The South End of North
By Ryan Miller
One straight line spans California, stretching from the Pacific coastline to the Nevada border as if someone sat a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on the map and ran the sharp point of a Ticonderoga pencil along where the spine met the paper.
The demarcation is as level as a tabletop. You could eat off of that line, where San Luis Obispo, Kern, and San Bernardino counties hang like a ragged tablecloth below Monterey, Kings, Tulare, and Inyo counties.
If the state can boast any clear and easy north-south divide, this is it.
Except a little farther south into Kern County, the Tehachapi mountains create a natural strip, a sort of geologic Panama Canal separating land masses above and below. Not quite reaching eight thousand feet at their highest point, they’re nothing too impressive as ranges go, but elected leaders have more than once proposed slicing the state along their peaks. It’s a popular idea, if not a successful one.
Historically, this is where California has come close to splitting.
Except miles north, all the way up in Madera, the county seat has some claim to being in the middle of the state. A bisecting line drawn from here would run west to Santa Cruz—close enough to Gilroy to smell the garlic—and east into Kings Canyon National Park and through the upper half of Death Valley.
In a literal sense, then, the halfway mark is here.
Except even farther north, past the sluggish snarls of Bay Area traffic and even more sluggish snarls of capitol budget talks, an idea brought to a boil by political frustration in the 1940s still lightly simmers in the shadow of Mt. Shasta. A separatist movement at the time, fed up with Sacramento’s governance—or effective lack thereof—aimed to create the state of Jefferson by attaching Southern Oregon to Northern California, the latter of which included only the uppermost counties and bottomed out with a thin finger of Lassen County in the east. Another, more generous take on Jefferson still doesn’t include Sonoma, Napa, or even Sierra counties.
To serious secessionists, this is where Northern California’s border runs.
Except . . .
Except . . .
Except . . .
California is big, maybe bigger than it ought to be. Among its 160,000 or so square miles of forests, deserts, mountains, valleys, and beaches, the larger counties are often described individually in terms of other states, as in “Kern County has an area nearly the size of New Jersey.”
The state’s area—and, perhaps more importantly, the diversity of people who fit into its sprawling borders—led to differences in opinion on those boundaries years before California was officially California to the rest of the country. When a constitutional convention first met in 1849 to discuss the future of the territory so recently ceded from Mexico, landowners in the south—many ranching and farming on massive Mexican land grants awarded as Spanish mission influence waned—contemplated their gold-fevered, potential brethren swarming through San Francisco toward Sutter’s Mill and tactfully suggested separate statehood for everyone north of San Luis Obispo. The dusty prospectors, transplanted East Coast speculators, and nouveau riche scouring foggy crags and tree-lined rivers for whatever precious metals they could scrape out of the soil or pluck from rushing snowmelt represented a practically incompatible social class—and maybe even a threat to property rights, considering their wild claim staking. By staying separate from the newcomers, the respectable rancho owners would continue to enjoy the aristocratic lives they’d built prior to the mad grab for instant riches.
They didn’t get their way, and California—reluctant southern section and all—was admitted to the union as the 31st state in 1850. Not even ten years followed before early state assemblyman and Californio Andres Pico tried for a similar split in roughly the same place, proposing a border that started south of Monterey and worked its way diagonally northeast, chopping off roughly the top quarter of Inyo County. Everything on the Los Angeles side would be in the new state of Colorado, united by its inhabitants’ sprawling estates and strong ties to Mexico.
His proposal made it to the governor’s desk, where it was signed and passed along, but a federal government preoccupied with a nascent civil war never recognized the effort—or simply decided to keep the free state/slave state balance by not opening the door for more debate. Though young California was already suffering an internal identity crisis, it was left unbroken, large, and prone to attempts at dissection and division for decades to come.
When I started asking around to learn where others consider the north-south line to run, my mom put her finger on Stanislaus County, while my wife gave the more ethereal answer of “where the beaches switch from being rocky to sandy.” One friend responded with a Twitter message: “In the middle.”
Fred DeJarlais, vice president of the California Map Society’s Northern California division, admitted that, as far as he knows, his group doesn’t formally mark the southern end of his jurisdiction. He thinks if the state is going to be divvied up, the lines should fall along wine-growing regions anyway. “When I go into Trader Joe’s, that’s what I’m looking at: ‘Hey, I want a coastal chardonnay,’ ” he said. “And that would be far more politically neutral, I think.”
There’s a trestle that spans Highway 101 somewhere south of Santa Barbara. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s a trestle. It’s a bridge-like skeleton of metal girders stretching over multiple lanes of traffic, but I have no idea what purpose it serves. To me, however, it marks where I leave Northern California and enter the southern section of the state. It’s an arbitrary border, to be sure, but they all seem arbitrary.
My personal border is admittedly one of the more southern boundaries I collected in my research. It may be because I grew up in Sacramento, so I’m a Northern Californian at heart, and I have a hard time letting go of that identity now that I live on the ambiguously aligned Central Coast. A line south of Santa Barbara lets me feel that I still belong decisively to the north.
When I left the state capital to attend college in San Luis Obispo, armed with region-based jokes (“How many Northern Californians does it take to change a light bulb? Hella.”) and linguistic tests (“It’s 101 if you’re from the north, the 101 if you’re from the south.”), I believed that I still had more ties to the fog than the smog. I was disappointed when I started receiving Westways magazine from AAA instead of the familiar Via—even if I never read it.
For years, I didn’t understand why I was so adamant about my northern identity. As I settled in San Luis Obispo after graduation, however, I came to see that I wasn’t alone. People in the middle of the state tend to have a lot of interest regarding where they fit. In California, folks in Eureka and Indio know their respective places in the extreme north and south. But San Luis Obispo, which roughly straddles the faded line of previous split attempts, suffers under a bit of an identity crisis akin to the bat from Aesop’s fable: as neither feathered bird nor landbound beast, it doesn’t belong in either camp, and so flies alone.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s “Native Son” columnist, Carl Nolte, echoed what seems to be the most popular sentiment, e-mailing that he “always thought Southern California began at the Tehachapis, or maybe just below San Luis Obispo, but a lot of people think that the Central Valley and the Central Coast are separate areas, distinct from Southern or Northern California.”
While many politicians have pointed out that considering California as having only two regions is an overly simplistic view, the world seems to easily divide into north and south. There’s no Middle Dakota, after all. No Medial Hemisphere. No Central Korea. No Midway Territories that fought against the Union and the Confederacy. One has to align with a north or a south, it seems.
And for many Central Coast residents, the south is the enemy. More specifically, Los Angeles is. San Luis Obispo held out against big-box stores for years, seeing a corporate chain influx as an invitation to bumper-to-bumper roads and a host of smog-tinged problems Hollywood types move to the area to escape. While a Home Depot and Costco began welcoming shoppers just a few years back, San Luis Obispo still bans drive-thrus—though rumors of their impending arrival, borne on the back of an In-N-Out Burger, grow louder every day.
Locals are proud—and often fiercely protective—of the small-town feel of their city. Years ago, when a Carl’s Junior opened on San Luis Obispo’s Higuera Street, home to independent shops and a weekly farmers’ market, someone quickly broke out the windows painted with the corporate chain’s logos. These days, an Apple store stocks iPads and other gadgets a few blocks down, but its move into town was debated and contested at length by residents who didn’t want the charm of “the SLO life” to get edged out. Most developments prompt counter-movements, organized by the sort of people who create mock-ups of how taller buildings downtown would block out the sun and obscure views of nearby cerros.
Defining what something is also defines what it isn’t. As L.A. sends its tendrils of traffic ever northward, many people who call San Luis Obispo home want to be able to say something concrete: That is not us. We are not them. It’s less of an identification with Northern California than it is a turning away from Southern California.
Christine Mulholland, a former San Luis Obispo City Council member and, yes, member of that Mulholland family, said there’s no question in her mind as to which side of the state holds the city—though she doesn’t have to be happy about it. “I don’t like to think of us as being Southern California,” she said. “But we are.”
Although dozens of state-splitting attempts followed Andres Pico’s over the years, the move to create Jefferson stands out for its particularly northern spin on the issue. In 1941, frustrated residents of the mountainous north gathered in Yreka to discuss their problems with a distant, unresponsive capital and lay out ideas for getting the sort of infrastructure they felt their communities needed. Their solution: join with similarly frustrated neighbors just across the Oregon border and form a new state.
The movement was a tad tongue-in-cheek, but it drew attention. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter who wrote about the development ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage. The effort gained momentum until it was derailed, like Pico’s endeavor before it, by war. Pearl Harbor was attacked within days of the region’s ceremonial election of a governor, and the would-be Jeffersonians remained disgruntled Californians.
The spirit of the movement, however, didn’t die out. Today, Yreka resident Brian Petersen (“I’m an independent. I believe in the Constitution and the Bible and my guns.”) runs jeffersonstate.com, a sort of marketing website keeping the rebellious idea alive. He uses the online portal as a means of educating the curious about the movement—which now includes residents in a dozen of the northernmost counties—and to sell Jefferson caps, T-shirts, and license plate frames. He even carries deep green flags that bear the great seal—two X’s in a yellow circle, representing the way northern folks were double-crossed by the capital.
Petersen signed on to the movement because, in the last thirty years, he’s noticed what he described as the decline of northern communities due to a struggling timber industry and harmful agendas pushed by a political body that doesn’t really understand how the far north works. He started the site about twelve years ago and has seen the Jefferson ideal continue to circulate through a unique population. “A lot of country folk have to put up with the laws and regulations made in Sacramento that are really made in L.A. and San Francisco,” he explained.
