Loathe Thy Neighbor

For a long time I wanted to move to California, and now I don't anymore. For a long time the whole country wanted to move to California, and now it doesn't want to anymore. These several changes of mind go together somewhere along the line.

California has been a dream for so long, and we have dreamed of California for so long, that we hardly even notice the mechanism anymore. The audio-animatronic men and women, the vinyl surf, the polyurethane clouds move grandly on the stage; caught up in their verisimilitude--or, rather, their lack of verisimilitude, because it is their difference from us that attracts us--we ignore the whirring of the ordinary gears and the slap-slap of the ordinary tapes running out in the pit below.

The place to go to start thinking about California is the books--Run River, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays-- of Joan Didion. Didion is a "native daughter," as she puts it. She grew up in and around Sacramento; she lives in Malibu. I've never met her, and I don't think I want to. Her writing is so intense that I suspect she is like the Emily Dickinson of whom an acquaintance wrote, "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much.... I am glad not to live near her." Didion's writing drains your nerve power, too, and the only reason you forgive her is that it so obviously also drains her own. Didion is California's Cassandra: She always tells the truth, and it is never the truth California wants to hear. You and I, for example, have sometimes naïvely thought of California as Eden. Didion tells us a darker truth: that Californians also think of California as Eden. "It is assumed," she writes--assumed by Californians--"that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled, by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?"

I know a little about the Donner-Reed, the Donner, Party; two years ago, I published a novel about the Donner Party that was as historically accurate as the records would allow. The Donner Party, you will recall, was that group of pioneers from Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Ireland and points between that attempted a new route to California in 1846 and was trapped for five months in the Sierra Nevada below what is now called the Donner Pass, during which time most of its members lived off the dead rather than starve to death. The Donner Party is usually thought of as the archetypal pioneer diorama, despite the fact that our pioneer forefathers didn't make a practice of eating their companions. The Donner Party occupies a special, dual place in the California mentality, as Didion goes on to show: "We were taught," she writes, "that they had somewhere abdicated their responsibilities, somehow breached their primary loyalties, or they would not have found themselves helpless in the mountain winter ... would not have given way to acrimony, would not have deserted one another, would not have failed."

Well, by any mortal standards, they didn't fail. More than half of them made it through the snowbound Sierras in the middle of the worst winter in 30 years. Nor did they fail at resourcefulness, as their willingness to live off the dead shockingly demonstrated. For their courage they are usually, and rightly, claimed by Californians as fine examples of the state's early pioneer stock. The state even maintains a museum devoted to them, as well as to the other early pioneers, in Donner Memorial State Park, near Truckee. Where they "failed," really, was in discretion. They didn't keep their mouths shut, so to speak. They brought contumely down on proud California heads. California would prefer that you admired its missions, which Indian slaves built, rather than the Donner Party. Didion once more: "It is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it had simultaneously begun,tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west." That scenario isn't likely to welcome a story as grotesque as the Donners'. Californians chewing corpses: The very thought revolts. Why would they need to? "December in California is as pleasant as May," the guidebook, written by a Californian, informed the Donners, the same guidebook that led them astray across a route the Californian was promoting but hadn't personally tried.

We--my then wife, my son, my daughter and I--packed up to go out to California on vacation a while back, to look around, having not found peace of mind in Kansas, having found cold in winter and heat in summer and commerce and small talk. People might live better in California, we thought, because California is said to be a better place to live. We packed our bags and found someone to sit with the dog. Promised the kids a visit to Disneyland. Had lunch before we left with a man who had spent his life fixing up the Midwest, trying to make it livable. He thought the idea of changing your life by changing your residence--the idea that has moved people to California for 300 years--was laughable. "You can't escape anymore," he said, laughing. "There's no escape anywhere. You might as well stay here." I said we'd see.

We arrived in Carmel, on the Monterey Peninsula, where we had rented a house, just before sundown one day, shivering in the unaccustomed chill of an ordinary summer evening by the northern sea. We picked up the key and bought groceries and some of that good California wine and let ourselves in. Fog streamed through the pines. We found wood and built a fire and settled back and toasted our luck, luck to be in California. Did we like Carmel, the sea, the cypresses, the fog, the white sand? We talked of living there one day. It was the best of the California we knew. The only drawback was that even small houses in Carmel started at $40,000, with no view. We didn't talk about that. We made small talk with wine. Picking our place.

