California is a place 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.
​—Joan Didion

​Justin Panson

When you walk through the cities of California today, you find streets that are littered and dirty, filled with destitute people sleeping in squalid tents. The so-called Golden State is crowded and expensive now. The urban parts are a hellscape of endless concrete infrastructure and highways snarled with traffic. In the face of such an emerging dystopia, people here continue to chase notions of an idealized lifestyle in what looks increasingly like a shallow, self-absorbed quest for status, fame, social followers, or the next digital invention.

Our homeland is hardly the biblical land of milk and honey that attracted wagon trains, dust bowl travelers and other pilgrims on the epic migrations of lore. It seems quaint to remember how California had been the generational land of dreams, real or imagined, with wide fertile landscapes, plentiful water, rich soil and a sense of promise that tracked with the western destiny of America.

As it is with mythology, the idea of California began with a story made out of whole cloth, invented for readers eager for adventure, thrills and escape. That origin story was penned some 500 years ago by a long forgotten Spanish author by the name of Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo who toiled in the then popular genre of the chivalric story, in which noble hearted knights were the itinerant heroes, galloping in to save the day, to rescue the maiden, etc. These armor-clad warriors were bound by codes of honor and formalized conduct.

Chivalric novels were popular at the time the Spanish empire was beginning to explore the New World. Such novels were a loose mix of truth, lore, and fiction. The explorers used the novels as a source of inspiration, while the authors of the novels, in turn, used the reports of new explorations to embellish their tales.

Montalvo’s book was called Las Sergas de Esplandián, and it imagined California as an island off the west coast of the American continent, an island ruled by beautiful black women, giant amazon women led by a buxom warrior queen named Calafia who was “desirous of achieving great things.” This female tribe kept a stable of man-eating griffins. For those of you non Dungeons & Dragons players, a griffin is a composite mythological winged creature with a lion's body and a bird's head, usually that of an eagle. 

The most famous chivalric novel, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, was written in 1605, nearly a century after Montelvo’s book and greatly influenced by it. Quixote was really a comic sendup of the genre via the exploits of its mad and loveable protagonist. In Chapter 6 of Don Quixote, Quixote's niece, the housekeeper, set out to destroy his library, considered the source of his fanciful behavior, and Las Sergas de Esplandián was the first book she selected for the pyre.

Las Sergas de Esplandián was popular around the time that Spanish explorers were landing upon the shores of present-day Baja California. The name California began to appear on maps by the mid-1500s. Owing to the book and/or uncertainties of early navigation, the idea of California as an island became a cartographic mistake that carried on for several centuries.

The development of maps back then involved reckoning from various manual methods of navigation. Readings were taken on the open seas using instruments like astrolabes, cross-staffs, and sextants to measure the angle between celestial bodies and the horizon. Dead reckoning involved estimating a ship's position based on its previous known position, direction, and speed of travel, often supplemented by observations of landmarks, currents, and winds. Sailors relied heavily on celestial navigation, using the position of the sun, stars, moon, and planets to determine their location at sea. 

Map making evolved from 13th century Portolan Charts which crudely captured geographic features, and Ptolemaic Maps made of concentric circles that offered a less than accurate framework for understanding the known world. Early mapmakers struggled with depicting the spherical Earth on a flat surface, devising projection techniques to solve this problem. The maps they drew and painted by hand had real artistry about them, embellished with cool illustrations of sea monsters, mermaids, and other exotic creatures. They used woodcut and copperplate engraving techniques in printing.

Fast forward through incremental advancements and breakthroughs in surveying and triangulation, all the way to satellite Global Positioning. For modern folks guided by the everpresent blanket of precision GPS, the idea of not knowing exactly where you are is terrifying, a scenario we are no longer psychically equipped to handle.

California tumbles into the sea. That'll be the day I go back to Annandale….
—Steely Dan

The idea of a island myth story leads to the contradictory symbolism around the island landform, as confinement and isolation, like shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, but alternately a self-contained oasis. The geographic notion of an oasis has for centuries shaped perceptions of California as paradise. The real history reveals a dark and brutal paradise—beginning with the Spanish conquest of native tribes—the Ohlone, Chumash, Yokuts, Tongva, Kumeyaay, and others. Two centuries of slavery and exploitation followed, through the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, to the terrible Admission Day compromise with human enslavers, all the way up to the brutalizing of migrants—first the Okies and now today’s latinx migrants, like the Okies, flat broke with hope for a better life in their hearts.

