by Meghan Daum
She had a point. Los Angeles is nothing if not the geographical equivalent of Baby Bear’s porridge: not too cold, not too hot, but, rather, a study in the unsung pleasures of lukewarm. I won’t lie: conspicuous intellectualism is not L.A.’s racket. When Midwestern kids get on that proverbial Greyhound bus and head for one of the coasts the way my parents should have long ago, the brainy ones tend to go east and the good-looking, not-so-brainy ones tend to go west. You see them strolling, mouths agape, down Hollywood Boulevard or waitressing at Marie Callender’s: blue-eyed high-school quarterbacks who were told they should try modeling but will be back home selling cars within six months; corn-fed Iowa kids who were the stars of their school musicals but just might end up in porn. I’m generalizing, of course. There are a million exceptions; this is only half the story. L.A. has more than its share of art-house pontificators, of pallid bibliophiles, of math types. It has major universities and major museums and quite a lot of independent bookstores. But it doesn’t wear erudition on its sleeve. Unlike New York, it doesn’t mind if you haven’t read Mann. It values a nice backyard over the prospect of being neighbors with Thomas Pynchon. Moreover, unlike San Francisco, it doesn’t purport to be “evolved.” The people of L.A. are honest about themselves and their city. They know it’s flawed; they know there’s at least one asshole for every decent person; they don’t waste their breath telling outsiders how great it is. If San Franciscans are evangelical about their city, always spreading the gospel of its goat cheese and its tolerance and the way the fog descends upon its holy bridge in chiaroscuric rapture, Angelinos are Jewish about theirs. Either you’re among the chosen or you’re not. Either you get why it’s good to live in L.A. or you don’t.
There was great appeal in this. Even having never lived there, I recognized the nonpreciousness of L.A. and was drawn to it. So after five years of telling Alison I’d consider moving once I got everything else out of my system, I finally acquiesced. It wasn’t hard, really. Not only could I twist the decision around in my mind to make it seem in keeping with the Little House on the Prairie motif—they traveled west, after all—but it so happened that for the first time in my life, I had some actual money.
I’d had, as they say in the corporate world, a “liquidity event.” I’d sold the novel about the girl who moves to a fictional Midwestern town. To my shock, I’d sold it for enough money that even after I paid off my $80,000 of debt and replaced my twelve-year-old Toyota with a new Subaru station wagon, I had a considerable amount left over. And therein my struggles around deciding where to live began to work in tandem with struggles around deciding whether and where to buy a house. Thus began phase two of my obsession with housing: the nonhypothetical phase.
One characteristic of the nonhypothetical phase is that, thanks to a combination of crippling indecision and my newfound financial cushion, I spent the next two years changing addresses almost as often as I changed the oil in my car. That is to say, as nonhypothetical as things could have been (that is, I could have bought a house right away and been done with things), I was actually living a pretty theoretical existence. Or at least a transient one. As a result, the chronology gets complicated. I’m going to try to lay this out as simply as possible, but if you’re still confused, don’t feel too bad. I didn’t know where I was half the time either.
I had not gone directly to L.A. from the little house on ten acres. Having extricated myself from the relationship with the artist/landscaper/aging slacker in the predictably messy way, I took Rex and went to live with my friend Kimberly in Lincoln. She owned a well-appointed Cape Cod house in a posh neighborhood near the country club. She was also in the process of deciding whether to remarry her ex-husband, who lived near Los Angeles, so she was only there about half the time.
The four months that I lived in this house were more than a little surreal. Shortly after selling the novel, I also had a movie deal, and I eventually went out to L.A. to meet with the producers and to convince them to let me write the screenplay. I recognize that that’s quite possibly one of the most obnoxious sentences ever written but—spoiler alert—this meeting basically amounted to the pinnacle of my Hollywood career. Mostly, this trip was a housing reconnaissance mission. Alison, who lived near the beach in Venice, announced that she’d found the perfect spot for me: Topanga Canyon. This was a magical place, she said (it would be magical for me, anyway; personally she thought the whole place kind of smelled like feet), a hippie–cum–trust funder–cum–wannabe–cowboy enclave in the Santa Monica Mountains, nine miles up a mountain pass off the coast. There were log cabins and tepees as well as eco-friendly/solar-paneled/sustainable/generator-runs-completely-off-of-hemp multimillion-dollar estates. There were writers and artists and corporate lawyers and probably glassblowers who lived in yurts. Moreover, there was land. So much land, in fact, that not only could I probably continue to fan the flame of my farm-girl persona but I’d have to watch out for mountain lions while I was at it. She knew this much because she’d eaten lunch at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, a $30-per-plate vegetarian organic eatery surrounded by sagebrush and Buddha statues just off Topanga’s main road, and, having taken a drive through the winding hills afterward, pronounced it, in her inimitable style, “nowhere I’d want to live but just weird enough for you.”
