Travels With Charley is the book that, at age 13, lit my hunger for taking road trips. I bought the novel in 1968 while on vacation with mom in Ocean City NJ, (relaxing on the beach with a book was something people did before smartphones) and devoured it before we made the trip home.

Then I read it again. And again. That worn 22nd printing Bantam paperback sits on my special books shelf with a few others, including Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and that first Golden Book of the Stars and Planets mom gave me when I was 9 because I spent so much time looking up at the night sky.

California was his birthplace and mine. He moved to the east coast of his own free will and I was dragged there at age two after my parents divorced, but I see a yearning for the land of his birth in this book that is similar to my own. Maybe this yearning for the homeland that was once ours is the wellspring of wanderlust and road trips. I didn’t know until recently that the motivation for Steinbeck’s road trip was his heart was failing and he knew he didn’t have much longer and he wanted to see America one last time. In his book he says simply that a writer who writes about his country should go look at it now and then. I wonder if the deeper motivation was that he wanted to plant his feet in California and Salinas one last time. If I knew I didn’t have much longer to live I would absolutely do one last road trip that ended up in Oceano, and the shores of Pismo Beach. 

Since that first road trip with classmates to the Southwest and California in 1974, I’ve taken more than I can count offhand. I remember Steinbeck’s warning that you don’t take a journey, it takes you, and it starts and ends on its own good time. But at the end of one road trip I am always ready for the next one. I look at my road atlas like I used to look at the annual Christmas catalogues when I was a young boy. I plan my trips to California selecting roads I’ve not yet driven to get me from Maryland to Oceano. I have spoken here before about escaping the gravity of home…

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon, there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

And even when the destination isn’t California, but somewhere else like Ocean City or Disney World and I am on vacation time and I am not going far, I know the vacation begins the moment I am on the highway travelling away from home. 

Next time I’m there I really need to see if I can get up to Salinas and behold his camper truck Rocinante with my own eyes and whisper a thank you.

I’m hanging out at the bar at Old Juan’s, a favorite place for good Mexican food and margaritas. It’s a short walk from my brother’s house and by now some of the bartenders there recognise me and know what I’m likely to order. As I’m savoring my margarita I happen to glance out the window by the bar and see a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom (but seriously…it’s a BMW masquerading as a Rolls Royce) pull into the parking lot with three older folks inside. This is something I’m not used to seeing in Oceano, which is a completely wonderful place to stay and to live, but what you’re more likely to see on four wheels there is somebody’s meticulously restored to better than factory new classic muscle car, not that empty status symbol for the rich and tasteless. 

After a while I mention it to the bartender, who tells me that because of the massive fires in LA, a bunch of celebrities and wealthy Los Angelenos have come up the coast and are hanging out in San Luis Obispo.

I can see it. Regretfully. That part of California, to which Oceano, Pismo, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Sun Beach also belongs, and also Morro Bay, is a bit of coastline in paradise that I was hoping to retire back to someday, because it’s where my dad’s side of the family is from and I was born in California. But it’s been “discovered” and if you have to ask what it costs of buy a house there you should be looking at Bakersfield instead. Which I won’t. The term “valley people” has a different meaning where my brother lives.

So best I can do now is visit my brother and the family there every now and then.

As I leave for my walk back to my brother’s house, I see the old folk getting back into their “Rolls”, and I can’t help but think You could have bought a Bentley for that money… Oh well…

#IHangOutAtTheBarForLocalGossip
#ItsNOTaRolls!

I joke that I’m a Californian exile, but it’s not all that bad. I’ve lived in Maryland nearly all my life and Maryland has been good to me. Much Much better than anywhere else mom was likely to resettle after the divorce. Either Pasadena where I was born, or Oceano where my dad’s side lives, would have been nicer for a gay kid growing up, but had she been able to go back to her former home in Pennsylvania I might have been driven to suicide once the hormones started percolating. 

