California Dreamin'
Although I have been living in Oregon since September, 2001, currently pursuing a quiet life with my spouse in a suburb outside of Portland, I find that as the years come and go, I still hold strong memories of California, where I was a long-term resident until the increasingly high cost of living in the Bay Area finally prompted a move to the less expensive realm of the Pacific Northwest. At roughly the same time every year, when I am midway through the long duration of another wet, dismal winter in Oregon, I have cold moments in which I am seized by a shivery longing for the sunshine of the Golden State.
My life did not start in California. I was born thousands of miles away from there, far across the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, in Warrington, a town on the River Mersey, near the city of Liverpool, in Cheshire, England. I cherish both my British origin and the heritage that it represents, but California also had its part in shaping the person that I know as myself, and I am distinctly aware of the degree to which California has left an imprint on my life. I consider myself to be an Englishman by virtue of my birth and my temperament, and a former Californian by virtue of my experience. Oregon is where I happen to be living at this time, but I am not given to thinking of Oregon (or, indeed, America itself) as my "home."
I can lay claim to having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during the unruly, exciting years of the 1960s and 1970s, when California was, for the most part, perceived as being an easygoing paradise, providing new opportunities with every sunrise. When California appears in my thoughts today, I am inclined to think mainly of the freewheeling state that I knew when I was much younger, the state of open horizons and open minds. During those years (especially the 1960s), California was a prime destination for actors, artists, writers, musicians, and anyone else who wanted to escape from the oppressive restrictions of the American mainstream. California offered a bright haven to people who rejected the empty lure of conformity and chose to think for themselves.
Living where I did, not far from San Francisco, allowed me the chance to form a lasting acquaintance with one of the great cities of the world. Being there during the prime years of the counterculture made my nearness to "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" (the name it was given by Herb Caen, the famous columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle) even more interesting. Apart from a period of six months in 1971, when I was seventeen, I never actually lived in the city itself, but I did spend a great deal of my time there, becoming particularly familiar with Union Square, Fisherman's Wharf, Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, and North Beach. In the 21st century, Union Square and Fisherman's Wharf are not quite the same, Haight-Ashbury is no longer filled with hippies and music, but Chinatown and North Beach have retained most of their singular appeal.
My life did not start in California. I was born thousands of miles away from there, far across the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, in Warrington, a town on the River Mersey, near the city of Liverpool, in Cheshire, England. I cherish both my British origin and the heritage that it represents, but California also had its part in shaping the person that I know as myself, and I am distinctly aware of the degree to which California has left an imprint on my life. I consider myself to be an Englishman by virtue of my birth and my temperament, and a former Californian by virtue of my experience. Oregon is where I happen to be living at this time, but I am not given to thinking of Oregon (or, indeed, America itself) as my "home."
I can lay claim to having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during the unruly, exciting years of the 1960s and 1970s, when California was, for the most part, perceived as being an easygoing paradise, providing new opportunities with every sunrise. When California appears in my thoughts today, I am inclined to think mainly of the freewheeling state that I knew when I was much younger, the state of open horizons and open minds. During those years (especially the 1960s), California was a prime destination for actors, artists, writers, musicians, and anyone else who wanted to escape from the oppressive restrictions of the American mainstream. California offered a bright haven to people who rejected the empty lure of conformity and chose to think for themselves.
Living where I did, not far from San Francisco, allowed me the chance to form a lasting acquaintance with one of the great cities of the world. Being there during the prime years of the counterculture made my nearness to "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" (the name it was given by Herb Caen, the famous columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle) even more interesting. Apart from a period of six months in 1971, when I was seventeen, I never actually lived in the city itself, but I did spend a great deal of my time there, becoming particularly familiar with Union Square, Fisherman's Wharf, Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, and North Beach. In the 21st century, Union Square and Fisherman's Wharf are not quite the same, Haight-Ashbury is no longer filled with hippies and music, but Chinatown and North Beach have retained most of their singular appeal.
Northern California was never dull in the 1970s. On the morning of February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of the formidable publisher, William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley. She had been violently spirited away by a ragtag gang of self-styled revolutionaries who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. I first saw the news at breakfast, on the front page of the Contra Costa Times, where the story appeared under a stark headline. Patty Hearst's subsequent plight, in which she renounced her family's wealth and joined the SLA, thereafter taking part in the armed robbery of a bank, being arrested and convicted, and, after serving time and gaining an early release, finally resuming her former life in the upper crust, was so unlikely as to defy belief. Her hair-raising story played out over a number of years, running as a top item of news around the world.
Toward the end of the 1970s, things grew dark in the city. On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, the Rev. Jim Jones, a psychotic American preacher who had gained local fame as the leader of the People's Temple in San Francisco, induced 918 of his followers (304 of them being children) to join him in an act of mass suicide, after he directed the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, who was visiting Jonestown for the purpose of examining conditions there. Jim Jones had taken his flock to Guyana in 1977, after reports of untoward activities within his church had come to light. During the months before the mass suicide, I had been reading articles about him in the press, in which former followers described his sinister character, so I was aware that something was clearly wrong in Jonestown.
On November 27, 1978, when the Bay Area was still reeling from the mass suicide in Jonestown, another sickening tragedy happened: George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, a member of the Board of Supervisors (also an unashamed homosexual and a well-known advocate of gay rights), were shot and killed at City Hall by Dan White, a former Supervisor. Coming so soon after the nightmare of Jonestown, it seemed as if the Bay Area had fallen under an evil spell. When Dan White was later convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, rather than first-degree murder, many people in the Bay Area, myself among them, totally rejected the jury's verdict, regarding it as weak and unacceptable. After serving a mere five years in Soledad State Prison, Dan White returned to San Francisco, where he killed himself in 1985.
While San Francisco has been able to preserve many of its wonders and delights, many other things in California have changed extensively since the old days, and I regard most of those changes as being for the worse. Business interests have greedily taken malign control of the state, ruthlessly driving out those who are not wealthy and creating a crowded way of life that is hampered by too many buildings, too many freeways, and too much concrete. They are clearly bent on transforming the entire state of California, roughly and recklessly, into an enormous theme park, an illusory kingdom of unrelenting avarice in which all traces of equity and honesty have been brutally vanquished by the grim forces of money and corruption.
Although it has taken more than ten years of residence, I have slowly become accustomed, if not entirely reconciled, to living in Oregon. My inward eye, however, maintains an occasional habit of looking back to California, the state where, a lifetime ago, I passed from youth into manhood. It is keenly distressing for me to see what California has become, but the California that I once knew well, the California that I shall always remember, is the eternal California, glowing and tempting, that sometimes flits through my winter dreams: the California of blue skies, fresh mornings, comfortable days, and warm nights. In that California, it is always summer, and I am always young.
Although it has taken more than ten years of residence, I have slowly become accustomed, if not entirely reconciled, to living in Oregon. My inward eye, however, maintains an occasional habit of looking back to California, the state where, a lifetime ago, I passed from youth into manhood. It is keenly distressing for me to see what California has become, but the California that I once knew well, the California that I shall always remember, is the eternal California, glowing and tempting, that sometimes flits through my winter dreams: the California of blue skies, fresh mornings, comfortable days, and warm nights. In that California, it is always summer, and I am always young.