Also by David Ebershoff

Pasadena

The Novel Born in a Traffic Jam


When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I spent a lot of time stuck in traffic in the back of a Pontiac Estate Wagon. My memory (that selective hope chest of the mind) has it that I spent most of my childhood stuck in traffic, the wagon’s hot, gum-blue vinyl burning my thighs. In my lap was always a book, and I’d open it up to escape from the traffic and the car. But I was prone to motion sickness and so to remove myself from the present scene—sisters fighting, dog panting, mother tsk’ing—I’d have to stare out the window and imagine another world.

At the very northern end of San Diego County there’s a long stretch of coastland owned by the federal government. At one end, on a pretty beach loved by surfers, is a nuclear power plant. At the southern end is Camp Pendleton, where you can see bulky Marines climbing walls or crawling through the chaparral, feigning war. But in between the cooling towers and the Marine base is a landscape of dry arroyos, hillsides of toyon and lemonadeberry, and sandy river washes where rattlers sunbathe at noon. The land slopes down to the high sandstone bluffs that overlook the Pacific. The beach below is wide and from it in autumn you can watch the pilot whales breaching on their way to Baja.

Except for the scars of a few fire roads and the column of alienish, quadripedal utility poles, this huge tract of undeveloped land can show a student of history, or a budding novelist, what California once looked like. Interstate 5 runs through the landscape but somehow doesn’t spoil it, and it remains one of the most untouched pieces of California coastline. At one point on the freeway there’s an INS check-station, where traffic is brought to a crawl and officers in beige uniforms and oval-brimmed hats peer into your car to see if you’re smuggling Mexican laborers. Because of the check-station, the traffic jam could get so bad that the car would be idle long enough for me to read a page or two from the book in my lap before my mother took her foot off the brake and we lurched ahead.

When I first read Wuthering Heights I was 15 and therefore still trapped in the back of my mother’s station wagon. One day, while gazing out the window at the dry chaparral and the bluffs rising from the ocean, it occurred to me that not so long ago Southern California was once as wild and weather-savaged as Catherine and Heathcliff’s moors. I imagined a time when people arrived from Mexico by sailing up the coast or riding horses and hinnies across the border arroyos. I thought about the coastland before the real-estate developers, before the highway men, before the Marines and the nuclear power plant. I imagined Pasadena, my hometown, when it was all fruit groves and balconied hotels for the wintering tourists. I began to see California’s history in a simple but useful way: as the perpetual struggle between its natural and civilized self, between the breathtaking past and the glittering future. It is a state in perpetual and sweeping change, and so are the people who live there, even if they don’t know it at the time.

The history of California is based on transformation and reinvention. Southern California went from frontier to suburb in little more than a generation. In the blink of an eye, the scrubland gave way to sprawl, asphalt paved the arroyos, and the orange groves were felled for freeway. Who can ever forget Emily Brontë’s howling moors contrasting with the sealed, careful hush of Thrushcross Grange? How does Catherine end up with Hindley and not Heathcliff? How does a woman become who she is? How did California become what it is today?

All of this rose and swirled within me over the years, an eddy of emotion and idea and question, and then a few years ago the vision cleared. Characters cleared their throats and spoke their names: Linda Stamp, her brother Edmund, her lover Bruder, her eventual husband Captain Willis Poore. I saw a young woman, a fishergirl, born in 1903 on the wild California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. I saw her years later, at the balcony of a large white house, surveying a dying orange grove on the outskirts of Pasadena. Who is she? How does she end up at the orange ranch in Pasadena? In my imagination, the long-gone orange groves took root again and the branches of chaparral pulled down the condos and a flashflood swept away the freeways. California’s beautiful past came to life, and I sat down and wrote a novel called Pasadena.