Queen Califia Comes Home

Land of Hope and Dreams

You may call me Califia. I have gone by many names throughout the ages since I first made the acquaintance of the Spaniards voyaging west seeking fame, fortune, and adventure. I am the stuff of both myth and legend. It seems only yesterday that your so-called "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," that Genoan simpleton Cristóbol Colón, stumbled blindly into my earthly paradise close by the east coast of what would come to be called South America. Colón, who you may know as Christopher Columbus, was a man prone to mendacious self-glorification. He led an army of thieves, opportunists, and incompetents, known throughout history as conquistadores. This Italian mariner, sailing for the Spanish crown, wrote the opening chapter in a human tragedy - a sadistic orgy of violence and piety that would eventually open an entire hemisphere through conquest, slavery, rape, and conversion, changing the course of human history. I was a witness from the very first chapter, living the odyssey that would eventually lead me to the modern nation-state of California, which serendipitously bears my name. This is my story. And in a way, yours. It is a story of ambition and greed. Of sex and war. Of conquest and, in the end, redemption. Or not.

Relating the narrative of my intrepid journey across time will require you, my dear reader, to fill your historical lacuna with ideas and facts not readily comprehensible within your limited corporeal understanding of the universe. Accepting the truth of my story will not demand magical thinking, rather it will require you to at least temporarily overcome your natural reluctance to accept a differing reality, a reluctance typically displayed by homo sapiens upon confronting the supernatural, when reality does not easily conform to humanity’s simplistic dedication to outmoded beliefs. It will also necessitate relinquishing unquestioned acceptance of observational truth taught under the rubric of the modern scientific method. You must ignore your initial response to my story, which will be to curl into a ball shaking with a paroxysm of fear and hysteria. Furthermore, it will necessitate clearing your mind of the cruelly benevolent self-serving manure fed to you daily by your political, business, and spiritual leaders, and accept the distinct possibility that the democratic enterprise underlying your claims of sovereignty over your “newly discovered” American lands has resulted in a legacy of waste and disaster - in short, a monstrous travesty against nature, which many of your rulers and creators believe justifies punishment of an impudent culture by vengeful and indignant gods.

Nearly half a millennium has passed since I first arrived in the state that would subsequently bear my name. Bathed in late afternoon autumn sunshine, thinking back on the journey that brought me here, I find myself whipsawed between the hope that in this new Pacific nation humans might finally, after 100,000 years of “evolution,” learn to coexist with our creation, and a phantasmagorical dreadfulness that the continuous cataclysm that has defined humanity’s relationship with the natural world will not end, and my heavenly friends might well be required to wipe the slate clean and begin from scratch. That if one is to be honest, the late great United States of America, which won the war against fascism and was a beacon of hope to impoverished multitudes, was, in reality, less a democratic utopia than a goldmine ripe for the plundering. 

The creaky old vertical lift bridge on which we stand has been recently repainted a bright gold, a fitting backdrop for the miraculous rebirth taking place in the once dead river. “Shield your eyes from the late afternoon sun and fix your gaze on the diffuse reflection of the Sacramento River languorously flowing west towards the Golden Gate, and you may bear witness to the rebirth below,” says the speaker. Beyond the rail, I am fixated on the spectacle just downstream, caught in a dream of California’s past and perhaps its future. 

It is such a magnificent autumn afternoon that I am only half listening to the speech of Prime Minister Clara Vailini, which summons the ghosts of a mythic eden. I cannot help but stare in wonder as the oft-dammed, rip-wrapped, tamed, and straitjacketed river nearly explodes beneath us in a vast hemorrhage of reddish-silver torpedoes slashing their way upstream on their perilous journey from the Pacific to the waters of their birth in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, silhouetted at our backs against the clear, cobalt blue California skies. One hundred years after state and federal engineers, turgid with fear over the seeming anarchy of nature, constructed their dams, pumps, and aqueducts - squalid little projects designed to harness the once mighty river - and began siphoning the waters of this vast valley to create the lawns and golf courses of Los Angeles, the factory farms of Fresno, and the silicon dreams of San Francisco and San Jose, the salmon are back from the brink of extinction. 

This is the first major run of native-born salmon in nearly a century. Carefully nurtured in re-re-engineered streams, the result of the efforts of thousands of dedicated schoolchildren and fishery biologists, the anadromous fish were making a comeback with the assistance of the new nation’s environmental agencies, and the Prime Minister was here to take credit. “Take it, there it is,” she intoned, repurposing the 20th-century words of Los Angeles hydro-engineer William Mulholland upon his delivery of water looted from the Owens Valley by the City of Angels.