We awoke to cold mornings and turned the furnace up and after we were warm, we walked down the hill, down Ocean Avenue, through the town to the white-sand beach, and watched the breakers and listened to them beat. Dogs ran the beach with handsome middle-aged women following them or elderly men in jodhpurs and riding boots, ordinary neighbors. Girls braving the cold in bikinis played Frisbee with boys in chopped-off jeans. The fog drifted away like smoke clearing a battlefield to reveal Point Lobos, the wild point of land south of Carmel Bay. Point Lobos is a state reserve, a jut of land where visitors are confined to narrow trails by edgings of wire and poison oak and so a place where wildflowers thrive and deer wander and sea lions bark from protected islands offshore and the cold surf breaks clean on pebble beaches of granite and Monterey jade. Edward Weston spent years photographing Point Lobos, and his photographs of its skeined kelp and Monterey cypresses and eroded coves have been compared, somewhat fatuously, to Beethoven's last quartets. I will give California Point Lobos.

Point Lobos attracted another artist to the Monterey Peninsula years ago, a man who is now dead, a man who is revered in Carmel as saints are revered in Italian villages, the poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers hardly ever came down to town, yet he was unwittingly Carmel's seignior, first proof of its dedication to the finer things of life and its disdain for the common. Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh.

He and his wife, Una, found Carmel in 1914. The town was young and wild then and you could buy an acre of shore line for $100 instead of the $40,000 or so it would cost today, undeveloped. Jeffers had an income and could afford to live where he chose. He chose Carmel, convinced with his wife that they had "come without knowing it to our inevitable place." Over the years, he built a house and a stone tower on Carmel Point, hauling great rocks up from the shore, wrestling the wrack. The house and tower still stand, occupied now by one of his sons.

Jeffers loved the landscape and seascape of the bay and the peninsula and the points. At the same time, he was intensely shy, almost phobic, of people. He felt so good about the place where he lived, and so bad about people, that he combined the two feelings into a philosophy that threads haughtily, chillingly, through his poetry:

I must not even pretend To be one of the people. I must stand here

Alone with open eyes in the clear air growing old,

Watching with interest and only a little nausea

The cheating shepherds, this time of the demagogs and the docile people, the shifts of power,

And pitiless general wars that prepare the fall;

But also the enormous unhuman beauty of things; rock, sea and stars, foolproof and permanent, (continued on page 160) Loathe Thy Neighbor (continued from page 102)

The birds like yachts in the air, or beating like hearts

Along the water; the flares of sunset, the peaks of Point Lobos....

But because pain stood in the way of Jeffers' pleasure with people, he displaced that pleasure onto nature. Found his beauties there. Notice that he could afford to buy the best view. It is, I think, the basic, generic, archetypal California shuffle: You move to California and buy a little beauty, buy a little space so you can have a little grace, and the neighbors be damned.

Not everyone: Tens of thousands of Californians moved there because they thought they could find a better job, but that hasn't gone too well lately, and when the jobs are off, you can divide the ordinary Californians from the shufflers. The judgment of the executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael McCloskey, a hard man, was: "We are in favor of zero population growth at the earliest feasible time." Just like that: where the elite meet to eat. It isn't accidental that the Sierra Club was founded in California, which already has more national parks than any other state. It isn't accidental that California these days, having noticed that people, ordinary folks, are moving in among its natural beauties, has decided abruptly to close up shop, discourage immigration, cancel development, as Oregon began doing years ago. (Historically, Oregon was the first Beautiful Place in the American West; people migrated there before they began migrating to California in any numbers. One recalls Dick Tuck's answer to Robert Kennedy when Kennedy asked him what they should have done to win the Oregon primary in 1968: Tuck said they ought to have airlifted in a few ghettos.)

California is the state, above all others in the United States of America, Florida included, where people move who covet the best view, who believe that art, beauty and truth can be bought. People like that don't make the best neighbors. Jeffers would have preferred to be alone on his point, as he grumbled in one of his poems: "This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses...." The word for that attitude is greed, and it is greed no less for being masked as nature worship. The people in those suburban houses also like the view. And are, in turn, greedy on their own behalf. For all its beauty, Carmel is in some ways a silly town, a town of tourist shops and tourist shopkeepers pretending to be a town of bohemians, as the adherents of the counterculture were called when Carmel was young. The artists and writers who settled in Carmel in its early years settled there because it was cheap. It is hardly cheap anymore. But the town struggles to keep such "charm" as it has left, and for the past several years, that struggle has taken the form of a battle over an artichoke farm, the Odello ranch at the mouth of the Carmel River, in the valley just below the hills on which Carmel is sited. Developers wanted to put up more than 800 apartments and motel rooms on the Odello property, a huge influx into an area with a population of fewer than 10,000 souls. Carmel succeeded in forcing the developers to reduce the density of their proposed complex to between 300 and 400 units and in setting aside half the Odello ranch for a state park; but so far the town has not succeeded in doing what it wants to do, which is to get the project thrown out entirely and leave the Odello ranch in artichokes.

So the individualists in their proud towers despised the houses packed together on seashore lots, and the owners of houses despised the dwellers in apartments and the visitors in motels.This beautiful place of suburban houses defaced with a crop of apartments.... And not even the apartment dwellers, if they're ever let in, would want the kids sleeping on the beach, which isn't allowed. Is there anyone in California who doesn't think the neighborhood's going to hell?

I discovered one morning a truth about Carmel: that it was beauty without substance: that it was a rest home. I met people there who said proudly that one day they had just dropped everything--and "everything" was usually a vital job in New York--and moved to Carmel, and I wondered what sort of people could simply drop all responsibilities and move somewhere pleasant and backwater by the sea. I thought about girls I had known who spoke of Carmel with a catch in their throat--thin, neurotic girls who came out once a year on their vacations to read Hesse or Gibran or Rod McKuen or even Richard Bach (they filmed portions of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in Carmel, by the way. Where else?) on the beach and reintegrate. They went back to work temporarily calmed, though by the time their tans had faded, they were crying at their desks again, as if a trip to California were no more filling than a Cantonese meal. I called an elderly man who had been powerful in a large Midwestern city before he retired to Carmel. He said he didn't want to talk, he'd had three operations and did I understand? I said I did and thanked him and hung up. Slowly it dawned on me that I was on the trail of privilege and that to find privilege was to find fear. And to find fear is always to find essences--to find what people tremble to protect.

I remembered another powerful man, this one a native Californian, whom I had met on a flight to Africa, where he was going to look into mineral exploitation. When he mentioned that his offices were in a high new tower in San Francisco, I kidded him about the dangers of earthquake, but he took the subject seriously. The building in which he had his offices was earthquake-proof, he said; at most, some of the windows might go. They had enough food up there, high above the city, to last out the aftershocks, and guns to shoot looters. His eyes gleamed at that, and before long he had drunk so much champagne that he couldn't get out of his seat.

• • •

We made a swing north from Carmel to get the lay of the land, still looking for a place where civilized folk could live. A classmate of mine teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz--a campus started in 1965 high above the faded town of Santa Cruz at the north end of Monterey Bay, among redwoods on what used to be a cattle ranch--and we stopped there. UCSC takes top students, the next generation of California leaders, the first really numerous generation of natives. At UCSC they live apart, as at a spiritual retreat; the colleges are scattered through the trees. It would be hard to get a mob together: I wondered if the planners had that in mind when they built the place, after Berkeley, after Free Speech. My classmate said the students didn't take very well to the stylized peace and quiet. More and more of them were moving down into town.

His keenest observation, the one that interested me most, because, having come from the Midwest and taught in the East, he was in a position to make the comparison, was that California students were remarkably different from Eastern students. Not necessarily better: different. Eastern students, he said, acted as if they believed the college line that they were training to be leaders. California students came to college with little interest in leadership. They trained in education and social work. They wanted to help.

In families new to wealth, the rapacious first generation gives way to second and third generations that expiate the guilt of acquisition with good works. A generation of Californians was expiating the guilt of acquisition with good works, expiating the sins of parents who had scratched their way to California for the view. Which helped explain the heat waves of suppressed rage one saw in the California air, because people don't shoulder burdens of blood attainder without rage. The older generation arrived in the land of Nod and made it theirs; the younger generation love the land and help one another. California isn't merely the land of the greedy; it is also the premier land of the guilty. If the picture of college-educated adults liberating vacant lots and bathing oil-soaked birds isn't enough to demonstrate that guilt, only consider the magnitude and the implications of California drug abuse, alcohol specifically included. But greed and guilt together produce offspring far kinkier than either one is capable of breeding by itself. Put greed and guilt together and you get the kind of people who put sugar in your gas tank if you dare disturb the falcons on Morro Rock. Put greed and guilt together and you get the kind of people who live in fine houses on Big Sur and spend conservation money publishing elegant picture books.

Winding north along the Coast above San Francisco under a perpetual fog, we stopped for lunch at Sea Ranch, that celebrated development of weekend and vacation homes for prosperous San Franciscans. Sea Ranch has received more honors than the Taj Mahal for its architecture and landscaping, but it is rather a barren place, weathered wood conferring on expensive houses a specious austerity, a place for people who get their taste from architectural magazines, people who wouldn't think of taping a child's painting to a window or shaking a mop out the back door. Sea Ranch, if truth be told, smelled of money, the kind professionals earn, more than they know what to do with. Canny investing to save the seashore: I thought Sea Ranch rather marred the view.

Mendocino, farther up, was an assay in the other direction. It had the rough, muddy look of a frontier town, which, in a way, it is. Not many years ago, it had a population of 784 souls. Since then, the counterculture has discovered it, building rural communes around it that look to it for supplies as farmers look to farm towns. And some of the counterculture folk, having discovered entrepreneurship, were setting up muddy, fogbound Mendocino to be a tourist attraction. The old clapboard hotel, since remodeled, built in 1872 and identical to the hotel in every Western movie you've ever seen, had been painted a fresh lemon yellow and the management had cleverly made up for the absence of central heating by supplying every bed with an electric blanket. I found it, as we say, charming, but since the bathrooms were down the hall, as in former days, and there wasn't much to do in town unless you were into wave watching or macramé, my wife found it squalid and we drove on to Fort Bragg and over the coastal mountains to Willits, bulldogged by logging trucks front and rear hustling the redwoods away.

Sea Ranch and Mendocino: The third corner of the triangle was a place called Konocti Harbor Inn, a family resort of vast proportions on the western shore of Clear Lake, the largest body of fresh water completely within the state of California. A nice place; I find no fault width it; I merely want to point out that it is owned and operated, for the benefit of its membership first of all, by the joint board of labor and management of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry, Local 38, San Francisco. And is therefore, like the two other places, like Carmel, like California itself, an enclave. California is a state of enclaves; California is an enclave state.

Let me explain: Years ago, one of our more intellectual generals proposed an enclave plan as a way of solving our problems in Vietnam. According to that plan, rather than try to win the war or settle the peace, we would simply withdraw our troops into protected areas and let the rest of the country go to hell. As you know, the enclave plan was never effected. If it had been, we would be in Vietnam still, guarding acres of asphalted enclaves while the Cong lobbed in rockets. But the plan didn't die; it only got shifted from the Far East to the Far West, where Oregon, a state stolen from the English by hardy American pioneers, asks hardy latter-day American, pioneers to turn their wagons around and head on home, and where California puts weekending professionals, six-gun-toting communards and sunburned plumbers and pipe fitters in separate housing. San Clemente is an enclave, as was Haight-Ashbury in mistier days, long ago. Not all enclaves are voluntary: Watts is an enclave and in valley towns in California the railroad tracks similarly divide Caucasian from chicano. But one thing humble folk know that Californians don't is that regardless of the way the top wires face, an enclave is always a prison.

And not many Americans, scrambling into enclaves right and left though we are, would say they thought the precipitation of people into enclaves was a desirable trend in a democracy. Yet it has been a long time coming, and it is the more difficult to think about because it has its roots in the American dream.

But let's drive on down from Clear Lake to the Napa Valley before we talk of that, and tour the Charles Krug Winery, admire the huge redwood vats, smell the smells of fermentation that we love so much and that sometimes get us into trouble, stand at the bar in the tasting room and swirl the chenin blanc in the late-morning sun, drive over to Sonoma and stand in the square where California was briefly proclaimed a sovereign republic by an inebriate mob of misbespoken men. I am thinking about freedom and comfort, and I am thinking about the reasons Americans move around.