Environmental measures aimed at preserving forests or endangered species can cut into traditional careers in the northern counties, leading loggers and miners to bristle at what’s seen as an intrusion into a long-held way of life. Media reports have quoted discontents who mentioned frustration at diverse issues that range from the Northwest Forest Plan and clean water acts, to eroding private property rights and the state sales tax. The problem extends to a generally confused public, Petersen contends, and to leaders who use that misguided public opinion and the court system to “ruin whole industries, one at a time.” One Californian’s preservation efforts are another’s demise, so the thinking goes.
He admits there’s realistically a slim chance Jefferson will ever form as a true state. But he’s keeping the fire alive because he’s found that others enjoy warming themselves with the idea.
As for personal opinion, he’s a bit more inclusive than strict Jeffersonian borders. “Northern California to me is at least above Sacramento, that whole metropolis,” he said. “That’s as far as I would go.” He said some of his neighbors, however, might exclude everything south of Redding.
Another notable split attempt happened in the mid 1960s, when State Sen. Richard J. Dolwig proposed dividing California at—yes—the Tehachapi mountains, hoping to eliminate redundancies in government at the opposite ends of the state and to smooth over politicized water issues.
Perhaps no other subject in California is as scrutinized as water. The life-giving liquid sustains the state’s massive agriculture industry and hydrates about forty million people, more than a quarter of whom live in Los Angeles County. Add in just four more counties—Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego—and you’re looking at more than half of the state’s residents living in one of its driest regions.
“We have a lot of water in the north, not too much in the south,” said Maury Roos, chief hydrologist with the state’s Department of Water Resources. He started with the department in 1957, just one year after it organized, so he’s had his hands in the state’s water—figuratively, at least—for a long time.
To get technical about the subject, the state is broken up into ten hydrologic regions from the North Coast to the Colorado River. But if there were to be just one north-south split, Roos reasoned some people could maybe make the break at the Sacramento Delta; about three-quarters of the state’s average annual natural runoff flows north of there. But personally? He’d draw the line, just like so many others, at the Tehachapis and associated ranges to the southwest and northeast. Water hitting that mountain ridge rolls north into the Central Valley or south into streams that flow into the Santa Clara River system and the South Coast area, which nourish the largest population center in the state.
Former San Luis Obispo City Councilmember Mulholland, whose family has played a central role in California’s water wars since the Owens Valley debacle, obviously had an opinion when the subject came up. She pointed out that an urban center as complex as L.A. can only thrive because water that falls in the north is channeled to Southern California, but the arrangement doesn’t sit well with everyone. In fact, Mullholland believes that smaller is better; that maybe rearranging natural resources to allow for massive growth isn’t the best idea (“We know that most of the water’s up north,” she said with a laugh); and that when things—like cities, like states—get too big, they become unmanageable.
She doesn’t know where she’d draw a Northern California border, though, especially since there are so many factors to consider—watersheds, population, resources, industry, food availability, and the like. “It’s a huge question,” she mused. “It’s kind of one of those ‘what if?’ games you could play all day.”
But she did admit that, having grown up in the San Joaquin Valley, she thinks the Tehachapis are a bit too far south to mark the end of the north.
Perhaps nowhere else in the state is the north-south difference as clearly realized as in Madera County. While California’s true geographic center sits in North Fork, a Highway 99 divider near the city of Madera contains two living symbols of the halfway mark—a redwood and a palm.
Madera Chamber of Commerce employees said nobody knows why they’re growing where they’re growing; the trees’ origins have been lost to history. The general belief, however, is that someone intentionally planted them as divisional markers separating equal portions of the state.
As a Northern Californian at heart, I fully admit my bias when it comes to my own interpretation of the symbology in the twin trunks. North ends and south begins where the redwood trees, as fuzzy as John Muir’s beard, give way to the stark, bare palms that seem so artificial, especially when signaling shoppers to indulge in the commercial excesses of Rodeo Drive. To me, the former represents the preservation of nature, whereas the latter represents a taming and shaping, a subjugation of it. It’s the difference between a hike in Big Basin and a glimpse of the Hollywood sign through a commute-stained windshield.
I’m oversimplifying things, to be sure—obviously unfairly—but that’s what happens when lines are drawn, when the complex is reduced to the comprehensible.
The California Map Society’s DeJarlais explained to me that the cartographic process is, by necessity, exclusionary. When making a map or defining boundaries, some information obviously has to be left out, and the person who determines what stays and what goes is, on some level, editorializing. We can try to be fair as we shape districts and build walls, but our opinions still manage to creep in.
Boundaries—or their absence—can be used for control, whether by decreeing who gets access to water or by holding far-flung populations accountable from a distant capital.
Of course, we’re not all mapmakers. If we were, there would likely be as many lines as there are people in this massive state. The water department’s Roos summed up the sentiment when considering where others might create a border. To folks around the state, whether in San Luis Obispo or Sacramento, Southern California starts about thirty miles from where they live.