Beguiled by the promise of tepees and maybe even artist/landscapers who weren’t aging slackers, I spent the remainder of my trip searching Craigslist for rentals in Topanga Canyon. By the time my plane back to Nebraska took off from LAX, I was holding two separate and shiny keys to my new life. Not only had I fooled the movie producers into giving me a screenwriting deal, but I had a lease on a guest apartment over the garage of a multimillion-dollar house so high in the hills it overlooked thirty miles of coastline. I was set to move in a month.
The timing couldn’t have been better. Kim was returning to her ex-husband and selling her house. Since she was also headed for the L.A. area, I could piggyback some of my furniture on her moving truck. The rest of my things (during my time in Nebraska I’d acquired a rather startling amount of early-twentieth-century American furniture) would remain in a storage unit in Lincoln until I had a bigger place someday and could send for them. For the first time in a long time, everything seemed on track.
Then I met Linda the Realtor. She was representing the couple that had bought Kim’s house. And since Kim was still in California most of the time, I often found myself chatting with her while she was sitting in the living room waiting on the inspection or attending to some other piece of business. I don’t know if it was trepidation about my imminent move or procrastination on the screenplay, but for some reason I began talking to her about how much I’d loved living in the little farmhouse with the lopsided porch (since moving back to town, I’d missed it more than I’d anticipated) and how in many ways I still dreamed of having a big farmhouse. I didn’t necessarily see this as a full-time kind of thing, I explained, more of a vacation-house kind of situation. And because Linda needed clients and commissions as much as any Realtor, she did what any decent businesswoman would do. She showed me listings for farms.
You need to understand that I was no stranger to the allure of acreage for sale (“acreage” is the preferred local term for out-of-town land that isn’t necessarily a working farm). During my years with the artist/landscaper/aging slacker (who was now my mostly amicable ex), we were as enthusiastic about the idea of buying a farm as my mother had been about Sunday open houses. Never mind that we had no money for one. Never mind that many of the ones we looked at weren’t even for sale but just abandoned, tornado-ravaged wooden frames that we imagined ourselves acquiring for nothing and restoring to habitability. I knew from these excursions that the vast majority of out-of-town homesteads were appalling. If they were new, they were usually prefab monstrosities with garages bigger than the houses themselves. More heartbreakingly, if they were old, they’d been raped by “improvements” like dropped ceilings, wall-to-wall carpet, and aluminum siding. It was rare to
see something halfway appealing and almost unheard of to see something genuinely exciting.
Hence the saga of the house at Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. I’m not sure if I stumbled across the place when I was out driving around with Ex, which we were still apt to do for fun, or if it was on Linda’s list of places to show me. In any case, the day I walked inside it was the day my California plans began, if not exactly fading away, losing significant muscle tone. I was ready to head west. I truly was. But as I stood in the driveway with Ex and with Linda, who’d had to rustle up the key from some faraway small-town listing agent, I felt my convictions slipping out from under me. The place bore an uncanny (read: scary and bizarre) resemblance to the farm I’d invented in my novel. That is to say, it was a rambling, creaking, quite-possibly-not-going-to-make-it-through-another-winter two-story clapboard house with five bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and (to my delight) a mudroom with wide-planked floors, wainscoting, and windows (weather-beaten, naturally) on three sides. It sat on about fifteen acres and had several outbuildings, including a smokehouse, a stable, and a handful of red wooden barns in various states of dilapidation. One more winter unoccupied and the place might have been on the way to ruin. Rolling hills of soybeans and corn undulated in every direction. On the roof of the largest barn, a weather vane spiked the boundless blue sky.
The asking price: $120,000.
“No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m moving to California.”
“Okay,” said Ex.
“Okay,” said Linda.
On the drive back to town, I was so distracted I nearly slammed my Subaru into a cow that had wandered into the gravel road. And that made me cry. Not because I was startled. But because—I had to admit it—I loved that cow. I loved the loose gravel and the broken fence that had allowed the cow to get out and the dust all over the car and the grains of soil always in my hair. I loved the whole damn hangover that was Nebraska.
But, no. I was done. I was leaving.
Obviously, I should have flown to California. Thanks to my infusion of cash, I could have put the car on the moving truck or had it shipped out without great financial hardship. I could have swallowed my fear about putting Rex in the cargo hold of an airplane—to this day, I have vowed never—and whisked us both to our destination in a matter of hours rather than a matter of endless, conversation-starved, talk-radio-addled days. But when it comes to moving, unless you’re crossing an ocean, I believed then as I do now that the only honest mode of transportation is the automobile. You need to see the highway miles unfold before you. You need to take both credit and responsibility for the distance you’re covering. You need, upon arrival, to be so tired and so hungry for anything other than gas station food that it doesn’t occur to you to be totally freaked-out about the fact that you have no phone number and no idea where the nearest supermarket is.