To begin with, I live in the Midwest, where most of the people who originally settled California and most of the people who moved there after World War Two had come from. The Midwest was never quite comfortable with those emigrations. Watching their neighbors pack up and leave for the West, Midwesterners suspected that the emigrants had the edge in gumption, and perhaps they did. Midwesterners suspected that the best people were moving west and wondered if that was a judgment on those who stayed behind to clean out the barn and see the cows milked.

But "best" isn't really right, is it? "Ambitious" would be more accurate, or, less elegantly, "greedy," as we have discussed. "Come on, boys," went the ad George Donner ran in the Sangamo Journal of Sangamon County, Illinois, on March 26, 1846. "You can have as much land as you want without costing you anything." And besides a gout of free land, there would be the good weather, no terrible Midwestern winters, and no disease, and lovely señoritas, and those great John Ford skies, and a chance to begin again.

Those aren't the same reasons--or, rather, those aren't the only reasons--we had for exploring, founding and settling the United States of America. We also wanted to share equally in the rights of man. Without that sharing, the other reasons become reasons only of physical and psychic comfort, and in the long run, they must prove, are proving, inimicable to the rights of man. Years ago, before he moved to California, Aldous Huxley had something to say about the relentless search for comfort. "Made possible by the changes in the traditional philosophy of life," he wrote, "comfort is now one of the causes of its own further spread. For comfort has now become a physical habit, a fashion, an ideal to be pursued for its own sake. The more comfort is brought into the world, the more it is likely to be valued. To those who have known comfort, discomfort is a real torture." And since California, by most measures--climate, per-capita income, you name it--is the place in the United States where the scrabble for comfort has made the greatest headway, it isn't surprising that Californians will do almost anything to keep what they've got, including shutting the state down. California's version of saving the land is that there isn't enough to go around, so those who have it should keep away those who don't. Which isn't exactly the message delivered to us in the Sermon on the Mount.

I enjoy comfort, you enjoy comfort, we all enjoy comfort; but, as with orgasm, comfort carries you away only when it isn't directly sought. Scrabbling for comfort is always scrabbling for an escape from mortality, and escaping from mortality is an infant's dream, not an adult's realistic hope. In this special way, then, to lust for comfort as Californians have lusted is to be imprisoned in the past, the past of childhood fantasies. To move to California in response to a desire for greater comfort is to move in response to a daydream, and it asks for grief.

We haven't, it seems to me, properly thought the frontier movement through. We wanted the land filled up--it was the only way we could be sure we owned it--and we let that obscure our judgment. I'm not sure I want to be represented in history by people who didn't bother to clean up their trash before they lit out for the territories or to look back once they left. I am a writer, and when I look to my own field of interest, I find that the one area of the country in which the standards of writing are consistently high is the South, whose writers seldom leave home. I think they know what ought to be obvious to all of us, that comfort is a chimera and an excuse, that a lifetime of minute examination, a lifetime of getting to know all the trees and animals and birds and bees, the meanders of every creek and river, the subtleties of weather and season, the patterns of speech, the streets of cities, the lay of the land isn't enough to master even one place, and that moving to another place means nothing grander than having to start all over again from scratch.

And yet Americans move incessantly, at least once every five years, and the affluent more often yet. Move in response to opportunity, of course, move in response to climate, but move, really, in response to daydreams of pitiful grandeur: to live in a "nicer" neighborhood, to have a "nicer" house, to have a beach to dream on down at the bottom of the town, a beach they will visit once or twice a year. Move and leave their graves behind: How many Americans remember where their grandparents are buried? And, having moved to a strange place in a strange season, many of the dreamers then seek out enclaves for themselves, singles complexes, suburban developments, ethnic neighborhoods, country clubs, weekend retreats. Where the wagons are in a circle and the Indians can't get in. Enclaves are identical to communities in every way but one, the most vital: You are born into a community or earn your place in its hodgepodge through long residence; at an enclave, you buy your way in. An enclave has a history, but it has no past, and we need a past, to lie beneath and behind us and remind us of who we are. To keep us humble. To remind us that there are things left in the world that can't be bought.

