CALIFORNIA’S over, everything I love about this place is going to hell.
I
knew there was something familiar about this thought from the moment it
occurred to me in Yosemite National Park. My sister and I started going
to those mountains 40 years ago with our parents, who taught us to see
the Sierra Nevada as a never-changing sanctuary in a California
increasingly overrun by suburban sprawl.
Once
we had our own families, we indoctrinated our kids in the same joys:
suffering under backpacks, drinking snowmelt from creeks, jumping into
(and quickly back out of) icy lakes, and napping in wildflower meadows.
Yosemite remains my personal paradise, but the impact of drought and
climate change has become overwhelming — smoky air from fires, shriveled
glaciers leaving creeks dry and meadows gray, no wildflowers.
The
big new forest fire didn’t help, as we hiked back to our car in
mid-August. We were never in danger, but smoke from that so-called
Walker fire filled the sky and turned sunlight orange. At the
surprisingly good restaurant attached to the Lee Vining Mobil station
just outside the park, ashes fell like apocalyptic snowflakes onto our
fish tacos. We watched a DC-10 air tanker carpet bomb flames a few miles
off. We had intended to stay in a nearby motel, but Highway Patrol
officers told us they planned to close the road, so we joined the line
of vehicles escorted past red walls of fire.
We
slept at a friend’s house on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada.
The next morning, as we began our drive home to San Francisco, this
sense of unraveling — of California coming apart at the seams — worsened
by the mile. The air was more Beijing than Yosemite, and the
Merced River, normally a white-water pleasure ground, was a muddy
sequence of black pools below mountains covered with dead ponderosa
pines, a tiny sample of the more than 12 million California trees killed
by drought and the bark beetles that thrive in this now-warmer climate.
The
San Joaquin Valley, still farther west, is depressing on good days,
with its endemic poverty and badly polluted air and water. But driving
in freeway traffic through endless housing developments on that
particular weekend encouraged a fugue state of bleakness in me.
Somewhere in that haze lay an industrial-agricultural plain where the
unregulated pumping of groundwater has gone on for so long that
corporate farms pull up moisture that rained down during the last
glacial period — with two paradoxical and equally strange geological
effects.
First, the evacuation of so much water from underground pore spaces is causing the surface of some parts of the valley floor to collapse downward
by nearly two inches a month. Second, the lifting of water weight — all
those trillions of gallons from underground, and more vanishing from
reservoirs and snowpack throughout the West — is now causing the rocky
crust of the Earth, which floats on our planet’s molten interior, to
push upward.
As
a result, the Sierra Nevada mountain range is gaining about 1 to 3
millimeters in elevation annually. San Francisco, normally cool and
clear, completed the picture: air so murky we could barely see the bay
below the bridge, yet another scorching day in a freakishly warm summer —
thanks in part to the immense blob of warm ocean water
parked against the west coast. Roughly five hundred miles wide and
thousands long, this warm water carries subtropical plankton that may be
related to the accelerated decline of the Pacific sardine population,
the failure of pelicans to mate and the mass die-offs of baby shorebirds
and sea-lion pups. Concomitant blooms of toxic algae have shut down
crab fisheries on the coast and, inland, befouled our rivers so much
that, on at least two occasions this year, dogs jumped in to swim and
promptly died.
We
were nearly home, inching through Sunday-afternoon traffic (rush hour
is now everywhere and always), when I realized that I had become my
parents. Put another way, it was finally my turn to suffer the sense of
loss that made my mother weep over every strip mall obliterating every
once-lovely farm during family road trips in our 1971 VW micro-bus. My
father’s nostalgia was more for 1950s Los Angeles: Bing Crosby living
down the street, the Four Freshmen on the radio, a T-shirt filled with
oranges as he rode the bus from his family’s Westwood home through
sleepy neighborhoods to a completely separate town called Santa Monica.
Confusing
one’s own youth with the youth of the world is a common human
affliction, but California has been changing so fast for so long that
every new generation gets to experience both a fresh version of the
California dream and, typically by late middle-age, its painful death.
For
Gold Rush prospectors, of course, that dream was about shiny rocks in
the creeks — at least until 300,000 people from all over the world, in
the space of 10 years, overran the state and snatched up every nugget.
