28  California

Deep in our cold Wisconsin winters, it was easy to dream about life in a place with temperatures that never went below freezing, where it was summertime all year long. But good weather was only one of the many things that appealed to me about California. From my earliest memories of the 60s and their hippies and free-living lifestyle, California was to me always associated with the new, a culture that was slightly ahead of the rest of us.

As for warm climates, most of us had more experience with Florida, which for many people was a winter vacation spot, a place where grandmothers went when they retired, the home of NASA and Disney World. The Gungor family did a roadtrip there one year, bringing back scale models of the Saturn rockets, a physical proof of an exotic but tangible world outside Neillsville. Florida seemed real to me, like Wisconsin only warmer.

California was out of the world, a land beyond, the stuff of legend and myth to me. It also held risks, a place of earthquakes, smog, and of course druggies and sin. My great-grandfather Howard had lived there for a while, and we had relatives still there, though not much direct contact. But overall, there was an over-the-rainbow quality to me of a magic and sometimes scary land that could be explored with a well-prepared adventurous spirit. It was even more special because it seemed like a place for the strong and bold. Anyone could go to Florida, but only a pioneer made it to California.

Sometime in my sophomore or junior year, my parents received a letter from a family in California, announcing that they were considering a move away from the “rat race”, wanting to raise their kids more wholesomely, in farm country far from the city. Central to their choice of location was the existence of a good church, and it seemed we fit the bill.

The Nichols family that arrived was a merger of two families, previously rocked by divorce but now with a happily-married mother and father, with three children from previous marriages: two girls from the mother’s side and a boy from the father’s. The kids were roughly our ages and had apparently been together for so many years that they acted like they’d been family forever. They were all out-going, with sunny personalities that seemed to reflect their homeland, and we immediately became good friends.

The oldest girl was about Gary’s age, and the son was a few years younger, but very easy-going and friendly, and quick to become integrated with all our church activities. The youngest girl was probably about ten or eleven, when I fifteen or sixteen, but she was an excellent flirt around me and I quickly found myself looking forward to every chance we had to meet.

In talking to the Nichols, California suddenly seemed very real to me. It wasn’t a place of mythology, it was a place where people actually lived and grew up. It was also full of the future, of fast highways in exotic Spanish-named cities, with fresh food and a laid-back attitude that made me feel I had found my future home. When they spoke of the shock of the cold Wisconsin winters, I felt a camaraderie.

Soon I acquired a map of the Golden State, which I affixed to the wall of my room and began to memorize the names of the cities, the counties, the rivers. The Nichols were from the small town of Hollister, near Gilroy, famous for its garlic. I looked in wonder at the map, noting how easy it was for them to drive north just a few hours, to magical places like San Jose (just like the song, I remembered, “Do you know the way”).

There was the Central Valley and Salinas, setting of the Steinbeck novels — which of course I eagerly read, absorbing more clues about that magical place.

I saw Highway One winding up the coastline, the famous scenic drive that stretched all the way from South to North, through fresh, coastal beaches and tiny, laid-back surfing towns. As a child of Wisconsin, it would not be until I was eighteen that I first saw an ocean, so the thought of being close to the Pacific brought me a giddy feeling of anticipation, a place I knew I would have to live someday.

It never occurred to me that the Nichols family, despite being long-time California residents exposed to all that Heaven, had for some reason deliberately chose to leave, and to move to – of all places – our small town of Neillsville. If California was so perfect, why on earth would they move?

Mr. Nichols offered an unsatisfying answer. California was too stressful, he said. It was “life in the fast lane”, a place where people drive so fast they can’t look around and enjoy their surroundings. He spoke of freeways full of impatient motorists, scowling when the others move too slowly, raising their fists at each other for no reason other than the constant pressure of living in a land where everything, all the time, had to be new, where the old was tedious and boring, irrelevant.

When he talked about California as a land of high pressure and stress, he might as well have been speaking another language, because to me those words sounded like an invitation to a great, intense, and wonderful game, a place with high stakes and high rewards, of an environment where everyone, all the time, was seeking the future, moving as fast as they could to break out of old molds and old ways of thinking. If that was a little stressful for some people, so be it, I thought. Great things happen to those who work hard. No pain no gain. I knew that I wanted to be part of it.