California, O California...land of many uses

I have driven in and out of countless national forests on this seemingly endless trip: forests decorated by soaring pines in Idaho and Washington, vast, verdant forests sidled up alongside pulsating Michigan waters, and forests in Arizona high desert that, with little more than a scattering of mesquite tangled amidst ranging sagebrush and relentless Gambel oak, seem to be making generous use of the term forest altogether. The one constant amongst these havens of dispersed campsites and milky way black night are the signs placed along the side of the road, either welcoming your arrival or mourning your departure...'BLANK National Forest,' they read and then, 'Land of Many Uses.'

What are those many uses? In my case, the uses are rather limited. I hike, sometimes, but only if I can be bothered, only if I can convince myself that I have no physical ailments constraining me that particular morning. I camp, typically somewhere I'm not particularly supposed to camp. I strain in vain for cell service, lifting my phone meaninglessly above my head, as if the added thirty-six inches of altitude are the only thing between me and enough 5G to download an episode of Friday Night Lights. I read my book, journal a bit, eat shredded cheese straight from the bag. These lands hold many uses for me indeed, but they're hardly the ones prescribed in their charter.

I see other people around me in these stretches of wilderness and I can't help but feel that they better understand what is expected of them. Some of them use the land to ride all-terrain vehicles, choking the air with black plumes of something chemical and noxious (the air's too clean as it is anyway). The logging trucks rumbling down the road, swollen and obese with freshly felled timber, are making use, are they not? The cabal of RV owners - and they are a properly smug, vicious clique, boasting of their hookups and sneering at those who dare traipse among them sans generator - well, they almost never do anything but sit in lawn chairs outside their rigs and look around in disdain. That's a use in its own way, I suppose. There are those lugging canoes or mountain bikes, heavyset fellows adorned in orange or camouflage setting out to purge the land of some of its breathing beings, and others even with cameras that cost more than my Subaru, lining up behind each other to take the same photo of mating elk, adjusting the aperture just a smidge to capture the bulls rutting with a little more elegance than the guy before. I stand there, arms by my side, shredded mozzarella accumulated in the corners of my lips, and feel useless.

There is no land that holds more uses than California, the state of multitudes built upon multitudes, the coast-abutting amalgamation of Gavin Newsom-indignation and industrial farmland and roadside quesadilla stand lit up only by string lights and an inland starry sky. I spent two weeks in California, driving in spurts interrupted by extended stays on friends' couches, and I'd like to think that I saw it for what it is: a place of contrasts proudly pronounced, hypocrisies less hidden than advertised. California is endowed with more geographical variety than anywhere I have ever been - there is no other state that begins at the top with dense foliage and trees that predate Leif Erikson and trickles out at the bottom through arid desert where water is little more than a whispered myth. It is also a state of unparalleled socioeconomic range, and this is coming from a New Yorker. It should come as news to absolutely no one that there exists incredible, jaw-dropping wealth there, huge estates and private beaches and Bentleys parked next to Lamborghinis at the Shell where unleaded runs you $5.67 a gallon and then both a hundred miles away and on the same block, there's a man beseeching you for a couple cigs, some crystal, a blanket, anything, a laborer tattooed with a too-orange tan toiling under an endless sun, a family crowded into the back of a rickety pickup, going somewhere, anywhere. This inequality exists everywhere, pervades throughout this great union of ours, but in California, it feels a little more overt, a little more pernicious, just that little bit more unforgivable. The imbalance in the abundant allocation verges closer to sin in this great, imperial state, the state that is ten states in one, where the only uniform reality is the gas prices verging on extortion.

When I think of California, I really do think first of land. There's just so much of it. I've watched this country transform into different dimensions of itself on this voyage, ebb from farmland into cragged mountains into lush coastland, but those evolutions have been progressive, transpired over numerous states. California encompasses all of those changes within its borders and yet it also encompasses more because it contains all the above, plus looming metropolises, plus desert, a new, curious phenomenon that greets you a couple hours east of LA and compels you to U-turn to that Walmart a few miles back and grab another jug of water just in case. Its land truly is land of many uses - in California, I meditated on black sand beach, watched my friend's roommate, with his pristine bone structure, get aggressively, persistently hit on in trendy Sunset Strip bars (I love baseball! yelled one girl with the passion of a banshee in heat upon seeing his Yankees hat), forged trail through Mojave cactus to reach the top of an isolated butte and wiped out on the way down, saw second-wave feminist art and spearfishermen and dispensaries stocked with wares more exotic than anything from Tahiti and so on and so on. If that isn't multi-use, nothing is.

I think first of California's land and then I think some more. In Los Angeles, I stayed with a good friend at his lovely home in Laurel Canyon, perched high above the city, ensconced among roads carved from the cliffs, darting between willows and chaparral. Laurel Canyon is a precarious spot, very fragile, where everything seems both intentionally placed and on the verge of tumbling down the hill, all the way to the bottom where it would break into a great many pieces and almost certainly block traffic. It's a storied neighborhood, even by elevated Los Angeles standards, and with all the prestige and movie star past attached, there is an inevitable premium attached to inhabiting these winding streets. Here, land is precious, every square foot a commodity, zoning laws and neighborhood associations fixed resolutely in place to preserve those conditions, for they are desirable in their own way. Neighbors know each other here and, although I say this with no malice or intent to instigate, you cannot help but know that they know who is not here, too.

I found much of California rather jarring, and not just for the extremes that inhabit within its confines. Some of it surely had to do with the fact that I had more friends and family situated in CA than anywhere else thus far on this trip and with those connections came opportunities to both sleep on soft couches and to peek voyeuristically into typically enclosed enclaves. Worlds reveal themselves to you with more intimacy when you have a guide. You see how people live, compare habits and patterns and routines to your own, to those of the person whose place you crashed at the night before, and if you subscribe to the ideology of perfectionism, you find yourself in a constant state of comparison and self-suspicion. That's jarring, certainly, as well as a valid use of this land. I found it similarly peculiar observing how quickly this state melts from one form of itself into another. Headed east out of Los Angeles - the city of angels, don't you forget it - on the boundary of the Angeles National Forest (that's a land of one and only one use: driving through it and out of it), the city simply ended. There was a progressive thinning of density and then a stop sign where nothing existed beyond. Someone, somewhere, can say they live in the last house in Los Angeles (or whatever name that neighborhood, a child of sprawl, answers to). It was, frankly, a bit eerie, to leave Laurel Canyon, where every square foot is accounted for and then, an hour or so later, find yourself among endless hills of beige, where entire square miles are anything but.

I don't want to be harsh on California. I can understand its appeal - those $24 salads really are tasty and the breadth of creative energy I felt there, in LA especially, verged on intoxicating - but I couldn't shake a malaise that loomed over me for those two weeks, everpresent like the threat of forest fire. I've tried to pinpoint that malaise, struggled in the endeavor. The best I can come up with is that it originates from within those many uses, from that limitless complexity.

As you roar down coastal highway or circle the monoliths of Yosemite, you feel like you've finally understood the place and then California releases another rapidly receding wave of itself upon you. All of a sudden, you've climbed those Los Padres hills and you're in Ojai, trying to understand how the same state that felt more like Mexico than America in the morning is imbued in the afternoon with a sinister New Agey sensation that approximates how Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros would appear if they somehow metastasized into a town. And then, without warning, the next wave comes crashing down. I've loved the feeling of constant change on this trip, it's been drug-like, but in California, I never really found my footing. There is virtue in possessing many uses, sure, but there is also, always, a danger that they might all go unused.