Lotus Land No More

By John Skow

Bill Barich and his readers had a good thing going. They paid him to do their traveling. He caught the planes, sat out the cancellations, endured bores and bacteria. Then he chucked out all the bad stuff and wrote lovely, whimsical books about the rest: horse racing, trout fishing, quirky people who turn comical, not sodden, after a glass or two. Traveling Light is the title of one of his airy collections, and Barich seems as if he is about to continue with such beguiling folderol as he commences Big Dreams (Pantheon; 546 pages; $24), which records a long meander around California. Wistfully, lightly, the author recollects arriving in San Francisco as a 25-year-old in 1969. "In the Haight-Ashbury, I rented a cheap flat and furnished it a la mode with a massive stereo and a mattress on the floor. Something new and exciting seemed to enter my orbit almost daily -- seven-grain bread, Zen meditation, the pungent smell of eucalyptus leaves. There was an earthquake, 4.7 on the Richter scale ... And one night at the Fillmore Auditorium, while Janis Joplin was wailing on stage, a girl in a see-through blouse ran up and kissed me without any warning at all. O, man. California."

O, man. You can see what's coming. Barich ages another 25 years and his marriage takes sick, as the state suffers severe economic megrims and rattles with real earthquakes, not toy ones, and realists among its population head for Oregon, where they are cordially requested to go away. Travel writing for such a pilgrim, over such terrain, is not going be a record of lotuses eaten and pretty girls embraced.

So it proves. Barich starts at the Oregon border and works his way south through the failed fishing and lumber towns of the north coast. What he finds there, and virtually everyplace else in the great coastal kingdom -- on through Yuba City, Copperopolis, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, the Salton Sea, San Isidro -- is the hunkered down, fearful middle-aged and the resentful, nihilistic youth who see no future and no present worth the trouble. Prisons are the state's sole growth industry. "More prisons were being built in California," Barich writes, "than anywhere else in the world. Frequently, they were built on farmland stripped of its value, gone to ... hardpan. Corporate farmers, the titans of agribusiness, often sold the dead land to the state for a handsome score." Go West, young man, and get locked up. Or be a prison guard.

Barich is still an interested, accurate observer, a brave striker-up of conversations with unpromising locals, but his goofy optimism is mostly gone. Part of it is perspective, of course; he and the other Haight-Ashbury kids were looked on by their elders as nihilistic and futureless a quarter-century ago. Now he's an elder, not quite a senior, but no longer a prankish sophomore.

If the author has changed, so has California. It is now a place where visitors marvel and say, "Wow, this must have been great." Breaking camp at Yosemite one morning at 6:30, after a night of headlights, radios and tape decks, Barich counts incoming cars: four a minute. "Almost 3.5 million tourists visited Yosemite every year, and I saw what a job it must be just to keep the rest rooms clean." Where to now, Ansel Adams?