“A society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day”
Pico Iyer on California, The Global Soul

I.

First there is El Morro, 1993.  17,000 acres, 366 homes.  I am six.  My chief memory is of the word evacuation.  We are evacuees.  In exile under a ruinous red sun.  What fascinates me most is the blackened sky, destroying all childhood notions that at midday the world will be light and full of cheer.  On a yellow school bus I sit next to a classmate, a burly boy with ringlets and enormous feet, who sobs with his face pressed against the window.

Hot Santa Ana winds push the fire from El Toro Road to Emerald Bay, Crystal Cove, Laguna Beach.  Neighbours lose houses but ours is spared.  We return to it a few days later.  My world is now a wasteland, a wilderness of ash and miscellany: what remains.  We walk through people’s flattened living rooms, see the curled edges of furniture, the melted pots and pans.  Teacups and saucers, a frame, a telephone.  Detritus.

II.

After the fire, the dreams start.  A methodical prioritizing of possessions: what would you save, if you had time enough to plan? Ever after I’m haunted in sleep by the desire to rescue a favourite pair of jeans, a box of books.  My birth certificate.  You could say it’s a way of discovering what’s important to you, except that the desire is always irrational, impulsive.  In the dreams I wander the hallways of my parents’ house, trying to fit as much as I can into a suitcase, including bars of chocolate with old family photos.  Trying to hold on to something that might so easily disappear in a cloud of smoke.

III.

Then Gaviota.  After we move to the Ranch everything seems more fragile.  Impossible to forget that the land is master of itself, that we are insignificant creatures.  And besides, we are more vested, more rooted here.  My father jackhammered a place for us amongst these rocks, built a sense of belonging out of stucco, satio tiles, a wooden frame.

2004.  This is the weekend that I am graduating from high school but what I remember is a sense of homelessness.  For two days I roam the towns along the 101 in my two-door sedan, carrying an assortment of clothing in the trunk, a few stray objects, several notebooks.  For two days I am the sum of what is in that trunk.  Freedom, terrible freedom.

If we lose the house, I think, at least I’ll have my diploma.

IV.

“But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.” Jawaharlal Nehru.

V.

I return to California after a year in a rainy country. I am not so distanced from it that I have forgotten; not yet.  I still sniff the air on hot summer nights and in wet November, when the English light the Guy, I’m a bundle of nerves watching the sparks from the bonfire.

We drive north from Los Angeles, listening to a country western station.  Near Santa Barbara, a voice cuts into the music, warning of a fire nearby.  We follow a line of fire trucks from Ventura; at Glen Annie, the northernmost exit before the no man’s land between Goleta and Buellton, they turn off and we see great orange flames on the hillsides.  The sky, even in midnight navy, has a strange glow.  Ahead of us is the ghost of a car, covered in ash.

The next day we try to read the haze.  The ash comes down like snow, so that in the afternoon you reach for my hair, pluck a few white flakes from the dark strands, say, it looks like you have dandruff.  On the radio, people are calling to talk about a power outage in town.  All the traffic lights are out, says one woman.  I’d like to see the National Guard home from Iraq so that they can deal with things like this.

Welcome to California, I say to you.

A place used to destruction.  She is systematically deconstructed, undone each year by the elements.  Ravaged by wildfires in summer and by mudslides and floods in winter.  Her spirit lies in her ability to stand shouting in the face of an inferno and then to go on after all that.  She’s a skeletal creature, really, reduced in every season to bones and faith.  Who are these madmen who live here?  What has possessed us?

“There is science, logic, reason,” Edward Abbey once wrote, “there is thought verified by experience.  And then there is California.”

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I’m doing a reasonable amount of reading at the moment. Revisiting Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (secretly thinking, ok, if she can win a Booker, why can’t I?), alongside heavy perusal of a book called Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War by Peter Leese. This may or may not be research for something; it remains to be seen (or admitted).

Also finishing Beloved. My opinion of it this time around is cloudy at best. It’s a shame, because my hatred for it was so pure for so many years. Overwritten, overwrought, over-hyped. Simple. Now I think, there may be no joy in reading it, but maybe I was a little hard on Toni Morrison, because sometimes there’s something just this side of beautiful about the whole thing. Maturity breeds indecision, it would seem.

Also on my mind: Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk, which I’m strolling through for structural and narrative inspiration (this may or may not be the reason for my recent obsession with seasons).

*The title of this post refers not to “Reading” the place but in fact the act of “reading” a book, to clarify any possible confusion…

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The Man’s been telling me about these guys for absolutely ages, but in classic fashion, I’ve ignored him up until now. I’m sure many of you will recognize this little dance: he finds something absolutely riveting online, and insists that I listen Right This Second while he reads whatever it is aloud, and I go on doing whatever it is I’m doing (trying to decide if my eyebrows are too thick or not, shopping for shoes online, etc). I say, “mm, uh-huh” and offer a few short, diplomatic spurts of laughter where possibly appropriate and then mumble variations on, “hah, wow, that’s so cool, who knew?” and he knows full well that I’m not paying attention because I do the same thing to him, and he continues merrily doing whatever the male equivalent of shopping for shoes online is.

But recently, he implored me with more than the usual enthusiasm to sit down and look through these two blogs, and I acquiesced, because I could hear something really, deeply genuine in his voice, and boy am I glad I did. Here’s why:

They’re really cool! He’s English and she’s American. They met and fell in love in space of days. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, where they now live. Yes, I like their story for its parallels to our own, and I like the feeling I got when the Man said to me that it’s nice to read about these people with a really amazing history and I got to say back, well, hey, we’re not doing so badly either, are we?

But also, maybe more importantly, I like reading the words of two people who are unashamedly in love with each other. It’s nice. It makes me feel all hopeful and warm inside. It’s like the blogospheric (can I say that?) equivalent of playing with a very small, fluffy puppy, which maybe makes it sound more trite than it is. It’s just somewhere between a favorite old book and a small animal, perhaps.

Part of me wants to say to myself: whoa, now, hang on. This is really, super creepy. You’re basically peering across an entire ocean into the lives of two complete strangers, watching their every (virtual) move, and making judgments about them, projecting your own hopes and fears onto them. Stop being a stalker and GET A LIFE.

The other part of me says: oh, shut up already. Scruples suck, and bloggers don’t write about their lives in the hopes that no one will ever read their words or identify with them as human beings (and if they do, wow did I get this whole blogging thing wrong).

It’s the latter part that wins. You know what? It’s nice reading something that makes me smile, and makes me feel normal(er), and also reaffirms my belief that human beings are actually really groovy sometimes.

*Ray LaMontagne, “Hold You in My Arms”

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I woke up this morning and thought, I’d really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there’s nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven’t gone for my run.

I’m doing research, and in order to continue this post I’m going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I’m writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I’ve been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It’s certainly not fiction, but it’s also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is “the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction,” while “narrative nonfiction…is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal.” Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I’m to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I’ve ever been able to pinpoint what I’m writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It’s The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee–you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I’m stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to “look at the value your book offers to the reader,” and that’s something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: “Why do you want to be president?” and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you’re going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question “why.”

Why? Because I’m too young to write a book; because there’s no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we’re finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We’re becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world–as individuals, as a generation, as the human race–is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are–physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually–the better we’re able to understand where we’re going. And because there’s always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It’s finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.

*Obama: “But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old.”

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