Joan Didion - Where I Was From

“The pool kills me,” Everett McClellan’s sister Sarah says, in Run River , when she visits the ranch on which he and Lily live. “It looks like Pickfair.”

The year Sarah says this is 1959. Although swimming pools were fairly general throughout California by 1959, this Pool on the ranch represents, as presented, Everett’s first concession to the postwar mood, and so cues the reader to yet another sign of decline. This did not exactly reflect any attitude toward pools with which I was familiar.

In 1948, when my mother and father and brother and I were living on some acreage outside Sacramento on which my father had built a house until the time seemed right to subdivide the property, my brother and I wanted a pool. We could have a pool, my father said, but only if we ourselves dug it. Every morning all that hot summer my brother, Jim, who was eight, took a shovel out to the middle of the field in front of the house and chipped in vain at the hardpan that underlay the inch or two of topsoil.

Five years older than Jim, doubtful that either he or I could dig a twenty-by-forty-foot hole eight feet deep, equally doubtful that our father — were such a hole to miraculously materialize — had any intention of following through (as I saw it, he might string a hose out there and turn on the tap, but no gunite, no filter, no tile coping), I declined to dig. Instead I spent the summer reading the plays of Eugene O’Neill and dreamed of escaping to Bennington, where I would prepare myself for a New York life in the theater by sitting in a tree in a leotard and listening to Francis Fergusson explain the difference between drama and melodrama. This was the year, 1948, when, already plotting my departure, I delivered the eighth-grade graduation speech on “Our California Heritage.” This was also the year, 1948, when the Sacramento City Parks Department awarded, as prizes in its annual Easter egg hunt, what The Sacramento Bee described as “live bunnies named after pioneers,” a teaching tool, it occurs to me now, that had “Genevieve Didion” written all over it. Ten years later I did have a New York life, although not in the theater, and I was writing the novel that would put such a protective distance between me and the place I came from.

THIS question of “changes,” involving as it does some reflexive suggestion of a birthright squandered, a paradise lost, is a vexed issue. I was many times told as a child that the grass in the Sacramento Valley had at the time the American settlers arrived in the 1840s grown so high that it could be tied over a saddle, the point being that it did no more. California, in this telling, had even then been “spoiled.” The logical extension of this thought, that we were the people who had spoiled it, remained unexplored. Nor would it be explored in Run River , the inchoate intent of which was to return me to a California I wished had been there to keep me. “Everything changes, everything changed,” one passage, obviously acutely felt at the time I wrote it, begins. “Summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts.” The “change,” the “all gone” part, is seen in Run River to have come only with the postwar boom years, the prosperous years when California “as it was” got bulldozed out of existence either for better (as Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar and Mark Taper saw it when they conceived Lakewood) or (as I then wished to see it) for worse.

Californians of more programmatic mind for many years presented these postwar changes as positive, the very genius of the place: it was conventional to mention the freeway system, the aerospace industry, the University of California Master Plan, Silicon Valley, the massive rearrangement of the water that got funded when Pat Brown was governor, the entire famous package, the celebrated promise that California was committed to creating and educating an apparently infinitely expandable middle class. The more recent programmatic attitude was to construe the same changes as negative, false promises: the freeways had encouraged sprawl, the aerospace industry had gone away, the University of California had lost faculty and classrooms to budget cuts, Silicon Valley had put housing beyond the means of non-tech California, and most of the state was still short water.

In a book of readings for students in freshman composition classes at California colleges, the editors and contributors speak of “the threats to the California dream,” of the need to keep “the California dream in sight,” of “the fashionable new mythology emerging nationwide in which California is being recast as a nightmare rather than a dream,” and of which O. J. Simpson — O. J. Simpson as “the self-invented celebrity who climbed from poverty to the summit of fame and fortune” or O. J. Simpson in the white Bronco—“better reflects the truth about the California dream.” In either case, genius of the place or its dystopian blight, the postwar changes that transformed California were understood to have been brought about by what was popularly seen as an unprecedented influx of population, what Pat Brown, in a 1962 issue of Look , called “the greatest mass migration in the history of the world” and George B. Leonard, in the same issue of Look , called “the migrating millions who vote with their wheels for California.” During World War Two and the immediate postwar years, 1940 to 1950, the population of California did in fact increase 53 percent. During the next ten years, 1950 to 1960, the population of California did in fact increase 49 percent.

Yet such growth was in no way unprecedented. Nor, in a state that had seen its population increase in the first ten years of statehood by 245 percent, was it even remarkable. The decade between 1860 and 1870 brought a population increase to California of 47 percent, the decade that followed an increase of 54 percent. The years between 1900 and 1910 brought another 60 percent. Those were the years during which Faulkner’s Ira Ewing, in “Golden Land,” would have fled Nebraska on the night train to end up twenty-five years later sleepless in Beverly Hills. The years between 1910 and 1920 brought 44 percent. Those were the years when it came to the attention of Saxon Brown and Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon that “it looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land”—two babes convinced that they had been deprived of their Eden by industrialization, by immigration, by whatever it was that they could not name. The ten years that followed, between 1920 and 1930, when only shallowly settled arrivals were to find themselves further marginalized by the onset of the Depression, brought 66 percent. There had been, then, from the beginning, these obliterating increases, rates of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community, and it was from such erasures that many California confusions would derive.

There used to be on the main street through Gilroy, a farm town in Santa Clara County that billed itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World,” a two- or three-story hotel, the Milias, where the dining room off the lobby had a black-and-white tiled floor and fans and potted palm trees and, in the opinion of my father, short ribs so succulent that they were worth a stop on any drive between Sacramento and the Monterey Peninsula. I remember sitting with him in the comparative cool of the Milias dining room (any claim of “cool” was at that time comparative, air conditioning not yet having taken widespread hold in Santa Clara County), eating short ribs and the cherries from his old-fashioned bourbon cocktail, the singular musky smell of garlic being grown and picked and processed permeating even the heavy linen napkins.