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

On a hot night, we drive to L.A. and back. I have never been to downtown Burbank before; it is two hours and a thousand worlds away from where we start. Entire city blocks taken up with lots for shooting films and television shows; the day dims its lights just as we enter the city and we get lost trying to find a single house.

On the drive back, we dip down through the San Fernando Valley—a thousand sparkling lights, my favorite view, as a kid, coming from Orange County to Santa Barbara. We stop at an In N’ Out Burger. I haven’t been to one in years but it tastes just the same, and I remember the night I graduated from high school, and we had fries and milkshakes in cocktail dresses. There are a group of teenagers behind us; one of them, in a green shirt, keeps getting up to refill his soda cup. They say disparagingly about where they live, “It’s Camarillo.” They laugh at everything; they refresh us.

When we get near to Santa Barbara a voice on the radio warns of a fire nearby. Soon I am following a line of ten shiny firetrucks from Ventura; at Glen Annie, the northernmost exit before the netherland between Goleta and Buellton, they turn off and we see great orange flames peeking up over the tops of the hills. The sky, even at midnight, has a strange glow. Ahead of us is the ghost of a car: covered in ash, it cuts through the night looking like a specter.

Today the fire still burns. We taste wine in the Santa Ynez Valley and then take the San Marcos pass to Santa Barbara. Midway through a movie, the power shuts off all across the city. It is strange to see what happens to people when the lights go out. Soon we are all pooled outside in the parking lot being covered by a film of ash. “It looks like you have dandruff,” he says, as I brush some dust from his beard.

At the train station, waiting to pick someone up, we can see the fire. It has spread along the ridgeline. The mountains are alight. Flames crest the hills. It glows red in some spots, orange in others. “Welcome to California,” I say. On the radio, most people are talking about the power outage. A woman calls in to the university radio station and gives her perspective on the fire—“All the traffic lights are out,” she warns. She adds, “I’d like to see the National Guard home from Iraq so they can deal with things like this.”

“Welcome to Santa Barbara,” I say.

Sometimes in a traffic jam I let slip that I hate it here. “I could never live here,” I say, and honestly believe it; but later I doubt it very much to be true. It’s only that I feel a stranger here, sometimes; being in California is like watching one big movie, so that you know the characters but not the actors, and though the landscape is familiar, it feels incomplete, unreal. All that feels real are the places I have touched: the creekbed where I used to leap from bank to bank before the El Niño rains changed the shape forever, the hill at the front of the canyon that we climb to see the curve of the earth from, the hammock hung between two trees that the cows now use to rub their backs against.

I am a stranger even there, sometimes. Driving through the gate that marks the entrance to the Ranch, I am stopped by a guard who asks my name (I used to know all of them, and they me, but not any more), and when I tell it to him, he asks if I’m an owner.
“I don’t know,” I tell him; my ownership is all tied up in legalities and family rights—somewhere, deep down, the paperwork says I am, but all that matters in that moment is whether or not I feel like I own something, and I don’t.

He gives me a visitor’s pass. “It’s just a formality,” he tells me. He’s new at his job and doesn’t want to get into trouble. I see the Ranch with visitor’s eyes. On the back of the laminated pass is a list of rules; “no nudity in common areas,” reads one of them. “I never knew you couldn’t be naked in common areas,” I say.

But once, I was driving along the Ranch road when a rat appeared beside me in the truck, so I pulled over to try to get it out (I thought: if I can get it out, it won’t chew the wires!—they were always chewing the wires). I am a fairly small girl and it was a fairly large truck. I stood beside it on the side of the road, one door open, trying to coax the rat out by telekinesis (I had no better ideas). One of the gate guards came along, in his official truck.
“You ok?” he said.
“Just trying to get a rat out of my passenger seat,” I told him, wondering if he might take pity and offer to help.
“Ah, you’re a ranch girl, you’ll be fine!” he said, smiled, waved, moved on. Then the rat took a flying leap out of the truck and I shut the door before it could rethink the move. That was it: I was a ranch girl.

Now I am a girl who is a ranch girl and something else, too. I don’t know what.

The chaparral burns hot in the summer (50 years since it last burned, they say). And in five hours, on three quarters of a tank of gas, we can go from the wilds of a working cattle ranch to the urbane lots of Hollywood and back.

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It has cooled down, finally, become duvet weather again overnight–windows open, we reach first for the sheet, which we cast away days ago when even the featherweight of the fabric was enough to jerk us sweating from a tossing-and-turning sleep. But a heavy wind, which persists through the day, causes us to get up and seek out the long-abandoned summer duvet. We awake as two duvet sausages, enjoying what it feels like to be wrapped in fabric come morning, not swimming in our own perspiration.