“But be wise. We, the new citizens of the United States of the Pacific, have a deep connection to these magnificent creatures. They are living evidence that humankind has the capacity to learn from our mistakes, to right wrongs, to pursue values beyond our pocketbooks. With your help, we have found a balance between the needs of our sixty million people and the flora and fauna that depend on the natural bounty that is California. And as the salmon represent salvation from 400 years of unrelenting human ‘progress,’ we Californians stand as a beacon before the eyes of the world, affirming that there can be renewal, life, and a spiritual awakening if we learn from the past and walk - or swim - boldly toward the future. 

“We have the ability - in concert with our fellow Ecotopians in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Baja Sur, and Hawaii - to hold back the rising seas of climate disruption and the Anthropocene mass extinction and stand as a living example for humanity, as well as the rump states of the former USA, as to what is possible if we respect the planet and plan not for today or tomorrow but for tomorrow’s tomorrow. And now, at the end of my six years as your prime minister, l say goodbye and good luck, and in the words of Benjamin Franklin, who long ago helped establish the foundation for democracy when our colonial forefathers stood for something greater than unending exploitation of resources and human spirit, here it is: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’”

To understand how I ended up on this bridge standing next to the Prime Minister as she is announcing her imminent accession to respected senior citizen, I need to trace my long journey across the Americas, because while this story is about the reawakening of California, and the birth of a new nation, this is also my story which, while separate and apart, has been intimately connected to my name… For over four centuries.

I am not here by sacred design. For those who look for cosmic purpose and meaning in history this narrative will sadly disappoint. I wish I could provide a map or at least a logical narrative. Maybe then a straight line from there to here could be plotted. You humans ascribe to the gods great powers: perspicacity, wisdom, logic. There are moments in the vast expanse of time where that might be true. The mythical and enlightened ones - Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Frederick Douglass, Frida Kahlo, Bob Dylan, Bono, Beyonce - each thought they knew the story line. Each came up short. Each got it wrong.

I have tried to explain the long-term impacts resulting from obsessive devotion to nature destroying pantagruelian public works to the permanent mental cripples and failed seekers who have been ravaging Washington, Madison and Jefferson’s colonial dream for many years, in numerous forms and various mediums. However, this requires blasting through the ahistoric and devoutly held axiom that humans, at least white Christian ones, should exercise as much dominion over the earth as possible. I have found that this enterprise is akin to explaining astrophysics in Latin to my pet gerbil, or the dynamics of a pandemic to a reality TV star-turned-politician. I apologize in advance if my language is at times formal. I attempt, not always successfully, to express myself in the more common language of the twenty-first century, but having spent eternity with my fellow immortals I am not always successful in this endeavor, and for this I apologize in advance. And while I acknowledge that a more “down to earth” approach, utilizing popular slang and grade school simplifications might be more effective, the Ruling Council has in this rare instance waived the prime directive of non-interference and allowed me for a share of the royalties to shed my disguise and share my story, so long as I maintain a certain godlike demeanor in language and attitude, adding a degree of difficulty, but still hopefully capable of imparting some hard-earned lessons. 

The best I can do is point you, hopefully, not to the false narratives hardwired to the brains of naive school children, which conveniently exorcise from the public reckoning the limits of their leaders’ disgraceful, corrupt, depraved, crooked, putrescent greed, but rather to a different narrative. In my chronicle, where the capriciousness of nature is viewed not as something to be feared and endured but rather accepted and hailed, the fableist yarn of modern progress is still to be unwound. 

The increasingly desperate belief/assumption/prayer that someone/something - a higher and wiser authority of some ill-conceived form - president, pope, general, or even God, at an absolute minimum, some extraterrestrial force, will save the human race from itself must be expiated from the telling. Truth be told, the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely an oncoming freight train, and you humans, in controlling that light at the end of YOUR tunnel, hold the keys to your own future. However, unwavering blind faith in the essential decency and superiority of white Christian patriarchal culture, that shameless old harlot, ruled over by drunken hoodlums and pimps, is certain to end in a cataclysmic reign of terror that will make Old Testament retribution seem mild when a future Gibbon unearths the bleached bones of your shattered desert civilization. The great English nineteenth-century romantic poet, Percy Shelley, laid out the stakes in his epic tale of Ozymandias: 

“I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Through the ages, my colleagues and I have been befuddled and frustrated by that most beguiling and frustrating of creatures which we have come to call humans. That strange French physician and seer, Nostradamus, read the tea leaves better than most, but in reality we gods are a motley crew, more human than we like to admit, neither all-knowing nor prescient, more coyote than owl, best understood by our Navajo friends - tricksters at heart. If the reader needs to project human characteristics upon the diverse incorporeal beings that reside over the rainbow, it would be that we all, every last one of us, is guided by a demented, sick, twisted sense of humor! The spiritual and cosmic as interpreted by Monty Python. 