And now I’m back in my little Baltimore rowhouse after another extended vacation in Oceano, and if it’s taught me anything it’s that trying to split my time between Maryland and California just won’t work. Either I move out there, which I can’t afford now because both renting and owning there on the coast are way beyond my means, or I stay here in Baltimore in my little Baltimore rowhouse with an easy mortgage payment, where I can walk to everything I might need on a daily basis, and just visit California for a few weeks at a time, but not for months at a time.

The pro of staying in California…somehow…is I get to spend time in the land of my birth, a place I’ve always felt deep down inside is my true home. It calls to me in a way nowhere else does. But I’ve lived for so much of my life in Maryland can I really say I’m a native Californian anymore? Technically yes, I was born there. Culturally it’s another thing. I notice the difference in mindsets and attitudes all the time while I’m there. I feel comfortable among them, at least the coastal Californians. I would be happy to spend the rest of my life among them. But in a way it’s like living here in Baltimore after having grown up in the DC suburbs. I’m comfortable living among the people here too. I enjoy their company. And the local food here is delicious. But I know deep down inside I am not one of them.

That might be that perpetual feeling of otherness that comes with being a barely post Stonewall gay kid in the late 60s/early 70s. Plus the constant static I got from my bitter Baptist grandmother for being my father’s son. But there is a truth there too. Baltimore has its own culture, as does coastal California versus central Maryland, and I am more Maryland than California.

Maryland has been good to me. It was one of only two states that gave same sex couples the right to marry by popular vote. Even California couldn’t work itself up to that. I blame the central valley. I got a very good public school education here in Montgomery county. I made many lifelong friends. I had good jobs once I got into micro computer programming, managed to buy a nice house within walking distance to everything I need including my office at Space Telescope. I have my dream come true car. I can spend my retirement here comfortably. I could wish it were different, but given how good Maryland has been to me it seems ungracious. 

So I think the die is cast. I can’t afford to move to California, I can’t afford to stay there months at a time and maintain my home in Baltimore too, and I’ve got it so easy here in Maryland now, both financially and situationally, it would be foolish to throw that advantage away. I can go visit California from time to time and be immersed in the land of my birth. But Maryland gave me a home.

Two great regrets are always with me. That I’m single, and that I’m not in California. Sometimes I get to allay the latter. But it’s never enough.

I’m sitting at the bar at Texas Roadhouse the other day. I like their fried chicken and they make a decent margarita. One of the young ladies behind the bar recognizes me from previous visits and we chat for a little bit. She asks me if I’ve done any travelling this year and I start down the list…California, Florida, New York City… A man sitting next to me wearing a ridiculous camouflage Hawaiian shirt says “All of that is good except California.”

“I was born in California”, I reply, not even bothering to look at him. “My dad’s side of the family lives there. I go back as often as I can.” Probably the tone of my voice shuts him up.
 
I have lived nearly my entire life here in Maryland and I don’t completely regret it. I got a good public school education here, the economy is good, the people are nice, the climate is…bearable. Maryland is one of only three states that gave its gay couples equal marriage rights by popular vote before the Supreme court legalized it nationwide (the others were Maine and Washington).

But deep down inside I have always felt myself a California expatriate. Its deserts and mountains and old growth forests, its stunning beaches and ocean sunsets, its urban life and wilderness paths and California skies, have called to me as far back as I can remember. Every time I go back I know it’s where I’ve always belonged, and I ache knowing I have to leave eventually to return to my life back east. It is the great regret of my life I didn’t get a chance to live and grow up there. After the divorce, mom moved me back to her family’s side of the country. But at least it was to a place where a gay kid could grow up and not want to kill himself.

I am aware of how the sort of moron who thinks military camouflage makes a Hawaiian shirt look nice hates California. The land of fruits and nuts as I’ve heard them say. But as that famous California hippy General George S. Patton once said, If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking, and there’s a reason the bible belt can’t even buy its own stop signs without help from the diverse and energetic coastal zones. So don’t be badmouthing my beloved California and expect pleasantness from me.

Oceano Sunset