The Gold Coast

  “Let’s camp here tonight,” Jim suggests. “Two can sleep in the car, and two on our beach towels in the sand. We can eat the rest of the lunch food.”

  It’s late and they’ve spent the day traveling; they all like the plan.

  The sun nears the hills to the west as they bring the food up to the ruined church. The slightly hazy evening light brings out the orange in the rock, and the entire knoll turns deep apricot. Frilly pink herringbone clouds are pasted to the sky. The fallen blocks on the church entryway make perfect stools, tables, backrests.

  They eat. The food and drink have vivid tastes. There’s a group of goats on the hillside to the south of them. Sandy holds his hand up to the light, framing a pair of black rams. “Back in the Bronze Age.”

  After dinner they sit back and watch the florid twilight clouds as the light leaks away from the land. An abandoned, still, dusky landscape. “Tell us about this place, Jim,” Angela says.

  “Well, the back of the map has a few sentences about it, and that’s all I know, really. It began as a Minoan town, around 2500 B.C. Then it was occupied by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. Under the Greeks it was an independent city-state and coined its own money. It was abandoned around either 900 A.D. or 1500 A.D., because of earthquakes.”

  “Only six hundred years’ difference,” Sandy says. “My Lord, the time scales!”

  “Immense,” Jim says. “We can’t imagine them. Especially not Californians.”

  Sandy takes this as a challenge. “Can too!”

  “Cannot!”

  “Can too!”

  About five reps of that, and Sandy says, “Okay, try this. We’ll go backwards from now, generation by generation. Thirty-three years per generation. You tell us what they were doing, I’ll keep count.”

  “Okay, let’s try it.”

  “Last generation?”

  “Part of Greece.”

  Sandy makes a mark in the dirt between flagstones. “Before that?”

  “Same.”

  Five generations go by like that. Jim has his eyes squeezed shut, he’s concentrating, trying to recall Cretan history from the guidebooks, his history texts back home. “Okay, this guy saw Crete deeded over from Turkey to Greece. Before him, under the Turks.”

  “And his parents?”

  “Under the Turks.” They repeat these two sentences over and over, slowly, as if completing some ritual, so that Jim can keep track of the years. Sixteen times! “That’s one big Thanksgiving,” Humphrey mutters.

  “What’s that?”

  “Lot of Turkey.”

  Then Jim says, “Okay. Now the Venetians.”

  So the response changes. “And their parents?” “Venetian.” Ten times. At which point Jim adds, “We’ve just now reached the end of Itanos, by the way. The end of this city.”

  They laugh at that. And move to the Byzantines. Seven times Jim answers with that. Then: “The Arabs. Saracen Arabs, from Spain. Bloody times.” Four generations under the Arabs. Then it’s back to the Byzantines, to the times when the church before them was functioning, holding services, having its doorsill scraped by the door’s locking post, again and again. Fifteen times Jim answers “Byzantine,” eyes screwed shut.

  “And their parents?”

  “In Itanos. Independent city-state, Greek in nature.”

  “Call it Itanos. And their parents?”

  “Itanos.”

  Twenty-six times they repeat the litany, Sandy keeping the pace slow and measured. At this point none of them can really believe it.

  “Dorian Greeks.” After a few more: “Mycenaean Greeks. Time of the Trojan War.”

  “So this generation could have gone to Troy?”

  “Yes.” And on it goes, for eight generations. Sandy’s shifting to get fresh dirt to scratch. Then: “Earthquakes brought down the Minoan palaces for the last time. This generation felt them.”

  “Minoan! And their parents?”

  “Minoan.” And here they fall into a slow singsong, they know they’ve caught the rhythm of something deep, something fundamental. Forty times Sandy asks “And their parents?”, and Jim answers “Minoan,” until their voices creak with the repetition.

