California Continues

I'd like to follow up a little on what I started yesterday. I came across the following Guardian article while surfing about this morning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt

It is difficult to explain all the things that California is, much less how it has come to its present state of affairs, in a single article. It is extremely difficult to explain it to someone who has never lived there for any length of time. Taking a vacation somewhere gives you a glimpse of something, reading articles about a place only gives you the impression of the writer (or what the writer intends for you to grasp) of the place.

I went to California in November of 1965, a new recruit of the US Navy. I was 19 years old, beginning my adult life, my 4 year enlistment cutting off any retreat to the security of my home. I saw myself as a Floridian, a rival state of California. The two states compete for tourist dollars, in some agriculture (citrus mostly), and for growth in population. We both tout our beaches, our climates, our entertainment, our lifestyles.

I was excited and fearful. Change like this almost always provides a dichotomy of emotion. Especially for me. It must be something I enjoy, that conflicting emotion because I have moved often in my life. As a nascent surfer, I had two places that loomed large in my imagination: California and Hawaii. Hawaii was almost imaginary, almost Utopian and unreal. California was there, real, solid (more or less... since they have earthquakes), attainable.

San Diego boot camp was my only demand from the Navy. I insisted on it as a condition of enlistment. I had no desire to go to Michigan in November, I knew what northern state winters were like. I had no idea that I wouldn't get near a beach in San Diego for 4 months. Nor that the weather would be so unlike the image I had in my head.

The make up of the company in boot camp was over 50% Californian. Most of those were southern Californians, predominantly from the Los Angeles area. California is really two primary states; southern California and northern California. It is actually more than two and the "northern" part is really the "middle". There are no borders and these divisions are subject to perspective and imagination.

Inside the two main divisions, are two city-states; San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each represents a certain life-style, a certain personality and view of life. And they also represent the two faces California most often presents as its image.

Southern Californians are blond, healthy, tanned, and always smiling. None of which is true. But that's the image. It is such a strong image that I once described my own son and his friends as "California Clones". And, of course, he and his friends were mostly blond, healthy, tanned, and smiling at that time.

Northern Californians were quirky, smarter, and paler. Tans, it seemed, were harder to come by.

Southern Californians were more arrogant. Northern more friendly.

Since most of the 20 years I spent in California were in southern California, I know it a little better and it more represents My California.

California seemed to want to be everything to everybody. Everything good, that is. It attracted people like some kind of biological magnet. And it provided for them. In southern California freeways, huge concrete ribbons going seemingly everywhere, spawned and encouraged a car oriented culture. And they seemed to ride above the city (actually, even Los Angeles is a complex of cities with hardly noticed borders) with off-ramps dropping down into little communities that had their own, often ethnic, flavor; Mexican, African-American, Asian, white suburbanite (a distinctly different suburbanite than you might find in New York, Ohio, or Kansas), all separated by the freeways that rode on earthen walls between them.

California catered to the influx by building. More freeways, more houses, more businesses, definitely more fast food places, more entertainment, all greeting more and more people. Welcome to the Promised Land!

And it is a monument to the fact that growth cannot continue forever, to be paid for by more growth and and future generations. The bill, it seems, has come due. That beautiful starlet has moved past middle age and the make-up and botox cannot hide the signs of a life spent in the fast lane.