California: A Murder Mystery

Consistent with Robert Malone’s experience of growing up in California and finding it a different and less-open place now, my childhood memories of the state are mostly memories of freedom, discovery, and opportunity. I grew up camping and hiking and skiing and backpacking, and so I grew up in the back of a Volvo station wagon in the 1970s — rolling around loose with the camping gear, if you can believe that children used to live that way. Massachusetts is 10,565 square miles; in California, Inyo County is a little smaller at 10,227 square miles, but San Bernardino is 20,105 square miles, and…well, that just leaves 56 counties to go.

I’m still working through the diversity of all that space as a nominal adult, endlessly debating the PCH vs I-395 question, finding all of the indescribably mindblowing shit that you can see if you just know how to get to it.

Yes, it was dangerous

To try to summarize in a single image (that will take a couple of paragraphs to set up), PCH — the Pacific Coast Highway — climbs the state for 650 miles, clinging to the coastline for about 620 miles of it. In one spot the state transportation agency gave up, and PCH turns well inland through a 30-mile stretch that was too rough for building. That big chunk of highway-free land is the Lost Coast. It’s turning into a commercial cannabis-growing hotspot, now, and parts are vanishing behind security walls, but the Lost Coast has a remarkable cultural history — as a quiet and isolated place that drew radical journalists and old hippies, but also a whole lot of cattle ranchers.

That duel identity persists, and the parking lot at the annual Mattole Grange Beef and Bean Barbecue has — or had, the last time we were there — a roughly even distribution of Subaru Foresters with COEXIST stickers and F-250s driven by people who wanted to Make America Great Again. They get along, because they live together. This is California, to me, as a child of the 70s: Literal cowboys on actual horseback, waving to their neighbors the leftist public intellectuals, who bring over a pie.

We were good weird, diverse diverse, a purple state that passed conservative ballot measures and also voted for Jerry Brown a lot. California contained real multitudes, from Oildale to Santa Cruz. It was a debate, an experiment, a contest, and it felt open. The recent news media freakout over Shasta County — there are terrifying extremists there who question public health authorities! — is my childhood California, an entirely familiar world.

Oildale, a hundred miles from the Sherman Grove

Diversity of thought has run alongside an extraordinary diversity of place. Rolling around with the camping gear in that back of that Volvo, the trip through Inyo and Mono counties was a trip for me into dark sky country, a place where night looked completely different than it did in suburban Los Angeles. One of the many challenges for the volunteers of Inyo County Search and Rescue is that they have to train for the lowest spot and the highest spot, for Death Valley and Mount Whitney, which are not that far apart. The landscape changes radically and often; you can drive on the same day from Sequoias to Bristlecone pines, and all that the change implies about terrain and microclimate. Yes, there are people in Los Angeles who sometimes wake up and debate whether to go skiing or surfing today. It’s been an exciting landscape, but my enthusiasm for it is being colored by the political nosedive. Except on the Tomales Point Trail, where I forget the other stuff.

The spirit of productive creativity, of Silicon Valley garage startups and Mojave Desert test pilots and the 1950s at City Lights, is fading quickly, if it isn’t just dead. I was just reminded of a line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — which was assigned with Joan Didion’s non-fiction in my twelfth-grade English class, alongside the expected Steinbeck and Shakespeare — and it fits the moment perfectly. It’s the one about the rising feeling of hope in the early 1960s, and how “with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” Yes. Yes, you can.

The spirit of sourness seems to be settling over everything: scolding, limiting, dialing back, degrading and lecturing. (Not to mention the metastasization of regulatory chickenshit.) Imagine the truly skillful maliciousness it takes to make this place feel like a cultural prison:

I spent a few years in the South in the army — “Hey, look, it’s Fort Benning again” — and have driven all over the country, and I like big parts of the whole thing. But I always feel like I have to live in the West, because of this:

I’m cheating, because this is Nevada

But if it’s physically open and culturally closed, there’s no spirit to admire or to join.

I’ve said about ten percent of what I meant to say here, but I suspect many of you feel the rest without hearing it said.