We go to a friend’s farm for the day; on the drive over, we stop by the Parkway Market, a pillar of my childhood, to buy a bottle of impromptu champagne. In the wine, beer, and liquor section of the store (which is substantial), there is a line of champagne bottles atop a shelf. They have a few pricey varieties of bubbly, but these look dusty, as if no one has given them a second look in years. In the refrigerator, however, is just what we need: a chilled bottle of a $4.99 variety. The kindly Asian man who has been the sole employee of the store for as long as I can remember looks up from his lunch to attend to us.

We drive on, down Santa Rosa Road. We turn off at the farm. There is infrastructure now, and detritus, where once there was none; the way I remember the farm is very different from the way it is now, but I suppose this is because we used it merely as the backdrop to our own (mostly horse-related) adventures. My knowledge of the place is punctuated by remembrance: this is where we used to ride along the river to cross; this where we set up a makeshift arena, complete with a series of crossbar jumps; this is where it was flat enough for long enough to gallop full speed; here we had to wrinkle our nose at the smell of fertilizer, and here the trampoline used to sit, where we would sleep on hot nights. Now we walk down to where the sheep are kept; they look as if they might wilt under their wool in the burning sunlight. We think we can feel a heat literally radiating from them, so we feed them quickly and head to the strawberry field to pick some berries for our champagne.

“I read somewhere that strawberries have more vitamin c than oranges,” says our friend.
“They do,” says my love. “They’re not actually berries. They’re aggregated droops.”
“Aggregated DROOPS?” I echo, giggling.
“Yes. Aggregated droops. D-R-U-P-E-S.”
“Oh,” I say. “Drupes.”

Inside, we pour a small glass each and drop our aggregated drupes into the fizzing liquid. I have had something stuck in my eye since dawn, and it starts to wear on me. I retire to the office to apply eyedrops. I swoon into a chair and look helplessly around me. We decide that the only thing to do about it is to go to the cinema, so we head to town to catch the new Indiana Jones–which is more (and I don’t think I’ll be ruining it for anyone by saying this–I may even rescue a few helpless souls from the experience) X-Files-meets-Tomb Raider than hunky- Harrison-Ford-blunders-his-way-through-the-archaeological-mysteries-of-a-jungled-country. The good news is that a solid two hours of holding my eye in a certain way seems to have set free whatever was trapped, and I feel like a new woman.

“It seems Harrison Ford is easy on the eyes,” someone says.

At dinner, we eat a little too much because it is just that good. And when we step outside to go home, a tiny chill has set in, so that I have to put my cardigan on.

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From the Ranch, which is wild and isolated, we went south along the coastline under cover of 4AM darkness. When I awoke we were going past the gray skyscrapers of downtown LA; I fell again into a restless sleep, and then we were in Santa Ana, Orange County, hot, sprawling, everything made to the scale of the car, nothing at all human about the wide-laned boulevards and the parking lots you could lose yourself in, if you aren’t careful.

The next day we took a train, then a subway, then a taxi, from Santa Ana to West Hollywood. Along Melrose, the city transitioned in fifteen minutes without us even knowing how: first it was gas stations and Subway Sandwiches and a funky little shop with candy and soda behind a counter, and then it was Hip Boutique This and Hip Boutique That; we sloped up a hill and arrived at the shaded house of a weathered hipster-art dealer with Rolling Stones hair and a striped boating shirt and skinny jeans and a cigarette slumping out of his animated mouth.

Then my cousin picked us up and drove us to Santa Monica, and we settled into her little apartment, tucked behind a house and a hotel, across the street from the beach. I had a bowl of cereal. We all walked down to the 3rd Street promenade; we had a beer and some tapas and enjoyed the sea air, which cooled a hot day.

The next morning we pushed our way through the Farmer’s Market and got a bus back to Union Station–an hour and a half along Santa Monica Boulevard, straight shooting but slow going along a desolate span of city. By the afternoon we were in Santa Ana again, with its thick, oppressive heat. I stood in front of the hotel air-conditioner to get cold beneath my skirt. We sloshed our way through the faint humidity and the overbearing sun to the mall, artificially cold, for a lemonade and a helping of gelatinous food-court Chinese.

By evening we were in Irvine, with its Stepford streets, its emptiness, its frightening placid air. We had dinner in the depths of an enormous Persian restaurant with our friend, an immigrant from Iran, and went back to her place for tea and to look at photos of her family, coffee-table books on Persian art through the ages and the Iranian mountains. We fell into a dense sleep at the hotel with the hum of the air conditioner in the background and awoke to a telephone ringing that called us each back from our respective dreamlands.

California is one big dreamland; populated not by cities but by islands, built not to the scale of the human condition (which would require downtown areas, and walkable distances, and a shrinking of the broadness of it all) but to the scale of industry, of the ultimate machine–connected by freeways and emptiness, full only of one thing: an unspoken ennui, a longing-without-knowing, a perpetual sense of the surreal.

