We drove to Lodi last night, heading down Highway 99 just after sunset. Here and there, patches of tule fog misted the windshield. Here and there, too, lightning from a storm in the Sierra foothills illuminated black clouds and a silver sky. In Elk Grove, we drove past the hulking, rusting metal frame of an abandoned shopping center project. In Galt we drove by crop dusters parked at an airport. We drove past trailer parks and dairy ranches and grapevines. In Lodi, we shared a bottle of graciano from local grapes and did not skip dessert.
"To a stranger driving 99 in an air-conditioned car (he would be on business, I suppose, any stranger driving 99, for 99 would never get a tourist to Big Sur or San Simeon, never get him to the California he came to see), these towns must seem so flat, so impoverished as to drain the imagination. They hint at evenings spent hanging around gas stations, and suicide pacts sealed in drive-ins."
I've been secretly stalking (is there any other way to stalk?) Joan Didion since we moved to Sacramento in 2003. I've toured the 7,000-square-foot, 1910 Colonial Revival mansion in Poverty Ridge where she grew up. I taught English and Journalism at the high school she attended. I was advisor to the school's newspaper, The Prospector, where she presumably got her start as a writer. I dug through archives to find her columns from when she reigned as The Prospector's editor. I convinced current Prospector editors to re-run the columns, although I doubt Didion's spirited denouncement of apathy gained her many new fans. I looked up her photo in old yearbooks. I successfully convinced at least one student every year to choose Didion for their Great American Authors project. I read "The Year of Magical Thinking" and reread "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and "On Keeping a Notebook," essays included in the Tom Wolfe-edited anthology "The New Journalism."
But it wasn't until today that I read "Notes from a Native Daughter," her 1965 essay about Sacramento.
"In fact, that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."
Now I will put on my giant sunglasses.
