quetzalicow: Will you take me as I am, California?

I recently went back home to California and it's taken me a while to chew on my visit, because it hit me hard, like it always does, because it's home and it's so much more than home. Like all returns, the trip back reminded me of who I am and not just where I came from, but how far I've gone since leaving home, yet how badly I need home because it's me. It's in my blood. It flows through me and when I'm there I feel alive. California's home and it's so much more. It's the pain of knowing what could have been had I stayed, of seeing a Paradise Lost.

When I left California, I did the most Californian thing I could possibly have done. Because California is about the spirit of going further, the spirit of adventure, seeking life and the exuberant joys and deep pains it brings you. Leaving California and being on the run, I've lived in 2 continents and traveled many tens of thousands of miles through all the states west of the Mississippi. And I've experienced places of beauty, like the Northern Cascades, and places that made me feel at home, like Lawrence, Kansas, but no place has marked me, formed me, hurt me, yet made me feel the exquisite ecstasy quite like California. And I take it with me everywhere I go.

People have come to California since it became California and it's been a melting pot and the United States's most diverse state since the times of the Gold Rush. California's name came from a mythical island populated by Amazons from a 16th century chivalric novel Las Sergas de Esplandián. Caliph is a word that came to Spain, like many Spanish words, from the Arabic, and means the caliph's domain, a place of infidel rebellion.

In 1849, prosperous farmers crossed the continent putting themselves at risk of cholera and starvation--Indian raids, contrary to popular belief, were rarer than lightning strikes--just to make it to the Promised Land and the place of infidel rebellion.

Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" should be California's anthem, but no artist captures the spirit of California quite like Joni Mitchell in her song "California" from the 1971 album Blue. Blue is one of human creativity's greatest achievements and has always been an album that has hit me devastatingly hard. Anybody who has felt the deep pangs of love--the joy, the tremendous sorrow, the pain that aches in your heart years later, will be hit by Blue like a freight train. Joni bares it all, giving us everything, the honest view of a 28-year-old who has loved and lost. The album's 6th song is "California" and it always makes me a bit homesick. I remember listening to its opening lines during a cold winter living in Barcelona--the cold was made horrible by the thin walls of the ancient building I lived in--as Joni describes sitting on a park in Paris and thinking about how "old and cold and settled in its ways" Europe is and it struck a deep chord with me in my homesickness, making my heart ache for California, which is just the opposite of those old, cold, settled ways.

What is poignant is how Joni, from a small town in Saskatchewan sings about California as if it's her home. In my last year living in California, I was with a Irish girl and what struck me when I first played her Joni's "California" was that she said California was the only home she could have known except for Ireland, a place for which she had deep nationalistic feelings. And that sentiment, which Joni expresses so well in the song and with the line "Will you take me as I am, California?" is something that resonates. California, for better or worse, will take people as they are. And it's an exuberant love that comes with calling California home for those many millions who have made the pilgrimage to call it their home. California will take people as they are. It will take those pilgrims as they are, even if it was the state that most systematically exterminated the Indians to make room for these people coming from around the globe.

Despite the mass extermination of more than 130,000 Indians, California has been a land of acceptance, of taking people as they are. We can talk about the gold rush and the internet, but California's main business has been as a refuge for the freaks, the weirdos and anybody who wasn’t accepted wherever they came from and found a home, a paradise, in California. When you arrive in California, it's like you made it. A paradise beyond description, where even extreme hyperbole does not do it justice. The redwoods, bigger than your imagination, the deserts at the edge of extreme, the decadence of the old palaces and miners' bars in what was the Emporium of the Pacific, San Francisco, and LA, not a city but 100s of square miles of just about everything, from the most popular and extravagant celebrities to the most down and out desperados, and just about anything in between.

A Golgotha of sin, California’s air of transience makes resonate the idea that anything’s possible. Any wild long journey across a continent will do that to you. It infects you with optimism. It's the American Dream on steroids, and when it gets weird and strange and colorful, it’s like the American Dream on highly potent acid.

The California Dream

California is still reinventing itself, taking the 21st century gold miners who come to the state to build apps and make the devices that control our thoughts and start the companies that are reinventing our world.

What's special about California is that it will take you as you are. What's also true is the notion that when you're in California, you can say to anybody, "I came here from somewhere else, just like everybody else." And it's true. Everybody is from somewhere else. Even the legacy Californians who may have 4 or 5 generations of Californian in them, they're so rare, and their families still came from somewhere else.

Starting with my fishing buddy Anthony and his family from Italy, everybody in California is from somewhere else. And we started by going to a fishing spot we call the House. I call it the Compound. We’ve always seen it with the windows closed and it looked like a compound to me. But Anthony’s boss knew the guy who built the House, the last one on the utility grid between Pescadero and Santa Cruz. The guy who built the strange house was an Economics professor at Stanford who predicted the 2008-09 housing crisis and all of its implications and wrote a book about it in the early 70s whose name I can’t remember. And he died before he could enjoy the strange house, which is really a long, long hall with elegant rooms straight out of Sunset Magazine that are practically pure windows. And when you’re inside the windows are made of some glass that truly enhances your vision of the ocean below, making the light of the sea dance.

The Compound

As we drove down to the Compound, somewhere between San Gregorio and Pescadero, we saw a school of hundreds and hundreds of dolphins, jumping in the air. They were intermixed with seals who also must have been chasing a bait fish of some kind. Anthony’s boss made us some delicious Bloody Mary’s and his wife made some delicious sandwiches which were made more delicious after sitting by the blustery sea air.

And then we spent the afternoon at Sam’s Chowder House drinking cocktails. With a sunset over the satellite dish by Maverick’s Beach, where Kirk Lombard, the Intertidal Harvester, sea forager of epic proportions searches for horseneck clams. I’ll even kiss the sunset...

And then it was golf in paradise. And below the magnificent Ritz-Carlton, right under the golf course, we get the remains of a strange brokedown palace reminiscent of the head of the Statue of Liberty in the classic Planet of Apes, the climatic scene at the end when we see what remains after the destruction of Earth that takes place. It’s a great revelation--this horrible strange world where the Apes rule and humans are subjects is actually Earth and we see the remains on this remote beach not too different from the beach in Half Moon Bay right under the Ritz-Carlton. This apocalyptic future right under the decadence of the Ritz.

Punto Mónico Sur: the Brokedown Palace

And karaoke in Korea Town in Santa Clara after a smashing Korean meal. Guns n’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience,” every Johnny Cash song in the book. Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock.” And last but not least “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

The beggar man in front of my home town coffee shop who has been there just about all of my 30-some years--He probably takes the train in from his 1.3 million dollar house in Hillsborough, we’ve all said my whole life and maybe it’s true.

And before leaving, drinks at my first local, the Dutch Goose, with my junior high gym teacher.