July 19, 2005 – An Odyssey to Southern California

July 19, 2005 – An Odyssey to Southern California

I have just returned from four days being away from who I am. Now, that I’m back I’m trying to describe who it was I spent the last four days being. I started being someone else, the moment my wife IM and I drove out the driveway of our house and stopped at Holder's Country Inn in the strip mall at the junction of Blossom Hill Road and Monterey Highway in San Jose. It was about 10:00AM on Thursday morning last week. We were planning a day on the Central Coast before visiting our youngest daughter RD and out two grandkids, CK and CB—their nicknames—for the weekend. The Country Inn proved to have quite a good breakfast to fill up for our half-day drive to Cambria, our favorite spot along California Highway 1, with its rugged coastline.

I got up on Thursday morning but didn’t get ready for work as per usual, instead I packed my overnight case for the trip south, the routine that described who I was during the workweek changed. As a result, I changed as well. The first thing I noticed different about myself that morning was I was no longer the worker with an 8:00AM to 5:00PM job. I was someone with no corporate affiliations or responsibilities for that day. At work, I didn’t exist. My desk at the office where I’m employed off Embarcadero Road on the east side of California 101 was empty. I had become the traveler, one of many people spending time doing things that were out of the ordinary. One of those things was having a late breakfast on a weekday at the Country Inn—the best hash browns I’ve had in a long time.

I had brought along the last three CDs of the unabridged audio book of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, which I planned to complete sometime in the next few days. Also in my bag of to do’s I had brought my notebook containing my scribbling about the book and other readings I’ve been doing recently. I have a terrible time remembering what I read or observe unless I write it down. The act of hand putting on paper thoughts I have in my head seems to ensure the information finds a place in my memory, which had been overfilled with technical minutiae for the past nearly 40 years. If I can’t bring something to mind, I can usually remember what notebook I recorded the information in so I can find it there. The terrible truth is that my mind has taken to storing information in notebooks and mentally indexing which notebooks contain what material.

That’s the other part about being the traveler. What I put in my notebook changed. The traveler not the worker was recording information beginning Thursday. The worker would have made entries in this notebook only after normal business hours. Moreover, the worker has a different notebook in which he records business information—yes sometimes the two get mixed up as both are identical in appearance. The traveler began by entering information into the notebook mid-morning when it would otherwise be closed. His entry was about the trip, which started in earnest after breakfast when IM and I drove onto 101 at the southbound on-ramp right off Blossom Hill Road just west of its intersection with Monterey Highway.

The entry described the journey’s objective, a drive down 101 to Cambria, which had last been undertaken in spring this year. However, the trip along El Camino Real—101’s more glamorous name given the trail by the Spanish to denote the road that connected its system of missions along the length of the state—would continue on Friday beyond Cambria through LA into Orange County. Besides revisiting landscapes beyond Cambria, IM and I hadn’t seen in several years, we had to meet with a real estate agent to list a property in Orange County for sale—the Southland is all about real estate, developing it, nurturing its value, and selling it for speculative profit. Saturday would be spent enjoying grandkids. Sunday would be consumed driving back north along the much speedier Interstate 5, which slices the western United States from the Mexican Border all the way to the U.S.-Canadian boundary. I 5 is about speed; 101 is about the romance of travel. Both would affect the traveler and his wife in the next four days.

The traveler drives differently than the worker, who sets out in the morning on a 40-minute drive. The route is so routine that the worker can drive it while devoting most of his attention to an audio book—Pattern Recognition mentioned earlier, which is what the worker had been doing the early part of last week and most of the week before: through San Jose starting at Monterey Highway, getting on Interstate 880 northbound at the North First Street On-Ramp, exiting onto northbound 101 a half mile later and staying on 101 until Embarcadero. Traffic back-ups occurring at the 880-101 interchange followed by another slow and go stretch a mile north when California 87 empties onto 101 north, followed by another slowdown further north where California 85 empties onto 101 north, about five miles south of the Embarcadero Road Exit. This routine occurs five days a week like clockwork—leave at 7:00AM, arrive between 7:40AM and 8:00AM every day. An oscilloscope works by sampling an event that is supposed to happen at a prescribed interval of time. A screen shows that sample, but it’s really a composite of countless samples all overlaid over one another. That is the worker. Sample his routine on Monday one week, another day of the week some time later and so on until you’ve sampled every day over a period of several weeks. The result is you see what the worker is for every day on the week.

The traveler has no such routine. The drive south is not predictable, though 30 years of driving south on 101 a few times a year does suggest some repetition. The traveler is looking to escape the routine of the worker, liberated from a timetable and schedule. And yet, he’s not escaping these confines, since the time he’s allotted for this indulgence is finite—96 hours to be precise. The trip south on 101 will consume three hours—the breakfast took another, and by 2:30PM the traveler and his wife are settled into an ocean-view room at the Cypress Cove Inn in Cambria looking at a coastline obscured by a shroud of fog that has kept the temperature in the range of 60 degrees Fahrenheit while the length of California along which the traveler has driven is baking in temperatures over 100 degrees F. The traveler is contemplating life after work. What would it be like to no longer be a worker, to have no routine for him to drive each day, nor any income that said routine generates.

