Time Essay: What Ever Happened to California?

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Before TIME Correspondent David De Voss moved to a new assignment, he spent nearly five years observing the California scene. This farewell essay gives his impressions of his favorite state's current condition.

Atop a bluff ten miles outside Sacramento sits California's opulent new Governor's mansion. When former Governor Ronald Reagan called for its construction a decade ago, he admonished his bureaucracy to design a home that symbolized the bustle and promise of America's fastest-growing state. Completed three years ago, the residence does indeed capture California's quicksilver suburbanty. It has expansive verandas, teakwood floors, eight bathrooms and a caretaker assigned to collect golf balls sliced off the fairway of a nearby country club.

But the $1.3 million house is not a home—and it no longer symbolizes California. As just about everybody knows by now Reagan's successor, Jerry Brown, refuses to inspect, much less inhabit the abode, conspicuously preferring to bunk downtown in a modest $275-a-month apartment. Today this monument to the California dream stands cold and mute, an incongruous reminder of an era that no longer exists.

Californians differ over when the dream fizzled. Those of a political bent say the end came last November, when the state bucked a Carter tide to vote for Hayakawa and Ford. Some argue that the peak came in '74, when gasoline shortages tarnished the freeways and exurbs anchoring California's lifestyle. Others insist that the curtain fell last year, when citizens realized the inevitability of an earthquake and the consequences of a drought. But everyone agrees that the California of the '60s a mystical land of abundance and affluence, vanished some time in the 70s.

The golden epoch that gave rise to the California dream began when America, disillusioned over the loss of its hero President, looked west for spiritual renewal. On the edge of the horizon it found California. Heretofore dismissed for its aimless spirit and shallow purpose, California seemed reborn—or at least exciting. While think tanks scanned the future, aerospace technicians outfitted adventures to the moon. There was a flourishing journalistic "underground" and an archipelago of multiversities that bristled with post-modern architecture.

Originally a simple mix of ranchers and stucco dwellers California society had become an exotic mélange riddled with hippies, surfers and executive dropouts. Out of this sprang a mutant pop culture. "Do your own thing" was the golden rule; ambivalence was its only sin. Mid-life divorce, recreational nudity and "Sunshine" LSD were all tolerated in the land of the topless shoeshine. Rock songs advertised the state (Fun, Fun, Fun) and its people (Eight Miles High). Thousands of teen-agers headed west and were hailed by older Californians seeking a formula for perpetual youth. Together they began an inner-directed search for a separate reality. Some trekked into the desert looking for Castaneda's ephemeral brujo, Don Juan. Others sought to gain an identity through encounters in the Esalen Institute's steamy communal baths.