  And finally Jim opens his eyes, looks around as if seeing it all for the first time. “This generation, it was a group of friends, and they came here in boats. There was nothing here. They were fishermen, and stopped here on fishing trips. This hill was probably fifty feet inland, behind a wide beach. Their homes down near the palace at Zakros were getting crowded, they probably lived with their parents, and they were always up here fishing anyway, so they decided to take the wives and kids and move up here together. A group of friends, they all knew each other, they were having a good time all on their own, with their kids, and this whole valley for the taking. They built lean-tos at first, then started cutting the soft stone.” Jim runs his hand over the porous Minoan block he is leaning against. Looks at Sandy curiously. “Well?”

  Sandy nods, says softly, “So we can imagine it.”

  “I guess so.”

  Sandy counts his marks. “A hundred thirty-seven generations.”

  They sit. The moon rises. Low broken clouds scud in from the west, fly under the moon, dash its light here and there. Broken walls, tumbled blocks. A history as long as that; and now the land, empty again.

  Except headlights appear on the road inland. Their beams lance far over the dark land, fan across it as they turn onto the side road to Itanos. The group falls silent. The headlights go right down to the beach below them. Car doors slam, cheery Greek voices chatter. A Coleman lantern is lit; its harsh glow washes the beach, and the Greeks go to work on the two old boats. “Fishermen!” Sandy whispers.

  After leisurely preparations the boats are launched, their motors started. What a racket! They putter out of the bay and to sea, lanterns hung from their bows. After a time they’re only stars on the water’s flat surface, far out to sea. “Night fishing,” Jim says. “Octopus and squid.”

  Sandy and Angela find a spot to lie down and sleep. Humphrey returns to the car. Jim climbs to the top of the knoll and watches the boats at sea, the moon and its flying clouds, the rough town map below him, defined by its tumbledown walls. Again he’s filled with some feeling he can’t name, some complex of feelings. “The land,” he says, speaking to the Aegean. “It’s not abandoned after all. Fishing, goat keeping, some kind of agriculture on the other side of the valley. Empty-looking, but used as much as scrubland can be. After all these many years.” He tries to imagine the amount of human suffering contained in a hundred and thirty-seven generations, the disappointments, illnesses, deaths. Generation after generation into dust. Or the myriad joys: how many festivals, parties, weddings, love trysts, in this little city-state? How often had someone sat on this knoll through a moony night, watching clouds scud by and thinking about the world? Oh, it makes him shiver to think of it! It’s a hilltop filled with spirits, and they’re all inside him.

  He tries to imagine someone sitting on top of Saddleback, to look across the empty plain of OC. Ah, impossible. Unimaginable.

  How could history have coursed so differently for these two dry coasts? It’s as if they’re not part of the same history, they are separated by such a great chasm; how to make any mental juncture? Are they different planets, somehow? It is too strange, too strange. Something has gone wrong back home in his country.

  He sits there through the night, dozing once, waking to the boats puttering back in, dozing again. He dreams of rams and fallen walls, of his father and licorice sticks, of a bright lantern under a cloudy moon.

  He wakes to a dawn as pink as the sunset was orange, a woven texture of cloud over him. Pink on blue. In the bay below Angela is swimming lazily. She stands on the smooth pebble bottom and walks out of the water, wet, sleek, supple. It’s the dawn of the world.

  A little later a pickup truck drives slowly down the road, honking its horn. A horde of sheep and goats come tumbling out of the hills at this
signal, baaing and clanging their bells. Feeding time! Far up the valley someone is burning trash.

  Well, Angela has to be back to work in a couple of days, and so they have to start back home. Reluctantly they pack up. Jim takes a last walk over the site. He surveys the scene from his hilltop. Something about this place … “They’re part of the land, it’s not abandoned. The story’s not over here. It’ll go on as long as anything else.” Humphrey honks. Time to go. “Ah, California.…”

  46

  … The first wave of American settlers trickled in by wagon from New Mexico, or came around the Horn in ships, or rode down from San Francisco after trying their luck in the gold rush. There weren’t very many of them. The first new town, Anaheim, was begun by a small group of Germans determined to grow grapes for wine. They arrived from San Francisco in 1859, and there were only a hundred or two of them. The town was platted in the middle of open cattle range, and so they put up a willow pole fence that took root and became a living wall of trees, a rectangle with four gates in it, one on each side. They dug a ditch five miles long to obtain water from the Santa Ana River. And they grew grapes.

