My Favorite Place in Orange County

            My favorite place in Orange County is not, as one might suspect, Disneyland.  No: it’s an overpass above the Pacific Coast Highway.  On one side of it, the beach and the ocean; on the other, a Mexican restaurant once frequented by Richard Nixon.  The overpass itself is a mesh cage.

            Climbing above the road, I always stop directly over a strip of brown train tracks that run parallel to the highway.  These stretch as far as the human eye can see in either direction, sandwiched between clumps of hairy palm trees, the ocean, the road, and mottled cliffs.  Part of me is astounded every time, at the pure linearity of the sight—a kind of symmetry nobody two hundred years ago would've ever seen.

            And the Pacific Coast Highway: the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, is an old road, built in the era before freeways--the era when movie stars with aviator sunglasses drove their convertibles north for weekend escapes.  Winding along coastal cliffs, there’s history in the cement.  There’s glamor in the growing cracks.

Something about this place, this overpass next to the Mexican restaurant once frequented by Richard Nixon, feels very real, to me.  Seagulls wait on the waterline, staring in ominous masses out to sea.  Pelicans bob in the swilling Pacific, beaks submerged.  Kelp decays in stinking piles underfoot.  Perpetually parked RVs with “Lazy Daze” and “Hooked on Jesus” painted on the sides dangle their rear ends over the sand. 

I once picked up a white stone from this beach.  It was an illegal acquisition, and I still have it in the pocket of my favorite jacket.  The stone is a lumpy quartz that smelled like the sea for weeks, and still has the texture of salt—as if its surface is riddled with microscopic holes. 

I called it my “pocket rock.”  It’s ancient, and I carry it with me.

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California: California is a world, in itself.  For a long time, I felt as if I’d never escape it, never find my way beyond its boundaries.  It’s a big state: when Greg and I took a bus from New York City to Philadelphia, we crossed through all of New Jersey in exactly the same amount of time it takes to get from the San Francisco Airport to my house.

            California: home of the lowest and the highest points in the continental U.S.  Home of John Steinbeck, wine country, hippies, redwoods, starlets, film noir, saloons, In‘n’Out Burger, the Mojave Desert, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

California has pyramids of wine barrels next to gravel roads with “Water into Wine?  Go Jesus!” sprayed across them.

            I’ve heard many people say that Northern and Southern California should become separate states.  It might be true: driving down the coast calls, at about the site of Hearst Castle, for a paradigm shift.  To the north is the Bay Area and above, where the 101 narrows down to a byway through forests, where tie-dye’s always kind of in fashion, where nonconformity is a standard value.  To the south, the 101 grows into a great conglomeration of asphalt and steel, and billboards of the latest action movies span the lanes.  All of L.A. opens up before the driver, a million white lights in a dark desert.

            Going even farther south, past the great and historically corrupt metropolis, the corporate buildings even into houses.  The road widens.  That’s Orange County.  Orange County is L.A.’s well-trimmed goatee.

Orange County is the quintessential postmodern landscape: everything is planned and controlled.  The trees are in manicured hedges, the parks have toll booths, and the hobos are moved along to less affluent areas.  Nature, in any wild form, usually has to sneak in--like when rats nested in the engine of Greg's car.
I once had a character, a young rebel, call Orange County “Beigeland.”  In the gated community where Greg’s family lives, it’s against the rules to paint houses anything but variations of brown.  Greg's parents' house, in this setting, is unique: it's distinctly more brown than the others.

Consumerism, down here, is the great recreation.  In one of the shiniest and most expensive malls, South Coast Plaza, the clothing store Abercrombie and Fitch pays an actual man to stand in its entrance, wearing stylish jeans and no shirt.  He always looks embarrassed, and a little cold.

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            Greg goes to UC Irvine.  The other day, leaving campus, he noticed several police cars in the parking lot.  The police were practicing what they’d do in the event that student protesters seized the administration buildings.  With the current state of UC tuition (it’s slated to increase 16% every year for the next five years), it is likely that California will see many student protests in the near future.  Irvine, though, located in the heartland of big business, is the campus of acquiescence. 

It honestly doesn’t seem to have the same wackiness as other colleges, the same spontaneity.  At UC Santa Barbara, there were random people in banana costumes running around chased by costumed gorillas.  At Berkeley, my brother met someone called the Pink Man, who rode a unicycle and said “Ca-caw, ca-caw,” flapping his arms.  Irvine, Greg and I joke, is the campus of students saying, “O-kay,” to everything—not necessarily with enthusiasm.

There’s an outdoor mall called the Irvine Spectrum, nearby.  It has a Ferris wheel in the center, which, according to Greg’s brother, “no one ever rides.”  Greg and I rode it, once.  We were the only customers, and the operator glared at us every time we swooped down.

            Then again, the nights here are beautiful—wet, with jagged mountain silhouettes against the befogged twinkling of cities.  The palm trees make the shapes of tarantulas against the sky.

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            Disneyland, now—Disneyland is the epitome of the non-real.  Disneyland is my second favorite place in Orange County.  I respect that theme park, even love it.  Where else could I buy a whole pickle after being serenaded by robotic bears?

Disneyland deserves its own chapter in my travelogue blog.  Au revoir, folks.  We'll meet up again in the Happiest Place on Earth.