I Remember California (ISWC T-700.027.647-3 BMI) represents the tenth and penultimate track of R.E.M.'s first Warner Brothers album Green, released in 1988 and recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. The song's E minor chords give it a melancholy feel, and its lyrics are somewhat ambiguous in keeping with the band's style. It lists off recollections about a few things that can be found in the 31st state and some characteristics about a particular person that the singer (possibly in metaphor) had in his grasp but either lost or decided to walk away from. Some interpret the subject to be a reflection on the state itself, or of a potential love interest he encountered there. Noder Tlachtga asserts that it is "a bitter commentary of hippie nostalgia in the 1980s greed culture". Some have speculated that the song is about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign on 6 June 1968. Verses that include "nearly-was and almost-rans", "I recall it wasn't fair", "progress fails", "all those sweet conspiracies", and "the lowest ebb and highest tide" make that a compelling theory in my view, as it represented a tragic loss of immense potential for progress that could have changed the arc of history in substantial ways. The song was likely written at around the event's twentieth anniversary, and the band intentionally chose to release Green in the United States on Presidential Election Day. But taken at face value as being a song about someone who feels sadness when remembering California, I can say that I find it personally relatable.
History is made to seem unfair
This past week I traveled back to Santa Barbara for the first time since moving away over fourteen years ago. When I left, I'd been a resident of the Golden State for nearly seven years, and had fully transitioned from being a spellbound Floridian transplant who saw this small coastal community as paradise to a jaded Californian who was tired of the hard water, air pollution from L.A., constant wildfires, and perennial unaffordability. I guess I was still in love with SBA when I left it, but was heartbroken by the the lived experience that its tantalizing radiance was just a mirage for solidly middle class people like me, and that I could never realistically meet the long-term requirements to maintain my standard of living in this surreal dichotomy of heaven and hell that is so utterly consumed with its Spanish Colonial Revival aesthetic. Part of me didn't want to leave, but my priorities and life goals made it impossible for me to stay. I'd call that unfair, but that's just the way it is.
Since I drove away from Santa Barbara for the last time on the afternoon of 29 October 2009, I've been living in Portland, Oregon and have done remarkably well for myself thanks in no small part to the serendipitous timing of several tragic events in my family life that ultimately left me orphaned in 2020 at the tender age of 52. The first chapter of my Oregon Experience was spent in a spacious rental house where my spouse and I threw occasional parties for our noder friends and relived the dream of the nineties during the Obama years. It was craft beer heaven and a vegan utopia. Portlandia urged us all to put a bird on it, and parts of the NBC series Grimm were filmed in my neighborhood so it sometimes felt like we'd brought part of California with us. You couldn't throw a bottle in any direction without hitting a fucking hipster, and the city was booming. It was a great time to be a Portlander. Then my mother passed away suddenly from a misdiagnosed case of vasculitis in 2012, and my father who had been fighting chronic myeloid leukemia for years was now a widower with no primary caregiver.
Things got progressively more unfair from that point forward. My dad sold his house a year later and generously gave us the proceeds which we accepted on the condition that he move in with us, but after a short visit he decided that Portland was just too far away from the world he knew, and opted instead to live with friends until late 2017 when he was on the brink of death from CML. We'd bought a house in the meantime and fixed it up with an apartment for him, and having exhausted all his other options he finally relented and moved out west to live with us. I am thankful that the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland is one of the world's premiere facilities for hematological research, and that its hospital specializes in the treatment of blood cancers. They were able to save my father's life at a point where few other hospitals could have done so. Had we never moved to Portland, this resource wouldn't have been so conveniently available. He lived with us for two full years until acute renal failure finally took his life just barely a week before the COVID-19 lockdown began. My dad had a talent for making well-timed exits.
I remember all these things
But my focus here isn't about Portland or my blood family. It's about a place that my spouse's extended family participated in founding starting in the 1830s, the random discovery that she is a genuine Californio descended from indigenous people and their Spanish colonial invaders, and my personal reflections in the aftermath of a trip that took me back not only to my own arrival in California, but to my adopted family's roots.
A few years ago, my wife's full brother took a DNA test producing results that strongly disputed their father's oral history of his side of their family: namely, Irish ancestry based on their surname, along with a documented family tree in San Francisco, California going back to the 1850s. Instead, the DNA showed no Irish lineage whatsoever, but Spanish and indigenous bloodlines that have been traced back as far as the seventeenth century in Taos, New Mexico. This was bizarre and unexpected, and prompted my wife and I to also take DNA tests through 23andMe. My spouse's test results echoed her brother's findings. This news incited a year of furious online genealogical research and discovery, motivating our recent trip to San Luis Obispo, California for personal exploration of the physical archives located in the county historical society's records center, and to see the old family land.
