After two years of living in Newport Beach and a painfully boring stint at an apartment in Irvine itself, I was ready to make a move. My car had finally given up the ghost and I was relegated to taking the bus. Orange County circa 1984 was not known for its plentiful and efficient public transportation. Since I only had to be on campus two or three days a week, I decided I needed to move to a place that was more interesting and provided more opportunities than sterile Irvine, and so I decided to move about 20 miles north to the city of Long Beach. I answered an ad, met and passed an “interview” and ended up moving in with an easy-going roommate named Jim who worked for an airline. The apartment was comfortable and I could either walk or hop on a bus to get pretty much anywhere I wanted within the city. A few times a week I caught up on my reading during the long bus rides to and from campus.

Long Beach was a good place to be. It has a nice beach with what appear to be strange islands floating off the coast. These “islands” are actually oil derricks that have been camouflaged with walls to make them look like apartment buildings or small skyscrapers and there were multiple palm trees planted around them. They are illuminated by colorful lights at night. It was an ingenious way to hide what would otherwise be a pretty ugly, industrial-looking eyesore. The Belmont Shores area of the city was a strip of trendy restaurants, cafes and bakeries, and the surrounding streets were lined with greenery and very upscale old California Spanish style houses. One of my favorite things about the city was the abundance of jacaranda trees throughout the city, which for a few weeks in the spring produce beautiful blue flowers, and a few weeks after that, the streets are simply paved in blue flower petals.

During my first couple of years in California, I met Bernie, an undergrad student at UC Irvine. We’d actually lived only a few blocks from one another in Newport Beach, and even after I moved to Long Beach, we continued to hang out, go for walks and bike rides, meet for dinners, and eventually took some road trips across the country and around the southwest together. We also sparred a lot over basketball, as he was a die-hard L.A. Lakers fan and I was devoted to the Boston Celtics. Bernie was a charmingly naïve guy whose family emigrated from Syria to the US when he was 9 years old. Though he spoke English perfectly and with no accent, he was forever getting words and phrases mixed up or struggling to find the correct word for something. He once mentioned the upstate New York city of “Sycamore” (Syracuse). He asked about the country music group “The Southern Bitches” (the Dixie Chicks), and as he was describing a trip he’d taken as a child to a ski area he mentioned “riding the cups” which after much confusion, I finally gleaned was an aerial gondola. Once he asked what the name of one of my houseplants and when I told him it was a Dracaena, he rolled his eyes and whined, “Why can’t plants just have normal names, like John and Peter!” He was very, very funny and could make me laugh harder than just about anyone I knew. We remained good friends for the next 20 years or so.

Eventually I saved enough money for a down payment on a new car and decided that with a tumultuous past of self-destructing used cars, I wanted to get something new. I opted for a Mazda pick-up truck, as they were quite popular at that time and were almost half the cost of a small sedan. Who needs a back seat?  I had considered buying something sedate in dark blue or smoke gray, until I went to the car dealership and the 7 year old boy in me screamed, “I want the RED one!”  I drove away in a fire-engine red pick-up that made me feel like I wanted to load up some hay bales and ride out to the North 40.  Meanwhile, when two or three of my fellow graduate students, who were really not terribly close friends, learned of my purchase, they took me aside and in something akin to an intervention, questioned my judgement and told me that I really could not afford such a luxury. My friend Jonie, who was also in the graduate program, and I still chuckle over this even 30 years later whenever I buy a new car. She looks at me with an expression of mock concern and judgement and asks if I really think I can afford this. And for the record, I never missed a payment on my fire-engine red toy!

Perhaps it was the truck that led to a mindset that left me open to one of the best experiences I had in all of my time in California. I wanted to go out and socialize, but have never been a “bar person” and more than anything, I loathed discos and loud dance music. I got wind of a gay country-western bar called Floyd’s that was only 6 blocks from my apartment. The movie Urban Cowboy had made a splash around this time and people across the country were flocking to country bars in boots and cowboy hats to learn country-western line dancing. With equal parts curiosity and apprehension, off I went to Floyd’s, and soon realized I’d found a new home. The atmosphere was friendlier than any bar I had ever been in, and the music, though I was not a country fan at the time, sounded to me like the stuff I listened to in the 1970s when true singers and songwriters produced such great music.

I got myself a pair of cowboy boots and started attending country line dance classes on Tuesdays, and to my surprise, I was pretty good on the dance floor. I dragged my friend Greg from UC Irvine to Floyd’s too, and we met several really wonderful people there. We became a close-knit family; there was Herb and Jim, a couple in their 50s who’d been together for over 20 years, Bill & Bill, a slightly younger couple who owned property out in the Mojave desert, and Greg soon met a guy named Fritz and they became a couple, so that made me the perennially single 7^th wheel. I began spending three nights a week at Floyd’s: Tuesday was line dance lessons, Thursdays were western swing lessons, and Saturday was open dancing.

