2016 and the miracle of Huell Howser

The big trend lately, it seems, is to pretend like California isn’t really America. The GOP has forgotten that it used to have the state on lock from 1968 to 1988 or that it got two presidents from there – apparently the existence of a robust Democratic majority and Covered California and the California Air Resource Board and a nonwhite majority means that for some reason, California doesn’t really count. Which is predictable. It’s different from them, and we all know that the worst thing you can be to the Confederates is different.
 
I started this year on January 1 getting up at jackass o’clock in the morning to catch a Gold Line train to Pasadena to see the Rose Parade. I’m ending it with friends and family and someone seeing California for the first time. In between? I rode the Coast Starlight home from LA and the Pacific Surfliner from Santa Barbara to Disneyland. Took a flight on Soarin’ over California for (hopefully not) the last time.  Spent two weekends in Yosemite, staring up at the stars (or at Half Dome). Made my first trip to the Lair of the Bear. Rode down to the Central Coast and got away from the world for a while. Watched minor-league baseball in San Jose under a warm blue sky that turned into a chilly evening. Caught a lingcod off the coast at Davenport and deep-fried it with a gang of Santa Cruz surfers. Parked my car on the edge of the Western world and watched the fog roll in while listening to echoes of DC. Exercised on base at Moffett next to the 129th California Air Guard. Camped not far from the birds at Bodega Bay. Rediscovered old haunts from Sunnyvale to the Sunset. Attended an Irish fleadh, a German Christmas market and two art and wine festivals, all without leaving my local high street. Welcomed Vanderbilt in to take two out of three on Stanford’s turf.
 
I went to Minneapolis wearing a black-and-gold Oakland A’s hat and to London wearing a blue wool flannel cap with a gold silhouette of California on the front. I don’t think I was wearing anything exceptionally Californian in Maui, but it was only January. And as summer rolled into fall and fall approached Christmas, I found myself more and more wearing either the plain solid gray throwback A’s hat, or that California lid I got for my birthday.
 
This was also the year I started watching California’s Gold.
 
Huell Howser was born in Gallatin, Tennessee. He went to Knoxville for college, made student body president at UT, served in the Marines and on the staff of Sen. Howard Baker, but after TV stints in Nashville and New York ultimately wound up in Los Angeles in 1981. About ten years later, he began a TV show that became synonymous with him, exploring the byways and backroads of California. Here, a ghost town battling to restore its name to what it was before the Post Office interfered a hundred years earlier. There, a small family farm still drying persimmons in the traditional Japanese style. Over there, a couple with an Aquacar driving from the road directly into the reservoir and puttering around.
 
Huell Howser – you couldn’t ask for a more Southern-sounding name. He sounded like a plate of grits to the end of his days, when he died at 67 only three years ago. And yet, he is remembered and revered throughout the state, especially in greater LA. I’d love to be able to get half as excited about anything as Huell seemed to be about everything.
 
I came here twelve and a half years ago in hopes of making it in Silicon Valley. And I did, sort of. And then things didn’t quite work out the way I planned, and one thing failed to lead to another, and before you knew it I was in an unpleasant space that I never really pulled out of. Which – given what happened to my old DC employer, and what’s happening in DC right now both culturally and politically – would have probably worked out just the same had I never left the DMV. The past isn’t a thing you can go back to, and that’s been a hard lesson to learn my whole life long.
 
I’ve said before, over and over and !-ing over, that I hate it here in Silly Con Valley. I do. I absolutely stand by that and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. But once you get outside the bleak orbit of Palo Alto and Cupertino and Google and Facebook, you’re still in California. And that’s the thing – no matter who you are or what you believe, California has a place for you. That’s not something you could say about where I grew up, because it sure didn’t. And for far too long, I’ve stooged along here as best I could because I was stuck on the surface, and Silly Con Valley definitely doesn’t have a place for me – I’m over 40 and not a programmer and not a VC, so I’m officially surplus to requirement. Imagine if I wasn’t white or male. 
 
But turn that aside, step out of the loop, rotate your perspective ever so slightly – and instead of Silly Con Valley, you’re in California. For over two centuries, this was the land of gold, the land of dreams, the land of opportunity before it was even American soil. Maybe it’s because it was a thing before America even got here, but California stands apart – the largest economy, one not harnessed just to oil or to financial services or to wheat or corn. The largest population, a fifth of the country. The only place with skiing AND surfing AND a Disney theme park AND vineyards AND rice paddies AND rail transit. Movie stars, hybrid cars, missions to Mars. (Accidental bars.) 
 
Huell Howser came to California, and California embraced him and he celebrated it for decades. Never married, no children, but left hundreds of hours of video proof that if you come here and look long enough for the right things, California will love you back. I’ve gone too long without looking, and it’s time I changed that and truly made this whole place my home. 2017 is the year I do like the bear on the cover of the old sheet music and embrace California.