True Life Stories:
MOVIN' OUT WEST
A lifelong New Englander pulls up stakes to head for the Left Coast
by
Joyce Maynard
Part
Three
I went to Stars for
a drink with a new friend, and Willie Brown (for whom she'd worked briefly,
back in Sacramento) walked in and stopped by our table -- a fact that
seemed to surprise no one but me. At that point I'd only lived here a
matter of weeks, but already I was beginning to understand, things like
that happen in San Francisco. Hitchhiking home in Mill Valley one morning
from the garage where my car was being repaired, I asked the man behind
the wheel what sort of work he did. "Guitar," he told me. He
was in a band.
"Oh nice," I said. "What do you call yourselves?"
"Talking Heads."
I got myself a new California driver's license and turned in my New Hampshire license plates -- feeling a stab of pain when I did. For as long as I'd been driving -- more than a quarter century -- my license plates said Live Free or Die. Now, of course, all they say is California.
Audrey picked up a job in Truckee for the winter, working as a chambermaid at a ski resort, with the fringe benefit of daily snowboarding privileges. She fell in love with the mountains of Lake Tahoe, but she also ached for home. For her two younger brothers, who still had the world of school on which to build the structure of their lives, the move was less disorienting. Willy got a starring role in Guys and Dolls and found himself a tennis partner. Charlie signed up for a nighttime drawing class at the San Francisco Art Institute and discovered with joy that many of the skateboarding locales he'd seen in skate videos for years, or featured in the pages of Transworld Magazine, were actually in his back yard. Friends introduced him to Stinson Beach and Bolinas. Within weeks of moving here, my sons were sleeping at houses of friends as often, on weekends, as they slept at home. Or they were here, along with half a dozen other boys. There was something reassuring in the discovery that now we were going through Lucky Charms out here at the same rate we did back in New Hampshire.
Early on in my time in California, I'd met a man I thought I loved. The relationship developed swiftly, over the course of hours of talk and miles of hiking trails, to the point where I saw or spoke with him daily. I called my friends back home to say I thought I'd found my life partner.
Six months into the relationship, at the end of a dinner party I'd given to celebrate the one-year anniversary of my first exploratory trip to San Francisco, the man announced after the last guest left, that our relationship was over. He was gone 10 minutes later -- leaving me reeling, first at the loss of him, then at the more troubling realization that he hadn't been the man I'd supposed, and in fact, I hadn't really known him at all.
California doesn't hold the patent on painful breakups or abrupt departures, of course, but the particular way this love affair ended -- that turn-on-a-dime quality -- would never have happened back where I came from. "He probably loved you for a time," a friend (also a Californian) theorized. "But nothing is forever out here."
"Let me tell you about being single in San Francisco," said another friend -- a single man himself, also in his 40s. "California can be a cruel place. People come and go. Watch your back."
Exactly a year has passed since I packed the last of our stuff into the Ryder truck and headed west. I have now known every month of the year in Northern California. Although it will be much longer before this is the place I'm referring to, when I speak of home.
Here's what I'd say now, of the choice I made to pull up my New Hampshire roots and transplant myself and my children in California soil:
The life I left back home was darker, colder, infinitely less exciting and glamorous. Sometimes I think my heart resides there still. The thought of my old front porch, the smell of lilacs and the memory of lacing up my skates and taking off across a frozen pond in the January moonlight can bring tears to my eyes, as the sight of sailboats on the Bay or the smell of rain in the headlands doesn't yet, and maybe never will.
The life I left back home was safer, more predictable, far less filled with risk and the possibility for failure. Also far more finite. Here in Marin County, even a trip to Whole Foods for vegetables is an event. (Didn't Deborah Koons meet Jerry Garcia there? No telling who I may encounter, browsing through the Heirloom Tomatoes.)
I drive to Coit Tower late one night and look over the city, feeling like a character in a romance novel. Standing on the edge of the water at Muir Beach, watching my dog splash in the water, I think about my question: Where on earth is there a more perfect place to live? No place I know.
