The Place Called California

by James Houston

Houston is a historian at UC Santa Cruz and has written numerous articles and books (both fiction and non-fiction) on California.  In this article, he makes a distinction between California as a geographical place and California as a state of mind.

When you are trying to locate a place, it is usually safe to begin with maps.  I always do.  But when the subject is California, you have to be careful.  Maps of this region have been deceptive from the start.  The earliest ones depicted an offshore island, separated from what is now Nevada by a long narrow channel.  Some people say these may be the most reliable maps we have - geographically wrong, but psychologically close to the truth.

On my relief map of North America, the place named California lies along the continent's western rim.  A broad valley, shaped like a cucumber occupies its center.  Two great rivers water this valley, fed by a dozen tributaries flowing down from the massive range of high peaks that frame its eastern side.  To the west, another range borders the valley, a long pattern of folds and ripples rising up from the Pacific Ocean.  The two great rivers empty into delta lands that channel the water, via a wide gap in the coastal mountains, toward San Francisco's nearly landlocked and marvelously protected by.  To the north there are more mountains, extending toward Canada, though a political line cuts through them to mark where California ends and Oregon begins, just as another political line cuts through the desert that occupies the southern quarter of the state, a desert that extends deep into Mexico.

Is this, then, what we mean by the place - this complex system of ridges and waterways, this mosaic of micro-climates and varied terrains?  Well, yes.  But no.  Not exactly.  Not when the subject is the state of California.  It is now almost impossible to separate the place on the map from the legends that have kept it alive in the imagination.  And one would not want to keep them separate for very long.  The beguiling attraction of California lives right there, in that interplay.  Simply consider the Gold Rush, this region's formative event.  How can a few thousand pounds of gleaming metal, no matter how native to the mountainsides and riverbeds, be disentangled from the noise and spectacle of the sudden multitude?  Without the gold embedded in the landscape, of course, there would have been no Rush.  But without the Rush, we would have only greed to remember, and bank accounts.  No magic.  No world-class legend to tickle the memory and stir the blood.

These two - the place on the continent, and the place in the mind - have never been easy to pry apart because the legends actually came first.  The dream, the expectation of something remarkable out there at the farthest edge of the New World, lived in the minds of the earliest explorers before they ever glimpsed the monumental headlands at Point Reyes and Point Conception or dipped their hands into the bottomlands of the luscious coastal valleys - San Fernando, Ojai, Salinas, Santa Clara.  It was a far western version of El Dorado that originates in a sixteenth-century novel by Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo called the Adventures of Esplandián.  There California is named and described for the first time - a science fiction name, in those days, as unearthly as Lilliput or Brobdingnag.  It was a mythical island, very near the gates of the Terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by Amazons, made impregnable by steep cliffs and rocky shores, and in this whole island, "there was no metal but gold."

California was not the first place on earth to get this type of advance billing.  Explorations of every kind have been propelled by heady visions and improbable dreams.  An intriguing feature of this region's history is the extent to which its array of natural endowments - climate, landscape, and bountiful resources - lived up to some of the visions, fleshed out the hopes for a blessed and promised land.

The rich potential of the valleys and alluvial plans was evident to the first overland travelers.  "Al the soil is black and loamy," wrote Fray Juan Crespi, chaplain of the Portolá expedition, as they crossed the Los Angeles basin in the summer of 1769, "and is capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted."  

It proved to be ideal for farming and ranching, and for seventy years or so this appeared to be what the earth of California had to offer - extensive grazing lands for cattle, prime acreage for wine grapes and wheat.  It was the discovery of gold that brought the boomtown mentality to an otherwise quietly fertile outpost.  When this remote western landscape actually delivered pockets and seams of the fabled ore so many adventurers had dreamed about, the world's imagination suddenly had a new touchstone.  Maybe El Dorado existed after all!

"On our poor little maps of California printed in France," wrote the journalist Etienne Derbec in 1850, "the San Joaquin is shown as a river flowing between the California mountains and the sea, a short distance from San Francisco, in the midst of a rich plain which its waters cover with gold dust every year.  The editors have taken the pains to gild that precious plain on their maps."

A few decades later the legend was recharged and reinforced when the landscape delivered up another treasure, dark and sticky, that had been waiting for millennia, locked in subterranean pools and caverns.  Fifty or sixty million years ago, when Long Beach was underwater and the central valley was an inland sea, uncountable generations of plankton sifted downward, leaving tiny skeletons to be transmuted into oil.  As these ancient deposits were discovered, one by one - the Doheny strike in Los Angeles in 1892, the Lakeview Gusher in the lower San Joaquin in 1910, the phenomenal find at Signal Hill near Long Beach in the early 1920s (in barrels per acre the riches in the world) - fortunes accumulated, both private and corporate, that far surpassed the wealth created by the Mother Lode.  The timing, moreover, seems uncanny, because during the same era, while the substrata was releasing its hoard of black gold, California was developing as a world headquarters for the machine that would be a prime consumer:  the automobile, with its own by-products, the car culture and the drive-in style of life.