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There is no sign on the hillsides that it may become dark in the next hours.  I used to mark the time by the crawl of shadows up the hillsides, you see.  If the shade had crept halfway up the hill, I knew I didn’t really have time for a walk before twilight set in.  Any less than halfway, and if I was quick, I could be out and back home before the crickets started their nightly din.

How long since I spent a June here?  Two years!  I had forgotten how the heat strikes you; how squinting in the sunlight all day gives you a pleasurable headache by the evening, how wide the sky seems when there are absolutely no clouds in it and how gold the brown hills look.  There’s a heavy wind blowing, but it’s less heavy today than it was yesterday and it will, we think, taper off in a few days’ time.  Until then we are buffetted when we go outside and the sea is full of heavy, frothy, heaving whitecaps.  

6 PM: in the throes of a langorous summer day, I am supine on the couch in a skirt and a thin strapped black shirt.  ”I can see your bottom,” he says (my skirt has hiked up); I cannot bring myself to care–my feet sweat, my temples pulsate slightly, a breeze comes in through the window.  I read once about Oxford that “Summer is more summery here than anywhere else I know; not better, certainly not sunnier, but more like summers used to be, in everyone’s childhood memories”* and I think this probably couldn’t be more true; but summer here, on the ranch, is more lethargic, more dreamlike, more like summers could be, in everyone’s vague and half-formed fantasies, than anywhere else I know.  

*Jan Morris, Oxford

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I have a cold; it’s a nice day, and I have a cold, and I’m grumpy about it in that “there’s nothing I can do, and it’s not even a bad cold, but I’m going to harrumph about it anyway” way. Last night I lay awake trying to decide if my throat hurt; when it decidedly did hurt, I lay awake trying to decide if it hurt in a coldy way or a just-kidding way. Having spent my lunch in the garden trying to convince myself that it’s a just-kidding way, I have a feeling it’s not. Ah well.

I’m also at work. This is not what they pay me to do at work, as you might have guessed. Ah well.

One year ago, I had a cold, too. I went to the Summer Eights and sat reading near the river in the shade of a tree near Christ Church Meadow and sucked on lozenge after lozenge pretending that I was just jet-lagged. I did this because there was a boy I’d met who I wanted to go on seeing, and I couldn’t bear to miss out on a date because of a cold, a lousy cold. Before we met up in the evenings I blew my nose furiously, took several ibuprofen pills, and put on a brave face, and since things were so exciting, I never once noticed my illness until the next morning, when we would wake with gin-soaked heads and I would have to swallow about a gallon of water before I felt able to speak, and then I would tiptoe to the bathroom and blow my nose furiously again and apply masses of careful makeup so that he would think, this boy, that I woke up not feeling hungover but feeling radiant and looking blemish-free.

I wore lots of skirts and dresses and shorts, not because the weather permitted but because it was summer, so one morning when I woke up and saw it pouring rain outside, he had to lend me a jumper to wear with my shorts, which was large and red and warm and had two neat holes in the armpits.
“All my jumpers get holes there,” he told me sheepishly.
“Sweaters.”
“What?”
“All your sweaters get holes there,” I corrected him. It was a thing we had about jumpers and sweaters, because I thought jumpers were actually the little onesie things you put small children into.
“Yes, well,” he said.

My cold disappeared, not aided by the late nights, the drinking, the way I felt all the time, which was happier than happy and full of youthful energy. He called me for dinner one night—proper dinner, he said, at a proper time (we tended to eat at midnight, generally). When I arrived he said he had a rotten cold and he hoped I wouldn’t get it and I felt too awful to admit that of course I wouldn’t get it, I had given it to him in the first place, so I said, “I probably will, but I don’t care!” and kissed him very deeply and wetly to prove it, because I hoped secretly that he would have felt the same way if I had admitted my own sniffly condition earlier. We drank several bottles of wine and watched High Society, which may or may not be one of my favourite films of all time purely on its laughter value. I never told him the true source of the cold–so I’m sorry, my love, to have made the truth so public now.

I remember sitting by the river during Eights Week so clearly. I don’t mean I remember the details—I can’t even recall what I was reading, though it may have been 100 Years of Solitude which I abandoned when I realized that the fluid, breathless, running tone was going to carry on throughout, unable to make my mind concentrate on it; I know what I was wearing, but only because I had picked it deliberately to impress him (a sheer, flowy white-and-blue floral summer dress), but I don’t know the day, the time, the circumstances of my being there. I had made my way to the river to see tradition in the flesh, and having found it (crowded riverbanks and boathouses spilling spectators onto the paths) I retired to a spot of warmth-and-shade with a strange glow of contentment, for the first time not because of anything but my own personal satisfaction.

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