~a column by Colleen O’Brien
California, long the mecca for Americans and their west-quest over our years on this continent, has finally hit a wall. It now suffers through too many weather events, as they’re currently called by weatherpersons, to warrant our pivot from the actual coast to a little bit east – Nevada, for example.
Nevada is high desert, which means daytime hot weather, lots of wind, cool nights, no humidity, thus few bugs. Nevada does not have earthquakes or volcanoes, and the forest fires are generally to the western, or California, side of the state, where the precipitation is enough to grow trees. Nevada does have water problems, has always had them from the era of first settlers, but has so few people compared to most states that they just might be able to handle it.
I am not denigrating California, as many do to the success of anything or anyone. California’s appeal, its glitter, its fame have seduced most of us over the decades. I grew up in the late fifties and early sixties wanting to buy only California shades of lipstick and nail polish, California labels of shorts and bathing suits, the ultimate – a California Ford Mustang. The movies taught me how to smile, walk, smoke, fall in love. The hit records from the Beach Boys and their California sound still strike a gong in my memory room, that place where my body wants to dance.
But what I’ve liked most about California was its aura of freedom. When I got off the plane in San Diego with my brand new husband in the autumn of 1964 and saw a woman probably my age waiting for someone on the tarmac – no jetways in those days; we walked down stairs and across blacktop to a chainlink fence, behind which was all of California – I knew I was in the right place: She wore high heels, white toreador pants (like the leggings of today), an ankle bracelet, a halter top and long dangly earrings. I was dazzled.
In the Iowa I’d departed from, none of these items could I wear, separately or all together: no dangly earrings at all, let alone with slacks. No heels with slacks. No tight slacks. No white slacks or white shoes after Labor Day. This wildly dressed woman was freedom at the gate, and I could not wait to be on her side of it.
My mom had given me a very weird admonition before I left the Midwest. “No curlers in your hair when you go to the store and no muumuus beyond your front door.” She apparently had seen these horrors when she took my sister to California upon her 1961 graduation from high school, but when I got there, to the mecca, I didn’t see myself in public sprouting curlers and draped in nightgown, I saw freedom apparent in a no-rules form of public dress. There was no going back.
The hibiscus was bloomin’, palm fronds wafting, bougainvillea climbing stucco porches, blue skies overhead, a slight breeze off the ocean carrying its salt air inland. I was young and in love, and California to me was pecan pie – enticing, sweetly edgy on my mind, potentially gratifying.
My favorite metaphor was not pecan pie, however; it sprang from a picture of me sitting on the grass by the new library in my life, looking down a small hill of coconut palms sweeping to a grassy field. I hug my newly checked-out books to my chest, and what I recall most viscerally is my actual wiggling with glee at my future living in California freedom.
This whole story came from reading that California is now in the way of a hurricane making its slow, menacing track up the Baja California peninsula of Mexico. The news disheartened me, as much does these days. California’s had enough – earthquakes, drought, cliffs sliding into the Pacific, forest fires growing in number and ferocity each year. And now a hurricane? Poor old California state-of-mind fading into first inheritor of all things Climate Emergence.
I know that part of Hawai’i is in a bad way because of wild fires, and I have compassion. But I’ve never been in love with Hawai’i. The Golden State, the moniker of which comes from its golden grasses of late summer rolling like waves over the hills of the Sierra Nevada toward the last stop of all the dreamers compelled westward across a continent, from every country of the globe and countless towns and farms across the U.S.
Like America herself, California, since anyone knew about her, has been an idea worth looking into, a dream worth pursuing, a lure worth banking on. I’m betting on both America and its most diverse state maintaining that historic story and moving on into the substance of the dream itself – forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
It’s never too late to make any or all these dreams happen, no matter the hardships America and its dreamiest state must go through on our way into a future of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s what we all want.
