Driving north out of Los Angeles, I enter the storm around Valencia, as I climb past 1000 feet. Rising into the clouds, I can feel the vapor becoming raindrops right outside my window. With visibility so poor, I can imagine this winding, climbing freeway continuing forever, carrying me up through spheres of weather, atmosphere, and finally space. Or perhaps it is more like Dante's Purgatory, a helical ascent whose duration cannot be measured, and which requires a stoical acceptance of where one is, even as the dense fog turns "here" into a meaningless abstraction.

At some point, I am no longer climbing, but merely undulating, creeping along the pockmarked faces of invisibly giant mountains. I cling to signs. "Bakersfield 65", I read, and for the first time the word Bakersfield comes apart in my mind, baker's field, and conjures a vast field of wheat glimmering under the late afternoon sun, while the scents of baking bread drift across from a vast, low, inviting house, perhaps of stone. It may be only 65 miles, but it is clearly on another planet, and miles are losing their meaning in any case.

Other signs point off the freeway into identical patches of rainy fog. Some of the fog patches have odd or exotic names: McBean Parkway. Lebec. Castaic. Frazier Park. Perhaps only the oddness of the names keeps me believing that they are different from each other. Perhaps I am driving in circles, and each time, after I pass, a demon runs out and changes the signs, replacing Castaic with Frazier Park and slightly reducing the distance to Bakersfield. My visual field offers nothing to refute this proposition.

So it is all but miraculous when, in an instant, the road drops from beneath me. I fall out of the storm, and might as well be arriving in heaven. Before me is a vast sunlit plain, sweeping to the very limits of sight. Storm-shrouded mountains wrap around the plain on both sides, but their turbulent clouds cling tightly, throwing no shadows on the plain itself. A rainbow sweeps over me from the storm above and touches down on the shimmering brown surface, as though guiding me to a place of rest.

Perhaps I think of first baritone solo in the Messiah, from the prophet Isaiah:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low ..."

Heaven is flatness, evenness. Christian hierarchies have it wrong, I think. Heaven is not above us; it is a place into which we will descend, gladly, just as battered explorers descended from their perilous mountain crossings into this wide, flat valley.

" ... the crooked made straight, and the rough places plain ..."

The road is evening out, I think, and the pun is perfect as the sun declines: evening, the time of homecoming, return, completion, the time when we are flattened.

I did not need the storm for this epiphany, or the sun, or even the rainbow. Stripped of its excessive technicolor, the essence of the moment was the sudden revelation of the valley, and the promise of descent from mountainous undulation to flatness. In a sense, it could have been any valley. Certainly my many descents into the Napa Valley, whose floor of vineyards entangles the eye like a lattice, have been epiphanic as well. California's most spectacular mountains touch down abruptly, so that driving down from them is almost like descending in an airplane. Driving into the mountains, likewise, can be much like taking off, as the flat stable world lurches abruptly to an angle and then relentlessly falls away. The airplane sensation says it again, of course: the flat land is a real, final place, while the mountains are transitional, process, purgatory.

But this was not just any valley: this was what Californians call the Central Valley. Technically, it is the San Joaquin Valley south of the Bay Area, and the Sacramento Valley to the north, but most people perceive it as a single vast place, a flat expanse of 400 miles in a state that is otherwise riven with topography.

Stare at a relief map of California, and the state appears to be one great valley ringed with mountains, with an ocean off on one side, a desert on the other. Cities cling to the coast, and sprawl out across the desert, and little valleys, like offspring of the original, wind among the surrounding mountains and hills, but the huge Central Valley is the physical core of the state. Any cultural meaning that one might attach to "California", the naive geographer concludes, would have to begin here.

Of course, the naive geographer is wrong. Most Californians shun this valley, and when the literate class fondles its definitions of California, they are rarely thinking of its physical center. Their California is a place of edges, tightropes of coastline and mountains. Many Californians profess to love the "outdoors", but by this they mean the spectacular hills and narrow, intimate valleys of the coastal regions, plus, of course, the Sierra Nevada and the volcanos of the far north. Urban Californians rarely linger in the Central Valley, or instinctively think of it as part of the "outdoors". When necessary, they dart across it like frightened mice, preferably without stopping.

The valley has its own cities, of course, but most of them tend to crawl toward the mountains as though trying to get out. Sacramento, for example, lies in the valley's midst. It could have sprawled in all directions, but it did not. To the west, north, and south, Sacramento's urban mass extends less than ten miles from downtown. The city has sprawled only to the east, surging for more than 40 miles to wrap itself around the first Sierra foothills, like a plant twisting and reaching to find the light.

Cities that can't crawl out of the valley are doomed to ridicule. When it came time to do a parody of the television soapopera Dallas, Hollywood looked to the valley and came up with "Fresno: the Power ... the Passion ... the Produce." Coastal media critics chuckled when Fresno's city fathers welcomed the film crews with warmth and generosity, as though oblivious to the derision.

But look at the map again. Spread it out on a cramped kitchen table in San Francisco, pushing aside cats, letters, mugs. Or unfurl it proudly on a vast surface in Los Angeles, perhaps on the expanse of tile by the pool. If necessary, clear a space in front of the fire in a Sierra cabin, as night falls and skiing gives way to conversation, or on the balcony of a house in Mendocino, where you can imagine there to be nothing but yourself and the sea. Look at the map from these places. Find yourself, of course, on whatever edge of the state you're on, then look at state as a whole, feel its form.

It yawns at you. Surrounded by mountains on every side, the valley is a chasm, a giant hole in the state. The associations spurt forth in a warm, pungent stream: the valley as a maw, a gash, a wound, a womb. The vast opening in the state's topography can be any sphincter of the imagination: one that gives forth or one that consumes. Each metaphor will find some resonance with some aspect of the valley's life. The valley is the state's plumbing system, breadbasket, drain, fount, wasteland, heartland.  

Americans attach a warm feeling to the word "heartland", which usually refers more or less to everything from the Rockies to Appalachia. The term glorifies the vast expanse of rural and small-town flatness from the nostalgic view of the bicoastal urbanist. The Midwest plays a special role in America's image of itself as having a heart, and as being bound firmly to the land. The Midwest is more rooted than the West, more innocent than the South, and more purely American than the urbanized Northeast, whose aristocracy, European forms, and sheer length of history are vaguely at odds with the country's need for perpetual rebirth. The rural Midwest responds to America's need for a center, and yet it remains an abstract center, too distant from the coasts to be seen or felt except as a fantasy, charged but not clarified by cross-country drives. Hence midwestern family farms remain powerful as a metaphor despite their rapid collapse as a culture.

Californians rarely feel such warmth about the Central Valley. They rarely look to it as the place where good people lead lives that are more wholesome, less harried, and therefore somehow closer to California's essence. Our Central Valley lore -- reinforced in young minds through mandatory reading of Steinbeck -- is a story of powerful landowners and abject, exploited workers. Today, the Valley underclass is mostly from Mexico rather than Oklahoma, but the patterns of power have hardly changed. As a result, the bucolic family farm is less likely to spring to mind when thinking of the Central Valley than when thinking of, say, Iowa, though the economic reality of the two places is increasingly the same.

But the Central Valley's sentimental unattractiveness has a deeper cause: it is too close. Except for San Diego, every urban area in the state is either in the valley or just over the mountains from it. The valley lurks on the edge of every city's sense of itself, and is therefore something that each city is self-consciously not. In both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the Central Valley is invisible, hidden behind mountains, but everyone knows it's there. When Bay Area residents climb Mount Diablo, a peak that separates them from the Valley, they are reenacting the ancient ritual of patrolling the frontiers, and assuring their control of the high ground.

Inner Bay Area residents, like residents of fashionable parts of Los Angeles, are able to perceive the Central Valley as though it were far away. After all, it lies beyond a lot of relatively ordinary suburbs -- which themselves feel like a frontier -- as well as beyond hills. It is easy to maintain a mental map of the Bay Area that ends at the last wall of hills, perhaps with the calligraphed note: "Beyond here be dragons." Thanks to outrageously frequent air service, a Bay Area resident can reach Los Angeles faster than she can reach the valley. The hyperspace formed by uneven travel times further isolates the urban coast from the yawning interior.

The yawn of the valley's great size is also, of course, the yawn of its famously bored motorists. Nowhere else in California, not even in the desert, is it possible to drive such long distances with so little apparent change of scenery. This monotony, of course, is mostly a phenomenon of long north-south drives. Driving east-west, you notice the transitions from the valley's west edge, mostly a barren land of large ranches, to the more densely cultivated east side, with its orchards and older farming towns. Between the two, you also pass through the dead flatness of the valley's center, a flatness so geometrically perfect that you could be on one of Salvador Dali's mathematical planes, awaiting the arrival of his ethereal horsemen of the apocalypse.

North-south, though, the drive is a notorious ordeal. The valley offers the fastest freeway routes linking the Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and the Pacific Northwest, so countless cars and trucks ply the long drive in the course of their urban lives. They are people who drive because they can't afford to fly, or who drive because they are hauling valuables, whether a life's load of possessions or a million semiconductors. It is these north-south drives, more than any, that generate the famous valley yawn, a private reflection of the valley's yawning shape. All too often, these two yawns converge in spectacular crashes, in which motorists who are (understandably) speeding and (understandably) bored fail to react to the unvalleylike suddenness of accident. As we contemplate these deaths-by-boredom, the yawning shape of the valley is once again a hole, an emptiness sucking in those that cannot face its peculiar uniformity.

To survive in the valley, you must take it apart, notice its variations, and thus deny the yawn of sameness. To a sharp enough eye, scenery always changes. You learn to distinguish between the graduated, punctuated sloping of the edges and the absolute flatness of the valley's center. You form personal relationships with each lonely oak and every shimmering clump of eucalypt. You learn to sense, driving north or south, the subtle drift of the hills nearer or further.

In the northern valley, you learn to admire the Sutter Buttes, a small isolated ridge rising shockingly from the valley floor, visible for over 50 miles. The first sight of the buttes, their approach, their passing, their disappearance -- these events can give form and structure to hours of driving that would otherwise depend purely on counting down the miles on the roadsigns. And you welcome signs of the valley's end, such as Mount Shasta, which first comes into view about 60 miles north of Sacramento and offers the northbound traveler the promise of a new and different realm -- the volcanic Cascades -- even as the land around remains as monotonous as ever.

You learn, too, to welcome the patterns of light. Fields that are flat and dull in the high light of midday burst into dance when struck with the sidelight of evening -- each rustling blade hurling its own shadow to produce a kaleidoscope of lights and darks rippling to the horizon. Topography comes alive in sidelight as well. Only during the morning and evening does the sun help you believe that, though you are a tiny speck lost in the great valley's yawn, you are actually arriving, progressing, and alive.

There are many ways to explain the intellectual and cultural fertility of California. But if there is an explanation rooted in California's landscape, we will find it only by confronting the Central Valley. To drop from foggy heights onto that seemingly endless plain is to move suddenly from a tiny personal world into one so huge as to speak of the divine. Look down at those specks on the valley floor, know that in a few minutes you will be one of those specks yourself, and you can feel all of California in a moment -- its immensity, its integrity, its abundance.

San Francisco, 1994
Portland, 1999