Staying Centered Amid the Storm

NORTH FORK —  There’s a tale to be told about how the exact center of California came to be pinpointed. As geographic mysteries go, it approaches barnburner status. A missing stake comes into play, along with musty surveyor records, government satellites, a determined college geography student, warring civic boosters and even Huell Howser, of PBS “California Gold” fame.

That, however, is not the story I have come here to tell.

Let it simply be stipulated that, not too long ago, at least three communities were making the claim that they were perched at the very center of California. In the mid-1990s, after assorted scientific travails, a team of geographers at Cal State Fresno finally placed the precise center on a hillside seven miles outside this old logging town, which is roughly halfway between Fresno and Yosemite.

The spot now is marked by a survey control point set in a concrete slab. North Fork history buffs have built a modest shrine of sorts, installing a plaque, a small stone marker and steps made of railroad ties that lead up from the road. The steps are lightly dusted with fool’s gold.

Right now, as it happens, my back is resting against the stone marker as I tap away on a laptop computer. I have come to the exact center of California in the spirit of the mountain climber: Because it is here. Also, there is something strangely attractive about the idea of sitting square in the middle of the wild tumult and constant motion that is California.

I came anticipating tacky, but the site itself turns out to be tastefully modest. As for the crowds, well, for almost two hours I have had it all to myself. There’s not a single building in sight. Every half-hour or so, a car or pickup will roll by on the narrow road below. They never stop.

It seemed perfectly quiet at first. In time, though, the ears found the proper frequency, and it’s possible now to hear the light breeze pushing through the oak branches and grasses, the buzzing of bees and horseflies, various assemblies of birds yakking at one another, and an unseen cow bawling out from somewhere across the road.

All in all, it’s pretty pleasant here in the middle. The early afternoon sky is a brilliant blue, and I’m surrounded in all directions by that most iconic of California landscapes: rolling foothills covered with oaks and wild grasses that have not yet lost their green.

And it strikes me, as I sit here, face to the sun, that this is the California, the physical California, that can become lost in the public noise of the moment. To listen to the airwaves and political rhetoric, to read the newspapers and attend the seminars, it too often can seem that California is nothing but a collection of problems to be fixed, of issues to be debated.

California is an energy crisis.

Or, California is sprawl.

California is a crumbling public school system.

Or, California is a caldron of competing ethnicities.

California is a mounting population count, a coming drought.

In a similar vein, there are the ceaseless attempts to present California as an abstraction--more than a state, a state of mind . . . the place where the future begins . . . the land of the lotus eaters, and all that.

All these may apply, but California is something more than its conflicts, however significant, and its cliches, however valid. It is fundamentally a place, a piece of geography, and a spectacular one at that. To overlook that simple fact is to risk losing balance and perspective.

For example, sitting here at California’s center, surrounded by this wonderful landscape, the threat of maybe being forced to make do without electricity every so often this summer somehow loses its punch. California remains bigger than the troubles we make for it.

Yes, it’s true: In the last century and a half much damage has been done to the land, many alterations have been made. And no, as the late Wallace Stegner once observed, we have not yet raised up a society to match our scenery. Still, as any trip across the state will reveal, there remains more of California, this physical California, to save than has been wrecked.

This is something I need to keep reminding myself, especially in the state’s dicier moments. Places like this, and there are plenty of them, help restore perspective. I mean, we are living in California. How bad can things be?