Californian decadence and eternity

Impressions on the half-life of culture and plenty in the Golden State

LOS ANGELES - NOVEMBER

Rich buttery winter sun falling down all around. The engine turned over, thank god—long slow drive along Vermont Avenue in the venerable Mustang, looking out from the seat, which is way down so you feel almost like you’re looking up at the road rather than down at it. Phone dead, reasonably sure that sooner or later I would, in fact, reach the Santa Monica Freeway, and I did. Whole long stretches of blocks around 12th a kind of tianguis in exile with popup tents from Big Five and tanks of agua fresca on card tables.

On the 10 heading west without warning a great mass of fog engulfed us, us as in me and all the other cars, headlights suddenly a hundred little lighthouses, and in an instant we might as well have been on the 280 or something. Great snaking conglomeration transformed into Melvillian mystery lights in the premature dark. California’s mystic grey-blue fickleness. It stayed that way all the way up the swaddled coast. At one point on PCH it receded a bit and you could see the rolling edge of the fogbank creeping toward the shore. A slow motion wave above the waves in the darkness.

I’ve been out to California more than usual this year and up until this time it had begun to seem to me a decadent civilization. Not in abject, precipitous decline the way that some people would like you to believe but in the Douthatian sense, a complacent and even unnoticed downward drift. I remember one moment in particular, earlier this year, cresting the Santa Susana Pass, looking down at Simi Valley below—Los Angeles’s Staten Island, where the cops live and where Ronald Reagan has his presidential library after Stanford wouldn’t let Hoover put it there. A neat grid of unremarkable ranchstyle houses that could be bought on a single middleclass salary when they were built, in the Sixties or before, and now are probably each worth the better part of a million dollars. There they were, bland in the sunlight, slowly rotting, never built to last.

What happens when they all fall apart? This was, it seemed to me, a civilization that had peaked somewhere around 1963 or thereabouts, both in the broadness of its material prosperity and in the acquisition of a distinctive culture, fashioned from elements from the aerospace industry, from the automobile, from the surfboard, from the application of wartime energy to peacetime leisure, and from experiments in consciousness, new drugs, and all the rest that everyone already knows about. There has been no major overhaul of the basic cultural vocabulary for more than half a century. The ensemble has altered a bit; parts of it had been exported to the better part of the world; individual elements had been refined, and the whole thing had taken on a somewhat more upper-middle-class cast, as opposed to the originally simply middle-class orientation. From humble little hippie health food stores to Erewhon, and so on.

And the political economy of the state had gone in the same direction, only more so—the happy band of mostly white homeowners, once the better part of the state, now looked more like a landed aristocracy (albeit a very numerous one) that guarded its privileges jealously against a much expanded ethnic underclass, so much so that it was willing to banish much of its own lower-middle-class to Arizona, Nevada or even Texas, states which are considered the height of bad taste by today’s homeowning Californians (most of whom do not believe that they possess any kind of class prejudice—that’s an East Coast thing).

At some point, I felt, and was not the first to feel, that a reckoning was due for California. This, after all, was a state that (setting aside, for example, a few years’ downturn for the aerospace industry in the LA area in the 1990s) has never endured prolonged economic bad fortune in living memory. A state built like few others around the car in a country where hints, very small ones for now, had begun to emerge that young people might like to get around on foot more. A place dependent like few others on ransacking the increasingly threadbare cultural pantry left behind by the Sixties.

I haven’t discarded this analytical frame—far from it—but driving through the fog up the coast in the growing dark reminded me of the possibility of California as eternal fact. In some way perhaps the logic behind Californians’ own seeming ignorance or indifference in the face of the state’s imbroglio was (besides self-interest) an instinctive sense of this. It’s something I’ve written about before, for example at the close of this New Statesman piece on California, my native state, from 2021, thoughts drawn from a drive through the Lost Coast.

The usual retort to doomsaying about California is a set of liberal, boosterish, Kevin Starr-type canards about how opportunity is not yet dead in the Golden State and can’t we make it wonderful all over again. My feeling this time was something different altogether, a sense of the infinite durability of California, I suppose more in a gauzy kind of mystical way than in any specific social or cultural sense—or even just ecologically, though I don’t personally subscribe to the anti-humanist, earth-first, eco-critical line of thinking that afflicts many Californians (including many spiritual Californians who may never have set foot in the state). Who knows how the state, the mortal California, will muddle through.

