California dreamin'

Driving through California, from Palm Springs to Los Angeles, up the Pacific Coastal Highway past Malibu and Santa Barbara to detour inland to Templeton and Paso Robles and Central Coast wine country, and back past Big Sur and Carmel and onward to San Francisco, gives me a glimpse of something I never quite understood: land itself as a character in American literature and art. Those American paintings with a strip of yellow sand and a strip of blue sky and nothing else breaking the horizon but a green-and-white striped umbrella. Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexican desert landscapes. (I looked for them in the LACMA and SF MOMA, but found only a petunia and a valley in SF.) The myth of the wild west - and it is truly wild, the desert is alien, even in a contained setting like the Joshua Tree national park. The myth of road trips, the road stretching ahead, straight and true, hacked out from between hills and running alongside the edges of cliffs. (The man in front of me at City Lights bought a copy of On the Road, and said, I bet you sell a lot of this book huh? The guy manning the counter, silver-haired and wire-rimmed bespectacled and urbane and condescending, said, we probably sell more copies of Howl.) The light reduces the landscape to nouns: rock, sand, sea, cliff, hills. Last time I was at City Lights, eight years ago, I bought Joan Didion's essays. What stays with me is not the neurotic social landscape - Hollywood tea parties, the morning after the Manson murders, the Reagan governor's mansion - but the hot, dry Santa Ana winds blowing across the valley, bringing migraines and madness and grief. Even the rolling hills of Paso Robles are bleached dry and harsh in the light. The same climate as Tuscany, the olive oil guy said, himself a Silicon Valley retiree, tricking out his farm in tech (in effect, Apple paid for my farm, he said), but drier. The land only dwindles down to human size in San Francisco, with its damp winds and misty fogs, the fog rolling in the last day we were there, covering Treasure Island and the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and the road 100 yards ahead, until all we could see was fog, a thick mist against the car lights, grey in the distance, damp and chill and still more familiar.