The way home. California. My home state. Not the state I was born in, or the one I grew up in, but the state Michelle and I are raising our kids in, and because this has become their home, it has become ours as well.
The name "California" comes from an old 16th century Spanish fantasy novel called Las Sergas de Esplandian, a story about a beautiful island inhabited by amazon women, with streets paved of gold. When the Spanish first landed to the south, and heard rumors of the golden cities up north, they named that northern area California.
With the Pacific Ocean to its west, the High Sierras with its harsh seasonal climate immediately to the east, and an ocean current that flows from the north to the south along its coast, California took a long time for the europeans to get settled here. Even coming up the coast from South America on their sailing ships was a murderous trial, pushing against the punishing currents and the prevailing winds.
Once they arrived here, they found that, unlike the rest of the nation, the native americans living here had no agriculture to speak of, no large settlements, and lived frugally in small clans, with a diet comprising marginally of only sparse game, and acorns.
They could cook anything out of acorns. California was a beautiful place with its stunning coastlines, its mountains and its lakes, but culturally, it was very much steeped in the past, even by Native American standards.
Of course the finding of Gold and Silver in the 1840s motivated the europeans sufficiently to find ways over the Sierras, and once those ways were found, the old native american trails were graded sufficiently into passable roads, and the white peoples then truly came across in droves, and then more droves to follow the first droves. To this day, it could be said that the european westward migrations have never stopped driving into California. It's probably the weather more than anything else that brings people out here. While most of the rest of the country suffers from either the cold, or the rain or the heat at various times of the year, California enjoys a year round temperate climate. Not too hot, or cold, and only shirt sleeves are needed at 2 in the afternoon most days from January to December. When the rain comes, it is usually only in the short 2 or 3 months of winter. Otherwise, you can go out in your front yard and play frisbee in the middle of a February afternoon. The rest of the year is dry, and you never have to think about it. People come out here for a visit, and they want to stay. California is truly the Emerald City.
***********
When I began this bike trip across America from east to west, and as I passed through small towns, I started out by culling little news stories and pictures of interest online to capture something of the flavor of each town. But then as I began to read more and more of the towns i was passing through, my interests deepened into how these towns were formed, and I found myself peeling back layers of history to get to the original inhabitants. Then, as the layers came away, I found buried beneath the contemporary histories, the deeper story of the people that came before the europeans, and the ruthless slaughter of the native american nation, they who lived on this continent for 13,000 years before the white men ever stepped foot on these shores. This became the central narrative, then, I
thought. Buried beneath the pavements and parking lots of the burger kings and the shopping malls was the greater story of a nation of men, women and children being slaughtered along the banks of rivers across America by a more technically adept people, just so that a newer nation could plant itself, and grow rich from the spilled blood.
Then, as I crossed America, from town to town, these stories of genocide became too numerous and painful for me to track any further, so much so that it has left me now with a wound left unattended. I can not now fix it, and it is a horror that can only be stepped over. I had to move on. I moved on to find other interests in the towns I passed through, peeling back some more layers, and thus found an America steeped in larger and more ancient geological forces. An America continually changing its shape over a period of millions of years, throttled by the movement of Plate Tectonics and Oceans. Of Glaciers and Volcanoes. Of prehistoric flora and fauna that once populated the country. An ancient land of Deserts, and Oceans that no longer exist. And again, the stories perpetuated themselves. All different, all the same.
Time robs everyone of us of everything, and the new continually blossoms over the old. I guess if I have learned anything, it is that each town, even the ones I thought would be plain at the outset, each has within them a story, a rich mosaic of history, each one contributing to the American fabric. I also have my personal history in this country, having traveled to all states save that of Alaska. I have tried to intersperse some of that history along the way.
*********
A little while back, Michelle, and the kids and I were standing on the corner of some California town waiting to cross the street to get breakfast. Then Michelle says to me "look at us", and suddenly I realized that we were waiting for the light to change even though there was no traffic. We didn't even think about it. Back east we never would have waited. I looked down at our feet and we were all wearing sandals in February. Though we were not darker or golden eyed, I realized then that we had unconsciously become californians.
*********
I am on my last 20 miles from home. Home to family, hearth and home. The closeness of it will make it all downhill from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment