California Northern: A Meditation on Place
We live in Northern California. It’s an amorphous place with no clear southern boundary that nonetheless contains unquestionably distinct regions, both in terms of culture and geography. The North Coast is unmistakable—the ocean, dark trees, and fog, the crusty mix of loggers and hippies, the delicious beer and ubiquitous weed. And then there are the endless miles of I-5 and Highway 99 in the Sacramento Valley—crop fields, gas stations, strange signs emblazoned with far-right slogans.
But is there anything that connects these regions and the many others in Northern California, some commonality binding these disparate identities?
Northern California can be a perilous place to live. Murders in the East Bay, methamphetamine labs throughout the valley, widespread flooding, wildfires in the Sierras, decreasing water supplies, a dwindling state budget, salmon disappearing from the ocean and rivers, high unemployment, decades of past development having snapped up every available inch of land. And yet, there’s a corresponding feeling that everything remains perfectly fine. Vast tracts of wilderness, San Francisco bustling away, snow in the mountains, sun in the valley. Even if the fabric of our region is falling apart, there’s plenty to enjoy while it all unravels.
There are few attempts to reconcile these poles of our experience, or to place them in context. Media coverage tends to focus on the tragedies at the expense of our day-to-day experiences. National publications run the occasional “End of the California Dream” article. Our better local newspapers—once forums for sustained investigation into towns, cities, and regions—wither, while a sprinkling of niche blogs struggle to fill the absence.
But what if deeper self-reflection could grant us some comfort? It might ease that sense of impending doom if we try to understand what’s happening around us. And what if trying to articulate the reality between the blooming paradise and the disintegrating desert, attempting to paint a picture of how it all fits together, made us more whole and less alone? A sense of connection and shared experience might better equip Northern Californians to face the region’s multitude of growing problems.
The rest of the country rarely makes a distinction between Northern and Southern California. It’s all one place, home to beaches, Hollywood, liberals, and loose morals. San Francisco is assumed to sit at the state’s northern border, and the 350 miles between the Bay and Oregon are disregarded. Many states suffer this sort of overgeneralization—Florida is more than old people and Disney World—but the sheer amount of land that’s written off in Northern California bears noting. Which ultimately may be for the better, as it means many of us Northerners are forgotten and, for the most part, left alone.
Pieces of our identity do leak out here and there. Skiing in Tahoe, wine in Napa, computers in the Silicon Valley, being bonkers-left in the Bay Area. But none of these reveal any sort of connective tissue that may be underlying our culture, nor do they accurately represent much of what’s happening here. They certainly don’t capture the variety of our residents, which includes many people who don’t have the money or desire to ski, drink expensive wine, spend all day on computers, or belong to the extreme left. Go to the State Fair in Sacramento some time—you’ll see what we mean.
It’s often said that Northern Californians spend far more time thinking about Southern Californians than vice versa. We think, so the common wisdom goes, that Los Angeles is a striking miasma of immediate gratification, style over substance, and, on a good day, Raymond Chandler. They think of our region as a nice place to go on vacation.
Forgetting for a moment any sort of rivalry that may or may not exist, it remains safe to say that the two regions are essentially different. You won’t find many Northern Californians who disagree—we approach life differently, have different environments, histories, and opportunities.
So what do we think of ourselves? It depends on your perspective, and there are countless perspectives, each with its own interpretation of this place.
You could attend a party school like Chico State, wakeboard on the weekends, and drink countless Bud Lights in your eternal search for the perfect woman—someone able to save your life from reckless disaster. NorCal would be a great place to do so in style and without judgment.
You could live in the far northern mountains, belong to the local militia, leave your immediate surroundings once a month for supplies, maintain faith in the eventual formation of the State of Jefferson, and expect “the shit to go down” at any second. Your corner of the state would serve as the type of isolated area perfect for making a stand when said shit goes down.
You might be a fieldworker from Jalisco who, after decades of work, is supporting a daughter at Cal State Monterey Bay. She lives at home, worries about gas money, and takes care of her little brother while you and your wife continue to hold down jobs. And while your lives remain somewhat precarious, California may be one of the few places outside Mexico you could have found a community, and where your children could access a high-quality and relatively affordable education.
You could live near Eureka, grow marijuana and look for all intents and purposes like a true-blood hippie, though with a barely noticeable dose of redneck mixed in. Despite your ostensible peace-and-love identity, you could carry a gun at all times and, over the course of your life, use it to disperse potential thieves several times. Northern California would be the most amenable place in the country to your business
of choice.
You could be a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, working in a downtown hotel and living with two families in a flat in the Richmond District. Your son could speak fluent English while you speak absolutely none, meaning all interactions with state agencies, bus drivers and bank tellers occur with your seven-year-old child as the point of contact. The city would be one of the few places in the U.S. where this setup would be relatively successful.
Or you could live with your family in a suburb of Sacramento and work for the Environmental Protection Agency on air quality, a job you landed due to your proficiency as a lawyer, not your love of trees and birds. On weekends, you could enjoy jet-skiing or riding your snowmobile, depending on the season, yet you’d hide these activities from your co-workers for fear of being dubbed a hypocrite. NorCal would be the only place you could motor across water or snow within miles of your home, yet be made to feel guilty about both.
And though all of these people would likely say they live in Northern California, any sort of shared regional identity they might feel with the others would probably end there. They would be hard-pressed to describe any glue holding everyone together, any bonds giving us a shared sense of purpose.
We wonder this often—do we feel a shared anything? Or will Northern California always be a patchwork, a bunch of disconnected individuals and enclaves who all happen to live in the same place? And if the answer to the latter is yes, how can this place survive?
There are many explanations for how Northern California could be home to so many distinct people and regions.
The most well-worn of these cites the sixties. The Bay Area, and by extension Northern California, served as the epicenter of that decade’s counterculture movement. The movement represented a cataclysmic rift in the fiber of America, challenging the core beliefs of the establishment and ending a wrong-headed war in the process. The ramifications of this era—particularly the strife between the mostly coastal, liberal counterculture heroes and the valley-based conservative status quo—endure to this day.
The counterargument: the Baby Boomers were the most narcissistic generation in our country’s history. Most of the tales of “cataclysmic rifts” can be traced to liberal Boomers justifying their youthful actions to themselves and trying to make their twenties seem more important than they really were. Yes, they ended the war. Or maybe they didn’t. Either way, they went on to become the most over-consumptive cohort in the modern world, gorging their way through resources in their later years, leaving their children with a heaping pile of awful environmental and economic issues to deal with.
There’s truth to both arguments. Regardless, it’s hard to draw a straight line from the conflicts of the sixties to many of the rifts keeping people apart now.
For example, my water versus your water. The supposed epicenter of counterculture, the Bay Area, puts dams in the Sierras and ships water across the state to survive. To this end, they’re comfortable building bigger reservoirs and destroying ecosystems in the process, while their supposedly conservative “status quo” enemies in places like the Calaveras County foothills plead for the preservation of pristine rivers for fishing and recreation. Another example: the plight of Latino and Asian hotel workers occupying positions in one of the most underpaid industries in the country. They facilitate Baby Boomers’ Carmel getaways and San Francisco conferences, but must still fight tooth and nail for basic health coverage. It’s hard to say these conflicts, in which the traditional conservative and liberal roles have been reversed, fall cleanly along any sort of lines drawn in the sixties.
Or, in the words of great Southern California thinker Jeffrey Lebowski, “What the fuck does anything have to do with Vietnam, man?”
If you’re really into historical explanations, you could work your way even further back, to the beginning of the state. Northern California as it exists today began with a mad race for gold, people killing each other and unsuspecting natives over mining claims, over land, over pennies, over nothing. Throughout this state’s history, it’s been considered a place of opportunity, a place to get yours when you couldn’t anywhere else. New residents keep coming, searching for what California has always promised, and so the battle continues. Somewhere deep within us, we know resources here are precious and limited, and that we’ll forever be fighting for our piece of the state.
This provides an excellent framework for explaining sprawl, for our high housing costs, our endless battle over forests and creeks and coasts and farmland. But it doesn’t explain why people are leaving. Since 2006, more than 100,000 residents have left the state each year, at least in part due to California’s suffering from budget deadlock and a dwindling job supply. Though the state’s population still rose during this time due to foreign immigration and births, in 2009 the growth rate dropped to less than one percent—the lowest it has been in more than a decade. Thus, it’s difficult to define Northern California as a constantly expanding population battling over increasingly limited resources when expansion has reached a near standstill, when residents are increasingly deciding to get out of the game and leave those who remain to tear each other to pieces.