But California history offers positive stories too, like the itinerant backwoods hobo John Muir writing soaring transcendental religious lines about majestic mountains and landscapes, inspiring preservation and a deeper understanding of the natural world:

The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling, keen lance rays of every color flashing, sparkling in florious abundance, joining the plants in their fine, brave beauty-work—every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.... Toward sunset, enjoyed a fine run to camp...enjoying wild excitement and excess of strength, and so ends a day that will never end.

There have been so many other inspiring figures across the decades. In progressive social causes: Caesar Chavez, Delores Huerta and Harvey Milk; in science and technology Sally Ride, Steve Jobs, search pioneers Page and Brin, Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking; in the arts Joan Didion, Ansel Adams, Dorthea Lange, the Beat Poets, Raymond Chandler, Amy Tan, Ed Ruscha, David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud. In the early twentieth century, populist Governor Hiram Johnson led progressive reforms, introducing oversight and anti-corruption laws, and direct democracy through initiatives and referendums. These acts and others led the way to California becoming a leader in advancing labor rights, environmental regulations, and social justice causes.

For a time an imagined paradise drove a real paradise. Post WWII California built an economic engine that was the envy of the world and funded higher education and progressive social ideals—a heady era of science, rockets and good schools. Maybe this is just cheap nostalgia? Hollywood and Disney dream factories captivated the nation’s imagination. Self reinvention attracted all manner of drugstore cowboys, knights errant and fools heading westard. But success and popularity bring inevitable consequences—suburban sprawl, water wars, and now the tech bros, like feudal lords, building castles and walling themselves off from a new underclass—the latter day ghosts of Tom Joad.

Amor Fati is a Latin phrase meaning you must love your fate, although it's not clear where fate ends and luck begins. In my case fate took the form of a diaspora kid escaping a dying Rust Belt factory town, aping Kerouac twenty years too late, inhabiting the well worn story arc of the westward bound romantic, carrying the same falsely idealized notions as Steinbeck’s Okies:

"But I like to think how nice it’s gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold. An’ fruit ever’place, an’ people just bein’ in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees. I wonder – that is, if we all get jobs an’ all work – maybe we can get one of them little white houses. An’ the little fellas go out an’ pick oranges right off the tree. They ain’t gonna be able to stand it, they’ll get to yellin’ so."

When I arrived here in Sacramento, an inscription on the water treatment plant caught my interest, celebrating river town ethos with a line from the Old Testament, Ezekiel, prophesying God’s word to the slaves and pilgrims of Israel: “And Everything Shall Live Whitersoever the River Cometh.” 

Later, on Sansome Street in San Francisco, this traveler would stand before another work that spoke to mythology and a great society, Diego Rivera’s Allegory of California, weaving aeroplanes, steel girders and men of industry in a WPA-idealized mural to progress and social elevation.

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This jaunt through history is not a love letter to paradise lost, nor an argument for redemption, but an attempt to trace an epochal connection between the Golden State and wider cycles—age upon age, doom upon doom, discovery upon discovery. The likes of Columbus, Magellan, Cook and da Gama begot better maps and methods of navigation. The world got smaller, civilizations grew great with the spoils of conquest. The age of enlightenment followed exploration, curiosity, books and learning—Newton. Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the German philosopher Imanuel Kant, with his summary motto “Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!” Quantum leaps in human comfort, wealth and civility followed: egalitarian law and due process, individual liberty, human rights, self governance, philosophy. Mathematical principles and evidence-based scientific inquiry replaced superstition.

From the Enlightenment, fast forward three centuries to dystopian 2024 when the so-called American Experiment is being rapidly dismantled by bully and warrior culture, by a post-truth ethic of self congratulatory pomp, by anti-science know nothings who are just making stuff up, by a con artist leader risen from the broken landscape with false promises, as had been predicted by none other than Mark Twain:

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.

We may yet come to understand the Enlightenment was always unsustainable idealism within the strictures of hierarchy and biology. Decades ago a futurist astronomer prophesied the current reemergence of superstition and fiat:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
—Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World

Thinking about millenia and empire is too large when the dishes need to be done and the windows are full of a beautiful Wednesday evening glooming. Trying to see California cartographic history as some kind of analogy may be a feeble attempt to understand the context of our own meager lives by way of arbitrary histories, sliced and diced in different ways.

Still, I like to think you can extend a line from the myth of Island she-warriors all the way to the endgame of your own choosing, the western terminus of a thousand histories across an endless sunkissed land of dreams. We are in strange days, living in immaculate ruins serenaded by the end times lullabies of Lana Del Ray echoing into dark infinity. In the foreground, a haunting tableau comes into focus—a headless crumbling monument inscribed with prophecies of yesteryear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
—Percy Shelly

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