Had you walked into Floyd’s on one of these nights circa 1986 or so, you would have witnessed the following scene: the music for a particular line dance would start. The DJ, Grover, would point at me and say, “Follow him!” and I would lead off the entire dance floor with the first step at the appropriate time. I was a redheaded, country version of John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, but without the white leisure suit!  I started buying a lot of the music that I heard at the bar and before long, had become a huge fan of country music and remain so to this day.

Herb and Jim owned a luxurious motor home, and once a month or so gathered the whole gang up for a long weekend of camping. What was wonderful about this was that we went to the most remote places imaginable, but we lived in style with air conditioning, comfortable beds, music, and hot meals cooked on the stove or on a grill. I treasure these memories of carefree days playing cards, going on hikes, cooking dinner together, sharing a love of country music, and enjoying nature, whether on a beach near Santa Barbara, in the mountains north of L.A. or in the midst of enormous sand dunes in the Mojave.

Meanwhile, Bill and Bill had a small house outside of Barstow, and a plot of undeveloped land in the desert outside of town. We’d all head out that way for long weekends as well, hiding out in the air conditioning, playing cards and socializing during the 100+ degree days, and then camping out in the open up on the hill for the evening. One of my favorite memories of these nights was lying on my back in the bed of my pick-up and being unable to sleep because I couldn’t stop staring at the multitude of stars and the shooting stars that seemed to whiz across the sky at frequent intervals.

As I continued to home my skills on the dance floor at Floyds, I also became interested in the gay rodeo circuit. Yes, two decades before the film Brokeback Mountain appeared on the silver screen, virtually every western state had its own chapter of the Gay Rodeo Association, and every couple of months there’d be one somewhere in California, or Colorado or Arizona. I was not one of the contestants, but was in the stands cheering and being quite impressed by the ability of these hard core cowboys to wrestle a steer to the ground and pin it for a few seconds (the chutedogging event) or to rope a fast moving steer from atop a fast moving horse. There were fun times, and I definitely felt as if I fit in with this scene far more comfortably than I did with the nightclub or Laguna Beach scene.

Meanwhile I continued to languish at the “Hotel California” that was UC Irvine. Academic quarters came and went, and the combination of no prodding from my dissertation advisor, coupled with the need to make money through part-time teaching at various colleges in the area meant that little progress was made in finishing my degree and moving on. When I did eventually get motivated, I devised a survey to administer to residents of various southern California communities regarding how they viewed the risk of a large earthquake and what, if anything, they had done to prepare. I also looked at a variable called “self-efficacy” (people’s feelings of power or control over being able to take various actions) to see how it impacted those perceptions of risk and intentions to prepare.

I wanted to sample people who lived right on top of some of the area’s notorious earthquake faults, and spent many days driving around the cities of Long Beach and San Bernardino (yes, San Bernardino actually reared its head again to play a role in my career!) to map out and get addresses of homes that were actually built within a fault zone. It was tedious, but also nice to be outside and to see what actually has been built on top of California’s faults. In Long Beach, the Newport Inglewood Fault underlies some golf courses and parks (good planning) but it also is topped by a long line of oil rigs interspersed with nursing homes for the elderly! It gives you a chilling idea of how we feel about the elderly! The San Andreas Fault in San Bernardino is mostly residential, and a question on my survey asked, “Are you aware that your home is located within the San Andreas Earthquake Fault Zone and if so, how did you learn about this?” My favorite answer came from a San Bernardino woman who wrote, “I live on Andreas Avenue, so it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out.”

I continued to explore the Golden State on weekends and holiday breaks. California is an amazing place, offering just about any landscape you might want. One of my favorite places was Joshua Tree National Monument, a boulder-strewn valley filled with exotic looking Joshua Trees, spiny cactus-like trees that are actually related to yuccas and produce giant groups of whitish- yellow flowers in the spring. This landscape served as the backdrop for some scenes filmed for my old favorite TV show as a child, Lost in Space, which really appealed to the 8 year-old inside me. Another desert destination for me was Anza-Borrego State Park, inland from San Diego. I’d always stop at the small town of Julian, which is in the midst of an apple growing region, to get some delectable apple pie to go. I’d place it in the sun on the dashboard of my truck while I went hiking, and then park at an overlook to watch sunset while I enjoyed my warm slice of pie. In the early spring I’d make a trip to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, about 90 minutes north of L.A. When California gets the right amount of winter rain, this whole area is covered by massive fields of wildflowers, but most commonly, the vibrantly orange state flower. It’s spectacular.