There’s a litany of other explanations as to why we’re at odds, all with some validity. The immense rural/urban divide, for example. Other than the greater Bay Area, Sacramento and its suburbs, and a string of mid-sized cities clinging to I-5 and Highway 99, Northern California is an empty, lonely place. Between the scattered and relatively isolated outposts are hundreds of thousands of acres of national forests and wilderness areas on the coast and in the Sierras and the Trinity Alps, from which permanent residents are expressly prohibited. It’s easy to understand what different backgrounds and desires someone who grew up in Gridley has compared to someone who spent his or her childhood in Oakland, and why neither would feel particularly connected to the other.
Furthermore, the Bay Area represents the only truly urban place in Northern California. Much of what occurs, or is thought to occur, in our region touches Bay Area cities in some way. That incredible Booneville wine was grown by San Francisco transplants, for example. Your favorite Modesto-based priest studied theology in Berkeley. And half the goods in your Mt. Shasta cabin were shipped through the Port of Oakland. As much as valley dwellers decry the big city (despite shipping their crops to foreign markets through it), the Bay Area’s tentacles reach far throughout the region.
There’s also simple geography. Several distinct regions split Northern California up, making each sub-region feel entirely separate from the others and giving each its own distinct identity. The climates of Mendocino, Stockton, and Tahoe, for example, are vastly different. When wildfires rage through the mountains, people on the coast wonder why houses were built there in the first place. When coastal dwellers lament water restrictions, farmers in the valley wonder if these people understand that the only reason they get to live on the coast is because valley farmers are busy growing their food. The tendency can be to isolate yourself in your own region, rarely leaving your local sphere to brave the people, landscape, and weather of a surprisingly different place.
Despite the variety of forces keeping us at odds with each other, some bonds do exist.
Northern Californians have an immense appreciation for being outside and experiencing this place directly. Granted, the ways in which we enjoy the outdoors vary widely, and sometimes even put us in direct conflict with each other. Take the peaceful hiker charting a path around Whiskeytown Lake, for example, who endures the roaring rumble of a jet-skier. The off-road vehicle fanatic who watches more and more of his favorite playground get fenced off for wildlife. The valley farmer who might make more money using pesticides, but who would kill off migrating birds in the process. Splits erupt between those who want to enjoy and harvest the outdoors exactly as it is, and those who want to mold it into an even more exceptional playground and producer. Regardless, a wide variety of Californians would rather be outdoors than in an office, or a bar, or a church.
Also, from a certain perspective, there’s not much difference between the outlook of the militia member of the foothills, the Central Valley conservative farmer, the pot dealer in Arcata, or some of the far-left in San Francisco. They all share a strong sense of self-reliance, a feeling that if left to their own devices, their community or subculture would function better on its own. They could take care of each other—feed themselves, create markets for themselves, develop superior laws and regulations than the ones we have now. Their lives would cease to be dogged by anti-drug laws, anti-gun laws, overzealous cops, environmental laws, or Proposition 8. Essentially, these people are utopians, though often they spend less time determining what that perfect world would look like and more time detailing the problems of the current one.
Finally, Northern Californians share a love for where they live; few are ambivalent about the region. We know a lot of people who grew up here and couldn’t leave, despite trying. We know a lot of people who came here from somewhere else and can’t bring themselves to leave. We might hate many of the other people here, but never the place. Even the rural anti–San Francisco crowd, who decry the traffic and mores of the place, still speak about “The City” with a certain suppressed pride. And Bay Area people gush about the rural parts of the state as if they had created them themselves.
While none of these common threads are quite pithy enough to serve as a sound-bite identity, maybe a shared love of a place is enough of a foundation to build on. Enough of a common identity to allow us to work together, to see ourselves in our fellow Northern Californians. Maybe we can use this love of place as a touchstone to rely on, a constant reminder of why we live here and why we remain willing to stay, whatever challenges lie before us.
It’s often easier to define something by what it’s not.
This publication is not an attempt to create an identity where there isn’t one. Our goal is to illuminate what this place is about, not to mold Northern California into what we’d like it to be. Nor is it a booster magazine created to make Northern California seem like a sort of paradise, with spicy weekend jaunts and software jobs waiting for all those who move here.
Now on to the more difficult task of claiming what this magazine is: it’s a place that offers windows into various aspects of life here in Northern California. A place where people can write about what they know. A place to explore our collective and regional identities, to think about who we are and what we share. It’s an effort to explain why so many of us believe Northern California is a unique place worth caring for. And it’s a forum for sparking dialogue, a home for strong opinions, in-depth reportage, basic storytelling, and for everything in between.