Travelogue: Southern California.

*Welcome to surf city, **USA**. Orange County is always a bizarre
experience of being almost at home, but not quite. The roads, which
don't really feel like roads as they wind between the hills in visual
isolation, are new and wide; the buildings are the new-form strip
centers and ordinance-restricted big boxes that would be at home in
Collin County; and the people are homogenous, affluent, and almost
entirely white. It's a new, shiny, and surreal landscape. The
geography owns a larger place here that almost anywhere I've seen. The
unusual flora screams its individuality everywhere you go: Palm trees,
spindly ground cover, and the uber-strange sight of whole hillsides
without a single tree. The topography is the biggest adjustment. For a
son of the great plains, conditioned to surveying the entire horizon at
a glance, and comforted by the security of knowing your surroundings and
your place in them, the coastal hills are a continuous exercise in
claustrophobia. Even in the midst of massive suburban development,
there's an isolation of only knowing the valley you're in and the
housing perched on its hillsides like so many scavenger birds. By never
knowing what's on the other side of the hill, there's never a sense of
context, or where your spot relates to the before and behind. *

* *

*San Diego** was part stereotype and part surprise. There is the cliché
beach culture: high informality, streets of intentionally ramshackle
shops, and the exclusive enclave crawling up the ridge road along the
prospect over the beach. Urban **San Diego** is something of a shock:
While there are the obligatory glass office towers of every American
city, the historic core has little in common with **L.A.** and much more
with, well . . . to put it frankly . . . Guthrie, Oklahoma. The
shocking juxtaposition of Victorian streets with palm trees and aircraft
carriers took a little adjustment. *

* *

*The ocean is always an inarguable asset, but the society that's sprung
up along its edge will take me a while to digest still. Every time I go
I have trouble deciding whether I love it or can't stand it. The whole
region doesn't have that pulse of place in the people of a city like
Chicago or NYC. Maybe there just aren't enough natives to grow a
consistent viewpoint. Maybe everyone's just so relaxed that I don't
notice it. *