Due to extreme winter weather that broke records across the continent, our travel to and from California's Central Coast was beset by flight delays and cancellations, but the time we spent on the ground there was sublime and went beyond all expectations. While Portland was covered in snow and ice, the weather in SLO was perfect and featured one of the warmest days the region had experienced since winter began. My wife coordinated a meetup with not only her full brother's family and numerous half-siblings who lived locally and in nearby parts of the state, but with second cousins whom they'd never met that were descended from their common great great grandparents. These cousins happened to also be involved in genealogical research and had been living on family land in San Luis Obispo County for generations. We were all delighted at the welcoming reception her cousins organized for us upon our first meeting, which started with breakfast in their family home and proceeded to tours of grave sites, ancestral adobes, and lands that were originally part of their side of the family's homesteads in California. This was rather overwhelming and surreal for most of her siblings, who had grown up believing a fabricated story about their ancestry. Learning that you are genetically part of a Y chromosome haplogroup that has deep roots in your homeland stretching back thousands of years can be a transformative experience.
As my wife is a professional archivist and expert in researching historical records, she was able to uncover a substantial amount of verifiable information and reveal connections that her cousins had been speculating about and seeking for years. The core of the story involves a handsome philanderer in the Trujillo family who fathered numerous children out of wedlock, including twins whose German mother was married to an Irishman. To avoid a scandal, the twins (Harry Francis and Harriet Frances) were given the family's Irish surname despite having no such ancestry, and everyone kept the matter a secret. My wife's paternal grandfather was Harry, and his biological paternal grandfather emigrated to California around the time of the Taos Revolt in 1847, having obtained land grants there from the Mexican government. These grants were parcels taken from the Mission's expansive land holdings following Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821. They were honored by the United States government following the Mexican-American War in 1848, and reauthorized by Presidents Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 and Benjamin Harrison in 1891. The land grant documents and maps still exist and reside in the county archives. My wife's four-times-great grandfather owned part of what is now downtown San Luis Obispo, including the Dallidet Adobe and gardens (California Historical Landmark #720).
Historical research is a concerted effort at remembering the past, and in doing so, honoring it. Learning about your own genealogy is a personal form of remembering and honoring those ancestors who might otherwise be forgotten. Discovering that those ancestors led lives of historical significance, whatever the scope, can engender feelings of wonder, fascination, and pride (or shame). Connecting family names with faces and places, visiting their graves, standing on the land they owned and in the houses they built and raised their families in, and reading their diaries and journals - written in their own words and handwriting - can impart the sensation of knowing them, even though they died decades or even centuries before you were born. My wife and I went back to California to remember not just our own time living there, but to uncover more memories of her progenitors and their lifetimes in the place they called their home.
I guess it's just a gesture
While the time spent in SLO, Atascadero, Pozo, Pismo, and their surroundings was delightful, our travel itinerary through Santa Barbara was bittersweet. I've noded about my journey to California under another username, and my time living there had its ups and downs, but it was mostly good. Coming back after fourteen years gave me mixed feelings. I was happy to be back, but it was kind of strange. We didn't have a lot of time to look around outside the airport, but did get to explore UCSB and Isla Vista a little. Some things were staggeringly different than when we last saw them, like the new airport terminal and the Davidson Library on campus where we both worked and met. Some things were completely the same, like the cliffs along the coastline and the narrow beaches. In the middle of it all were the students: completely different people from the ones we left behind, but still exactly the same in the way that college students have always been at that school. The surfers bobbing on their boards off the coast of Coal Oil Point look exactly the same as they always have, though I'm now older than many of their fathers.
I miss Santa Barbara sometimes, particularly its weather, but going back didn't assuage that yearning. It's not the place it once was, just as I'm no longer the person I was when I lived there. The passage of time is so gradual that you often don't notice its cumulative effects on yourself and the things around you, so stepping back to a place from your past that you haven't watched changing along with you is kind of jarring. The California I remember and called home isn't a real place anymore, even though the locations still exist in an evolved form. Ella Winter's comment to Thomas Wolfe that "You can't go home again" is true because home in that sense of the word's meaning is just a memory. It only exists in your mind. Maybe that's not fair, but that's just the way it is.