This might be a good time to let my readers in on where we deities reside and how it is we communicate with our subjects, for it is far different than what is usually imagined by your holy men, let alone the great unwashed masses. Our settlement is not a truly physical place (though at times to be explained later we do rent space in the material world), not Olympus or Valhalla, more -to use a human legal concept - a tenancy in common for eternity. The heavens, you see, are not at all as you humans perceive them. They do not exist in the clouds or as some pure white light. Sadly, we are cognizant of the rather fragile emotions that guide our creations and none of us had the heart to tell Michelangelo that what he depicted in the Sistine Chapel was a pure flight of fantasy; although what he was creating was pure beauty, it had no basis in reality. Neither Raphael nor Titian did any better. There is no old white guy with a long beard, and St. Peter is certainly not the gatekeeper. Truth be told he, like Jesus, is a short, dark Semite from ancient Palestine, more closely resembling a short Hassidic Rabbi, than a towering caucasian presence! There are no seraphim or archangels floating above the planet. Seventy-three virgins are a misunderstanding,  seventh-century Arabic being somewhat obscure - the actual translation provides seventy-three grapes!  I must confess, the holy warriors who do arrive end up tragically disappointed in paradise. 

The most elaborate of human endeavors - not the Hagia Sophia, Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid of Giza, nor those at Teotihuacan or the Potala Palace in Lhasa - do our humble abode justice. As best I can describe the heavens, they exist within a large building with a steep vertiginous slope. The fenestration contains no right angles. Think of a- twenty-first century skyscraper as designed by Antoni Gaudi. Not the Tower of Babel or the architecturally perfect human contrivances at Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, rather the Sagrada Familia or Park Guell, languidly reaching to infinity and beyond. Sumptuous and ineffable, yet tasteful. On the ground floor are the various planets, structural supports you might call them. Looking up at the wavering edifice if you were allowed a fleeting glimpse, you would be enraptured by the entire range of colors capturing the full galactic spectrum of light in the infinite frescos that adorn the complex. 

Your earth is a minor foundational keystone in the great establishment. On each floor, specialized celestial beings work scrupulously on their master designs for the cosmos. On one, structural engineers determine what elements a particular planet should have. For earth, it was decided on a varied landscape of oceans, volcanos, deserts, mountains, jungles, and many more, as the engineers, not yet provided a blueprint for the flora and fauna that were under construction on the upper stories, felt that the widest possible ecosystems should exist so all creatures might have a chance at survival. In hindsight, we underestimated the rapacity of the predators at the top of the food chain, later to be called humans, which had not yet been created. 

Different floors contain real estate developers, philosophers, architects, artists, public relations specialists, theologians, physical and social scientists, historians, dream weavers, and many more, each responsible for a piece of the creation myths and hagiography that make each planet unique. One of the most troubling design flaws we discovered over time is that too many of the carbon-based forms with which we provided some form of reason, regardless of the planet or solar system involved, would eventually believe themselves to be uniquely created by whatever God or Goddess they adopted and somehow conclude that they were created in their  image. Hubris was a particular design flaw that we aimed to eliminate in subsequent models and better-designed planets.  

A special mention should be made of the real estate developers on the thirteenth  floor. These gods specialize in salesmanship, yet often their creations are less than advertised. I’ve never quite understood why on certain planets these guys gained so much power, though I suspect it is related to one of the minor gods who worked there. On your earth, he has gone by many names - Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Jini, the Antichrist, and many more. In reality, he is not quite the big deal you humans make him out to be; more a licentious demon homunculus than ruler of the underworld. A pathetically insecure, narcissistic mountebank with a cadaverous face, orange hair and skin, short and obese, sporting a monstrous gut and ass that could block the very sun, and tiny little hands and feet. Certainly not as frightening to view as Supay, the Inca god of death, Mictlantecuhtli, Aztec god of the underworld, Malingee, a nocturnal aboriginal spirit, nor even Ganesh, a Hindu god with an elephant head. These deities frightened even me, but Satan, if truth be told, is not evil incarnate as he himself imagines, but rather a dogmatic vestigial fading potentate enforcing an atavistic yet trivial pedantry, eternally cosmically bewildered and actually quite comical. 