And then there was San Francisco. I’d started to visit the City by the Bay quite often now that I was a Californian, and with each visit I became more enchanted with it. People seemed so much less superficial and judgmental than in southern California. There were endless restaurants and cafes, urban parks, and jaw-dropping views from the top of almost every hill I climbed. Over the next few years I became increasingly attached to San Francisco, and the seed was planted that someday, somehow I wanted to live there. It was a little bit of an incentive to get my degree finished so I could move on to the Bay Area’s greener pastures.

That would take a few more years and a much-needed pep talk from my former masters thesis advisor, Kelly Shaver back in Virginia. He told me sternly that I was a perfectionist and that if I did not stop it, I would never finish my dissertation. “Matt, you just need to write the damn thing!  You know more about your topic and your research than anyone on your committee, and once the thing is done, it will sit on a shelf in the library and gather dust. Stop trying to make it perfect and just WRITE it!”

These words were probably the most valuable advice I received in all my years at UC Irvine, and at long last, in December of 1990, I completed my doctorate.  I remember that as I prepared for my final orals defense, my advisor called to ask what I would be serving at the orals. “Serving?” I was told that it was customary for the doctoral candidate to provide refreshments at the orals defense. So that morning, in addition to baking scones, I created an orange Jello mold and sculpted it into the shape of California. I surrounded it with fruit salad and adorned it with tiny plastic palms trees, which when I shook the plate, vibrated as if they were responding to a 6.5 quake. I am convinced that it was this creative flair rather than any true scholarly brilliance that got me the Ph.D.

At this point I had been in school for a solid 25 years and was 32 years old. I was a little unsure what to do next, as all I’d done before was finish one degree and go for another. Now it was time to start a career, and I was drawn to the idea of teaching. I had been a part time professor for about four years by this time, and liked the classroom interactions and working with students, so it seemed to be the perfect career. It would also allow me a flexible schedule with summers and Spring Break and holidays off. My dissertation advisor at Irvine and my friend Elaine both frantically pushed me to pursue a post-doctorate and look for a high pressure faculty position in a “publish or perish” environment. Finally, I shocked them when I confessed, “I don’t want to live the way you two do. I’ve watched you over the years and you’re under constant stress, trying to write grant proposals, working on a dozen research studies simultaneously and trying to get the results published. That’s not the life I want. I’d like to be at a small school where I can focus mostly on teaching, then go home at the end of the day and have a life!’ They seemed disappointed, but also, they had to acknowledge that maybe I had the right idea.

That April, I took another trip to San Francisco. Every time I visited, I felt like crying when it was time to leave. It just touched my soul in a way that few places had up till this point in my life. After climbing to the top of Twin Peaks, the highest point in the city, to take some photos of the million dollar views of the city below, I started my descent through some of the residential areas near the summit. The neighborhood consisted mostly of box-like apartment buildings, but they all faced out on that amazing view. It was quiet and peaceful up here, even though the city’s busy neighborhoods were a 5 minute drive down the mountain. I walked along a street called Gardenside Drive and I remember thinking to myself, “How do people get to live in a place like this? I would love to live here.” But I didn’t have a job and didn’t know a soul in the city and could not imagine how I could make that wish come true. Little did I know that within just three months I’d be living in an apartment on Gardenside Drive with a view of the city from my balcony. Years later, when I was looking at a photo I’d taken from the top of Twin Peaks that day in April, I spotted my own apartment building in the foreground. I would never have imagined that I would be living my dream in such a short time. Life is indeed a fascinating journey.

In the first chapter of my California saga I recounted my childhood obsession with the Golden State and my first visits there as a teenager in April and June of 1975. A year later I graduated from high school and began attending a local university only a few miles from home in Massachusetts. Therefore, the California Dream was relegated to a back burner for awhile. At college I studied Psychology and made a number of dear friends who have remained part of my life to this very day. When I graduated, I did apply to a couple of graduate school programs in California, but it was evidently not yet my time and I was turned down. I was left to decide between Ph.D. programs in New Hampshire and Rhode Island or a Masters program at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Though it may have seemed the odd choice, I opted for Virginia, feeling that it would be good for me to move away from New England and get a taste of living in a new place. It turned out to be a good decision, as I made more wonderful friends there and benefitted from the mentorship of Dr. Kelly Shaver, who combined instilling great fear and holding very high expectations, but tempered this with a lot of humor and support. The result was some of my very best academic work. His area of expertise was the social psychology topic of Attribution, which in layperson’s terms is all about how we attempt to understand and explain the misfortunes suffered by others, as well as those we experience ourselves.

