How Much Longer Can California Bear the Weight of Our Dreams?

Even before its mythology of utopian promise captured the American imagination, Spanish explorers named California after a fictional island in the 16th century novel Las Sergas de Esplandian, about a paradise rich in gold and resources. For centuries afterwards, cartographers continued to map California as an island even as it became clear the discovery was attached to the mainland. To this day, the Golden State continues to bear the weight of our fantasies of limitless splendor.

Of course, the discovery of this land was not a discovery at all, as over 300,000 people had been peacefully inhabiting it for over ten thousand years and carefully tending to the unique terrain and weather patterns. In their intimate relationship with the land, Native tribes had developed sustainable farming practices and forest management techniques, such as cultural burning to revitalize the lands and promote biodiversity. Although European settlers remarked at the beauty of the well-tended land, they regarded these practices as primitive. Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, Ron W. Goode, points out the different approach to the land between the two groups of settlers. “We thrive on the land, not survive. We look to our grandchildren’s grandchildren, seven generations, basically 120 years down the road, that’s where we look.” (Schelenz). As colonization of this new frontier continued, the native population began to diminish and with it, the health of the land.

After winning the Mexican-American War in 1848, in a fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. acquired California as well as the economic and market potential of the state’s fertile land and resources. In the Gold Rush that soon followed, hundreds of thousands of Americans began their migration west toward a new frontier. Indigenous populations suffered once again as newcomers brought disease and genocide upon their people while they tore through 12 billion tons of earth using mercury to extract the precious metal from its ore, leading to toxic exposure that continues today (International Indian Treaty Council).

In its nascent stages of U.S. development, California was already laying a foundation of inequality where enterprising businessmen were acquiring property in huge swaths. Given the state’s temperamental weather conditions, only commercial farmers were able to afford the irrigation systems necessary to grow in the unique environment. Railroad companies were offered land grants as compensation for the economic growth and tax money their lines would generate. Once the lines were built developers created a new economy through intentional propaganda that tapped into the fantasies of Americans who were told there was someplace better than the one they were, if they kept heading west, following the sun toward the edge of the sea.

After graduating high school in 1965, my dad was listless with no vision for what he might do with his life. His dad was the janitor at his school and his mom worked at the Sebago shoe factory. He started working day shifts at the paper mill and tooling around with his friends, getting into fist fights at night. He was still shy with girls and when he saw one walking toward him on the same sidewalk, he’d cross to the other side. Growing bored of the repetition of factory work, he enlisted in the army and went to VietNam where he continued getting into fist fights, mostly with GI men from his own unit. After returning home, his father died from a heart attack, unexpectedly. At his funeral my dad, the eternal class clown, cracked jokes and kept cheerful while averting his gaze and after everyone had gone home, he walked into the woods and cried.

In the spring of 1975, he graduated from USM with a teaching degree, which it turns out he had no interest in using. That Fall, after borrowing his mom’s car to drive to central Maine for a job interview, he boarded a bus the next day for California with $40 in his pocket, maybe to give it a shot at a singing career or maybe just to leave behind the possibility of spending his life in the obscurity of a yellowing classroom. When he got to L.A. he went on one singing audition where, in a theater on Sunset Blvd, with the house lights down low and the spotlight permeating his skin, he forgot the words.

Like my father, my mom was also escaping the east coast with an eye toward something brighter than the Levittown neighborhood she grew up in where the streets were lined with tract homes, coming together in seams over the old potato fields, like the teeth of a zipper. My grandfather who served in World War II as a tail gunner moved with his new bride into the Long Island development built to accommodate veterans like him and allowed them to purchase a home with their GI Bill.

The suburban community offered its own ultra-concentrate promise of the American dream with the introduction of mass produced homes, prefabricated with the assurance of a whites only policy. The efficiency of this assembly line urban planning almost spread through the nation. My grandparents were one of thousands of couples with the opportunity to own a home in these tracts after the war. They raised five children who played kickball and potsy in the summer under a blanket of streetlight and sat in the pews of St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church. In the winter of 1976, my grandmother passed away after a painful battle with scleroderma, a disease that causes an overproduction of collagen in the body, which fashioned her trim figure that was once on the pages of magazines, into a sort of prison. My mom dropped out of college shortly after without telling anyone and climbed into a friend’s passenger seat, and let the I-80’s belt of asphalt take her away.

My dad found work at a restaurant called the Boston Half Shell in the first floor of a downtown skyscraper where live lobsters were shipped in every week from Maine. The economy of movement he’d learned from factory work made him the fastest bartender they had and he worked the service bar, handling drink tickets for the restaurant, the lounge, plus four seats at the end of the bar. While introducing herself in her native accent, one of the cocktail waitresses handed him a ticket, then walked back to the lounge to collect more drink orders, and he watched the snug navy borders of her sailor-themed uniform lean in close to a table of regulars from the advertising office on the thirty-third floor, and observed the attention in her eyes as she read their mouths.

My parents went to the movies on their first date. America was celebrating its bicentennial anniversary that year by seeing Rocky in the movie theater; a hero’s journey about a shy but masculine working class everyman, hustling to get by in the decayed streets of Philadelphia, who is given the shot of a lifetime to prove himself as a contender and get the girl. In the midst of the social tumult of the era, Rocky became an anthem for blue collar workers crushed under the weight of progress, and a fairytale that allowed them to believe the dream their forefathers wished, could come true and that heroes could emerge from the wars we wage with ourselves. When the movie ended my mom bought my dad a Rocky tee shirt at the concession stand.

