In Search of a Sense of Place. January 2, 2006.

California and Washington, DC.


Today’s missive begins during the first week of December in a little coffee outpost, under the same roof with a bank and a real estate office, in the Sonoma Valley that serves Flying Goat Coffee, roasted up the road in Healdsburg. The thick and chocolaty espresso leaves several rings in the cup as I take the final sip. If you want good coffee, wine, beer, and food, Northern California is the place to come. Prince Charles, on his recent visit to the United States, attended some official functions in New York and Washington, then made a bee-line for western Marin County to enjoy the fruits of organic agriculture, including, I am sure, some great cheeses like Cowgirl and Humbolt Fog, washed down with a few bottles of the local claret. Reports suggest that he happily would have skipped his time in New York and Washington and come straight here.

California, like most places, is in reality a multitude of places and certainly contains more multitudes than any other place that is not self-governing. (Whether California is governed at all remains an interesting question.) There is, as already noted, culinary California, as well as surfer’s California, urban California, skier’s California, rural California, northern and southern California and so on, on and on. And, of course, there is a dark side, even to sunny California.

A recent San Francisco Chronicle features an article about an undertaker in Oakland who is sick and tired of doing funerals for teenagers. At some 250 homicides in 2006, Oakland has already superseded last year’s total by over 100. Many of these are teenage gang members, or teens who have somehow run afoul of gang members. I have trouble believing what my eyes are telling me as I read this gruesome story, although I have read stories like it before and know that it is true.

How can there be a gang problem out here where the weather is so nice and the land is so beautiful? Sure New York or Chicago has gangs. Winter in those cities is positively awful. Everyone in town needs prozac, or something like it, by March. I remember the album cover of Chicago: The Blues: Today, the great Vanguard three-record set that came out in 1965. The cover was a photograph shot from an elevated platform, the overhanging sky a dull gray. The elevated platform was gray. The smoke curling up from a chimney was gray. The snow between the el tracks was gray. The only color (a sort of dirty orange) in the photograph came from a warning sign next to the tracks. There was perhaps the faintest trace of tan in the walls of the housing projects some hundred yards distant. No other photograph reminds me so powerfully of winter in Chicago.

I drove a taxi in Chicago in the summer of 1971. I drove all over the city, from good neighborhoods to bad. It was not difficult to tell the difference. Turn the corner into a bad neighborhood in Chicago in those days and instinct immediately took over. My fellow cabbies all agreed that one got out immediately, in defiance of any and all traffic regulations. I have not driven all over Oakland or Los Angeles, but I cannot imagine that any neighborhoods there today look so bad. According to everything I have read, they don’t. Yet the crime rate is horrendous. I suppose it is not so surprising that sprawling, big city Los Angeles would have a gang problem, but I have heard of gangs operating up north here in Santa Rosa and in the eastern suburbs of the Bay Area like Pleasanton and Walnut Creek, places that look far too nice and wealthy to have any problems at all. Why?

At this point I remember that one of the important events in my intellectual life took place on another day when the New York Times was sold out and I bought the Los Angeles Times instead, back in 1990. The headline in the People section read, "The People Prof: What Do Yuppies, Gangs Share? Walter Goldschmidt Knows." What they have in common, according to the article, is the need for recognition by their peers; the need to belong to some society, however small. When the Los Angeles Police Department announced a war on gangs, Goldschmidt, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UCLA, predicted its failure. Crime rose in the year of the Department's war. Goldschmidt explained that police action only led to greater cohesion on the part of gang members. Gangs form because teenagers perceive the dominant culture as being against them, or as simply not caring about them enough to provide adequate opportunity. So they drop out of school and join gangs, where they at least feel that they belong. When attacked, gang members pull together like the members of any club worth belonging to.

The obvious question then is: Are the schools in these places that bad? Are they offering so little? If so, why? And is it just the schools? How about the parents, the wider community, society?

Whatever the cause of gangs (and they have been with us a long time, in the old world and the new), there are certainly some trends in contemporary life that many people find disturbing and these trends are writ particularly large in California.

This autumn’s reading has included a particularly good book about California from the Sonoma County Library entitled Fault Line: Searching for the Spirit of a State along the San Andreas, by Thurston Clarke. The author took six months or so to travel the San Andreas Fault from Shelter Cove and Point Arena in the north to the Salton Sea in the south, where the fault fractures into Mexico. He has a wonderful eye for people and places, for the human community and the natural. Here he is on three human communities:

“The same issue of the Hollister Free Lance inviting the public to an open house at the new $7.8 million county jail also announced that San Benito County’s supervisors had decided to save $100,000 a year by closing the library. (Hollister sits astride the San Andreas some fifty miles south of San Jose.) While jails were essential and mandated by the state, parks and the library were ‘at the end of the county food chain,’ one functionary explained. No explanation was given why this rather paltry sum, the cost of one low-end tract house, had not been offered by the developers surrounding Hollister with ‘exclusive residential communities’ and promising ‘all the comforts of a “modern California community.’

. . . I walked through some model homes (in Palmdale, north and east of Los Angeles) in developments near the fault, three-to-four bedroom houses between $115,000 and $128,500 (in 1996). Every model I saw, regardless of size or price, had elaborate bathrooms called “spas,” and at least two places for watching television. Even the largest models lacked a living room large enough to accommodate six people in any degree of comfort. Instead, there were many small places where family members could escape one another. These were called the “bonus room,” “family room,” “media niche,” “entertainment niche,” “nook,” den,” or more honestly, the “retreat.” They ensured that when parents returned exhausted from their two-hour commute, they did not have to share a room, television, or computer with their kids. They indicated that life in Palmdale was a dark, indoor one for adults who left home five days a week before sunrise, returned after dark, and slept late on weekends to recover. . . .

. . . Cathedral City is a working-class town sandwiched between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage (on the eastern edge of greater Los Angeles). It is where people who guard agates and groom greens live in modest tracts and trailer parks alongside Social Security retirees. The middle school resembled a self-storage warehouse and the modular classrooms in back could have fallen off any container ship. Teachers at the meeting told me it was new but already overcrowded, having increased from 900 to 1,200 students in three years. Students had to pay for their own sports and the district could not afford after-school activities. Many kids went home to empty houses and played video games or joined gangs.”

There is a lot more to this book, but Clarke is at his best in presenting this nightmarish image of a society where the forces of coherence are failing. Yet how could any civil society possibly keep pace with the growth of California?

Population has outraced civil society here from the beginning of European settlement. California contained 25,000 Europeans (both Yankees and Californios) in 1848, along with a native population estimated to be anywhere from 15,000 to ten times that. Thanks to the gold rush, the European population hit 250,000 a scant three years later. By that time, California had entered the Union without ever being a territory. It went from being part of Mexico to being a state in about two years. The flood has not subsided or even leveled off since. The population hit 1,500,000 in 1900 and more than doubled every twenty years thereafter until 1960, when it had more than 15,000,000. It then took forty years to double again and is around thirty-six million.

Crime is up in other American cities as well. Other parts of America breed alienation in heartless housing tracts both urban and suburban. Are these problems really different or worse in California? Sometimes I think so, but I have no proof. Garrison Keillor writes of his native state (and mine), Minnesota:

“The state was settled by no-nonsense socialists from Germany and Sweden and Norway who unpacked their trunks and planted corn and set about organizing schools; churches; libraries; lodges; societies and benevolent associations; brotherhoods and sisterhoods, and raised their children to Mind Your Manners, Be Useful, Pay Attention, Make Something of Yourself . . . “

Did folks like this not come to California? In fact, they did, in greater ethnic diversity, but they did. They wrote a progressive constitution. They built a great public school system, libraries, civic institutions, the works. I think the short story of California is that these institutions simply have been overwhelmed by the tidal waves of growth. Yet the California dream continues to draw people and there are certainly places where the dream is doing spectacularly well.

One of these for me has always been the Esalen Institute perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean some thirty miles south of Monterey. I have spent a lot of time there, with no time ever being more wonderful than around the winter solstice. Watching the sun sink into the ocean while soaking in the famous mineral baths of a winter evening is particularly special. Following it with dinner and a couple glasses of wine is to feel like one has been transported to the abode of the gods. After a few days there with a good group of people, everyone has been soaked and massaged, stimulated yet relaxed, noticed and appreciated. Joy, the most important fruit of the Holy Spirit, is everywhere in evidence.

I was there a couple weeks ago for a Yoga seminar, taught by a spiritual anarchist from New Zealand (more on that some other time). One member of my group happened to be a winemaker from Napa.

Did this nice man bring a few bottles of the good stuff to share?

He did. Oooooh yes he did, this Saint Gregory of Napa. Yes. Yes.

Two luscious, fruity, smooth, drinkable red wines, both of which fairly leaped out of the bottle into the glass and hurled themselves gleefully down the throat, dancing and singing all the way. Big, dopey smiles formed on our faces as we looked at one another. We felt unbelievably clever, warm, blessed. Someone said something; or maybe no one said anything. I forget. We started laughing. We couldn’t stop.

Now I am back in Washington; in winter, a very mild winter without a trace of snow, but winter it is, with darkness and dampness and the funeral for President Ford taking place across the street from my apartment. I was on the Mall a few nights ago when the motorcade stopped at the World War II Memorial: a long line of police motorcycles lit up with red, white and blue lights, followed by a dozen or so dark sedans, a limousine with two American flags and a hearse bearing the presidential seal. This is what brings me back to Washington time and again. History seems far away in California, but here in Washington, it is close enough to touch.

Joan Didion has written about this: “One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

In Washington, in 2007, we know that history has bloodied our land, and we have bloodied other lands as well, as we celebrate this president who brought the Vietnam War to an end. We cannot help wondering who will bring the Iraq War to an end, and how, and when. We await, as ever, the prince of peace.