If you had to pick one place pressed most intently into imaginations of post-20th century kids, it’d be California. Not the Sierras, or the Redwoods, or the Mojave, though they certainly get their chance to enchant millions. No, when young kids in post-industrial suburbs look outside their car windows and imagine “anywhere but here”, what they’re really imagining is the sun-soaked beaches of America’s most salient state. Its golden glow hit me from a few thousand miles away.

The lands named for saints and angels have not so ironically become the cultural printing press for our national obsessions — what we watch, listen to, play, wear, and idealize. The Californian megalopolis has cornered the market on the American Dream. Transplants flood the state for beautiful people, the warmest weather, lavish homes, the best wine, the newest tech, the grandest beaches, and an illusory chance at the greatest fame. It’s easy to rest on this and miss everyone else left with the American nightmares — impoverished ghettos, raging forest fires, radical housing inflation, disappearing aquifers, and rampant homelessness. Where the ocean meets the desert, so too have America’s visions of utopia and dystopia wrestle for ground: For every Santa Monica, there’s a Compton; for every Monterey, an Oakland; for every La Jolla, a Tijuana.