In the early 20th century film studios left New York and set up production in Los Angeles to avoid the patent laws for equipment, held by Thomas Edison. The location was ideal for shooting because of its reliably warm and sunny weather and its proximity to various terrains that could portray jungles, deserts, forests and snow-capped mountains. Touted as a landscape of rugged individualism, California rejected union labor which meant studios could afford the long hours of carpentry and the skilled eyes of set dressers and other tradesmen that were required to build elaborate sets. Los Angeles owed its initial success to the ability to seemingly break off from the consequences of reality.

By 1929 more than 90 million moviegoers visited the theater once a week. Many Americans, nostalgic for simpler prewar times, cursed the industry as a corrupting force as the roaring 20’s picked up speed with the introduction of Ford’s mass-produced Model T and a culture that was losing sight of agrarian pastoral life. In the wake of the stock market crash, filmmaking continued to move forward as audiences returned to theaters again and again in escape of the wreckage of the Great Depression.

As its industries flourished throughout the century, Los Angeles’ population became increasingly disharmonious to the natural features of the landscape. City planners used deceptive tactics that secured land and water rights in the Sierra Mountains and allowed them to build an aqueduct system to accommodate the growing metropolis. The Los Angeles River, once the lifeblood of Native tribes that had grown accustomed to its rhythms, now caused unpredictable drought and flooding which threatened the surrounding increasingly dense populations. In 1938 Los Angeles County Public Works began its work to cap the 52 mile long river with a concrete lid.

Three months after seeing Rocky, my mom proposed to my dad in his Dodge Dart on the way to their last shift of the week. By Monday they were Married in Las Vegas, with the witness of a Polaroid photo. At the end of 1977 my mom began sewing inserts into her cocktail uniform as her belly grew with twins. They saved money to buy a house in a suburb outside of downtown and by the mid 1980’s we were a family of five with two dogs and two cars that my dad washed in the driveway on Sundays with a soapy mit in the last few minutes of light when the day no longer cast its deep shadow under everything that is tall and magnificent. My mom stood on the front porch and watched us play in her old tee shirts. The empty space of her billowed over us like time caught around our little bodies. At night I’d listen to the ballet of her solitude from my bed then she’d close the dishwasher and I’d fall asleep in the sound of the whooshing.

What I didn’t know is that after I was born she was diagnosed with cancer that was removed but came back four years later, permanently, in some sense of the word. The last time I saw her was in her hospital room on Halloween and I waved goodbye in my clown costume through the door frame. I didn’t know I would learn the meaning of the word permanent so slowly and get so used to the word wishing. She was 36 and the first among her sisters to be diagnosed. Soon her sisters would realize the cancer’s mindless production was spreading through members of the rest of the family, as well as Long Island and Nassau County, which became a well-documented cancer cluster (Jacquez). Research was conducted to investigate potential environmental factors, such as pesticides from the potato fields the neighborhoods were built on or radiation from the high tension wires that surrounded the area, but with no conclusive outcome.

The development apparatus that built Levittown, including the discriminatory redlining policies of the FHA, became widespread during America’s rapid urbanization. Minority communities in Los Angeles were left starved for resources without the tax revenue that had been accumulated through property ownership and generational wealth in more affluent communities. In 1992, footage of the police brutality committed against Rodney King by the LAPD dropped like a match in Downtown LA and ignited the anger that breathed through the halls of its brittle infrastructure. In the midst of the protests, outside of the downtown restaurant where he still bartended, my dad got into a fight. As he came back in, his bloody hands untied his apron and he put his apron on the bar, saying, “I quit,” mostly to himself. In the early hours of the next morning he drove the stake of a homemade For Sale sign into the front lawn of our house and we moved to Maine in time for the next school year.

As I got older, California’s mythology included a more personal dimension of fantasy for me, as a place I could go to in my mind where my mom lived. After high school, I drove back to Los Angeles, with the conflicting desires to escape and be seen. When I visited my old house in the suburbs and realized it was too small to hold all the perfect things I had imagined it to. I went into the city, and looked for the spotlight in the same way that my parents did, with the hope that it could give me a different place to be and in a way it did, in the plays I began reading, and in the black boxes of the theaters I performed in. But what California offers in its fantasy is equal in measure to its brutality. I continued to move between Maine and California, trying to stitch the two sides of myself into a whole person, or to build the bridge that could connect me to the island of my imagination.

Spanish explorers gave California the same name as de Montalvos’ fictional island after finding pearls within the shores of its brisk waters, like the explorers in the novel did. Historians believe the book’s passages about the land being rich with gold are what set the men on a search of their own.

The creative force of the narratives we carry with us is powerful. It is strong enough to build worlds and change the courses of history. As California makes headlines every day with weather disasters as diverse as its landscape, we are reminded there is no force more powerful than nature itself. In the 1700’s officials would eventually accept that California was not an island. It had always belonged, for better or worse, to the spectacular continuum of the rest of the world. We are left now only to reconcile the space we placed in between.