Big Dreams Read online

  Acclaim for Bill Barich’s

  BIG DREAMS

  “Big Dreams is very fine work, deceptively easygoing, and filled with the sort of thwarted longing that seems, more and more, to define our times.”

  —Don DeLillo

  “Bill Barich is a wonderful writer. His angle of vision is his very own, his prose is a delight. Big Dreams is a very winning book.”

  —Larry McMurtry

  “Mr. Barich gives us short biographies of historical figures while weaving in interesting bits of information about native tribes, explorers and settlers.… A book that is well worth reading.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Bill Barich’s wise, funny, heartbreaking meditation on California is the best read of the year. Few writers are so lucid and evocative, and no one provides more pleasure and insight page for page. Anyone who has ever loved or hated California should read Big Dreams. As should anyone who loves wit and language.”

  —Robert Stone

  “California, here, is raised to an even higher power—to actual poignancy. Mr. Barich writes with superb intelligence, with sympathy and unusual grace.”

  —Richard Ford

  “Bill Barich is one of the few writers left whose books I want to snap up and devour as soon as they hit the shelves. He elicits … stories that not only amuse us but remind us that everyone is possessed of a unique take on the world and that also make us somehow recognize a kinship of dreams with all those strange souls he encounters.”

  —Robert Eisner, Boston Sunday Globe

  “Mr. Barich has his own voice, scrupulous but passionate too. He holds back on the details of his private life and throws himself into the details of other lives and landscapes. Big Dreams works because he keeps crossing the borders between history, reportage, and reverie.”

  —The New York Times

  ALSO BY BILL BARICH

  Laughing in the Hills

  Traveling Light

  Hard to Be Good

  Bill Barich

  BIG DREAMS

  Bill Barich is the author of Laughing in the Hills, Traveling Light and Hard to Be Good, His writing has appeared frequently in The New Yorker. He lives in the San Francisco area.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 1995

  Copyright © 1994 by Bill Barich

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, New York, in 1994.

  Parts of Big Dreams have appeared, in a different form, in The New Yorker, Volt, Zyzzyva, and the San Francisco Examiner.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: •Hal Leonard Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “All the Gold in California,” words and music by Larry Gatlin, copyright © 1979 by TEMI Combine Inc. and Songs of All Nations. All rights for TEMI Combine Inc. controlled by Combine Music Corp. and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Publishing Corp. • New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpts from The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, copyright © 1939 by The Estate of Nathanael West, copyright © 1966 by Laura Perelman. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • Rondor Music International: Excerpt from “California Girls,” words and music by Brian Wilson, copyright © 1965 by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI). Copyright renewed 1993 by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Rondor Music International. • Sony Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Kern River” by Merle Haggard, copyright © 1985 by Tree Publishing Company, Inc. All rights administered by Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Sony Music Publishing. • University of California Press: Excerpts from Up and Down California in 1860–1864 by William H. Brewer, translated and edited by Francis Farquhar, copyright © 1949 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Barich, Bill.

  Big Dreams/Bill Barich.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80065-7

  1. California—Civilization—20th century. 2. Barich, Bill—

  Journeys—California. I. Title.

  F866.2.B37 1994

  979.4′05—dc20 93-43213

  Map design by Vikki Leib

  v3.1

  To Patsy and Nora

  Girls of the Golden West

  I tried hard to imagine another earth and could not.

  I tried hard to imagine another heaven and could not.

  Czeslaw Milosz, “From the Rising of the Sun”

  I love you, California, you’re the greatest state of all

  I love you in the winter, summer, spring, and in the fall

  I love your fertile valleys, your dear mountains I adore

  I love your grand old ocean and I love your rugged shore

  Where the snow-crowned Golden Sierra

  Keep their watch o’er the valley’s bloom

  It is there I would be in our land by the sea

  Every breeze bearing rich perfume.

  It is here nature gives me her rarest. It is

  Home Sweet Home to me,

  And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh

  For my sunny California.

  —F. B. Silverwood and A. F. Frankenstein

  California State song

  STATE FLOWER: California poppy

  STATE BIRD: Valley quail

  STATE TREE: Giant redwood

  STATE REPTILE: Desert tortoise (endangered)

  STATE FISH: Golden trout (endangered)

  STATE INSECT: Dog-faced butterfly (endangered)

  STATE ANIMAL: Grizzly bear (extinct)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  PART ONE: AWAY

  PART TWO: FAR NORTH

  PART THREE: ELDORADO

  PART FOUR: SAN JOAQUIN

  PART FIVE: BELLY OF THE BEAST

  PART SIX: EARTHQUAKE WEATHER

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PART ONE

  AWAY

  In California, if you go out to take a sunbath, when you wake up you’re middle-aged.

  —Ludwig Bemmelmans

  CHAPTER 1

  IN 1957, a boy on my Long Island block stopped me after school one afternoon and told me that the Brooklyn Dodgers, my favorite baseball team, were definitely moving to Los Angeles. The shock to my system was extreme. I was thirteen years old and had never been betrayed before.

