When I think of California it is countryside I see, golden hillsides of burnt grass dotted with splotches of dark green oak trees. You can see why lack of water is a problem in this desert:
A few miles inland, hidden from the ocean by a mountain range.
An environment totally different from the coast, baking hot summers with cold foggy winters.
And then you climb the last range of hills and descend to the sea.
This is a completely different world of cool summer sea breezes attracting tech millionaires who in turn drive up horrendous prices for real estate. They’d rather live here than in the baking heat of inland California.
It’s a pretty town I used to live in, nestled between the Santa Cruz mountains and Monterey Bay.
The Santa Cruz climate is mild in summer with cooling breezes off the cold ocean waters with winters of cold and damp yet largely snow-free except perhaps on the mountain tops. With Silicon Valley an hour away remote work is easy so the wealthy come here to live by the sea to manage their factories located in the heat of the inland valley.
Low income housing, homelessness and working poverty are all the usual issues here. If you want to move here you need money or you need the ability to rough it. Street living is normal downtown, so get a van and come and test your resilience!
We moochdock here scrounging off friends, parking in driveways and using their showers. You can buy showers in the community centers for five bucks but we are the privileged friends from out of town!
Somehow Santa Cruz works at staying weird, encouraging artists and performers and experimental self expression and all those sorts of edgy arts and crafts. How they live here being artists I don’t know. Trust funds maybe. I keep learning new terms and expressions from the hippest and wokest avant-garde artistes in Sant Cruz. My lack of appreciation marks me as a curmudgeon.
The homeless population is vast and ubiquitous so car living is just one more form of affordable housing and it frankly boggles my mind how many van dwellers we see cluttering the streets. It’s as though the most expensive place in the country for rental homes (officially so rated), is ashamed of the label and thus has given up regulating alternative living. Rooftop hatch open, windows covered…I see van life!
I stopped downtown one evening to empty our porta potty discreetly into a public pit toilet. My wife whose office used to be across the street was correct: someone was living in it, just as Layne had warned me there would be an overnight toilet dweller.
I drove out to the beach and used a public toilet there as our back up plan. I see lots of RVs for instance on the west side of the city and no pit toilets. I dread to think of where they are emptying their effluent. Probably not at the ten dollar campground dump stations.
We have at least four different driveways we have been invited to use and we get to enjoy free hot showers at the owners’ encouragement. I follow Layne’s lead as I would be just as happy street living and showering at the community centers if I wanted to stay in Santa Cruz.
Its not hard to blend in around here though because we are travelers not residents we wouldn’t fit in among the rather down at heel types who haunt these hang outs. They live on the streets in closed communities but we affluent travelers are in a different social stratum. It’s all nonsense to me but egalitarianism is offensive on the top and the bottom rungs of society.
A friend of mine asked how Florida deals with homelessness and my rather glib reply was by ignoring it. Key West has always been a magnet for the homeless and hopeless, and in my opinion has done as good a job as one might hope considering it’s size and resources. California seems hopeless to me such that cities are awash in unsanitary homeless encampments.
The homeless camps are everywhere and affordable housing is nowhere to be seen. There is lots of new construction all over Santa Cruz for instance but none of it will house the poor.
So you step over the indigent and pretend they aren’t there. It’s a weird compromise but I can adapt for the short time I am here.
I’m “unhoused” as California’s political lingo has it but by choice. I am looking forward to some high desert and mountain public lands in the western states after I get back from my European family visit to be unhoused in beauty rather than urban squalor.
My sisters have lived their lives farming in the same spot for their entire lives in Central Italy. Explaining my happiness living the nomad life in the States will not really be possible but after the first few questions about my dubious choices my lifestyle as incomprehensible as it is will fade into the background.
I like life on the road and as I search for a place to sleep, or empty our trash, or fill our water tank or empty our toilet I find doing chores doesn’t fill me with the existential dread that chores used to when I was housed. Taking the trash out every Monday used to be a marker, another week of sameness accomplished, the last the sane as the next. Nowadays I have no idea where any of it might happen.
Layne remarked that the past 21 months have felt like a decade as we have explored our continent and our selves. She enjoys the silliness of life in a van as much as I do.
She prefers California where she feels at home and where I feel like an interloper in someone else’s circus:
It’s all good as the cliché has it. Quiet nights, long conversations with friends and overpriced foods. All the other stuff is just a passing backdrop to life on the road.
