People Don't Know What California Is

When I was a kid, my grandmother had a vacation home in Bear Valley, in Northern California. I would have thought Bear Valley was a town, but I'm now reading it is a "census-designated place."

If Bear Valley is known at all, it's for its skiing, but we tended to make the four hour drive up to grandma's place in summers, for the Bear Valley Music Festival. Walking around in August, all the snow long-since melted, nothing happening in the mountains during the off-season, you could find inoperative ski lifts. This was one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but from the wrong angle, if you and your family were standing in an overgrown field, looking up at these temporarily abandoned elevators to nowhere, it was eerie.

Either my dad or aunt told me Bear Valley was weird in a "We don't take kindly to outsiders" sense, which tracks for a region whose economy never fully recovered from the collapse of the silver industry in 1873. One year, my aunt and grandmother went up to the house for the first time in a few months and a stranger was sitting in the living room. He saw them, scrambled out a side door and, as far as they know, never came back. I don't think they figured out how long he'd been living there, either. But he had been living there.

California's full of places like that, census-designated and otherwise. Every state is, of course– I'm not going to pretend squatters are a localized phenomenon– but people who aren't from California often don't know what California is.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area, which everybody calls “Northern California.” I’m not going to argue it should be designated any other way, but this is the San Francisco Bay's position in its state:

If you started in San Rafael, at the top of the Bay Area, you could drive for seven hours before reaching Oregon. I’m from Northern California and then above that it’s The Real Northern California But Let’s Not Discuss Such Things In Polite Company.

In a very real way, from Oregon down, California is 500 miles of weirdness, and then you reach Sacramento, and then it's 120 miles to the Bay Area. It's 70 miles from the Bay Area to Santa Cruz, 400 miles from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles, 150 miles from Los Angeles to San Diego, 17 miles from San Diego to Mexico.

People say certain cities are "weird." Before its second tech boom, people who'd never been to San Francisco thought it was America's left wing dystopian home to scattered tribes of queer people wandering the streets, forcing bags of weed into the hands of children on the precipice of communism. Longtime residents of "weird" cities will make that their whole life, gathering bumper stickers with unactionable commands like "Keep Austin Weird!" and "Keep Portland Weird!" The weirdest city in the world is nothing next to the truly weird towns 100 miles away. San Francisco has a lot to be proud of, but Emperor Norton and The Residents are a Pat Boone concert at a church picnic compared to Santa Venetia, the Marin suburb where Philip K. Dick lived out A Scanner Darkly, doing meth with anybody who wanted to sleep on his floor. Oh, does Portland have Voodoo Doughnut? Well, halfway between Oregon and Lake Tahoe, you'll find Redding, California, home of Sherri Papini. That's Smegma and Taint territory.

A concrete poem to visualize traveling down the coast, from Oregon to Mexico, with each line of yelling representing about 100 miles:

Oregon
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
Sacramento, which is its own kind of AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
Berkley, Marin, Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose
AAAAAAAH!
Santa Cruz
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
Los Angeles
AAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!
San Diego
Mexico

I've driven up and down California many times. The most recent one was especially unpleasant: We were visiting my family a few years ago, I got a nasty case of food poisoning and Johanna got us 500 miles from Menlo Park to Palm Springs as I sat in the backseat, trying to not puke on our dog. The trip is never what you'd call 'exciting.' As much as I love long drives, as much as I love how California looks, stopping at diners along the way, the roadside attractions, the redwoods, the distant Six Flags vistas and the chance to get a good think in, being in a car for 6 hours can suck.

And as you pass towns, you wonder what it would be like to live in them. What's going on in Grass Valley? Who calls Perris home? You get to your destination and look up Perris' local paper. You look at the edit history on Perris' Wikipedia page and find out its opening paragraph tried to explain why Perris kids don't test well, while throwing in a weird note about ethnic diversity that feels vaguely racist:

Look, skydivers need planes, planes create noise pollution, the youth in The Skydiving Capital of America are being irritated into stupidity. There's nothing anybody can do about it.

You keep looking through the Wikipedia edit history and find the city's most notable people have been removed from the Notable People section because David and Louise Turpin tortured their own children for 20 years and somebody at Perris City Hall thought it would be best to instead draw your attention toward the Southern California Railway Museum. It's the biggest railroad museum on the West Coast! Louis B. Mayer owned a horse ranch in Perris for a few years! Please don't ask about anybody who's lived in Perris since!