  The other towns followed quickly after the partitioning of the great ranchos. When the ranchos were broken up and sold off, the new owners made advertisements to sell the land, and started towns from scratch.

  Some of the landowners were interested in the new ideas of social organization circulating at the time, and several of the towns began as utopian efforts in communalism: the Germans in Anaheim were a cooperative, the Quakers helped to found El Modena on Society principles, Garden Grove began as a temperance community, and Westminster was a religious commune. Later the Polish group led by the Modjeskas settled in Anaheim and began a separate little utopia, although it fell apart almost at once. El Toro was founded by some English, who made it another outpost of the Empire, celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday and forming the first polo team in America: the British notion of utopia.

  When the Southern Pacific Railroad extended from Los Angeles to Anaheim, a boom began that lasted through the 1870s. Santa Ana was founded, with lots sold at twenty to forty dollars apiece, when they weren’t given away. Two years later there were fifty houses erected in the town. East of Santa Ana, Tustin was founded by Columbus Tustin, and the rivalry between the two new villages for the spur rail line from Anaheim was intense. When Santa Ana won the spur, Tustin was destined to remain a village for many years, while Santa Ana went on to become the county seat.

  Orange was founded by Andrew Glassell and Alfred Chapman, two lawyers who were active in the rancho-partitioning lawsuits, thus becoming rich in both land and money. The town began with sixty ten-acre lots, surrounding a forty-acre townsite.

  Southwest of these towns, on the coast, the lumbermen James and Robert McFadden built a landing that became an important point for shipping. The wharf was known as McFadden’s Landing, and the town that grew around it was called Newport. The McFaddens had bought the land from the state for a dollar an acre.

  Soon towns had sprung up everywhere across the county. In Laguna Beach because of the pretty bay. In El Modena because there was good land for vineyards, and the water from Santiago Creek. In Fullerton because the train line passed that way. And so on. Developers bought pieces of the ranchos, set out some streets, held a big party and brought out some of the crowds arriving in Los Angeles for a free lunch and a sales pitch. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Towns like Yorba, Hewes Park, McPherson, Fairview, Olinda, Saint James, Atwood, Carlton, Catalina-on-the-Main, and Smeltzer, didn’t last much longer then their opening days. Others, like Buena Park, Capistrano Beach, Villa Park, Placentia, Huntington Beach, Corona del Mar, and Costa Mesa, survived and grew.

  In 1887 this growth was accelerated when the Santa Fe Railroad completed a line across the continent to Los Angeles and immediately began a rate war with the Southern Pacific, which had been the only line. Fares that had been $125 from Omaha plunged to a rate war special of $1 before leveling off at around $25 for a year or two. The trickle of settlers became a small flood, and sixty towns were founded in forty years.

  The only area of Orange County that did not experience this blossoming of towns was the great landholding of James Irvine. Irvine came penniless from England to San Francisco during the gold rush, and engaged in land speculation in the city until he was rich. Then he and his partners moved to southern California, and they bought the entirety of the old Ranchos San Joaquín and Lomas de Santiago, which meant that, after Irvine bought out his partners, he owned one-fifth of all the land in Orange County, in a broad band that extended from the ocean far into the Santa Ana Mountains. His land crossed all the possible train routes from Los Angeles to San Diego, and he was powerful enough to hold off the Southern Pacific Railroad, which could be said of no one else in the state; his ranchers fought off forced efforts by the Southern Pacific construction crews to push a line through, and he granted permission of passage to the Santa Fe Railroad just so he could balk Southern Pacific for good.

  The Irvine land itself was kept free of new towns, and after a decade or two of sheep ranching it was cultivated, in hay, wheat, oats, alfalfa, barley, and lima beans, and much later in orange groves. For a hundred years the marked distinction between the heavily developed northwestern half of Orange County, and the nearly empty southeastern half, was due to the 172 square miles of the Irvine Ranch, and Irvine and his heirs’ policy of keeping the land free.

  In 1889 the county of Orange was carved out of Los Angeles County. With the help of some money slipped to legislators in Sacramento, the border was set at Coyote Creek rather than the San Gabriel River, so that when it came time to choose the county seat, Santa Ana was more central and was chosen over Anaheim. Anaheim’s citizens were very upset.

  So the little towns grew, and the farms around them. Despite all the feverish land speculation and real estate development going on, the actual number of people involved was not great. The largest towns, Santa Ana and Anaheim, had populations of only a few thousand, and the newer towns were much smaller than that. Between each town were miles of open land, covered by farmland or the old range, head high in mustard. The roads were few, the little rail systems even fewer. Under the constant sun there was an ease to life that drew people from the east, but in small waves that grew very slowly in size. Publicists based in Los Angeles trumpeted the virtues of southern California; it was America’s own Mediterranean, the golden land by the sea. The new orange groves contributed to that image, and orange growing was sold as a middle-class agriculture, more socially and aesthetically pleasing than the giant isolated wheat and corn farms of the Midwest. And perhaps it was so, at first; though many a man found himself working his grove and another job as well, to pay the grove off.

  An American life of Mediterranean ease: perhaps. Perhaps. But there were disasters, too. There were floods; once it rained every day for a month, and the entire plain, from the mountains to the sea, was covered with water. All the new adobe buildings of Anaheim were melted back to mud. And once there was an outbreak of smallpox that finished off the last of the Indians at San Juan Capistrano, which remained as a silent remnant of the mission past. And the crops failed often; brought in from afar and usually planted in monocultural style, the grapes, the walnuts, and even the oranges suffered from blights that killed thousands and thousands of plants.

  But by and large it was a peaceful life here, at the Victorian end of the frontier. Under the hot sun Americans from the East arrived and started up new lives, and most were happy with the results. The years passed and new settlers kept arriving and starting little towns; but it was a big land and they were accommodated without much change or sign of their arrival; they disappeared into the groves, and life went on.

  The new century arrived, and the sun-drenched life by the sea fell into a pattern that it seemed would never end. In 1905 the young Walter Johnson, pitching for Fullerton High School, struck out all twenty-seven batters in a game with Santa Ana High
. In 1911 Barney Oldfield raced his car with a plane, and won. In 1912 Glenn Martin flew a plane he had built himself from Newport to Catalina, the longest flight over water ever. In fact you could say that Martin began the aeronautics industry in Orange County, by building a plane in a barn. But no one could guess what would come of that kind of ingenuity, that pleasure taken in the possibilities of the mechanical. At that time it, like life itself, seemed a marvelous game, played in the midst of a prosperous, sunny peace.

  And all that—and all that—and all of that—

  All that went away.

  47

  Back in OC Jim can’t shake a feeling of uneasiness. It’s as if somewhere the program and the magnetic field keeping him on his particular track have been disarranged, fallen into some awful loop that keeps repeating over and over.

  And in fact he falls into the habit of tracking about for several hours each day, all his free time spent in a big circle pattern on the freeways, Newport to Riverside to San Gabriel to San Diego to Santa Ana to Trabuco to Garden Grove to Newport, and so on. While he stares out the window looking down at his hometown. Around and around the freeways he goes, stuck in a loop program that resembles a debugging search pattern caught by a bug itself. Software going bad.

  Once he stops to cruise through South Coast Plaza.

  Twelve department stores: Bullock’s, Penney, Saks, Sears, KlothesAG, J. Magnin’s, I. Magnin’s, Ward’s, Palazzo, Robinson’s, Buffum’s, Neiman-Marcus.

  Three hundred smaller shops, restaurants, video theaters, game parlors, galleries …

  A poem is a laundry list.

  You wear your culture all over you.

  Chrome, and thick pile carpets.

  Mirrors everywhere, replicating the displays to infinity.

  Is that an eye I see in there?

  Escalators, elevators, half-floors of glass, fountains.

  Lots of plants. Most are real, from the tropics. Hothouse blooms.