Insane asylums filled with failed argonauts and the dream was dead —
unless you were John Muir walking into Yosemite Valley in 1868. Ad hoc
genocide, committed by miners, settlers and soldiers, had so devastated
the ancient civilizations of the Sierra Nevada that Muir could see those
mountains purely as an expression of God’s glory.
“I’m in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me-ee-ee,” Muir
wrote about the giant sequoias, in a Whitman-esque letter to a friend.
“I wish I were so drunk and Sequoical that I could preach the green
brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine
wilderness like a John the Baptist.… Come suck Sequoia, and be saved.”
Muir got his turn when San Franciscans dammed his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park, part
of a statewide water grab that included Los Angeles developers’
swindling Owens Valley farmers out of both their water and their
economic future. But all that water helped create the coastal urban
paradise that lured my grandfather west in the mid-1940s, when there
were fewer than 10 million people in the state: abundant jobs in defense
and entertainment, middle-class families buying homes with sunny
backyards, plenty of room on wide highways to seaside coves where good
surf peeled across reefs with abundant lobster free for the picking.
Dad
went to the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years in
the Navy and three more in law school, then moved to Washington, D.C.,
with my mother to work for L.B.J.’s anti-poverty program. He came back
in late 1968 to find Los Angeles buried under a concrete megalopolis. Up
in San Francisco, meanwhile, where Mom grew up, methamphetamine and
violence were already darkening the hippie dream.
Kevin
Starr, a professor of history at the University of Southern California
and author of a seven-volume history of the California dream, told me
recently that he considered the mid-1960s — 1963 specifically — the end
of modernist California, that period for which it makes sense to speak
of “an agreed-upon, commanding” version of the dream. In Mr. Starr’s
view, around the time I was born, in 1967, California entered a
postmodern phase with multiple dreams in parallel: back-to-the-landers
on communes; migrant farmworkers organizing in the San Joaquin Valley;
gay and lesbian life proudly out in the open; and, of course, the
outdoorsy-liberal existence that my parents found in Berkeley.
Real
estate was still affordable and the public schools were among the best
in the nation, so it made sense for my parents to shape life around
meaningful work and just enough money to enjoy all that glorious public
land. Mom sold her artwork and helped start a women’s small press; Dad
worked for the local branch of Legal Services and, in 1972, on a
combined income of $13,000, they bought a four-bedroom Berkeley
Victorian for $27,000. They joined the Sierra Club and took us
backpacking and, later, rock-climbing. When my parents felt especially
flush, they took us skiing near Lake Tahoe. They even considered buying a
weekend home at Stinson Beach in Marin — although $10,000, the asking
price, was ultimately too much.
By
the time I graduated from Berkeley High School, in 1985, those Stinson
Beach homes fetched more like $350,000, but even public school teachers
and jazz musicians could still buy modest homes in Berkeley’s lesser
neighborhoods. Families like mine were building a secular religion
around cross-country skiing in winter, rafting or kayaking on the
springtime melt, climbing Yosemite’s cliffs with great new safety gear,
and enjoying cold-water surf courtesy of new wet suit technology. Food,
too: organic produce, local oysters, California king salmon, Napa wine.
It
was soft hedonism, admittedly, but a decent life that remained more or
less available right through my early adulthood — as in 15 years ago.
That’s when my wife and I — “arguably the last two writers ever to buy a
home in San Francisco,” says Mr. Starr — bought a fixer-upper in an
unfashionable neighborhood with a street gang on the corner. Even as our
daughters went off to preschool, it seemed plausible that we might pass
on our lifestyle to them.
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I
REALIZE that most Californians do not live in my Northern California
bubble, and I have no doubt that it all looks very different to the
brothers from Chiapas, Mexico, who once helped me remodel my house, and
who then spent their modest earnings on land back home; or to
fourth-generation Japanese-American kids whose great-grandparents lost
everything when the federal government incarcerated their families in World War II
internment camps. But I do know that all over Northern California,
there is a profound mood of loss: Oakland, long a bastion of
African-American cultural life, has seen housing rental rates jump 20
percent this past year; San Francisco’s lesbian bars are closing, and
the Castro gets less gay by the year.