There was a time I had been without a job to attend to each day and without the income that would have resulted. I realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in what I did and the amount of revenue it produced. Before my loss of job, I had been a Director of Marketing for a small start-up. I was thus described as “marketing guy.” Before joining the start-up, I had been editor, thus described as “purveyor of information.” The former had the connotation of someone whose pronouncements should not be taken seriously—as most of it was probably intended to present facts with an underlying agenda. The latter suggested someone producing information with less bias, but certainly not complete nor totally objective. That time off reminded me of myself as a young teen before I had acquired a handle to identify myself to the rest of the world. Back then I did what I enjoyed doing each day and dreamt of when I would be somebody other than a kid, somebody with places to go and people to see. Since then, I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of people and all of it has conspired to make me the worker I am today.

The traveler on the other hand has nothing to identify him to the rest of the world save the material possessions he wraps himself in, a late model European car; a 60-year old physical structure—apparent from salt and pepper hair (more the former than the latter—and the unyouthful skin of an older man; jeans, sport shirts, and running shoes—the uniform of today’s traveler. However, no one can tell that he has two grown daughters and four grandkids, and two elderly, self-sufficient parents with their wits intact. They can’t tell from observation that he’s a marketing guy, what his net worth is, and whether or not he’s a success or failure in life. The last one is the tough one especially for the traveler: “Have you succeeded in doing what you set out to do so many years ago?”

The road traveling south from Cambria is California 1, the most scenic highway you’ll ever find. You pass the tiny towns of Harmony, then the larger Cayucos—which looks more like a Baja California fishing village, the much larger Morro Bay, and finally the largest of the lot San Luis Obispo. Between Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo along the way you pass, the California Men’s Penal Colony, a California National Guard Camp, a Sheriff’s Department Facility, and California Polytechnic State University: punishment, defense and education—government defined. San Luis Obispo is the border between Northern and Southern California and the contrast is nowhere more obvious than Atascadero—actually Shell Beach, just a bit north—where IM and I stop for breakfast.

This is where large-scale real estate development begins. Since we began traveling south 30 years ago, the western side of 101 through Atascadero has become covered with condos and single-family dwellings all staring out into the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean. At Shell Beach we exit 101 for Breakfast at the Cliffs Resort on Shell Beach Road. There the parking lot is full and we end up breakfasting at the Spyglass Inn just south of its more upscale neighbor. In between the two hotels a half block from the freeway, a completely new resort development is rushing to completion. Just 44 miles up the road in Cambria, residents successfully blocked the efforts of the Hearst Corporation to build a resort hotel on Highway 1 just off the San Simeon coast, at the bottom of the circuitous drive up to Hearst’s Castle: Southern California versus Northern California. At heart, I’m of the Northern Persuasion and I’m reminded of that as we enjoy breakfast looking out at a beautiful overcast view of the Pacific.

By the time breakfast is over it’s after 11:00AM and we begin our journey in earnest toward the megalopolis of LA-Orange County. Beyond Atascadero, 101 traverses countless coastal acres of agriculture: broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, etc. not to mention the hectares devoted to flowers—though neat rows of vineyards are starting to encroach on this green grocer’s dream: Northern California’s invasion of its southern neighbor. The stretch of 101 through Santa Barbara speaks to the other California development: exploitation of mineral resources. In the north after the Forty Niners stripped the land—expanding outward from Sutter’s Mill—of every ounce of gold that could be picked, shoveled, or blasted by high pressure water, the south began sucking up its black gold. The story can be repeated for every valuable mineral California seemed to have in abundance like silver. The north in my time on the face of the earth has turned to exploiting intellectual wealth of its inhabitance. The south has continued to extract wealth from the human hunger for escape into myth and fantasy.

The road south from Santa Barbara is a journey through continuously expanding population growth, once small towns such as Carpinteria, Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Woodland Hills, and Sherman Oaks becoming densely populated, stripped-mall-laced suburbs, each a growing Micropolis. Many of these places were once young like the traveler but now have lived over half a century and have grown in size, its younger self distinctly showing signs of age. The traveler leaves 101 at Interstate 405 and joins the bumper-to-bumper, slow-and-go, midday traffic of LA on a Friday afternoon. Backups extending the length of the 405 past the new Getty Museum perched atop a smog-encased promontory across from ironically named Bel Air; past Interstate 10 one way pointing to the Santa Monica and the Pacific beyond, the other pointing east toward the southwestern heartland of America; past The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center; to just beyond LAX. From there the freeway picks up speed for those in the carpool lane; for the rest it remains commute hell. The traveler and his wife spend a full hour reaching the carpool lane after joining the 405. They spend another full hour negotiating the varying speed carpool lane through Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach before finally arriving at their destination in Irvine.

The traveler has much in common with this state. He is torn between the material wealth from unbridled growth, epitomized by the south, and the introspective, restrained growth of the north. In that sense he is a contradiction: driving a petroleum-hungry automobile over 400 miles all the while lamenting the loss of open space to development. Ask him if he could be content living in bucolic Cambria and he will say no. The slow-paced life, the lack of modern conveniences, and absence of the go-go excitement of a large city—its drawbacks notwithstanding—would drive him mad. This self-realization happens during each of these journeys as the traveler and his wife try to envision themselves living in any of the towns or larger cities along 101. This, they realize is not who they are. The traveler is a denizen of the modern world and is content to swim in its petrocarbon pollution, though given a choice between LA and San Jose, he would always pick the latter.