California

When we visit a former home with the people we came home for.

The metaphor:

Hello from Santa Cruz, home of the banana slugs! Last Friday, I had an armchair view of Honeoye Lake and I wrote about hawks and herons. This Friday found me in a lounge chair pointed at the Pacific, watching the gulls and pelicans.

Santa Cruz is technically Northern California, just 60 miles south of SFO airport, but Friday was pure blue skies and blaring sun, a SoCal feeling day. I sat in the shade of my umbrella, vibrating with vitamin D and recreational caffeine, remembering when we lived in LA.

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The story:

We’re here for Ben and Emily’s wedding, and they’re here for the surfing. They moved to Santa Cruz from San Francisco, Steve’s cousin and his fiancee, where they lived for a decade and first learned to surf. On a visit a few years back, they told us over Indian food that they’d bought a house in the exact area they’d targeted. Grinning with contagious excitement, they explained they’d set a four-block radius where they could walk to surf their “favorite wave.”

This idea delighted me. You can have a favorite wave! It lives somewhere specific, and you can live there too! This was news to me, but well known in the surfer world: Santa Cruz boasts a seven-mile-long World Surfing Reserve, where more than 20 surf breaks are cited within the protected coastal waters of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. But coming here, the depth of the culture and commitment took me by total surprise.

We got in late Thursday night, and arrived at our hotel in the dark. The Beach Boys were playing on the lobby jukebox and surfboards lined the hall to our room. I thought this was a contained commitment to branding until I took a run by the water Friday morning. West Cliff Drive was full of not just actual surfers zipping up their wetsuits, but a lifesize bronze sculpture of a man with his board (plaque inscription: “To Honor Surfers”) and a Surfing Museum at Lighthouse Point. This seemed like a lot, but the sun burned away my skepticism along with the cloud cover. You know what? Sure! Why not!

I recognize this feeling, the swell of possibility and absolute lightness. I felt this way 12+ years ago, standing on the sand in Venice Beach with Steve. It was February and our first time in Los Angeles. He’d gotten a job offer based out there, and we figured we might as well check it out. From our DC apartment, the idea of moving cross-country seemed remote and a little puzzling. Then we flew from the snow to the summer, and saw how the beaches gave rise to cliffs and, behind them, mountains. We looked at each other, mouths open and eyebrows up. Um, yeah! Let’s do this!

Steve took the job, and we moved in summer ‘13, road tripping across the country with our ancient chow mix. We were consummate East Coasters, natives of upstate New York. We’d met at a preppy college in Connecticut, and spent our young professional years in first-term Obama’s DC, toting metro cards and Blackberries. Los Angeles was an alien world where birds of paradise bloomed in our front yard and winter didn’t bring snow, just citrus. We didn’t have to check the weather before walking outside. We made friends in the movie industry and I took Spanish classes at the community college alongside the kids of Latin American immigrants who knew all the words but not the grammar. It was a total trip.

We got married the following summer ‘14 and as a honeymoon, we drove north up the coast. We came through Santa Cruz then too, rounding the switchbacks on Highway One and eating oysters by the sea. I felt the same feeling back then that I’ve had this weekend, high on sunshine and the smell of the sea. It’s such a strong contrast to where I grew up that it feels surreal. Every plant looks like it was drawn by Dr. Seuss himself, or maybe crafted by Project Runway contestants, sewing delicate petals in wild designs while Tim Gunn yells, Make it work!

There’s no forest green here, no emerald or kelly – it’s a totally different palette. There’s a dark Mediterranean green on bent and shrubby trees, grasses and succulents in mint and pistachio, frosted in silver or tipped with maroon. I got on Instagram when we moved to LA, posting shot after shot of bright roses and poppies, bougainvillea like curtains and flowers like trumpets. I felt like an East Coast emissary, reporting back from another world.

Actually getting back to the East Coast wasn’t as charming. The year after our wedding, we ran out of patience for red eyes and layovers. We spent vacation budgets on visits to family and vacation days on transit delays. I knew some people do this all the time, make it work for years, but I also knew that some people didn’t. Unlike in DC, where I’d worked with international teams on global policy, my LA office was full of people who’d grown up nearby and saw their parents on weekends. I started to think of them when I saw the succulents: these spiky oddities were normal to them. These were their plants.

It was just after Christmas ‘14 in the Buffalo airport, over beers ordered during a flight delay, that Steve and I agreed it was time to come back East. With a pen and a cocktail napkin, we brainstormed what we wanted in our next chapter, and I started looking for jobs in the mid-Atlantic. By summer ‘15, I accepted an offer based in midtown Manhattan and moved out to start in July. My first night back East, I met up with old friends in Central Park. We sat on a blanket in the soft grass, the sun setting slowly in the peak-summer sky. We’re from here! I thought, feeling all we had in common, taking in the familiar greens. These are my plants!

As twilight fell, the air stayed warm, and we lingered a bit longer. Suddenly, I saw sparks of light sporadically dotting the park. Fireflies! I hadn’t even registered their absence out west, but here they were, blinking like lighthouses guiding me home. My heart swelled. These are my fucking BUGS!

I’m reminding myself of all this, as I spend the weekend wondering, wait, why don’t we live here? I mean, I know not every California moment is idyllic as a vacation. I feel relieved to be back in the realm of plentiful water and occasional blizzards, my natural disaster of choice. There are big warning signs on West Cliff Road: DANGER! They say, warning that people not to get too close to the edge. PLAY SAFE!

I amused myself darkly by imagining all the warnings the sign didn’t give. DANGER! It could say. THE WARMING CLIMATE IS ACCELERATING OUR RATE OF WILDFIRES AND MUDSLIDES, NOT TO MENTION THE ERODING COASTS AND COLLIDING TECTONIC PLATES! But we didn’t leave as a rejection of California, from creative LA to surfing Santa Cruz, the redwoods and mountains, the seals and the bobcats. We left to go home.

After moving to Brooklyn in 2015, we went upstate in 2020, and as you know, we never left. In fact, before our flight on Thursday, Steve and I spent Wednesday night at my parents’ house. They had dinner ready when we arrived, and we took a 15 minute Lyft to the airport the next day. It was a reverse of the travel we used to do, landing from Los Angeles and Lyfting to their house for Christmas, or in the lead-up to our wedding. And when we leave here next weekend, we’ll have dinner with them and catch up about our weeks, sharing our meals and our mannerisms.

In the meantime, we’re in an Airbnb with Steve’s parents and brother, blocks from the houses with his aunts, uncles, and cousins. We’re riding bikes to meet up at the beach, eating fried fish tacos and reapplying sunscreen that’s scented like coconut. We’re cosplaying like we’re from here, like we were raised in the sun and the sand. Like we don’t have to choose between this life and our families: like we’re already home.

The question: What feels specific to your hometown – any special plants, smells, bugs, or people?

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