We went on down toward Los Angeles, stopping off in Santa Barbara to look up the descendants of the Reed family, the family most prominent in the Donner Party after the Donners themselves, but the Reeds had moved. Bill Loud was in the phone book, not the kind of man to be modest in the face of fame. I called Joan Didion late one evening to tell her she was right, but she had an answering service and I never got through. With work of her own to do, my wife had gone home early; I took the kids and drove through Los Angeles to Anaheim, to the Disneyland Hotel. One of my brothers, a Los Angeles policeman, lives nearby.

My other brother, America's last Fabian socialist, the owner and operator of a Huntington Park welding shop, picked us up for dinner at the policeman's house. I remember the evening as a series of snapshots: three brothers, all of them ruddy, freckled, stocky, rather awkward men, sitting somberly at the umbrella-shaded picnic table beside the modest back-yard swimming pool; the policeman proudly showing off his handmade pegged-oak bar that he hardly ever uses, because he hardly ever drinks; a pineapple stuffed with toothpick-loaded fruit; the policeman's daughter in her waitress uniform, just back from waiting on table to earn money for school; the kids in the pool riding a giant banana; the policeman's pretty, gracious wife tearing off hunks of string cheese and passing them around; two card tables of kids, their plates loaded with food. The policeman's wife was Italian-American; the three brothers were one generation removed from an Arkansas hillbilly farm; we spent an hour talking about dogs; we agreed that good dogs make good neighbors. Didion speaks of California settlers of "the peculiar flawed strain who had cleared Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri." That was us. I think it helped that I had never left home.

The next day and night my children and I spent at Disneyland, figuring out the best rides and getting there first, before the three-hour lines began to form, beating strategic retreats to the hotel on the monorail whenever our feet got sore. It occurred to me, watching a crowd of teenaged children milling before a rock band, that Disneyland was the ultimate enclave, a place papered with imitation history that had no past at all, a place where the only connections between people were those they brought in through the gate, and that it was the dream of a Midwesterner who went to California to seek his fortune, and found it, so they say. Not a very original thought. I felt something that was more my own at the end of the evening, after the marvelous fireworks, when a gymnast in silver lamé, lit by blinding lights, slid down a wire as Tinker Bell, poor Tinker Bell on her magic slide. "The answer to fear," Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, "cannot always lie in the dissipation of the causes of fear; sometimes it lies in courage." That was what I felt, something like that.

Easier said than done. But sometimes the real intrudes on our fantasies and requires more of us than we think we can give, and yet we give it. Before we left Carmel, we attended a ceremony dedicating a new eight-cent stamp commemorating Robinson Jeffers' life and work. Dame Judith Anderson, a longtime friend of Jeffers', was there to read from one of his poems, the highlight of the ceremony after the clang of the Fort Ord band and the mild tributes of Postal Service officials shipped all the way out from Washington. Dame Judith chose a poem Jeffers had written after his wife died of cancer, when he set aside, for a time, his disdain for humanity because he found a bond with it in human grief. She read so fiercely, read with such passion and so personal a sense of loss, that all of us, strangers in a chilly room, momentarily shared what she and Jeffers felt, and so we kept our hands clenched in our laps and listened to the words of a dead man spoken and heard through tears:

The lies--the faithless hopeless unbelieved lies,

While you lay dying. For these reasons

I wish to make verses again, to drug memory,

To make it sleep for a moment. Never fear: I shall not forget you--

Until I am with you. The dead indeed forget all things.

And when I speak to you it is only play-acting

And self-indulgence: you cannot hear me, you do not exist. Dearest....

That is not greed, or fearful hauteur, that is simple grief, and it is real.

Or again: One Sunday afternoon, my wife and I had gone to an upstairs restaurant on the Monterey wharf and sat sheltered near a fireplace and ordered good wine and crab boiled and crab cioppino. Across from us, half the length of the restaurant away, sat a huge family of huge people, men and women averaging perhaps 250 pounds apiece, eight or ten of them, a row of motorcycle helmets hanging on the hatrack beyond them to indicate how they traveled if their boots and heavy sweaters did not.