There are many dramas inherent to relocation via the highway: the tears triggered by a country song, the weird free fall of registering at a motel and not knowing your address, the exhilarating merger of open road and open future. But no one ever talks about those agonizing miles between your departure point and the point at which the interstate fades into a generic ribbon of asphalt. No one ever talks about the suspension of disbelief required to pull out of a driveway that is no longer yours, coast through a neighborhood that will soon no longer be home, and pass—if not for the last time ever, at least for the last time before they become symbols of nostalgia—the landmarks that, while utterly prosaic, have long been the only thing standing between disorientation and sweet familiarity. No one ever talks about the importance of staring straight ahead while making this exit. You cannot turn your head and acknowledge the park, the museum, your favorite restaurant. You cannot wonder if the person driving that red Honda you just passed is your friend from the gym. Like breaking up with a lover, you need to be as gracious as possible, but even more so you just need to walk out. You cannot play Goodnight Moon. You cannot bid farewell to the yellow house on the corner. You cannot duck inside the church and light a candle. You cannot stop and get coffee. You can only look straight ahead and drive. You can only think about the next thing, the hello and not the goodbye, the up and onward and not the over and out.
Take it from one who did none of the above. Like an addict bargaining for one last fix, I found myself leaving the Lincoln city limits and not merging onto Interstate 80 but continuing south and then turning east (as in, the opposite direction of California) for fifteen miles or so to the farm on Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. It wasn’t even 6:00 a.m.; the sun was pushing a ridge of pink light across a gray sky, and I had on National Public Radio, though it was too early for even Morning Edition, which meant that the overnight host was still playing Berlioz and Wagner and, I suspected, drinking tea and doing crosswords in the dark (I knew this for a fact because I knew her; I also knew she was paid $7 an hour). The coziness of this all—plus the fact that as I came over the hill and saw the farm come into view, I felt that God himself was waiting there with my name on a sign like a limo driver at the airport—was sufficiently distracting that I almost missed the driveway and, as a result, had to slam on the brakes and peel into it in a cloud of dust.
And that’s when I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I should have left Kim’s house and gotten right on the interstate. Barring that, I should have made a U-turn the minute I hit Northwest 207th. I should have taped a picture of a palm tree on my dashboard and used it as a focal point until these spasms of stupidity passed. But there I was, at dawn, sitting in a Subaru loaded down with computer equipment and blankets and a dog, staring at a farm that I suddenly wanted almost as much as I’d ever wanted anything. I needed to save it from ruin. I was its only hope against the violence of winter—or a buyer with the inevitable bad taste. I got out of the car and let Rex out, too. I kicked the gravel and surveyed the outbuildings, wondering which one might make the best writing studio. I was about to stroll out to the edge of the cornfield to watch the sunrise when, as though I’d touched an electrical fence that divides sanity from insanity, I commanded Rex back into the car, slammed the hatchback, threw myself behind the wheel, and pulled out even faster than I’d pulled in. I got on the nearest entrance to the interstate heading west and didn’t so much as look in the rearview mirror for half an hour. Nor did I cry for the entire two-and-a-half-day journey.
To anyone who’s considering a move to Southern California, know this: unless you’re relocating from Phoenix or Taos or Reno—in other words, from one desert to another—autumn is not the time to answer Hollywood’s call. The “perfect” weather is counted among the region’s chief commodities. But every year we pay a tariff called September and October. This is the season of fires, of the Santa Ana winds, of ash-choked skies and mercilessly hot, still nights and public radio commentators making endless references to the Raymond Chandler line about meek little wives feeling the edge of a carving knife and studying their husbands’ necks. There weren’t a lot of fires that first year I was in L.A.—there would be plenty of time for that—but even during that relatively tame fall I was aware of the nearness of a certain unavoidable doom. It wasn’t just the threat, infinitesimal yet omnipresent, of a mountain lion bounding from the rocks when I was walking the dog, or of the whole earth being swallowed within seconds by an 8.6 quake. It was the way things that are supposed to be slow, such as erosion, seemed to happen before your eyes. Within hours in California, a hillside can be burned, a road washed out, a house loosened from its foundation and clinging to a slope by only its pipes. And that first autumn, as I waited like a fool for some semblance of October crispness, I don’t know what was more unbearable: the fact that the air was so hot that the front doorknob burned my hand or the fact that fall catalogs, with their delicious sweaters and scarves and wool dresses, continued to arrive in the mailbox even though I couldn’t possibly order any of it because it was ninety-five degrees on Halloween.
Even after two months in To
panga, even as the days grew short, the over-the-garage apartment, which was totally bereft of shade, baked in the sun like a clay ashtray made by a schoolchild and permanently forgotten in an art-room kiln. To be above the tree line in the Santa Monica Mountains means that you’re often quite literally above the clouds. As though you’re in a hot, shadeless heaven—or on an airplane going nowhere—the clouds form a silvery layer beneath you that blocks the view of the land and seems to stop the ocean breezes in their tracks.
The houses, too, are oversized and new and made from materials—glass and sandstone and limestone—from which unforgiving sunlight seems to ricochet and blind passersby. Unlike the rustic A-frames and serene post-and-beams of the lower and mid-canyon, where it was not only cooler but also dark and leafy and oddly redolent of the smell of either tomato soup or marijuana, the peak of the canyon felt craggy and exposed and stripped of natural life.
