell your story when there’s no tradition of others telling their stories and therefore making their invisibility visible. You have no shoulders to stand on because you are still swan-diving into possibility.