Manifest Destiny

Coming to California

I never expected to live in California. More accurately, I never thought I quite deserved to live in California. It was too pretty, too cool, too desirable. It was like yearning to date the captain of the football team, a bold, baldly ambitious notion, the belief that you deserved to have the best there is. I never felt I could reach for something so big and shiny.

Photo by Gustavo Zambelli on Unsplash

In fact, I ended up here accidentally. I was working on a book about the dog actor Rin Tin Tin, and all the material I needed to see and all the people I wanted to interview were in Los Angeles. We were living in Boston—far, far from Los Angeles, via the longest nonstop flight in the continental United States. My son was just a few months old, and the prospect of leaving him for weeks on end to do my reporting made me physically ill. The prospect of not getting the book done also made me physically ill, a somewhat different kind of illness, more in my head than my heart, but potent nonetheless.

My husband had just finished a five-year work commitment, so he was on his own clock, and one day I cooked up an idea: instead of me bouncing back and forth to California, we would pack up, all of us, even the dog, and head there for a month or so, together. I would get my work done and dandle the baby on my knee at the end of each day.

There was a bit of arm-twisting involved but I succeeded, and off we went. We had lucked into an Airbnb in Malibu, on the beach, so this was not a hardship posting. Still, I approached it with a degree of pragmatic, efficient briskness—I had a book to write, this would help me accomplish that, and the glorious view of the Pacific was just gravy. In other words, I wasn’t sidling up to the captain of the football team with this move: I was getting a job done.

But it was a romance nonetheless. Malibu was, of course, ridiculously, seductively beautiful, in the simplest physical terms, a sultry mix of mountains and canyons and ocean. I was equally taken with its weird, hodgepodge culture of beat-up cowboys, surfers, movie stars, and tramps, wandering up and down the narrow artery of the Pacific Coast Highway. The PCH itself was like a string of mismatched trinkets, a bonsai store next to a shitty souvenir shop next to a Michelin-starred restaurant next to a cattle- and horse-feed store. A city planner would have shot himself on the spot. Me, I found the rattle and jangle of these disparate elements intriguing, a sort of visual jazz composition, dissonant and raw.

To make a long story a little shorter, we got hooked, and not just by Malibu. When that Airbnb lease expired we moved down the beach to Venice, which we loved, and then to the Hollywood Hills, an entirely different sort of neighborhood full of nooks and blind corners and late afternoon shadows, and a view of four different mountain ranges and the long lap-like spread of the San Fernando Valley.

By then we had talked ourselves into believing that it made perfect sense to buy a house in Los Angeles, even though it made no kind of sense at all. After trying so hard to resist it, because it was too easy to love, and feeling not quite entitled to it, because it was too exciting and sexy and fast and fun, we grabbed Los Angeles and we got it, a foothold in this mad, maddening, marvelous place. We’ve been here twelve years now, so we’re still rookies, new enough to be surprised by something here every day, familiar enough to ache imagining any of it going away.

Tonight, a newly awakened wind is tickling at the eaves; a layer of ash as soft as baby powder has settled on every surface. Hoping against hope for better news in the next few days.

XxSusan