In the early 1980s, seventy years after the Lakeview Gusher darkened the skies above Taft and Maricopa, Kern County alone still ranked 18th among the world's oil-producing regions, delivering more barrels per day than some of the OPEC nations.  (And there were more registered vehicles in California than there were people in the seven nearest western states.)

Meanwhile, another resource, another feature of the place itself, the weather, had fueled three new industries.  The first was real estate.  From the 1870s onward, land developers packaged the climate, telling easterners that California offered "the loveliest skies, the mildest winters, the most healthful region, in the whole United States."  The second was cinema.  Early filmmakers, looking for a way to put some distance between themselves and New Jersey, where Thomas Edison was trying to control the patents on film-making equipment, crossed the continent to southern California.  They found a number of things that encouraged them to stay, including varied terrain, an abundance of light, and over three hundred clear-sky days in any given year, which made it ideal for outdoor and location shooting.

Hollywood and aviation have at least that much in common.  The early days of flying, pilots and designers also found the southern California climate ideal for testing planes, for taking off and landing.  Though the Spirit of St. Louis departed from New York in 1927 to make the first transatlantic flight, the plan was designed in San Diego.  The demands of World War II gave this fledgling industry size and shape.  One thing led to another.  Nowadays, in the endlessly summer deserts of north of Los Angeles, while the U.S. Air Force tests its space-age capsules and weaponry, the spirit of aerial adventure lives on in the work of Paul McReady, the aviation renegade who has developed a record-setting series of engineless and

human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor, the Gossamer Albatross, the Gossamer .  In 1981 his 198-lb Solar Challenger astonished the aviation world when it crossed the English Channel powered solely by the energy of the sun.  The plane was designed in Pasadena.  It was systematically tested in the dry clear air above Shafter Airport, a few miles south of Bakersfield.

In this way, time and time again, some feature of the place we call California has led to some new opportunity or perception; and these in turn have advanced the reputation and the legend of the place.

Location itself can be described this way.  Simply as a physical creation, the thousand-mile coastline, from Crescent City in the far north, to Point Loma in the far south, is one of the world's most widely praised and often visited beauty zones.  Because of its numerous blessings, Californians have hugged this coast from the earliest days of European settlement, spreading out around the long necklace of presidio and port and mission towns founded by the Spanish.  This is still where most Californians live, work, and play.  Some eighty percent of the state's twenty-six million inhabitants reside within a band about forty miles wide, between Santa Rosa and the Mexican border.  They eat fruits and vegetables trucked in from the Central Valley; and their water comes from somewhere farther inland and higher up, sources like Hetch Hetchy and Mono Lake.  But they work in San Diego, in the L.A. basin, in the extended megalopolis around San Francisco Bay.  And the coastline is their principal recreation zone - the beaches, the tide pools, the several dozen surfing spots, the fishing and sailing in offshore waters, the stirring scenery along Highway One, the drop-off cliffs that launch hang-gliders, the trails and hot springs and campsites throughout the many ridges of the long Coast Range.

Because of its location, this coast that shapes the curving outline of the state has also helped to shape its history.  By the late 18th century, Spain, England, Russia, and the United States were all eyeing the strategic advantages of California's as-yet-undeveloped ports and harbors, in their long-distance struggle for control of Pacific trade and trading routes.  Today, with control of the Pacific still in mind, some thirty percent of the entire U.S. naval fleet is based in San Diego.

It is the look of this coastline, as perceived from the East, that has had such a profound effect on what we might call the region's psychological history.  Most travelers to California have come from somewhere east.  Because of its place in history, because it was settled late and happens to occupy the continent's farthest edge, the West Coast has been viewed as some final stopping place, the end of the trail, the conclusion of that great thrust and opening outward from Europe that began five hundred years ago.  No one has voiced this more deliberately and passionately than the Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers.  For him, the meeting of shore and water was not only a scene of wild and holy magnificence, it was the cultural cliff-edge, where lives culminate, where cross-continental destinies are somehow completed:  This theme propels his early poem, Continent's End (1924):

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray,
the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the
continent, before me the mass and doubled
stretch of water.

If El Dorado was this region's first large metaphor, Continent's End was the second.  And in recent years a third image has risen into public consciousness, as a way of describing California's place on the map and in the mind.  It is the term, Pacific Rim.  A rim, of course, suggests a circle, and the term itself places this state, not at the outer edge of European expansion, but on a great wheel of peoples who surround the Pacific Basin.  It helps to bring into sharper focus some of our ever-changing ethnic, cultural, and economic realities.

