Work took me to the Bay Area twice this month. It is one of my favorite places on Earth after the three years we spent in California near San Francisco in the ’90s.
Flights of nostalgia whisked me down memory lane as I reminisced about traipsing around California with my girlfriend (these days my wife) collecting experiences as if they were delectable desserts to be devoured.
Looking back on your youth can be bittersweet. It reminds you of how open to possibility the world seemed even if you didn’t recognize it at the time. But it also provides perspective.
Until my 20s, I had lived in Augusta, Georgia, except for the two summers I worked in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, N.C.
I was ready to escape, to see the world.
As a child raised on ’70s and ’80s Hollywood movies set on or near beaches (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” anyone?), when I moved to California in 1992, I expected to meet a lot of surfers and dudes who said “gnarly” and “tubular.”
No such luck.
For nearly a year, I lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a mostly rural redoubt with quaint towns and a small ski resort 45 minutes away. Most of the people were regular everyday folk going about their lives like my family and friends in Georgia.
Still, California was different enough that it was enthralling.
Spring was the best time of year. If you were lucky, you could snow ski and swim in the ocean the same weekend. One weekend I managed to slalom down the slopes at 8,000 feet elevation one day and swim in the Pacific Ocean the next at the Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, the setting for key scenes in the 1980s classics Lost Boys (Yes, I picked my swimming spot so I could tell that story to anyone who would listen for the rest of my life.)
Then for nearly two years I lived in and around Stockton, a rough city about an hour or so from San Francisco best known as the location for the ’70s show Big Valley (It was Lee Majors’ first big show before he transformed into “The $6 million Dollar Man” in the early ’70s.)
Stockton is in the middle of California’s Central Valley, a massive agricultural region that stretches for hundreds of miles up the interior of the state. The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation’s food and 40% of its fruits, nuts and vegetables.
It’s also had some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. The food is fresh. Plus, the Central Valley is home to people of all ethnicities and races from around the world who brought their food with them. Ethiopian. Vietnamese. Hmong.Cambodian. Indian. Mexican. Salvadoran.
For a kid raised on boiled vegetables and meatloaf, the culinary discoveries rocked my world.
I’m telling you all this because California was the first time in my life I was forced to reconcile what I thought I knew about a place — Hollywood, celebrities, sprawling megacities — with what a place, in reality, is.
California is not simply L.A. or San Francisco or San Diego. It’s also Stockton and the many cities like it in the Central Valley and all the rural towns around them.
States and their populations are always more complicated than the stereotypes we learn about them.
It’s a lesson that stuck with me as we moved around the country.
I suspect the lesson stuck, in part, because over the decades as we traveled the country, I came to realize the region I grew up in — the American South — was a lot more complicated than how it is usually portrayed in TV shows and news accounts. A lot of the stories you might have heard about the South, especially about race and discrimination, are true. But, as I discovered in California, it’s not all there is.
Speaking of Georgia, as much as I miss California these days — and on certain days, I miss it a lot — I miss Georgia more. It’s where I grew up, and where my family and my oldest friends in the world live.
Funny how that is. I couldn’t wait to leave Augusta in my 20s. Now I spend part of my days reminiscing about growing up in my hometown.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet.