Sam McManis - Crossing California: A Cultural Topography of a Land of Wonder and Weirdness

A Cultural Topography of a Land of
Wonder and Weirdness

Sam McManis

Crossing California
Copyright 2018 by Sam McManis. All rights reserved.

These stories originally appeared, in different forms, in the Sacramento Bee.

All photos by Sam McManis. All photos originally appeared in the Sacramento Bee and appear here courtesy of the Sacramento Bee,

Cover design by Dominic Grijalva

Published by Craven Street Books

An imprint of Linden Publishing

2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721

(559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447

CravenStreetBooks.com

Craven Street Books and Colophon are trademarks of
Linden Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61035-313-7

135798642

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

For Beth, and for my mother

I was tired, bone tired. Not the kind of tired that is of the Man-I-Really-Worked-My-Tush-Off-Punching-the-Clock variety, or even the soporific blahs that come from sheer unadulterated boredom, and certainly not the type of tired that involves actual physical exertion of, say, a running a marathon or scaling Half Dome.

No, this was a specific kind of tired known, at least to me, as California Freeway Ennui. I had just concluded yet another weeklong sortie into the wilds of California. Id visited deserts high and low, a traffic-choked metropolis, a few one-pump-of-the-brake-pedal towns, a mountain retreat and a seaside highway. Id even traversed a dusty trail to the summit of Mount Wilson, where, if you squinted real hard and engaged in selective observation, you might forget youre still in Los Angeles, where even after all these years the air is opaque and palpable.

Weary as I may have been, longing to just set cruise control and zone out on Interstate 5 back to my Northern California home, I had one last mission to complete: to stand in the center, the dead geographic center, of the state. It was stupid and sentimental and probably would be a colossal disappointment, but so be it. I had seemingly been everywhere else in California, all four corners and many pit stops in between, but had always put off this side trip, mostly because it was so far afieldabout 7 miles south of North Fork in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where pine and oak battle for arboristic supremacy and where a gas station is as hard to find as an extinct grizzlyand I had always quasi-scheduled it on the return trip from a Southern California sojourn. Something always came up. Id be barreling down the Grapevine, that asphalt DMZ that separates SoCal from the Central Valley, where you can view miles of flat agriculture land straight ahead on I-5 and look east and see the Sierra range from the Highway 99 route. Inevitably, Id think up excuses not to veer right. It was either the wrong time of year and snow would be obscuring the center-of-California marker said to be put there by proud Sierra dwellers, or ominous summer thunder clouds would loom over the range, or I was losing the light and the prudent thing would be to put it off to another time.

This time, I remained vigilant and veered right onto 99. No more excuses. The center of California, and the enlightenment that I surely thought would come to me there, awaited. I followed the GPS (which, in the foothills, I like to think stands for Giving Poor Service) directions exactly as plotted. Naturally, I got lost. I had gone 7.1 miles beyond North Fork, as directed. I had seen that the highway, which changed names several times, had turned into Italian Bar Road, which was right on course. I had passed the U.S. Forest Service office, another marker. But now I found myself whizzing by a sign welcoming me to Fresno Countydecidedly not my destination.

Lost, I tell you. Hopelessly lost. Donner Party lost.

As I pulled over to the soft shoulder to regain my bearingsand fret about the mere quarter tank of gas I had remainingmy smartphone was dumbstruck: No service. I put my head against the steering wheel, ready to bag the whole idea, which was flawed from the start, anyway.

Then it hit me: How futile even to try to get to the center of California, either literally or figuratively. It may exist on some brass marker set in stone on some nondescript hillside, but what does that have to do with trying to find the real heart of the state, to understand the inner core of Californias being, to, in the callow words of the New Agey folks I encountered so many times in my travels, center ones self?

Enough. I turned the car around and headed back.

So, sorry to disappoint those who embrace clich, those who find comfort in easy categorization and a sense of order in the reinforcement of hoary stereotypes, but there is no one California. No such thing as a typical Californian, either. Nope. Nada. Doesnt exist.

My fellow media mavens lieor maybe just lazily exaggerate to avoid diligent sussing out such inconvenient things as facts or nuanced storieswhen defining California as where all the fruits and nuts are on the Left Coast. Many a comedian, lo these many years at your local Laff Factory, has made a decent living skewering wacky Left Coasters. They do it because thats what people want or expect to hear; thats where the punch lines reside. Whether it be from jealousy (the mild weather, the gorgeous terrain) or insecurity (those Hollywood elite Beautiful People, with their hard bodies and smooth Botoxed visages, and those equally hardy, healthy NorCal outdoorsy types), they want to believe that Californians just arent authentically American, that they do not possess values of the heartland, that they will not let pass through their artificially plumped lips anything foodstuff not organic, vegan, macrobiotic, locavore and artisan crafted, that they would, as with their extreme opposites in Texas, secede from the Union in a heartbeat if they could.

But Im here to tell you that its just not so. Some of the most conservative, antigovernment, scarlet-necked shit kickers Ive encountered reside along the Interstate 5 corridor north of Sacramento and on up to the state line. And, by contrast, some of the crunchiest, patchouli-scented neohippie slackers call Austin, Texas, home, even after the South by Southwest carnival packs its tents and moves on. So, like, go figure.

True story, one that says it all about the hearts, minds and lower intestines of a bifurcated (or maybe just bipolar) Californian: In late 2015, I saw an SUVdo note, a hybrid SUVcareening down Interstate 5 in the San Fernando Valley with an Im Ready for Hillary sticker on the left back bumper and a TrustTed sticker, as in Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, on the right bumper. As if that wasnt confusing enough, a window sticker proclaimed, Deer: The Other Red Meat, contrasted with the license-plate holder boasting, This Car Stops for Broccoli. I sped up, changed lanes like a madman, to catch a glimpse of the driver, but he or she hit the gas and took off before the inevitable freeway gridlock near Burbank.

Little matter, nothing surprises me anymore. It couldve been an Asian American skinhead with septum piercings listening to Joni Mitchell while sipping boba tea, or a trustafarian white girl whose vaping mist enveloped her Native American dream catcher dangling from the rearview mirror while cranking up the Toby Keith on the radio.

Believe me, Ive been up and down California, traversed much of its 163,696 square miles by car, foot, train, bike, bladder-jarring jeep, Greyhound and recalcitrant horse. Ive roamed from the pine-scented forests of Del Norte County to the fragrant sage scrub of Imperial County; from the otherworldly starkness of Mono Lake to the crashing waves along the Lost Coast. Ive stalked the tony aisles of the newly minted Broad Museum in gentrified downtown Los Angeles, and quick-footed it through the International Banana Museum along the desiccated shores of the moonscaped Salton Sea. Ive inadvertently gotten my car stuck in a tree at a cheesy drive-thru giant sequoia roadside attraction along the hemp highway between Mendocino and Humboldt, and witnessed, with both fascination and cant-look-away horror, grown men and women, sans children and sans inhibitions, belt out full-throated versions of Let It Go at a Disneyland sing-along.