Because it faces west, this coast is where most trans-Pacific travelers have landed and where immigrants from Asia have settled.  Among the people of Asian and Pacific Island background now in the United States, some forty percent live in California.  The Asian presence, such a vital feature of this state's unique cultural mix, is much more than a matter of numbers.  It is felt in the architecture, in eating habits, in the popularity of certain ideas and belief systems, such as Zen and yoga, in the practice of martial arts and healing arts, and in the evolution of the economy.  In 1982, for the first time, United States trade with Atlantic nations was surpassed by its trade with nations across the Pacific.  In 1986 the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles moved 58.6 million tons of cargo, almost triple the tonnage handled by the ports of New York and New Jersey.

The legends of California are always tied to some feature of its varied and abundant landscape.  The oil boom launched by the first major strike in the San Joaquin in 1909 and 1910, for example, had a kind of prologue in the 1906 earthquake.  Both episodes begin with underground, innate features of the western earth that have helped to shape both history and mythology.  While it wrecked a large piece of San Francisco, the famous quake also flattened the Russian Orthodox chapel at Fort Ross, seventy miles north, and shook loose a wall of the San Juan Bautista Mission, which we now know stands right in the rift zone, eighty miles south.  There had been other fearful quakes in California since settlement began, but this was the one that set a city on fire and first drew widespread attention to something geologists have come to view as a principal feature in the physical life of the place, that six hundred mile crease through the landscape, the San Andreas Fault.

In a similar way the prologue to the Gold Rush is the story of the ill-fated Donner Party, who started too late from the Middle West, fell prey to squabbling along the trail, entered the Sierra Nevada range well past the season when it was considered safe to cross, and thus found themselves trapped in the early winter of 1846.  One of the most notorious events in the history of the American West - some say it is the basic event - the Donner tragedy provides an unavoidable counterpoint to the legends of fulfillment and abundance.  It is a story not only settlers pushed past their limits, who devour human flesh in order to survive.  It is a story from a region where the weather can turn on you in an hour, where the landscape is no longer an ally or bountiful provider, and where nature is an adversary, or perhaps a mentor you can never afford to take for granted.

The lesson of the Donner Party contains a warning not unlike the warnings of John Muir, the great naturalist and patriarch conservationist who began to tramp the Sierra Nevada range some twenty years later.  Be attentive to this land and its habits, he said; learn to enjoy it, but never let down your guard.

The power of the high country so filled Muir with awe and wonder that he devoted his life to preserving as much of this far western landscape as he could.  He worked to save Yosemite Valley, and succeeded.  He fought harder to save Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he claimed was too beautiful to be dammed up and turned into a reservoir, and failed.  He founded the Sierra Club, and in his writings he gave voice to an environmental consciousness, a reverence for natural beauty and a respect for the potent and interlocking cycles of the earth, that speaks ever louder as the years go by.

One of the great California ironies is the way its very virtues sometimes seem fated to bring about the state's undoing.  This region still draws people at a phenomenal rate, continuing to grow by a thousand or more per day, day after day, year after year, about half by birth and half by in-migration.  As the demands on space and resources intensify, one sees examples everywhere of how some cycle of nature is overlooked, or given low priority, in the rush to develop a parcel of real estate, maximize income, or expand a city:  in a new subdivision, built across a fault line, half a dozen duplexes are tipped off their foundations by a quake; somewhere along the coast, a fragile slope, over-logged and over-built, is cut away by erosion and four homes go sliding to the bottom; in the lower San Joaquin Valley, over-irrigation coupled with poor drainage fills a hundred thousand acres of cropland with plant-killing salts and minerals, while a spectacular lake in the High Sierra drops fifty feet in fifty years in order to serve a thirsty city three hundred miles away.

The succession of such events, together with the ongoing debates over river use, air quality, the coastal impact of offshore drilling, and so on, are gradually leading us toward a revision of the original California legend.  Gradually we are discovering, or rediscovering, that this land is not a cornucopia of limitless reserves, but a well-endowed place with very specific limits that have to be acknowledged and honored.  And these limits, too, are fundamental features of the place - weather, tides, wind and water flow, cycles in the soil and in the earth beneath the soil.

The legend dies hard, however, the one with the boomtown voice saying, "Take what you want while the taking is good."  And perhaps we can still learn from the native tribes who once flourished in this part of the world.  They understood that in order to survive it was important to find a way to live in harmony with the whole environment.  If one failed to do so, the penalty could be severe.