This set the stage for my long-awaited move to California. I applied to several doctoral programs in the Golden State and was accepted to an interdisciplinary program in Social Ecology at the University of California Irvine, an hour south of Los Angeles. Students in the program had to combine a “hard” science with a social science for their comprehensive exams and dissertation. I eventually ended up developing an expertise in both the geological aspects of how and why earthquakes occur and the social psychological aspects of how people view their risk and how that translates into whether they do or do not prepare or protect themselves from disasters.

The move to southern California was memorable. I spent that summer up in New England saying farewell to friends and relatives, and as August approached, it was time to begin my cross-country drive to L.A.  At this time, I owned a rather beat up old Plymouth Duster.  I placed a “California or Bust” banner in the back window and off I went, with perhaps only a few hundred dollars to my name. The details of how the cross -country journey went are sketchy, but I recall being equal parts terrified and excited. This was a big move, and TV buff that I am, I couldn’t help but feel that I was the star of my own sitcom, moving to California to chase my dreams. Soon I would meet a zany cast of characters who would serve as my co-stars on the show. It’s easy to daydream as your spend eight hours crossing the Great Plains.

My first misadventure occurred somewhere near Winslow, Arizona when I discovered that my transmission fluid pan was leaking badly, and faced with an untenable $500 to replace it, I bought a case of transmission fluid at a K-Mart and gave my poor car transfusions about every 10 miles for the rest of the trip into southern California. Thankfully, I had secured a teaching assistantship at Irvine that paid quite well, so once I arrived, I knew I was going to be OK.

I was both amused and unnerved by the fact that upon entry into the state I had to stop at an Agricultural inspection station to declare any fruits or plants in my vehicle. I was amused because it felt like bringing in some fresh strawberries was akin to being a drug smuggler, and unnerved because I had three African violets that I’d nurtured for years tucked away in my car. I was afraid they would be confiscated and considered keeping them hidden, but as an innocent young man who had only had to stay after school once in my entire life through no fault of my own (my mom folded a homework assignment for my woodshop class in 8th grade and put it inside a book to keep it from getting wet on a rainy day; the teacher did not want the assignments folded and ordered me to stay after school). That was traumatic enough; I could not imagine the experience of being thrown onto the hood of my car in the blazing Mojave Desert sun and handcuffed for trying to smuggle African violets. Thankfully, I was waved through the checkpoint without even being asked if I had anything in the car. “What a bizarre place this is…” I thought.

I ended up finding a room in a four-bedroom house on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. It was common for students to rent such places for the 9-month school year, after which rent soared by a few thousand dollars for the summer months. The address was 302 East Oceanfront, and I delighted in people asking whether that was Oceanfront Avenue, Drive, Street, etc. I’d respond with, “Just Oceanfront.” The place faced the beach boardwalk with a view of the Pacific and the Balboa Pier. All day there was a parade of roller skaters, skateboarders and bicyclists zooming past. I felt like a “beach dude: and for a New England kid who’d always dreamed of living in California, there could not have been a more exciting first place to call home.

However, I soon learned that I didn’t meet the qualifications for beach dude status. Despite the fact that with my hearty New England blood I was able to swim in the ocean throughout that first winter, chuckling to myself that “Real men don’t need wetsuits” as I watched surfers braving the waves dressed like seals, I did not measure up to southern California standards regarding my weight. At the local surf shop in Balboa, t shirts and bumper stickers reading, “No fat dudes!” and “No fat Chicks” adorned the front window. An unnervingly high number of cars in town had bumper stickers that read, “I don’t break for fat dudes!” or “I don’t break for fat chicks!’  I was afraid to cross the street for the first year I lived in southern California.  Worse yet, when I would come home from school in the mid afternoon and sit out on the patio facing the boardwalk reading a book, many of those roller skating or skateboarding past made comments about me with welcoming words such as, “Ooh, look at the fat dude!” or simply made pig-like, oinking noises as they passed.