There’s a funny contrast between East and West in a geo-cultural-historical sense—and take this with a grain of salt, I’m no John McPhee: the East is, in the classic framing, more “rooted” historically, closer to the Old World; but much of the Eastern seaboard is geologically insignificant, accidental, temporary. Brooklyn, Martha’s Vineyard, each is no more than a glacial moraine, a pile of gravel pushed up and washed out in the last ice age. Four centuries of history and culture, like sand castles on the shore. California, with all its tectonic drama, and all its supposed rootlessness, is “built” on something far more substantial, if not exactly unchanging.

Jonathan Richman, an authority on things East Coast/West Coast, says something along these lines in his song “Rooming House on Venice Beach”—itself, like many other songs on that album, a kind of eulogy for the lost middle-class moment of the Sixties. Describing his titular apartment:

It was rough, rough, rough
With ancient, rustic hippie stuff
It was cheap, cheap, cheap
Nowadays, I hear that rents are steep
It was eerie, eerie, eerie
Followers of Watts and Leary
You could walk, walk, walk
To Marina Del Rey by the dock
Oh, the ancient world was in my reach
From my rooming house on Venice Beach.

This idea of the sea as the ancient world struck me as odd listening to the song—the ocean is just the ocean, after all, ancient or new, it’s all the same. But lost in the fog it seemed clear what he meant somehow …

LOS PADRES NATIONAL FOREST – DECEMBER

Hungover, packed in a bit of a daze and then drove out of foggy Ventura up the coast, sun breaking out around Goleta, up the San Marcos Pass from which down below glimpsed the green vineyards and orange trees and outcrops of the foothills and planted fields further down, the coastal plain covered over by a thick halftransparent gauzy cake of fog. On the other side sun over the godgiven ancient oakdotted country, tan and dark green and gold and the green-blue of Cachuma and then we missed the turn winding through the vineyards, horse country, meandering up and around the hills into backcountry, yuccas and sagebrush, past burned out canyonsides—a fire came through sometime since we were out here a year ago to the day. At the near empty site we ate bread and a tin of sardines and hewed off chunks of salami and made some coffee and walked up the canyon for a bit. The trail passed above clear bluish green pools of water and up onto the first lap of the canyonside where a rise afforded a view of the canyon and a little cluster of cottonwoods around the creek far down at the base of another crenellation of the mighty L.P., whose bare higher rocky face was lit up gold by the sun which was already dropping behind the line of hills. A perfect Los Padres scene, greengrey scrub hills with patches of darker pine, like on a dog’s fine coat, on the shaded sides of the slope; on the sun side, patches of bare tan grass, golden pelt of the hills, and at the higher reaches bare sedimentary rock, tan or dark grey, crowns. I stood among the scrub and listened to two birds call back and forth, single twanging chips of distorted air bouncing back and forth, and then walked down and crossed the clear creek back to camp in the dusk.

Night was cold and full of stars, pure dry lights in the blackness. In the sleeping bag in my jacket and wool balaclava my body was warm but my nose was cold. Swimming through that state of mind that belongs to a night “under canvas,” my father’s term. (In this case under mesh.) The night extending forever in cool infinities. Not asleep but not quite awake. All things recollected and passing about.

Hike up to Potrero camp in a glade by Manzana Creek. Then up Potrero Canyon up toward the looking stark bare sandstone face of the Hurricane Deck, a twentymilelong single massif, the forbidding king of the Los Padres southern section. My parents used to backpack the whole length of it, a feat that seemed to me almost impossible. Where were they getting water on the ridgeline? That great austere rock called to me and I continued up a dry trail that switchbacked steadily up the scrubcovered crenellations of the foothills. Visions of the Hurricane Deck filling my mind, I kept climbing. Looking at a manzanita plant, deep red bark and light green leaves, it appeared in my mind as a fashionable woman’s outfit glimpsed on a sidewalk downtown, dark red coat and light green pants … or, maybe, light green nails and dark red dress … I had been living in New York for too long, or the effort of hiking up this ridge was driving me insane.

I glimpsed a bare crag off to the north where Manzana Creek cut its way toward the sea near Santa Maria, sweating, legs burning, climbing past a shaded darker green and pale green hillside of whitethorn ceanothus, dropping now through an oak meadow, then climbing again, gradually through a corridor of reeds, mercilessly then over bare sandstone up toward the lonely ridgeline—the Deck.

Over to the south noble green hillcrests, distant clusters of cottonwoods. On the opposite side, a lesser row of hills, straight uncrenellated line. I ran down part of the descent, then slowed, my legs screaming, tendons threatening to give way. Screeching to a final halt back down into the ravine as clouds rolled in from beyond the hills slow enough to give me time to limp to the creek and shed my sweatstained clothes, no living soul around, and wade gasping into the bluegreen pool where tiny anchovysized fish scattered and I rubbed the sweater from me under the cold water and stumbled out gasping onto the sharp gravel of the bank.