Up along the north coast, the Yurok expressed this via a World Renewal dance, describe in Theodora Kroeber's retelling of one of their best known tales:  "To a world in balance, the flat earth's rise and fall, as it floats on Underneath Ocean, is almost imperceptible, and nothing is disturbed by it.  Doctors know that to keep this balance, the people must dance the World Renewal dances, bringing their feet down strong and hard on the earth.  If they are careless about this, it tips up and if it tips more than a very little, there strange and terrible misplacements."

That is a prologue to the story of The Inland Whale, who became stranded in a landlocked lake.  Why?  The people had grown careless.  they allowed the earth to tip too far, so that ocean waters came pouring across the land, carrying all the creatures of the sea.  When the earth finally righted itself, and the sea water drained away, a female whale was left behind.  Unable to return to her natural habitat, she became a lonely wisdom figure.

In this ancient story, life is a balancing act, and the earth is a delicately hinged support system one must revere and respect.  Evidence suggests that some of the early Spanish explorers saw California this was too.  Fray Juan Crespi found the landscape itself to be something one approached respectfully and with more than ordinary caution.  As diarist and chaplain with the Portolá party, he was the first writer to give us a detailed account of what this region looked like as European settlement began.  Making daily entries as the party crept up the coastline from Baja toward San Francisco Bay, Crespi reported at length on the fauna and the flora, the habits of local tribes, and the habits of the land. 

At the end of July 1769 they were camped along the banks of the river we now call the Santa Ana, which follows the Riverside Freeway into Anaheim and Garden Grove.  In those days it followed a similar course but had a different name, el rio del dulcisimo nombre de Jesus de los Temblores.  On July 28, the padre wrote:

The bed of the river is well grown with sycamores, alders, willows, and other trees we have not recognized.  It is evident from the sand on its banks that in the rainy season it must have great floods which would prevent crossing it.  It has a great deal of good land which can easily be irrigated...I called this place The Very Sweet Name of Jesus of the Temblors, because we experienced here a horrifying earthquake which was repeated four times during the days.  The first, which was the most violent, happened at one in the afternoon, and the last one about four.

Undaunted, the exploration party continued north the next morning, from Santa Ana into what is now the heart of Los Angeles.  For the next five days they were periodically shaken by quakes large and small.  Though Crespi was alarmed by the tremors, he never failed to comment on the beauties and endowments of the land they passed through, its possibilities for food and shelter, irrigation, timber, and farming.  In diary these concerns, the land's blessings and the unaccountable quivers in the earth, live side by side.

On Tuesday, August 1, they camped just south of where Mission San Gabriel now stands:

At ten in the morning, the earth trembled.  The shock was repeated with violence at one in the afternoon, and one hour afterward we experienced another.  The soldiers went out this afternoon and brought an antelope, with which animals this country abounds.  They are like wild goats, but have horns rather larger than goats.  I tasted the meat, and it was not bad.

On Thursday, August 3, the party forded a river they had named for our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula (now called Los Angeles), and Crespi described "a large vineyard of wild grapes and an infinity of rose bushes in full bloom."  A few miles later they reach a small stream:

The banks were grassy and covered with fragrant herbs and watercress.  The water flowed afterward in a deep channel toward the southwest.  All the land that we saw this morning seemed admirable to us.  We pitched camp near the water.  This afternoon we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us.  We judge that in the mountains that run to the west of us there are some volcanoes, for there are many signs on the road which stretches between the Porciuncula River and the Spring of the Alders, for the explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch; they were boiling and bubbling, and the pitch came out mixed with an abundance of water...and there is such an abundance of it that it would serve to caulk many ships.

Imagine Crespi, born on the Spanish isle of Mallorca, seasoned traveler and soldier of the Cross, marching through the richest land he has yet seen, and struck by subterranean powers such as he has felt nowhere else in New Spain.  The dark and loamy soil, where grapes and roses evidently grow wild, is rolling and rumbling beneath his sandals.  Ahead of him rise the Santa Monica Mountains, which appear to be volcanic; that is, he hope there are volcanoes up ahead, for that would at least explain the rumbles and the percolating tar pits reported by the scouts.

Crespi has no way of knowing that a rift zone lurks thirty miles to the east.  He has no access to the theory of Continental Drift, which some two hundred years later will help account for what is going on.  He has no way of knowing that the same forces that created that long crease and these subsurface tremors - two great slabs of the earth's crust grinding together - also contributed to the scenic grandeur and the miraculously fertile fields.  And yet in his diary of 1769, he manages to catch this condition, this pairing.  Be wary in the land of promise, his diary suggests.  Be attentive, because this appears to be a land of two promises, where abundant possibilities and a potential for disaster live side by side.