If you’re going to live the California dream, you’ll never escape the nightmares.
I’m a boy-dreamer from Pasadena. The second morning after the firestorm, I put on my press pass and headed up to Altadena, the unincorporated foothill town on my hometown’s northern border. It’s a journey I’ve made a thousand times.
I drove through my life. Past the Pasadena Jewish Temple, where my three boys went to preschool, now destroyed. Past the Altadena Town & Country Club, where my sister got married, now a ruin.
Past Eaton Canyon, now synonymous with one of the most devastating fires in state history, where I hiked on school field trips and my honeymoon.
The higher I ascended the mountain, the more burnt-out houses I saw. Many belonged to friends, old and new. By the time I reached Loma Alta Drive, almost everything was smoking rubble. Overwhelmed, I parked the car next to a little road leading to a trailhead.
The little road’s sign read, “Zane Grey Terrace.”
I laughed through the tears. What would Zane Grey say about all this?
Zane Grey, like so many famous California figures of the past, is now forgotten. But in the first half of the 20th century, he was perhaps the country’s best-selling author.
He produced dozens of pulpy novels and stories about the American West. Many were about urban men and women and their struggles to settle and survive in the canyons and hills of unforgiving environments. His books could be clunkily written, but Hollywood loved them, and turned so many of Grey’s stories into films and TV that they became cliches, the stock images of life on this side of the country.
Zane Grey’s journey
Grey’s personal journey resembled the plot of one of his novels; it was quintessentially Californian and crazy, though no crazier than buying a house on a dry hillside and thinking you’d found an enduring home.
Grey was a depressed New York City dentist, married to a teacher, when he started writing stories. Then his books began selling, and he moved to California, settling in a Myron Hunt-designed estate on Mariposa Street in Altadena. There he lived the California dream, indoor and outdoor, with easy access to hiking, climbing, and the stream and falls of Eaton Canyon. Altadena would be his residence until his death in 1939.
“In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living,” he wrote, according to a biography.
Of course, his life wasn’t easy. He never escaped his black moods or depression. And he had a reckless secret life that could be damaging to people he loved.
In public, Grey was a font of progressive piety, inveighing against alcohol, sex, the “jiggle and toddle and wiggle” of dancing, and fortune-seeking. “Money is God in the older countries,” he wrote in “The Call of the Canyon.” “But it should never become God in America.”
Grey himself never stopped making books and money. And he relentlessly fulfilled his own desires — for homes and land, for travel adventures that took him away for months, and for beautiful women. He met at least one mistress while hiking in Eaton Canyon.
“I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon,” he wrote. “She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.”
In his hypocrisy and self-centeredness, Grey was like today’s prosperous Californians — moralizing to the world about living responsibly and respecting nature and seeking justice, while denying themselves nothing, and certainly not a nice hillside home with a view.
Creating our own worlds
When our friends’ homes burn up, or slide down the hill, we tell ourselves that this is the price we must occasionally pay, the hardship we must temporarily endure, for all the beauty and bounty of everyday life. And in this age of climate change, we make resolutions — to retreat from the fire, to be more responsible, to live differently, to accept limits.
But do we really intend to keep any of our promises? Do we really believe ourselves?
We know the honest answer. But we never dare say it out loud.
Except when we gaze at the homes and businesses burned in Altadena. Or watch a row of billionaires’ beach homes burn on TV. Or drive down Mariposa Street in Altadena and find that the Eaton fire has destroyed the Zane Grey Estate, a well-preserved architectural treasure.
Then, only then, do we blurt out the truth.
“Unbelievable,” we say.
Of course, it’s not the scenes of destruction that are unbelievable.
We are unbelievable.
In our defense, we Californians must be unbelievable to survive. We Californians have to think of ourselves as the world’s winners because how could we go on if we admitted the truth — that we are losers, whose ancestors were the world’s losers, who fled here so that we might see our start-up fail, that we might never make it as an actor.
We can’t acknowledge that death and destruction and despair and apocalyptic events are routine, or we’d never be able to live here. So, we conjure, and inhabit, our own worlds.
As the masked outlaw Bess says in Grey’s greatest novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, “You dream or you’re driven mad.”
Waking up
But we can only defend ourselves with dreams for so long. Eventually, the nightmares awaken us.
Maybe you’ll think I’ve been driven mad, but I believe the biggest nightmares, the disasters that shake us, are not a California curse.
Rather, they might be our state’s greatest gift. Because they rouse us from the distractions of our dreams. They make us look away from the arresting beauty of this place, and compel us to see one another, and even talk to our neighbors.
When we awake to the nightmare, we are at our most connected. We are at our most generous and human. We consider reality head-on and make new plans. We are, however fleetingly, believable.
Even Zane Grey, mass producer of Western fictions, knew this truth. Late in his career, he wrote a “Recipe for Greatness,” which speaks to what it takes to do our best in this nightmarish California.
“To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seem good to die …”
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.