This constant social pressure to be thin and fit weighed heavily on me. Within my first year and a half in California, I lost almost 50 pounds, dropping from about 230 to 180. Friends and family back home were worried that I was seriously ill. I also shaved off my straggly beard for the first time since my college days, emulating the clean shaven look popular in southern California at that time. Of course, it was good for me to lose the weight, and I actually had fun doing it. Southern California has many bike trails that run along the flat coastline through various beach cities. I rode my bike from Newport Beach to Long Beach, a 40-mile round trip, a couple times a week. Once a week or so I would go farther, following more bike trails past Long Beach to Santa Monica, resulting in a nearly 100 mile round trip. I’d stop for lunch or sometimes have a swim somewhere along the way, and then ride back. With all this exercise, I was able to drop a couple of pounds a week, despite the fact that I was eating like a horse. I enjoy eating like a horse, so this was a good regimen for me! I also enjoyed walking around the peninsula or taking the tiny ferry over to Balboa Island and walking there, always taking time to visit a favorite pie shop. I don’t mind walking a mile or so when the end goal is pie.

My roommates at the beach house that first year were Jon and Steve, two stereotypically blonde and handsome California dudes. Each had a girlfriend that would spend many a night at our house. The rooms were not well insulated for sound, so unfortunately what went on behind closed doors was not exactly a secret. Jon’s girlfriend giggled loudly and incessantly as soon as their bedroom door was closed, and I was sorely tempted to burst in on them and ask what was so damned funny. I typically hung out with my third roommate, Ron, who was a kind and quiet guy from northern California who liked to cook, eat and watch TV. We spent a lot of time watching videos on television’s new craze, MTV. Even today when I hear certain songs by Tina Turner, The Pretenders, and Duran Duran, my mind takes me right back to that time of my life.

We all had to move out of the house in May and find other housing for the summer, but in August I was actually the first person to contact the landlord, so I was able to recruit the roommates for the house that year. I rounded up a fascinating cast of characters… perfect for my imaginary sitcom! There was Tom, a somewhat aggressive and flamboyant gay man, Alain, a quiet foreign exchange student from France who also turned out to be gay, and Harry, a heavy-set, long haired, jolly Oregonian who despite his painted toenails and glittered fingernail polish was entirely heterosexual. Stereotypes were being smashed at 302 East Oceanfront!  By October, Tom and Alain had begun a romantic affair, despite Harry and me begging them not to. I recall saying to them, “When you break up… and you WILL break up… you are going to make life hell around here.”

My prediction came true in spades, and every time Tom and Alain would have a tiff, trouble ensued. On one occasion, when they were not speaking, Alain came home with a couple bags of groceries and a gallon of milk, which he put into the refrigerator. He retreated to his room, and soon Tom appeared. “Did Alain just come back from the grocery store? Is that his milk in the fridge?  I nodded and watched with horror as Tom opened it, poured it down the sink and with an evil chuckle, returned to his room. Minutes later Alain came out to get a glass of milk, found the completely empty gallon jug in the fridge and ran down the hall screaming, “Merde!” and a few other unintelligible French curse words.

And then there was Harry. Perhaps my most vivid memory of this time was when Tom came in one evening from school looking visibly shaken. I asked what was up and he said that as he was walking home from the bus stop, a strange person was skipping down the street wearing a dress and singing We’re Off to See the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz. Tom had quickly crossed the street to avoid any interaction with this deranged person, but when he got closer he realized who it was. “It was Harry!”, Tom huffed as he dramatically stormed off to his room. That episode of my sitcom could have won an Emmy!

This was the time in my life when I was finally ready to deal with the fact that I was gay and wanted to be more open about it. I joined a gay support group, made a few gay friends, and then became my own version of an “activist”. UC Irvine had a gay newspaper produced by students. It was called Outside, and featured a masthead of barbed wire and catchy headlines like, “Ten Reasons to Hate Heterosexuals.” I hated this paper, as did some of my other gay friends, feeling that it did nothing to reach out to people and only to create divisiveness. I decided to take on the paper as its new editor; I renamed it, The Phoenix, and the new masthead featured a beautiful bird rising from the flames. My politically moderate gay friends wrote articles and worked on the paper with me, and straight friends contributed articles too. My goal was to make the paper accessible to everyone and it worked. Though we did have to contend with vandals who ripped stacks of the paper out of the dispensers on campus and tossed them into dumpsters, local businesses like card shops, restaurants, and gay bars purchased advertising in the paper (a first for this student newspaper) and we had a successful two or three year run until I finally had to focus my attention on getting my dissertation finished.

Still, this was a difficult journey for me. One of the most memorable moments, perhaps in my entire life, happened when I joined a couple of new acquaintances and went to the “gay section” of Laguna Beach one weekend. I did not really have much in common with these new friends, but was trying to fit in. At one point the people I was with went to an adjacent blanket to chat with some of their friends, and I overheard one of them ask my companions, “What are you doing with that fat thing over there?” When my companions did not defend me, I got up and took a walk down the beach knowing that I would never feel like part of the “gay community” of Laguna. There was a breakwater down the beach a bit and on the other side there was a family oriented beach. I watched the couples and their kids for awhile and realized that I did not really feel that I belonged there either. I walked out onto the breakwater and sat at the end of it, the family beach on one side, the gay beach on the other, and felt as though I had a foot in each world, but belonged to neither. It was a feeling I would have many, many times during the rest of my tenure in California.

