California dreamin’... of England

GROWING UP, I used to flee my 15th century English boarding school every summer and come to California. California was where my parents lived, but, no less important, it was where freedom lived and long horizons had their home address. It was the source of everything we craved -- and didn’t have -- in our tiny, medieval, all-male cells: movement and opportunity, beaches and bikinis. Mustangs with their tops down along PCH and cheerleader camps spreading like blond explosions across the campus at UC Santa Barbara. California was the place where we could put history and hierarchy behind us. It was -- as those blond cheers and cries of optimism reminded us -- the future stretched out ad infinitum.

This has always been the California that the Old World cherishes, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the longing reached its peak. I would get on the Pan Am plane in London every July -- bound for LAX -- and see my classmates turn away with envy. I was going to the center of a revolution -- to the very place where youth was remaking the world in its own image -- while they had to remain among the fixed.

Every autumn, when I returned to the low, gray skies of Berkshire, I told my friends how I had seen the Dead live in a nearby campground and heard “White Rabbit” sailing across the lagoon at UCSB. I had seen the world made new on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue and found ancient caves in the hills that made Xenophon and the Punic Wars look nouveau.

There were long, sunlit afternoons listening to Vin Scully call another golden twilight over the palm trees at Dodger Stadium. Country-rock harmonies ringing out underneath the stars in the Santa Barbara Bowl, as the lights came on around the ocean far below.

When lucky friends from England visited, we made the obligatory trip to where the soul itself was being reborn, at the Esalen Institute -- often welcomed, thanks to our British accents -- or savored the inadvertent ironies of Solvang, or the Madonna Inn up the coast. California was where we went when we wanted to leave real life far behind.

It was only much, much later, then, after I’d come to see that daydreams pack less danger than fantasies, that I began to realize, to my surprise, that summer, like anything, is best appreciated in its absence. Endlessness itself can be imprisonment.

And it was only when I looked back on both cultures from a new home in Japan that I noticed that summer light was actually sharper, more clarifying in England than in Santa Barbara. The sun didn’t set till long after 9 p.m. on summer evenings there, and the afternoons drifted on, over acres and acres of rich green fields and lazy rivers, till they dissolved into a drowsy Keatsian twitter sometime before midnight. The sound of a cricket bat in the distance. Shouts from a far-off tennis game on grass courts. And after the languid falling of the dark, Handel concerts above the rolling lawns, and spirits hiding in the trees in college productions of Shakespeare’s “Dream.”

I had made it my identity, my policy to style myself as an exile, a fugitive from England’s narrow spaces, given new life, like Isherwood or Hockney, in the subtropical light of California. But summer in California, I came to see slowly, is bleary skies and sticky afternoons, traffic jams among all those trying to flee the city. Winter is the time to enjoy the light here, when early evenings and crystalline skies put a frame around the sunshine.

California, I suppose I realized, had given me possibility; but only England could show me what to do with it -- in part by giving me 10 months a year of chill, gray finitudes.