Californias

The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, was after college. A company cold called me for an interview. If you searched the internet at the time, it happened to look like I knew the most about HTML canvas, and maybe it was true.¹

The company founder was surprised I had never seen the America beyond New England, so in addition to a flight and a hotel, he offered me a rental car for several days. They wanted me to fall in love, I think, with something out there, without knowing what that might be. It wasn’t a bad strategy.

The driving itself had a visceral effect. Abdominal, actually. Some turns in California are impossible in New Hampshire. They are too tight and too fast, as you take them you can feel your gut react, how if only there was ice, this would be it. If you are from New Hampshire, mentally the car slides right off the road. Of course there was no ice on the roads there, even though it was February back home.

I drove into San Francisco and turned around — I was too timid to park. I decided I would go in by train later. And then I drove down this lane, a kind of concrete corridor for I don’t know how long, an hour or hours. I’d never seen anything like it. It just kept going. This in particular has always stuck with me. In New Hampshire if you drive for a couple hours in most directions you can be in many different states, you pass lots and lots of forest, towns, etc. Here it was solid concrete. Of course its not unique, but to me at the time it was. Probably I had accidentally found the single worst direction one can point a car on the west coast.

I did find better roads, ones with the tight little turns and thrilling vistas. But that corridor gave me a mistaken impression of the nature of the place. Or at least, it let me see the one thing to disenchant a traveler.

It wasn’t until years later, with Simi, when we would rent a car again and drive (this time) to northern California, then into mountains south of San Francisco. That was the only time I really got to see the nature of California. It has a mystery and a distance very different from what you find in New England. Outside of the cities there is a multiplicity of skies, hills, flowers. There are these certain convulsions of lushness and absolutely sun-blasted landscapes that seem to take turns holding the upper hand. They would somehow creep into each other. There is nothing like that where I am from.

We rented a car because we wanted to see the misty Northern California, which felt pleasant to our senses of remoteness. But I also wanted to see Salinas valley, and Cannery Row, to see what Steinbeck was talking about. His writing made an impression on me, and I wanted to pick up the crumbs of what he saw, at least.

in Carmel valley, Salinas, Monterey

We toured, and shared in giddiness and in silence. The nature contained all the mystery and terror of the accumulated millennia of the world, and it was sweet to the touch. The beauty of the land made the concrete portions all the more strange and unsettling.

~ ~ ~

The interview went well. They took me out to dinner on a Saturday night (they drove) with about a dozen employees. I still have no idea if this is common or not, but it felt unusual. On the drive back to my hotel, they handed me an envelope with their offer.

It was much more than I was making, and I gave no decision for several days. Safely back home, I found I couldn’t accept it. I was too intimidated by the whole idea, and too unwilling to leave New Hampshire. Though it is a mysterious feeling even now to ponder just how different life would have been.

Had I gone out west I would have been, I think, much more pushed around by every whim of a zeitgeist. I think I would think very differently today. Probably I would be much richer, and have no family. Maybe I would come to not mind the concrete. Maybe none of that is true. I of course would not have met Simi.

It is difficult to know where you end and your environment begins. You are inseparable from it. You have to eat. And when you suffer a cut or even a pin prick you realize that your blood happily wants to merge with the rest of the world. There’s a thin layer that holds it back.

This is true mentally, too, isn’t it?

~ ~ ~

Here it’s quite humid outside. The crickets give a nice sound to the evening. The remaining fireflies search for one another. I am trying to finish another draft, and can’t, so I write this one. Good night,

s s

1. A year prior my boss had asked if I knew anything about HTML Canvas, and I didn’t, but I said I would learn. It took on a minor obsession, and after a while on the Q&A site StackOverflow I had answered about 13% of all Canvas questions ever asked, and wrote a blog of tutorials that no-one read unless they needed Canvas performance or interactivity advice. But this company found what they were looking for. Pearson contacted me too, and asked me to write a book, which I agreed to do. Unfortunately, I had no fame at all then. Not even a handful of Twitter followers or any notoriety beyond my puny niche. I didn’t even have any friends in tech. So despite some nice reviews, it sold poorly.

The book was titled HTML5 Unleashed, and all the reviews that loved it really only mention the canvas part. All I wanted was to write a book on canvas, but the publisher wanted something larger. It consumed nights and weekends for a long time. The cover was quite ugly (their choice). Since I had no one I could market it to, the reach was abysmal and it was not worth the time spent. I never would have imagined that gracious people on Substack would give me much more for much less. Thank you.