Then
there’s the shock of raising kids with public schools ranked among the
worst in the nation, and public universities that have more than doubled
in cost since 2007. Most of my outdoor pleasures are still available,
but it’s getting scary with the desertification of subalpine ecosystems,
Sierra snowpack at a historic low, as much as 20 percent
of California’s once-majestic forests at risk of dying, and freeway
traffic so ubiquitous that it can be soul-destroying just getting out of
town to see all this stuff.
The
real estate market, in the meantime, has become so bizarre that my
funky little neighborhood is already beyond the reach of young doctors
and lawyers — techies only need apply — and Stinson Beach is strictly
for plutocrats.
Josh
Churchman, a 63-year-old commercial fisherman who lives near Stinson in
a legendary hippie hide-out called Bolinas, told me a story about
sitting in his living room back in the early ’70s. A neighbor stopped
by, offering to sell Mr. Churchman a nearby home for $20,000. “I had the
money in cash, in the room, but I was building a new fishing boat so I
turned him down,” Mr. Churchman says, in a California tale many times
told. “In a single generation,” says Mr. Churchman, “my hometown went
from where a guy like me could afford a home to ‘Not in your wildest
dreams.’ ” As for the waters that gave Mr. Churchman a living, well, he
hardly bothers fishing for salmon anymore, with the record low catch.
“Eyes
wide open, here,” says Terry Sawyer, co-owner of the nearby Hog Island
Oyster Company, where the big issue is excess atmospheric carbon dioxide
raising ocean acidity so fast that oyster larvae struggle to build
shells. “The California dream of us being wet and making a living and
enjoying ourselves may be threatened,” he says. “I have kids, and I want
that dream intact for them, but it may not be the same dream. I may not
be growing the same organism. I am hopeful, but I am extremely
concerned.”
Everybody
is — except, of course, those living the most obvious new California
dream, the technology gold rush. Try telling successful 25-year-old
entrepreneurs in San Francisco that California’s over and you’ll get
blank stares as they contemplate stock options, condos going up all over
the city, restaurants packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at
farmers’ markets every day.
It’s
not only 25-year-olds saying that. “You’re a naturalist, Duane, so of
course you see it through that lens,” said Mr. Starr, later in our
conversation. “But don’t lose sight of all the great new things
happening, all over California. Marc Benioff just built one of the
greatest pediatric hospitals on the planet a few miles from your house!
And this whole tsunami of foreign investment pouring into California is
really a ringing endorsement of the dream.”
I
drive by Mr. Benioff’s hospital every day, and I know that Mr. Starr is
right. I am also impressed, sincerely, by all these brilliant people
making fortunes seemingly overnight. I recognize that prosperity is
better than its absence, and I like the fact that Californians still
help make the future look hopeful, by developing better solar panels and
electric cars,
sustainable agriculture and marine-protected areas that preserve fish
populations and their habitats. I have also noticed the friendly crowds
jostling my elbows at every surf break and on the shockingly long lines
below Yosemite rock climbs. These people have as much fun as I ever did,
loving the only version of California available to them.
But
that’s my point. Wallace Stegner, the great 20th-century novelist and
environmentalist, in a mood similar to the one I’m feeling — he hated
hippies, worried they might foretell the impending collapse of Western
civilization — wrote that “Like the rest of America, California is
unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and
energetic — only more so.” Put all those qualities together and you get a
place that always belongs to somebody else, before you even know it’s
for sale.
Back
in my 20s, I thought I’d grown up in California too late — after all
the mountains had been climbed and all the good surf breaks discovered.
Right on schedule, in middle age — as the state’s population reaches 40
million — I am now tempted to think that I lived through the end of a
golden era. But maybe the better way to say it is that just like every
other Californian for as long as anybody can remember, I have merely
witnessed a fleeting chapter in a centuries-long human story in which
the lost Eden we all heard about from our parents is eternally changing
into the pretty damn nice place we found — and then, much too soon for
comfort, into the next bewildering mixture of good and bad that we
scarcely recognize.
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