  Those first, rare ball games from the Coast were watched closely at our house. I remember being awestruck by the billowy palm trees and the perfect weather. I thought, It never rains out there! Everything looked fresh and clean, spared from the urban grime of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. Even on our midget TV screen, I noticed an appealing absence of tension, as if everyone in the pastoral West were granted enough space at birth to satisfy each wish.

  At that instant, my perception of the universe altered subtly. No longer was California just a musical name at the far edge of a map in my geography book. Now it was real instead of imaginary, a place that anyone could go to, where people actually lived. Here was the start of an obsession.

  All winter, as I walked dej
ectedly over our frozen playground diamonds, I pictured myself transported to the Dodgers’ tropical stadium for some batting practice. The fantasy had a healthy radiance, an aura of well-being. My own neighborhood, a subdivision of almost identical Levitt tract homes built on some plowed-under potato fields, seemed threadbare by comparison. The landscape had no glamour. Snow fell and then melted, and slush slopped into your boots.

  In high school, I listened to the Beach Boys’ records and went to the Meadowbrook Theater near no meadow or brook to see B-grade beach-party movies shot in Malibu, wherever that was. The atmospheric blend of sand, surf, and blondes in bikinis spoke profoundly to my teenage narcissism, and I began to ache for some contact with California and all the bright, sexy, untarnished things it represented.

  But how to get there? It took a stroke of luck. After graduating from college, I joined the Peace Corps and was dispatched by dint of miracle to the University of California in Los Angeles for ten weeks of training before being shipped to Nigeria for a tour of duty.

  Our group of volunteers was quartered at a rundown, pink-stucco apartment complex not far from the UCLA campus. We loved it beyond reason. Bougainvillea grew in jungles along the crumbling garden paths, while tiny hummingbirds sipped nectar from the scarlet bristles of some bottlebrush trees. In the unaccustomed February heat, we swam laps in a decrepit pool and reclined on ratty loungers to elaborate our tans.

  Every letter we wrote to our families struck the same chord. “Dear Folks,” we bragged. “It’s February, and I’m sitting by the swimming pool.…”

  Paradise, we thought.

  In L.A., the sun really did shine every day. It lent an elevated status to our lives that we preserved by snapping photos. We posed on ocean bluffs, flexed our biceps at Muscle Beach, and stood with our toes touching the stars embedded in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The city itself was held in an eternal soft focus—hazy, loose, and easy on the senses.

  On Alvarado Street, we discovered Mexican food and fell to worshiping the avocado, an exotic fruit none of us had tasted before. Avocados became an emblem of what we were experiencing, the rough skin of existence peeled back to reveal the succulent, green flesh hidden within.

  For our Saturday night gatherings, we fixed guacamole in big bowls and licked the pulp from each other’s fingers. Music blared from radios, and the gentle air caressed us. Our seduction was complete. Late in the beery evening, I would retire to a corner and take a private vow to return to California someday, buoyed up on the usual pilgrim’s dream, the seed dream of all westward migration, a dream of starting over.

  In 1969, at the age of twenty-five, I did start over, forsaking a hapless career as a teacher of New Jersey seventh-graders to cast my lot with the hippie tribe in the Haight-Ashbury. I had no job or profession in mind, but in an intuitive, quasi-mystical way I believed that something was waiting for me in San Francisco, a new self whose shape I could barely discern. Everyone in Levittown thought I was crazy.

  Then came the spectacular drive across America. Cut loose from my roots, I felt both guilty and thrilled, scared and ultra-confident. The industrial ravages of the East dropped away behind me, followed by the countless farms of the Midwest, cow after cow after cornfield, but in Wyoming the scenery turned panoramic and filled me with optimism. I swallowed the broad vistas whole, in great gulps, simultaneously expanding my lungs and my consciousness.

  Outside Cheyenne, I picked up two hitchhikers from Nebraska. They had infant beards and pretended to be older than they were. I guessed that they were runaways, and they owned up to it in Utah. They were escaping from pigs and haystacks, they said, and aiming themselves toward salvation in their own personal Eldorado.

  Nevada was a blur of sagebrush and desert scrub. At dawn on a pearly August morning, tired but elated, we crossed over into California shouting Yes! Yes! and ascended into the Sierra Nevada. As we approached Donner Pass, at an altitude of about 7,200 feet, one of the hitchhikers brought forth a recollected grade-school lesson about the emigrants from Illinois who had got trapped in the mountains during the winter of 1847–48. Those who’d survived had cannibalized their comrades.

  “I’d never eat anybody,” the other hitchhiker said.

  “Then you’d be eaten,” his partner grimly replied.

  The tale of Donner Pass put a damper on our mood. Its moral appeared to be that not every trip to California would ultimately be rewarded.

