So when the job offer came, aside from the prospect of new experiences, and all that materialistic stuff, the idea of leaving Manhattan’s traffic, crowds, noise, subways, cabs, elevators and surly waiters for the simple joy of driving myself to work, parking in the same building my office was in, was an enormous inducement. An inducement my new employer probably never even thought about. After all, I was moving to Paradise.
I figured if you’re going to live in Los Angeles, find a house on the west side near the beach. I also am a tree planter and lover of the mountains. So I found my personal Paradise in Pacific Palisades, in an area called the Highlands. There was a saying at the time: “If you're rich, you live in Beverly Hills. If you’re a movie star, you live in Malibu. But if you’re lucky, you live in Pacific Palisades.” I was lucky.
But the stress of life in California? The perils? Oh boy.
My family has now lived in the Golden State for decades. We have lived in Southern California and in Northern California. I love this state. After Alaska and Texas it is America’s largest state; that’s very big; 770 miles from top to bottom! So there is so much here. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, wine country, skiing, many fantastic National Parks, endless miles of coastline and beaches and beautiful girls.
The Sierra Nevada includes the highest peak on the U.S. mainland, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet. The range embraces Yosemite Valley, famous for its glacially carved domes, and Sequoia National Park, home to the giant sequoia trees, the largest living organisms on Earth, and the deep freshwater Lake Tahoe. Not to mention Death Valley, the hottest and driest national park in the U.S., home of Badwater Basin which is 282 feet below sea level!
California has an excellent university system and research facilities, an agriculture system able to feed nations, the original Disneyland and other major tourist attractions. Museums, dinosaur burial sites, incredible gardens, old Spanish missions, many military bases, and advanced and experimental aircraft manufacturers and test sites.
But I don’t think it’s news that we have earthquakes here. They’re a common occurrence here because we’re located on the Pacific Ring of Fire: about 37,000 quakes are recorded annually, thankfully most are too small to feel. We have raging wildfires and hellish forest fires. We have mudslides and rockslides. We even have volcanos, including the monster Mammoth Mountain, a lava dome complex in Mono County. The domes formed from 110,000 to 57,000 years ago, building a volcano that reaches 11,059 feet in elevation. While the volcano is still active, eruptions have been small and sporadic over the millennia. But threats are closely monitored. If Mother Nature were to get angry and blow her stack...
We have droughts. Flash floods. Terrible wind storms. Torrential rains coming off the Pacific. But Mother Nature is not the only challenge we face. The Golden State is essentially bankrupt both financially and seemingly morally. The populace endures endless drug wars, gang wars, drive-by shootings, and even mass murders. With the easing of drug laws, pot farms spring up like mushrooms; outdoors and indoors. A porous border invites a steady stream of illegal border crossers; there are now so many generations here that no-one seems to care anymore. The State simply adapts as best it can.
Despite the fact that there are many more conservative voters here than one would think judging by the popular media, our politics are dominated by a well-organized uber liberal gang which has managed to use every tool in the kit to maintain its strangle-hold on the State’s finances and laws. We are so politically correct that there seems no hope of ever returning the State to sane financial and economic policies. Due to the suffocating regulations and taxes, businesses are checking out but they’re not checking in.
California’s “known” population according to census figures ranks us #1, standing at about 39 million. Over the past decade, calculating in-migration of all kinds, out-migration of population, births and deaths – again contrary to popular perceptions – the State’s net growth in population seems to be well below one million! But the out-migration is undeniable, and undeniably caused by suffocating liberal regulations and its cousin, an overly-PC culture driven by the powerful influences of Hollywood and the San Francisco region. This is important nationally because U.S. presidents can be elected by America’s eleven most-populous states, making the remaining 39, unfortunately far less relevant.
Typical of the out-migration, my next door neighbor, just retired, sold his home and is moving his family out of California. They leave because of the overbearing political atmosphere, high taxes, impossible laws, and a hundred other cultural reasons. Though, when pushed, my neighbor admits his love for California, his native state. He’s heading for Utah. I wish him well. Sad to see him go. He and his family are the best of neighbors.
We lived in Pali when the massive Northridge quake hit Los Angeles. It was a bad one. A terrible experience for so many of us. My office building was physically split apart and my office was torn away from the corridor. Our building was condemned but still standing, but nearby buildings as well as freeway overpasses actually collapsed. Those of us who were in the quake’s major lines of force bear a kind of post-quake stress memory that lurks near the surface of our everyday lives. “When driving and stopping for a red light, don't stop under a freeway overpass.”
I found it somewhat of a challenge adjusting to the work ethic out here. The adulation of all things “Hollywood” is an obsession. I’m not sure I ever met a young person in LA who wasn’t “just working at some job until they got their big break in the entertainment biz.” A break which, for 99.999%, never comes. Maybe one day I will pass along my own entertaining experiences in that arena.
Retired, and living in the mountain resort area of SoCal, our communities have been evacuated several times over the years due to raging forest fires which in one episode devoured over four hundred homes and took the lives of firefighters and citizens in our small town. Making matters worse, the fire was started by an arsonist. This firebug has since been tracked down, tried and convicted of murder. In that episode, we stayed at our son’s house near Los Angeles. Wouldn’t you know it... a different wildfire flared up in the hills near his home!
Knowing there are many other crazy arsonists lurking out here, awaiting the dry periods and the Santa Ana winds, causes many of us stress. Every time a helicopter thumps past, or sirens wail in the distance, hearts speed up. We are glued to our on-line alert systems, emergency-band scanners and all the rest.
Still... what part of the country, or the world, for that matter, is free of stress and peril? Other “paradises” such as Hawaii have active volcanoes and raging Pacific storms. There are tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, floods, landslides, avalanches, sink holes, fires and the whole panoply of Mother Nature’s arsenal unleashed on different parts of America.
Year after year, we hear of populists calling for the breaking-up of California into two or more separate states. While the delineation of these new borders becomes a puzzle of immense complexity, the goal is to create states with, if not conservative, at least moderate political policies. I personally can’t see this happening, but hope springs eternal because something certainly needs to change.
It’s often said that what first starts in California soon sweeps across the rest of America. These things are primarily matters of pop culture and politics. But our coastlines, mountains and lakes will stay here. At least for the time being!