Or there's Vernon, the town overwhelmed with political corruption despite being the permanent home to only 200 residents. Or there's Solvang, built to look like an old Danish village. There's Slab City! Read about Slab City. Even a famous place like Palm Springs is weirder than anybody gives it credit for: So many Golden Age of Hollywood actors had contracts requiring them to stay within a two-hour drive of Los Angeles County, but the actors wanted some peace and to vacation away from press, so they built up a city that's been perfectly preserved by gay men and now the nicest mid-century modern architecture in the world is sitting out in the middle of a desert.

I was thinking, this past weekend, about a 2016 trip to San Juan Capistrano. The beautiful place with the swallows. I'd been living in Philadelphia for four or five months, and Johanna and I flew out to Southern California for a friend's wedding and then drove up to the Bay Area to visit my family. I like this friend a lot, but he's really Johanna's friend, from our time at college in Washington, DC.

We only really knew the groom and a few of my wife's friends from college, who'd either made the trip or moved to Southern California in the four years since graduation. We went hiking with our friend Jimmy a day or two before the wedding, and that was very nice.

In a few sentences, I'm going to say something potentially out of pocket about a different attendee, and I want to write here that this person was repeatedly very mean to Johanna in college. I'd met him in passing once or twice and otherwise had no real opinion on the guy, but he was enough of an asshole to my partner that the groom at this wedding had, years earlier, told this other person to stop being an asshole. The animus might seem unnecessary if I didn't preface it with this. It's probably still unnecessary, for reasons I'll get into. I just don't like people who have been mean to my wife.

So anyway, we arrive at the wedding and this weaselly fuck is there, and he, knowing we've flown in from Philly, sincerely says "Welcome to the Best Coast!" He grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college in DC and had lived in Los Angeles or somewhere nearby for two years. I had been out of the state for a few months and now this recent transplant was telling us about all the things you could do around this place I'd lived in for 22 years. And I told him that. "No, I know, I was born here." And he kept telling Johanna and me about golf courses or whatever. Welcome to the Best Coast.

It was the same feeling I got when I moved back home in fall 2012, after college. Facebook relocated to my old neighborhood the year before that, and Google'd been in Mountain View for over a decade. As much as I had wanted to leave the Bay Area for college, I returned so annoyed at all of the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sheryl Sandbergs who had swooped in and made billions. I was half annoyed they'd made an already expensive area impossible to live in and I was annoyed at who they were as people, that the Bay Area was becoming more synonymous with techno-libertarianism than actual progressive thought. I'm sure Mark, Sheryl and I all voted for the same president that November, but only two of us were responsible for an ethnic genocide in Myanmar.

I felt this way about everything, though. My insecurity extended to nightmares like Eric Schmidt, who had come to Berkeley for grad school in 1976, and so had lived in California longer than I'd been alive, even if he was originally from the East Coast and was, at the time I moved home, spending a significant chunk of the year with his mistresses in New York. Schmidt had already politically terraformed the Bay Area as much as he ever would by the time I headed to college. Steve Jobs grew up in Mountain View and Los Altos, and even if he'd died in 2011 from largely disregarding doctors and trying to treat his cancer with apple juice, the Bay Area is still cut in his image. He's the reason Zuckerberg wore hoodies to Facebook's product launches and Sergey Brin jumped out of a blimp to announce Google Glass.

So what was I annoyed by? Everybody moving to California? The Donner Party moved to California. That's what The Grapes of Wrath is about. If people didn't move to California and then act like they'd always been there, People have been moving to California and then acting like they've always been there long before the first person from elsewhere asked me if I'd ever tried In-N-Out.

When I'm in a place to really stare into the deepest part of my own ass, I can recognize in all of this frustration a repellant undercurrent of feeling like California is mine, and the transplants and the people wearing trucker hats with the image of the California flag flaking off the foam are just dabblers. I don't believe in borders and yet I roll my eyes at everybody moving to where I'm from. That's gross. This is not an easy thing to admit to. It's ugly.

And I have left. I will return, but I'm not there now, and as much as I can say I'm partly gone because all the tech millionaires and billionaires have made it impossible to afford to live there, I could make it work. And I like where I am now (long term, at least– I'm currently in yet another hotel as our damaged house is slowly fixed). I'm colonizing Philly as much as all those AI dipshits are colonizing San Francisco.

The truth is I'm gatekeeping California lore because I'm a petulant child. Oh, you bought my grandma's home in San Francisco and built a big fence around it and had it digitally scrubbed from Google Maps? Bro, I bet you can't name three true crime horror stories that've gone down between Lake Tahoe and Napa. Oh, the first one you thought of was the abduction of Jaycee Lee Dugard? Is your favorite Beach Boys song "Kokomo," too?

The truth is we sometimes have so little, or think we have so little, that we lay claim to trivia, even when it goes against our principles, even when we hate when other people do that. I can't be precious or controlling about any of this anymore. So tell everybody you know: Bear Valley is odd.