Overall, I liked southern California, but even in the early to mid-1980s I saw the writing on the wall regarding what was happening to the state. There was a beautiful drive I would take inland toward Saddleback Mountain. In the late autumn there was fall foliage, and in the spring and summer there were strawberry fields where I’d pick fresh berries. I’d return the next season to find a three-story office building where the berry field had been, and miles of open spaces replaced by new housing developments. It was sickening, and I kept thinking how all of the beautiful aspects of the state were slowly disappearing due to the constant development.

The city of Irvine and the campus of UC were also an interesting phenomenon. The city was a “planned community”, and some of the faculty in my program had even helped design it based on cutting edge research from the field of Environmental Psychology. But Irvine was a sterile place, where the color of your home, your roof, your shutters and your doors was all regulated. One of my professors who lived in faculty housing near campus lamented the fact that she’d actually put her housekey into the wrong door more than once because her cul-de-sac was indistinguishable from every other one. On the campus itself, a beautiful park with meandering trails was the centerpiece, encircled by the classroom and administrative buildings. However, given that students had a mere 10 minutes to go from one class to the next, they had no time for a leisurely and circuitous stroll through the park, so the lawns had been torn up by well-worn footpaths that went across the park in a beeline from one building to another. So much for understanding and anticipating human behavior!

As for the Social Ecology Program, I did not feel I was getting a good education there. Many of the faculty were big name researchers, but the reality was that many of them were horrible teachers or were too busy to even bother trying to teach, leaving most of their duties to be completed by graduate assistants. There was truly no mentorship from the faculty and no pressure for us to progress in the program. Some of my peers were referred to as “tenured graduate students” because they had languished in the program for 10+ years, longer than many of the faculty had been there, and had still not finished their degree. As it turned out, although I came in with a Master’s Degree already, I still spent 8.5 years trying to finish the Ph.D. I made up a parody of the Eagles’ song, Hotel California: “Welcome to the U. of California… such an ugly place, by the San Andreas…” And of course, the line, “You can check in any time you like… but you can never leave” didn’t even need to be changed.

Students in the program were extremely whiny, competitive and back-stabbing, and after all the time I spent there, I made only one true friend, Jonie, with whom I am still in contact. Worse yet, I actually had to “fire” my first faculty advisor. One day he asked me at least 50 questions concerning my research project and I was so excited by his uncharacteristic interest in what I was doing. The following day I saw him on the local TV news talking about MY research and not even mentioning my name.

I did have a lot of laughs with one of my professors. Dr. Elaine Vaughan was a young, very funny African American woman, originally from L.A. but she had lived in San Francisco for years prior to coming to Irvine. She took the bus or I gave her rides because she’d never learned to drive. She was also a strict vegan, and only shopped in health food stores for her groceries. We became good friends during my time at Irvine. She often had me in hysterics of laughter with her tales of being perhaps the only black woman for 20 square miles in ultra-white, 1980s Irvine. While waiting at bus stops, people would pull up in their BMWs and Mercedes and ask her if she needed a house cleaning job, their faces falling when she introduced herself as “Dr. Vaughan from the university.” One day she was on a tirade about political correctness, saying, and I quote, “I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to call myself this week. Ten years ago we were ‘colored people’. Now we want to be called ‘people of color’? What is the difference?! This has to stop!”

One day she told the story of going to her favorite health food store when a “Big old, Orange County woman with a beehive hairdo” approached her in the checkout line and asked her if she was familiar with Buckwheat. Placing her hand on her hip and throwing some attitude she asked, “What did you say to me?” She was ready to go off on a tirade and start a major race war, asking why she, in particular, should be familiar with the character Buckwheat from the old Little Rascals YV show. Suddenly she realized that the woman was asking if she’d ever cooked with buckwheat flour. “Matt, I think I’m getting overly sensitive living in this county!” she confided.  And whenever I ‘d share some crazy news about what was going on in the gay community, she’d look at me, shake her head and exclaim, “Mmm, mmm, mmm. And you people REALLY think you’re gonna get rights?” Elaine would have been a great character for my sitcom; they probably would have offered her her own spinoff by Season 2.