  So we rode on in silence and brooded about our fate until the vegetarian hitchhiker pulled out a harmonica and noodled a back-woodsy rendition of a dumb pop song about going to San Francisco and wearing flowers in your hair. We couldn’t help singing along, and soon we were laughing as we winged our way over a bridge into a magical city cloaked in a dense summer fog.

  In the Haight-Ashbury, I rented a cheap flat and furnished it à la mode with a massive stereo and a mattress on the floor. Something new and exciting seemed to enter my orbit almost daily—seven-grain bread, Zen meditation, the pungent smell of eucalyptus leaves. There was an earthquake, 4.7 on the Richter scale. Objects broke and were never mended. And one night at the Fillmore Auditorium, while Janis Joplin was wailing on stage, a girl in a see-through blouse ran up and kissed me without any warning at all.

  O, man. California.

  THAT MAGICAL CITY VANISHED IN TIME, of course blown away like a thistle, but I stayed on in San Francisco. I worked and married and bought a house. Always I harbored a naïve belief that I was only a temporary resident who would be going back to New York someday soon, but I never did.

  Twenty years slipped by before I knew it. Slowly, without willing it, I’d been transformed into that curious thing, a Californian, and on the brink of middle age, as the century was about to turn, it occurred to me to demand an accounting.

  If I hoped to take stock of my life out West, I reckoned that I should also take stock of some other lives and visions, listening to my fellow dreamers while I explored our common bonds. So I decided on an ambitious journey, even a metaphysical investigation, allowing myself six months to wander from the Oregon border in the Far Northwest all the way down to Mexico.

  Every true California story, I would learn, begins in yearning and ends in transformation.

  At the public library, I found two writers to accompany me on the road, Edwin Bryant and William Brewer. They had embarked on similar journeys in the mid-nineteenth century, but the reports that they had compiled were different in tone and in kind and were separated by the yawning chasm of the Gold Rush. Whereas Bryant had traveled west from Kentucky in 1847 to a little-known territory still wreathed in myths, Brewer had made his tour after the first great cycle of boom-and-bust, and his writing was sometimes tinged with the initial stirrings of loss.

  A stiff, formal, frontier portrait of the youthful William Brewer served as a frontispiece in his posthumous book, Up and Down California in 1860–1864. He was handsome and bearded and had a high-minded look.

  Brewer had come to the West from Poughkeepsie, New York, to join Josiah Whitney’s geological survey team as its chief botanist. His wife and infant daughter had recently died, and he was starting over. He put in long hours in the field and was known for his honesty, his tact, and his genial good humor. At every opportunity, he wrote richly detailed letters to his brother Edgar back east—the clear-eyed letters of a naturalist—leaving behind the raw materials that would later be edited into a narrative.

  Edwin Bryant had bequeathed us no picture in his What I Saw in California. He was a journalist of bold temperament, and he couldn’t resist a trip to the Coast to examine all the curious rumors that he’d heard about “the countries bordering the Pacific.” He believed, too, that the milder climate along the ocean might help to improve his failing health.

  Opinions about California were divided, Bryant noted. Some Kentuckians were certain that it sheltered “the condemned and abandoned of God and man,” while others claimed that its attractions were “scarcely inferior” to those of Eden. Gossip had it that five t
housand Mormons were stationed in Kansas to prevent any emigrant parties from reaching “the reputed El Dorado.” Bloodthirsty bands of Indians were also supposed to be there, robbing and murdering innocent victims.

  Bryant wasn’t sure what to think about such talk. As he saw it, his job was “to give a truthful and not an exaggerated and fanciful account of the occurrences of the journey, and of the scenery, capabilities, and general features of the countries through which we shall pass”—a worthwhile goal, I agreed, and one that I would try to live up to in my own report.

  ON THE MORNING OF MY DEPARTURE, a Sunday in mid-April, an unexpected storm swept into San Francisco and began drumming against our bedroom windows at dawn. I heard thunder, saw streaks of lightning, and thought about omens as I slipped into my clothes and bent to kiss my sleeping wife good-bye, not knowing what a good-bye it would prove to be.

  The night before, we had stayed up late over a bottle of wine, trying to convince ourselves that my impending absence would be good for our relationship. We had been happily married for almost fifteen years, but in the last few months we had foundered in a new place that baffled us—a distasteful place where our needs were in competition. We seemed to be growing in opposite directions, and the torque of it had left us drained and frightened.

  Whenever we had hit a rough patch in the past, we’d been able to wait it out. Always the confusion and the negative emotions would dissipate after a while. This time it felt different, but I left the house still clinging to the hope that being apart for a few weeks might break the deadlock between us. Things would be back to normal, I told myself, when I came home for a rest at the midpoint of my journey, in early July.

  Midpoint, midlife, middle age: I walked blindly into the future and boarded a little United jet to Eureka, a port city on the North Coast about three hundred miles away. The pilot took us up through some bruised-looking thunderheads, and soon we were suspended in that up-in-heaven space, where the world appears to be made of pure light and every trouble is insubstantial.