As you near the top stories, those with unconstricted views of the firmaments, the more powerful gods reside. When viewed as a whole it truly is amazing that this motley crew with divergent theories of creation, constrained by a fossilized and callow institutional culture, continue to be perceived throughout the infinite realms of space and time as representing perfection. In my humble view, a spurious canard ably spread through the galaxies by our multi-talented public relations professionals on the 100,000th floor. 

In an epistemological sense, the upper stories can be quite trying. The outwardly omnipotent gods representing all the known vanities and foibles of the species from innumerable solar systems reside there, and as a result, reaching consensus  can be at times near impossible. Mediators are often required for compromises to be hammered out. How else can one explain aardvarks and jellyfish, saints and sinners? With lustful satyrs, priggish ascetics, and imperious egomaniacs, the upper floors resemble a city comprised of vegan strip bars lording over a reactionary hinterland. Communicating with the flesh and blood creations down below has always been tricky. So it was decided by the ancients in the antediluvian annus horribilis immediately following the big bang from which it all came together from the great chemical void that we gods could only communicate through dreams and deep within the id of those we wished to influence. We were prohibited on fear of banishment from direct sensory communication, except in the exceedingly rare instances where special dispensation might be given. And so it has been since even before recorded time began.

To speak to the huddled masses that have evolved from the great apes I therefore required something relatable, as humans as a whole are beings of limited imagination and become easily frightened.  Like numerous gods and spirits have done through the ages, something corporeal was needed. Pachimama suggested a jaguar, Krishna an elephant, Kachina a jackrabbit. None were quite the image I was seeking. Humans do not react well to jaguars - apex predators and all. A talking elephant could be somewhat off-putting, and a jackrabbit too comical. I needed to function as a muse! A human body was needed. Most, however, were so unbecoming to a Goddess; frail, small, and uninteresting.

No single body would do. With special dispensation from the ruling council (yes, bureaucracy runs even the heavens) I was given permission to take over the bodies of humans involved in protecting my lands and work through them. Other sentient beings as well: salmon, otters, bears, pumas... All in a day’s - or millennium's - work. Before you get all hinky on me, understand that I choose carefully. It only works if the host body is chemically inclined, hard wired if you will, to follow my lead. I suppose that in this way it could be considered akin to hypnosis. If I tried this with a New York real estate developer, oil industry executive, used car dealer, or the vast majority of US Senators, their heads would explode and my cover would be blown. The host body will not do anything that it would not do otherwise. 

My journey to the heart of modern day California has required me to learn more about humans than my heavenly colleagues thought healthy. I had to understand  how Thomas Jefferson - a Democratic-Republican; an odd man who loved nature, science, and politics; who spoke of freedom yet owned people; who sent Lewis and Clarke (I loved Captain Clarke and helped him gather plants and animals for T.J.) to explore and report on my people and lands - differed from the modern so-called conservative Republicans, a group of mostly coarse, vulgar criminals suffering early stages of senile dementia, who worship money and suffer an insane desire to rape the natural world. Even more odd because the first modern American leader that tried to  conserve nature was Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican... But you see, I am getting ahead of myself.

Over the years I have inhabited the bodies of the aforementioned Jefferson, Captain Clarke, Henry David Thoreau, Teddy, Rachel Carson (my favorite for obvious reasons), John Muir, Chief Luther Standing Bear, Elvis, John Stewart, Clarence Clemons, and many more.

I helped, mostly unsuccessfully, to shape a narrative that valued the natural world. That tried to convince humans that 2,000-year-old trees had souls, had value beyond board feet and backyard decks. That the oceans the gods created were not sewers and that clean air was worthwhile. That each of our creatures had a place in a great web of life that could not always be monetized. Mostly, that humans with their infernal opposable thumbs and technology were made stewards, not masters, of this big blue globe floating in space. That wonderful man Stewart Brand showed it to them with his Whole Earth Catalog, and by showing it to them, attempted to reach them - to make them understand that this planet is the only one they get, so they better damn well start taking care of it. That their misuse of power, driven by greed, selfishness, and cowardice, treating the earth like a gang of drunken pig farmers at a Las Vegas strip show, would bring down upon them a convulsive ravenous storm from which the only escapees might well be the cockroaches that thrive in the insignificant hovels humans have constructed. 

Over the millenia I have inhabited the bodies of congressional and state legislative staff, legislators and President Barack Obama. I did hate those mom jeans! Which brings us to the true beginning of this long and winding tale.