Flickr: Ozette
There’s a quiet in Davis that used to unnerve me. At night it settles in, leaving only the faint ocean roar of the 80 in the distance. All those people hurrying to San Francisco, or Tahoe, or who knows where blend into a white noise as subtle and compressed as the Tule fog. No planes overhead, no dogs barking, no BART, no beats or bass lines from cruising cars. No yelling, no shopping carts, no bangs, booms, shots, or sirens. It used to be so disarming, coming up from Oakland for a night, to have night settle in and dampen all but this ribbon of freeway. I don’t appreciate the quiet now, though it no longer makes my ears strain for hints of auditory mischief.
Despite living in what counts, for the west coast at least, as the middle of nowhere, Davis is indisputably on edge of the urban fabric. The freeway is a constant reminder that we’re a stones throw from the crossroads of everything. San Francisco pulls like a magnet in our conceptual field. Sacramento is like a neighborhood everyone just forgets to visit. Tahoe is our back yard disguised as a country club. Half the cities you’ve ever heard of in California are a stones throw away. Davis is tangled in the roots of Northern California’s transportation bindweed.
This irreconcilability is part of what erodes away the impression of inapproachableness I used to feel about Davis. That this town was a proud, staid, calm, settled place. It is those things, but it’s also full of undergraduates finding their place in life. It has local produce and Co-op supporting hippies and keggers and midterms and pool parties. It has a tight core Davisite community, but also a population that supports more pizza places and bars per capita than seems possible. In the end, it’s just a town. A funny, slightly quirky town – the sort that orders brand new low-emissions double-decker busses and whose major town event involves a parade of home-made bikes and antique farm equipment – but a town nonetheless. For every boycotter of Israeli-made products picketing outside the Co-op, we have a handful traffic scofflaws parading around Davis like it’s their private property.
For all of this, Davis is great. Approachable, amusing, and immensely livable. I’m happy to be here, making memories and building a life surrounded by such warm and likable people. But there’s this part of me that seems to be as strong as ever, this sense of home burned into my being, that won’t ever let me feel at peace here, or anywhere. I can be on the winning team, but I’ll never have the home-court advantage. I accept this as reality, as something I do not strive to change, but I can acknowledge that a piece of me believes in something I can no longer grasp. There are all these memories built up already, of places, and sounds, and smells, and feelings which belong so wholly to another time and another land that they may as well belong to a different life, surfacing like deja vu from some past existence.
Today, this spiritual hallucination is the ocean. My ocean is different than the one we have here. It has sand which is perpetually cold, and so very hard. Stinking banks of seaweed are scarce, but driftwood stacks in huge piles at the high water line. There are no seals or dolphins to speak of, but tide pools enough to fill even the longest days. Buckets of sand dollars are waiting to be found; an infinity of small rocks hide an unimaginable number of even smaller crabs. The beach is pierced again and again with clear, very cold streams running into the Pacific. If you look long enough, you may see a deer or raccoon on the margins, where forest abruptly gives way to sand. There are no bed-and-breakfasts, no hotels with outdoor pools, no steakhouses. Just a cold, steady wind threatening to give you windburn, water so cold you don’t dare put more than your toes in, and misty, rainy silence so deafening you can’t help but know yourself in that moment. You’re not on the path from metropolis to metropolis, from urban sprawl to urban center. You’re hours away from everything. So far from any kind of civilized life that no one even really lives here. It’s just you, this pavement disguised as sand, and the crushing, life affirming solitude that is the coast as its meant to be.