Sadly, Elaine died of breast cancer before the age of 50.  I miss her friendship and humor and would have loved to have been able to talk to her about all the senseless racial hatred and violence that’s happening today. I firmly believe we’d have been on the same page.

Against this backdrop of distractions, emotional growth, turmoil and some fun times, I was slowly plugging away at my dissertation project, which focused on how people living on some of California’s active earthquake faults see their risk from a major quake and whether we can find ways to increase their earthquake preparedness. I got to visit the San Andreas Fault several times while helping a professor do geological research there; we took core samples of ancient oak trees growing along the fault and were able to detect when major earthquakes had occurred in the past by studying the tree rings. The growth rings were noticeably thinner during years following major historical quakes due to broken roots and branches, and we could then extrapolate and count back to find older quake and study the intervals between them. It was fascinating!

I got hired to give disaster preparedness presentations at local businesses, and I got my first part-time teaching jobs at local colleges and at El Toro Marine Base, which brought in much needed money, but kept me further from the goal of finishing my dissertation. Meanwhile, I was awakened by the almost weekly minor earthquakes we were having in the mid-1980s in southern California. and would try to guess the epicenter and magnitude of them.

It was an exciting time for me, and in many ways, I did feel as if I was living the California Dream. But even better times were waiting just around the corner, as I left Irvine and moved first to Long Beach and then to San Francisco, and my love affair with the Golden State grew deeper. But I’ll save that for the next installment. Please stay tuned.

In just under a week from now, I’ll be leaving California after having lived here for the past 38 years. With this impending move and the ample time that the COVID crisis has provided for self-reflection, I’ve been pondering my long and often complicated relationship with “The Golden State.” I’ve decided to describe how this relationship began long before I ever stepped foot in California, and how it grew and changed over the course of my life. This will be the first in a series of relatively short posts or “chapters” that focus on different periods in my relationship with California. In this first entry I’ll describe how my fascination with California began and set the stage for my eventual move to the Golden State.

My relationship with California started about 50 years ago in the late 1960s and early 1970s when, as a young boy growing up in a working class city in Massachusetts, images of “The Golden State” leapt out at me from the TV screen. I saw Jed Clampett’s mansion, his “cee-ment” pond (swimming pool), and sunny skies and waving palms trees on the Beverly Hillbillies. Then there was the modern, suburban spread inhabited by the Brady Bunch, and at the age of 12, I thought nothing could be more “hip” than to be one of the Bradys! I marveled at the exciting police chases that featured cars flying over cliff-like hills that were depicted on the Streets of San Francisco. California’s presence was also felt over the radio airwaves. I knew that ”I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A.” (California Dreamin’), that it was evidently necessary to ask directions if you were on your way to San Jose, that “gentle people with flowers in their hair” would greet me if I ever got to San Francisco, and that It Never Rains in Southern California. Living in a rather dreary and provincial city in the northeast, California seemed like a mythical place at the other side of the rainbow.

When I was about 12 years old, and had already been infected with a travel bug, I undertook a project in which I wrote letters to the Chambers of Commerce for cities all over the U.S.A. How I found these addresses in a pre-Google Search world, or how my letters written in a child-like scrawl were received by whomever opened the mail is a mystery, but my mom good-naturedly sent out the letters and soon I started receiving colorful tourism brochures and postcards from a couple of dozen cities. They were all exciting, but of course the ones from California particularly piqued my interest the most and fueled my desire to someday travel there. San Diego boasted about its famous Zoo and Sea World, Los Angeles provided images of Hollywood, surfer dudes, and Disneyland, while San Francisco touted the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and its uniquely hilly and crooked streets.

Over the next few years I became obsessed with everything California. In the back yard there was a large area of dirt, hidden from view by a lot of bushes, where I was able to play. With the help of a shovel, the garden hose, and a variety of assorted race track trestles, Monopoly houses, and other assorted pieces of games and toys I built San Francisco back there. I dug out the shape of the Bay and filled it with water, I built a Golden Gate Bridge made of tall, orange plastic towers, and I carefully placed white and gray skyscrapers and dozens of tiny houses across the hills I’d created with mud and dirt. Once I had it all perfectly set up, I got out the snow shovel, slid it strategically under the San Francisco Peninsula, and started to “twang” the handle, creating an earthquake in my city. Sections of the city slid into the Bay in dramatic mudslides, buildings tipped in the soft, muddy soil, and the Golden Gate Bridge collapsed. Where I came up with such a realistic scenario is anyone’s guess, but I knew my model was quite realistic. Then I would begin the long process of swooping in with my rescue planes and helicopters to restore the city to its former glory, repairing all the damage… until the next “Big One” struck later in the week. It is almost spooky that 20 years later I would find myself living in San Francisco and doing research and teaching about… earthquake preparedness!

