The Myth of ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’

You can go home again, but you may not recognize it anymore.

I’m a Californian through and through. My sensibilities lie in the West, home of Jack London, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion. When Huck Finn said he was going to light out for the Territory, I know the appeal. The wide-open spaces, the natural beauty, redwood forests, the tallest point in the continental United States not a hundred miles from the lowest point, California calls to me, calls to anyone who dreams of something better.

Once proclaimed the greatest writer of his generation, Thomas Wolfe is now known mostly for the title of his famous posthumous work, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” And it’s true. It was true in 1940, and it’s still true today.

For me, “You can’t go home again” is about an individual growth and change. After being away for a while, the place to which you return seems different. But it’s you who have changed. You have grown physically. Your experiences have broadened your mind and your outlook, exposed you to people of different creeds and skin tones, to unfamiliar dialects and mores. When you return, you hardly recognize the place as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The place seems smaller.

I left California, in particular, the San Fernando Valley, for graduate school in 1986. Famous in songs and movies, the San Fernando Valley was one of the great suburbs of America. Surrounded by foothills, it sits north of downtown Los Angeles, a 20 by 30 square mile postage stamp, a physical manifestation of the American dream among the fragrant orange trees, glittering skies, and tall swaying palm trees, with Hollywood and the Pacific Ocean just over the hill, beckoning the world like a siren’s song, to seek fame and fortune.

My parents provided a stable life. One house, one doctor, two piano teachers, three schools, one set of parents. I knew every one of my neighbors. Walking to school, I memorized every mark on the sidewalks, the plus signs and initials gouged into wet cement with sticks. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. On the way to school, we played games, racing popsicle stick boats in the gutters when it rained or taking turns kicking rocks. We scored points if the rock landed on a square with a mark on it, but we had to jump over the marked slabs or risk two thumps in the arm from our pals. We marked time year after year by the ever-revolving door of pets and the growth of the palm tree in the front yard.

Maybe I changed when I left, maybe I didn’t. My entire time away, It felt like me in my body, grad school in New Mexico and in Kansas, city boy become country bumpkin, not the usual progression. My life epitomized change. Married twice. One degree earned, two degrees abandoned, dreams deferred. It wasn’t so much that I was different, but the valley and the world had changed.

We think of places as static, but they change greatly. When I moved away, it’s as if the Valley and my childhood had never existed, had filled up with the alluvial soil of great mountains and become a desert. The place I intimately knew changed entirely, shed its skin to become something fierce and hard.

In the 20 years I had been gone, cataclysmic changes rocked the world: the Berlin wall fell and with it, Soviet-style communism; a sanitized version of Desert Storm with its smart bombs played on the television in the middle of the night; the greatest period of economic growth in our nation occurred and the United States Congress balanced a budget; 9/11 brought down the twin towers in New York and America embarked on its longest war; we searched for non-existent WMDs in Iraq and took down a dictator that we had installed.

In Los Angeles, milk cartons carried the pictures of missing children, something to contemplate over morning coffee or cereal. Los Angeles’ fragile peace was destroyed by the riots following the Rodney King beating. Road rage ravaged the freeways and motorists shot at each other. It took more than two years to rebuild the Valley following the Northridge earthquake, the most expensive earthquake up to that time. A population explosion saw a million people added to the overcrowded valley, snarling the already crawling traffic.

Astronauts change forever upon their reentry to earth, carrying with them knowledge of outer space that only a select few of the seven billion souls (and counting) on Earth have ever experienced. Returning to Southern California was my own reentry into the atmosphere of the West. I had lived in New Mexico and Kansas, but I was never a New Mexican nor a Kansan. You carry California with you forever like a tattoo over your heart.

In the Midwest, among the corn and wheat fields, where wild skunks and fox, turkey and deer and opossums, white pelicans with black wingtips, orioles, cardinals, and red-tailed hawks could still be seen on a Sunday drive in the country, I never locked my doors. I felt safe.

Twenty years after I left, I moved back to California, back home. I didn’t feel safe the way home should feel. Los Angeles had outgrown me, had changed, grown hostile and overcrowded. Or maybe my own growth included latching onto some of the midwestern roots that my parents came from, politeness and kindness, a softness that made me vulnerable in the city. It was a turbulent crossing into the West. San Diego felt more like childhood while Los Angeles had become a hardened criminal tried for a capital offense.

So I traded Los Angeles for San Diego, a major city that felt like a sleepy suburb compared to noisy, frantic L.A. San Diego embraced me with sunshine, close proximity to the ocean, a twice-yearly blooming season with fragrant star jasmine, tropical birds of paradise, and tall palm trees standing sentinel in every yard.

In San Diego, the water laps at the shore, the skies are bright and unclouded by smog, and the stars twinkle through the light marine layer at night. There is no more territory to light out to. San Diego marks the end of the continent, but not the end of dreams.

I took up sailing in San Diego bay, shaped like a nautilus. There is more to see of the world. When California breaks off from the continent and floats out to sea, it’ll be an island unto itself. I’ll circle around again, set the sails with the wind at my back and plot my course. My compass knows the way. It always takes me home.