It is also strangely
lonely in paradise -- and I don't suppose I am the only person who feels
that way. You can buy a plane ticket, drive your rental car to an unknown
city, buy a house there. It's not so easy, 
acquiring
a sense of community. Particularly in a place where there are so many
options, all of us are free to flit like the hummingbirds hovering by
the hibiscus blossoms on my tree, from one to the next. Among my friends
here, now, I number a teacher, a therapist, a Silicon Valley inventor
of artificial intelligence programs, a nightclub piano player, a documentary
filmmaker, a waiter, an artist, a tax preparer, a chef, a stock trader,
a computer repairman, a landscape gardener. I feel lucky to have made
good friendships here, and I know they will only grow deeper, and that
I'll make more friends too. Still, there's no way I can have an old friend
yet. When trouble happens, my impulse is still to dial a 603 area code:
New Hampshire.
A year ago March, while I was traveling out here that first time, my house back in Keene was burglarized -- a particularly shocking event, given that I'd always described our town as a place so safe I never had to lock my door. Evidently someone overheard me.
Among the many items stolen that night was my computer, with many hundreds of pages of my work on it, and no backup disk. After I got home and recovered from the first terrible shock of the event, I put a letter in our town paper, the Sentinel, explaining what had happened, and sending out a plea to my community to help me get my hard drive back.
Wherever I went after my letter was published, friends and total strangers alike stopped me on the street, expressing their sorrow and concern. Eventually, I did get a call from a woman who knew where my computer was. And though our bikes and snowboards and stereo equipment never reappeared, the hard drive was returned to me, intact.
In a way, that burglary helped get me out of New Hampshire. It reminded me not to romanticize the innocence and old-fashioned values of any place. Although, having lived through the disillusioning experience of that burglary, I was then given the rare gift of watching how my community gathered round me. Here in Mill Valley, I could publish such a letter in the Independent Journal, and no doubt people reading it would feel badly for me. But they wouldn't stop to express their regret, when I'm shopping at Whole Foods. How could they? They don't know me.
A line came to me in a dream the other night, and stirred me so deeply I actually woke up. It was the first line from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, a book I haven't read, or even opened, for 20 years. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
It's such a simple, ordinary sentence. And that one word -- "had" -- speaks of such loss and longing. The farm is gone. The writer won't be back.
I had a farm in New Hampshire once, with 50 acres and a skating pond. And then a pink Victorian house, with a big front porch and a trampoline and a goldfish pond out back. I had friends, and a history, and 50 teapots, and a sense when I walked down the street that people knew my name, and my dog's name. And I knew theirs. (They also knew my business. Too much of it, sometimes.)
I left all that when I moved last summer to Northern California -- a land inhabited, in large part, by others who have made similar exoduses. We all checked our past at the door when we crossed into this state. There's good and bad in that.
The spirit that brought my children and me here was not so very different from the one that led the early settlers to pack up their covered wagons and head west, more than a hundred years ago. Fresh territory. Broader vistas. Bigger mountains, stronger waves, taller trees. If New England was a small and cozy land of tradition and heritage, California -- in its expansiveness of scale and outlook -- is the country of endless possibilities. I wanted those, not only for myself, but also for my children.
I have wanted to come to California since I was six years old, watching the Mickey Mouse Club, wishing I could be one of those kids.
I have wanted to come to California since a boy in my second grade class came home from a family vacation with a photograph of himself standing next to a section of giant redwood, sliced like a piece of salami, with all the rings revealed, including the one that would have been new right around the time Christ was born. I wanted to go to Disneyland and ride in the teacups. (Now I know Southern California might as well be a whole different state. But back then it was all simply California.) I wanted to audition for movies, ride the cable cars, stand on a redwood deck with a hibiscus blossom in my hair from my own hibiscus tree, drinking a margarita and watching the sun set over the mountains. I do all that now.
This fall, Audrey starts college at UC Santa Cruz. (As an in-state student, no less.) When my younger son served up hot dogs at the snack bar down at the Mill Valley Little League field at night games on cool late-spring nights, kids called out, "Hey Willy," while his older brother performed like a dancer on his skateboard. Charlie can ollie (negotiate) seven stairs now -- or could, until he broke his collarbone trying. Just as my grandparents came to Canada, from Russia, so their children could be citizens of the new world, I know my children -- who own surfboards now, along with snowboards, also beepers -- may well become Californians, even if I never entirely assimilate, myself, or lose that sense of transience that still haunts me.
Every time my sons
and I drive across the Golden Gate bridge, I say out loud, "Can you
believe it? We live in California!" I still feel like a person in
a movie, like an illustration on my Golden State collector plate. As we
cross into the Marin Headlands, I still almost expect to hear the refrain
from "This Land Is Your Land."
"Get over it, Mom," my sons tell me.
Maybe some day I will.
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