In the front yard there was another barren area of dirt, and my friends and I would play in that area with our Matchbox cars, creating roads and driveways leading to our “houses”. Invariably, I lived on top of a hill with a long, winding driveway and always “drove” a fire-engine red or orange car. Again, decades later I live in an apartment on top of the highest mountain in San Francisco and drive a reddish-orange car…

During the winter, I had a spare room in the house in where I set up a racetrack and electric railroad. I gradually constructed an entire community, saving my allowance money to buy model houses with red tile roofs, 50s style diners, motels with swimming pools, and tiny orange and palm trees. I built some rolling hills from pillows covered with a mossy green blanket and planted some trees and cattle and horses on their slopes. I used green construction paper to make freeway signs and decided that my little community would be the California city of San Bernardino. (Why I chose San Bernardino, of all places, is another mystery, but it sounded quite exotic to me at the time). Soon I had the I-10 freeway cutting through the heart of my city, unaware that I’d be driving that freeway pretty regularly in a couple of decades.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I had planted California poppies in my little flower and vegetable garden; they have been my favorite flower ever since. I somehow learned and could recite from memory all of the streets in San Francisco, in order, from Van Ness to the Bay: Polk, Larkin, Hyde, Leavenworth, etc. I could draw you a pretty good map of the L.A. freeway system, complete with both the route numbers and the freeway names: the San Diego Freeway (I-405), Ventura Freeway (I-101), Santa Monica Freeway (I-10), etc. I probably knew more about California than some of its long-term residents.

In 1974 my mom and I began planning our first trip to California. I pored over maps and AAA tour guides, looking for attractions and places to stay and would eagerly fill my mom in on what I had found every night when she’d come home from work. Alas, as I’ve described in another blog post, I Blame It All on My Mother, she died after a year long battle with cancer in early 1975. As a sort of pilgrimage in her memory, I decided I needed to see California for both of us, and so at just 16 years old, still a junior in high school, I booked a 10 day trip to California during Spring Break in April using some insurance money my mother had left me. I wish I could recall the reactions of the travel agency staff that I worked with as this 16 year old kid selected his and hotel stays and paid by check.

I spent five days in San Francisco, staying at the Holiday Inn Chinatown, with a view toward the Bay and Alcatraz. I remember walking the city for hours upon end, and even made a trip over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. One of the nurses who’d taken care of my mom in the hospital gave me the number of a friend of hers in Marin and told me to call him when I arrived so he could show me around. I’ve unfortunately forgotten his name, but I do remember that he was a handsome, blond fireman who could easily have played the role of a surfer dude in any TV show set in California. He worked part time at the San Francisco Yacht Club in Belvedere and treated me to lunch there with a view of the city in the distance. He then took me for a ride on the back of his motorcycle, instructing me to hang on to him tightly (which I was quite happy to do!), and he took me up to the top of Mount Tamalpais on twisty roads that led through the redwood groves to the summit. Little did I know that in another 20 years I’d be teaching at a university just 5 miles further up the road.

I then flew to L.A. on an evening flight and still recall that we were no sooner in the air than the pilot announced that the glow in the sky in front of us was Los Angeles, a mere 300 miles away!  I arrived at LAX and caught a city bus at 10:30 at night to the Sunset Strip area of Hollywood. (I don’t think that these days as an adult I would feel safe doing that!) I arrived at my hotel at almost midnight, introduced myself and the clerk got me registered. I sheepishly mentioned that I had asked for a room with a view of the city. He paused a second and said, “I’m sorry but we don’t have any of those left, but don’t worry, it’ll be a nice room for you.” I was crestfallen, but almost too tired to care. I did notice that the clerk winked at the bellboy as he gave him my room number and key, and this man took my bag from me and led me to my room. When I opened the door, I gasped. There, spread before me from this room on the 10th floor was a sea of twinkling lights as the entire L.A. basin spread out below me. Wow. I felt like a Hollywood celebrity that night. L.A. even decided to give me a little taste of its shaky foundation; I was awakened at 3AM by a minor earthquake. Does it get any better than that? 

I took day trips by bus to the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland, and I’d have to say that my 10 days in California lived up to all those years of dreaming about the Golden State from afar. That summer I went back for another, longer trip to California, that also included stops at Vegas and the Grand Canyon, and a year after that I made my first cross country drive to California at the ripe old age of 18. The seed had taken root and although I had no idea how I would make it happen, the desire to live in California was slowly and steadily growing in my young mind. But that plan would take another six years to come to fruition.