Twenty-Five Years in California

It’s an anniversary. As I write, it’s been 25 years since I arrived in southern California after driving west for three days, covering about 2,200 miles.

I had a specific reason to come here, and that motivation has been justified as reason enough — and more — for all time.

On each year’s anniversary, I ask myself some version of the question, “What have I learned?” If I haven’t learned anything in a quarter of a century, I’m not paying attention.

I’ve lived in portions of Los Angeles for the entire time, and some uncountable number of things I’ve learned are related to what it’s like to live in a metropolis of ten million people, after spending several decades in a small, Midwestern city.

I’ve covered a reasonable swath of the town, but if it were my life’s mission to exhaust what there is to see in L.A., I’d fail. Too large, too diverse, too widespread.

That — in essence — is the challenge that faces lifelong residents and newcomers alike who hope to understand what “California” is. And that’s what’s made these 25 years so stimulating and endlessly challenging: There’s always more to see, more to learn.

A well-known simile compares the difficulty of summarizing large, complex matters to a committee of blindfolded people trying to describe an elephant by touch: One person finds the trunk, four people find legs, another the tail, and so on.

One can never hope to find THE California: there isn’t just one. What do you think of when you envision California? A Pacific Ocean beach?

Disneyland?

Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada?

Giant Redwood forests?

Or, some part of the vast tracts of the Mojave Desert, only a portion of which is encompassed by Joshua Tree National Park?

That list ignores a thousand miles of coastline, volcanoes, more deserts, theme parks, movie studios, forests, grasslands … cities. We even have cities other than Los Angeles, and the first thing you think of when you hear “California” might be in one of them.

I’ve also left out wildlife, and architecture — all the libraries …

… an enormous number of not-to-be-missed things. Not to mention the people I’ve met, whose diversity, energy, intelligence and creativity make them like people you meet everywhere: endlessly, fascinatingly unique — each one of them.

If this subject comes up at dinner time, each person around the table might name one of those iconic places, or any number of other vastly different California environments. Yet, an enormous portion of California gets overlooked by almost everyone, because it doesn’t have enormous cities, ocean beaches or even many palm trees. Nevertheless, some significant portion of the food you’re eating at that dinner may have been grown in California’s immense Central Valley, which produces about 60 per cent of the produce grown in the U.S.

That’s what I celebrate on this anniversary, and what it is I hope I’ve learned: the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to see so much of California. I’ve been blessed by good fortune. The brief list and few photos above are a small portion of what I’ve seen.

And I celebrate a hope my blessings continue, and I’ll keep going. I’ll never see it all, but there’s more out there. In fact, let’s climb up here and take a look around ….

Oobop shebam

Links in this post connect to some of the hundreds of articles I’ve written about California.

© Brad Nixon 2018. Redwood National Park, Central Valley and BN on Obsidian Dome photos © M. Vincent 2018. Used by kind permission. Thank you, Counselor, for 25 years of discoveries.