Legacies Lost

 A few weeks back, I got together with an acquaintance for fish and chips.  While chatting about this and that and the other, he asked a question popular among the majority of the local population who weren’t born here: what brought you to Mt. Shasta?

 The Answer nearly always has something to do with the Mountain.  It can be religious, spiritual, aesthetic, or just a desire to be away from the noise and congestion of the city.  In my case, it was coming around a bend on old US 99 some 40 odd years ago, and seeing the Mountain for the first time, still 40 miles south of us, and already the most imposing landscape feature I had ever seen.  My dad drove the car and hid a grin as my eyes got huge.  I had absolutely no idea such a mountain could exist.  I had been grousing because we had been in California for a half an hour and I still hadn’t seen a single palm tree.  It made the Canadian Rockies – at that point, my only first-hand experience with mountains – look like nothing.  It was then that I fell in love with this place.  I still experience that sense of awe I felt as a child, on another August day, so many years ago.

 So I asked the Question back, and got a really interesting answer.  “There was a short story I read about the Mountain once, by Robert Heinlein.  I can’t remember the title, and that’s frustrating, because I would love to read it again.  But that story is what brought me up here.”

 I knew the story.  I read it once, sometime back.  Something about Ambrose Bierce.  I vaguely remembered that it was a pretty good story.  But I couldn’t remember the title, either.  Damn.

 But I remembered something else.  I had a copy of it as a part of an anthology in my library.   I promised my lunch companion I would look it up and get back to him on it.

 A few days later I found it, and since I had it out, proceeded to reread it.  While we were talking about it, my buddy had guessed it was written in the 1950s, and I thought it was earlier – 1946, maybe.  Turned out to be one of Heinlein’s very earliest works, dating from 1941.

 It holds up surprisingly well, although Heinlein, with his strong emphasis on human nature over gadgetry, tends to hold up well.  His depictions of women and blacks would be mildly jarring to a 21st century reader, but only mildly so.  At a time when women were dames who screamed at mice, and blacks were grinning Stephen Fetchit characters, Heinlein’s basic honesty and respect for people took the edges off what could often be harsh stereotypes.

 The premise of the book is that the Mountain is where you come, not only to reach your potential, but to exceed it.  It’s a notion that is popular around here, and I could see why it appealed to my companion.

 I passed the title along to him, and a few weeks later, came across another book that I had read and enjoyed some 25 years ago.  In the twenty-five cent pile was a hardback copy (used) of Curt Gentry’s “The Last Days of the Late Great State of California”.  This is one of the more remarkable books about California you’ll ever read.  It’s pop history (when written, a topical look in the here and now at California) thinly disguised as a science fiction/disaster epic.  The premise is that California is totally destroyed and submerged by a cataclysmic series of earthquakes in 1971, and the book is a fond but unsentimental look at what the state was REALLY like just before it died.  (For readers with a weak grip on reality, you’ll be relieved to know that I survived this because Mount Shasta is 300 miles north and 200 miles inland from the San Andreas fault. But I get mine 25 years later, in “Dante’s Peak”)

 The book has its flaws.  The inside cover, for instance, is a simple map of California, showing the course of the San Andreas fault.  Gentry has the Klamath mountains about 150 miles south of where they actually are.  Then, too, some of the locals would be sharply offended by his characterization of local hero and supposed George Washington reincarnation Guy Ballard, who Gentry describes as the extremist leader of the militant Mighty I AM Minuteman Army of St. Germain.  Supposedly, they were fighting the international Jewish conspiracy.  I know a lot of I AM’ers, and believe me: they are neither militant nor extremist, and certainly not prone to forming armies.  These are people who refuse to use the color red in any way, shape or form, because they feel it fosters violent or negative thoughts.  They wear lavender and purples.  They’re more like Unitarians or Quakers than like the National Vanguard.  (There IS a “Minuteman Army” in these parts, whose philosophy seems to be 2/3rds hatred of blacks, the government, and Jews, and 1/3 crack.  They don’t believe in St. Germain.)

 Flaws notwithstanding, the book is an amazing look at an amazing place.  He talks about the physical attributes of the place, of course, and the variety.  But mostly he talks about the people and the political and religious movements that sloshed around California in the sixties.  He talks about E Clampus Vitus, and their movement to erect (I’ll stick with that word choice) monuments to the whorehouses of Gold Rush days.  There was a huge uproar over that, of course, created by people who never noticed that their watershed drained along Putah Creek.  He talks about some of the other legends of California; legends that were history to him, such as Upton Sinclair, John Sutter, Gerald L.K. Smith, John Muir, William Riker, and Aimee Semple McPherson.

 He talks more about California phenomena that were contemporaries to him, and are history to us: Carol Doda (she of the incredible endowments), Art Hobbe, Herb Caen, Clark Kerr, Walter Knott, Charles McCabe, George Murphy, Richard Nixon, Harrison Gray Otis, Joe Pyne (the Rush Limbaugh of the sixties), Dick Tuck, Earl Warren, Robert Welch, and Sam Yorty.  For anyone over 50, those names will bring back a lot of memories. He even mentions a then-obscure assemblyman who would become a California legend: Willie Brown.

 But the central people he dwells on are Caesar Chavez, Edmund “Pat” Brown, and Ronald Reagan.  Especially Ronald Reagan.  Nearly a third of the book is devoted to the construction and foibles of this quintessentially Californian creation, and does a good job of showing how utterly fraudulent the Republican hero worship of him is.  (Even back in 1966, he was seen as little more than an affable moron with good handlers, who instituted policies that got him called “Ayn Rand in drag” and blew up the state budget while destroying valuable social services.  The most cruel of those was the California outpatient system for mental health patients, which successfully saw to the needs of tens of thousand of mental patients who otherwise would be in institutions.  Now, thanks to Ronald Reagan, many such people, neglected on the streets by his cold policies, are in prison, at considerably more cost to society.  His most destructive move was the essential dismantling of what had been the finest university system on earth.  Even then, he tended to blow up and lie, pull amazing gaffes, and long before the Alzheimer’s struck, he often confused his movie roles with reality.)

 The book ends with a vivid description of the death of California, a satisfying read for anyone who enjoys end-of-the-world type stories (and we all pretty much share that guilty pleasure).  This is followed by “Lost Legacy;” an accounting of what the loss of California meant (would mean) to the rest of America, and the rest of the world.  It is a considerable list.

 And therein lies one of those minor little coincidences that take two disparate elements, two stories written long ago that just happened to come to my attention in the past couple of weeks, that so deftly look at things that never were, and talked about what could be.  The Heinlein story, you see, was also called “Lost Legacy.”