They had come from somewhere to eat, several generations of the same family, and they looked, from behind, like two backfields of professional football players opposing each other across a picnic table. I had noticed them and forgotten them, watching the people on the wharf below, when the room was suddenly shocked to silence by a great moan as one of the giant men slid off his chair and collapsed on the floor. I saw him grab his throat and saw his eyes roll back, and then the two backfields of his family surrounded him, shouting and arguing, and the rasping sound of desperate snoring tore the room.

I was frozen to my chair; so was my wife; I thought the man had choked on his food and I could see that his family was trying to get his mouth open while the snoring turned to the terrible silence of snoring cut off, of a wet plug smacking into place in the man's throat, while his feet kicked, drumming the floor, and I thought all at the same time that the man must be an epileptic and that I knew by the book how to perform a tracheotomy but didn't know how to dare to begin but that if I or someone didn't dare something, the man was likely to die of asphyxiation from swallowing his tongue, and I half-rose from my seat and sat down again weak at the knees and half-rose again and then, Jesus God, a black woman at another table got up and ran over and shoved the giant relatives aside and knelt down and someone stage-whispered, "She's a nurse," and she set to work to get his tongue out of his throat, and then she gave out a moaning scream once and again and once again and someone stage-whispered, "He's biting her thumb," her screams so piercing he must have all but bitten it off, and by then the manager of the restaurant had called the police and an ambulance and the fire department, too, taking no chances, and sirens whooped and wailed in the distance while die black nurse popped her dented, quivering thumb out of the man's mouth and wrapped it in a bunch of napkins for safety as well as traction and bravely stuck it back in again and got the tongue turned around and pulled it forward and with great sucking sounds like a drainpipe clearing the man started breathing again, and so did we.

The fire truck was a bilious shade of yellow and the ambulance shining white and the men who piloted them were soothing and competent and by the time the man--the victim, we overheard someone at the next table say, of an insulin reaction--was wheeled out to the ambulance, he had opened his eyes, this huge natural man from California, this huge man who had ridden in with his wife and mom and dad and brothers and sisters, all on motorcycles, artificially kept alive, when he got his dosage right, by regular injections of a drug discovered in Canada only 53 years ago, this huge man saved by a black nurse he'd never spoken to before, and all of us left behind in the restaurant that was quiet then except for the nurse's hysterical giggling waking up then to realize that our comfortable afternoon on the Monterey wharf had been forever altered into a memory of the fragility of our connection to the world, because a chicken bone might as easily have sent any one of us writhing to the floor, our entire comfortable life caught in our throat, and if we were lucky, as the diabetic had been lucky, there would be someone in the room who knew how to spare us, but it wasn't likely to be someone from our enclave, it was likely to be someone from our community: Our pals back at the enclave hardly knew how to tie their shoes, and no more did we; privilege outfits us as badly for emergencies as it does for the long haul.

Which is most of the lesson the people of the Donner Party learned, those who survived. One of them, Virginia Reed, 14 years old, wrote home about it afterward, wrote the last word about privilege, comfort, nature worship, golden dreams and Pacific sunsets:

We are all very well pleased with Callifornia. Particulary with the climate. Let it be ever so hot a day thare is allwais cool nights. It is a beautiful Country. It is mostley in vallies. It aut to be a beautiful Country to pay us for our trubel geting there.

It is a beautiful country. It is mostly in valleys. It ought to be a beautiful country to pay us for our trouble getting there. Words that ought to be inscribed above every port and harbor and Customs in the land: two unconsciously lyric sentences followed by an outburst of dry exasperation from a girl who knew better than most men that the going can be rootless and can bring great pain.

We don't need rootlessness anymore, we need roots. Thinking about that several months later, after I was back in Kansas and the winter had closed in, I remembered Oppenheimer again, something he wrote in late 1954, after his security hearing, after the witch-hunters had wrung him out, when his weaknesses and indiscretions, his strengths and loyalties alike were publicly on record and he had nothing, one way or the other, to lose:

This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing.

But, in fairness, you should know that Oppenheimer goes on to say that we must equally remain open to new experience. How we are to do both, the man who moved to California, the man who built the bomb doesn't explain. Nor can I, yet, but I don't think I'd put moving to California or laboring in California to keep the rabble out very high on my list.