My California dreams are kindled by a hundred library books on the gold rush of 1849 and a prime-time lineup set almost entirely in California, an idyll of poolsides and palm trees, patrolled in the Striped Tomato by the Bay City detective duo of Starsky and Hutch, whose paid informant, Huggy Bear, is a human jukebox. Keep feeding him money and he sings. Three’s Company debuts in the spring, set by the beach in Santa Monica. Mr. Bradford on Eight Is Enough is a newspaper columnist for the Sacramento Register, which I recognize as a fictitious paper because the real paper there is the Bee. I think maybe I’d like to be a newspaper columnist instead of a lawyer. I watch Twins games on the little TV in the basement, write summaries of them on Mom’s typewriter, and imagine filing them to the Minneapolis Star or Sports Illustrated. I spend much of the long winter of 1976–77 in that basement, hunched over that typewriter, composing newspaper-style stories on various subjects—including vivid accounts of our epic basement matches in what I have come to call the National Indoor Ping-Pong League, or NIPPL.
In the spring of 1977, two months before our departure, Space Mountain opens at Disneyland. Star Wars has also come out this month, and seeing it at Southtown—knowing I’ll soon be living a similar space-based adventure for the two minutes and thirty seconds’ duration of Space Mountain in Tomorrowland—is almost too much to bear. I’m now allowed to ride my bike to Southtown, and that bike is a sparkling-green hand-me-down Schwinn Varsity ten-speed with ram’s-horn handlebars wrapped in black grip tape. At ten years old, on a ten-speed, riding home from a PG movie, I am practically a grown-up. When I see Rocky at Southtown, I ride home in record time, drop my Varsity in the driveway, and begin boxing the arborvitae outside our garage, “Gonna Fly Now” playing in my head all the while.
In late June, just before we leave for California, Bloomington reasserts its position at the center of the cosmos, a status I feared had disappeared forever in January, when the Vikings (incredibly but inevitably) lost their fourth Super Bowl, this time to the Raiders. (“Look,” Dad said at the start of the game, pointing out the Raiders center, who had OTTO on his back, above the number 00. “He’s a palindrome.” It was as good as the day would get.)
In becoming the first team to lose four Super Bowls, the Vikings don’t even win a booby prize as Johnny Carson’s first choice for an NFL laughingstock, an honor he has bestowed in his monologue jokes on the terrible Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And yet here we are, less than six months later, with Bloomington preparing for its most intense and prolonged national close-up yet. On the searing Sunday afternoon of June 26, 1977, Jim drives me and Mike McCollow to the Met. Mike and I have tickets to sit in the left-field bleachers there while Jim punches in for work as the sixteen-year-old manager of the center-field commissary, where his staff of teenage flunkies prepares the food that the vendors working the bleachers will sell. When I turn thirteen, I can become one of these flunkies too.
The Met, usually three-quarters empty, is sold-out. The Twins are tied for first place with today’s opponent, the White Sox, and 46,463 fans have come out to see our own Rod Carew in his summerlong attempt to hit .400, which no one has done since the immortal Ted Williams did it thirty-six years ago. Seventy games into the season, Carew is still hitting .396. The first fifteen thousand fans aged fourteen and under are handed a cotton Carew jersey on the way in. Mike and I immediately pull our new shirts over our heads and settle onto the wooden benches with an empty gallon jug. We bring it to Jim beneath the bleachers at regular intervals. He fills it, alternately, with the two pops the Met carries: Sunkist and Coke. The stadium is fizzing, and so are we.
Beneath a boiling sun, the White Sox lead 1–0 after half an inning, the Twins lead 8–1 after two innings, the White Sox draw to within 8–7 after two and a half innings, the Twins extend their lead to 12–7 after three innings, and the game goes back and forth like this, seemingly forever, until the vendors announce that the entire Met has run out of soda. Mike and I nudge our gallon jug of Sunkist under our seats, hoarding it like we’re survivors of an Andes plane crash. Over the next three hours and thirteen minutes, fifteen thousand children in Rod Carew jerseys tremble with excitement and the depleted stocks of stadium soda every time our hero comes to the plate. He hits a home run that shakes the stadium. He doubles and receives another cataclysmic ovation. When the day is finally over and the shadows encroach on the grass and the hot dog wrappers blow like tumbleweeds across the warning track below us, Carew has gone four for five with six RBIs. (His teammate, right fielder Glenn Adams, has set a team record with eight RBIs.) The Twins 19–12 victory gives them sole possession of first place in the American League West, and the scoreboard flashes Carew’s new batting average at day’s end: .403. As the stadium trembles with the ovation, I wonder if this is what California will feel like during the Big One.
Within days, he will be on the covers of both Time and Sports Illustrated, smiling up from every waiting room, library, and end table in America: Rodney Cline Carew, named for the doctor who delivered him on a train in Panama. That is exactly the kind of storybook adventure I am waiting for in California. THIRTY-THREE EXCITING ADVENTURES! in MANY EXOTIC LOCATIONS! At long last the day has arrived.
Gonna Fly Now.
9.
Ventura Highway in the Sunshine
Two by two we board the great beast, animals onto the Ark: Amy and John in new Keds, Tom and I in Adidas Gazelles—he chose red, so I chose blue—and Mom in lockstep with Dad, who shoos us forward, his five kids’ tickets fanned out in one hand like a straight flush. Jim is a brooding hulk bringing up the rear, resplendent in white Tigers. When I step from the Jetway into the jumbo—past the spiral staircase leading to the lounge, in pants Mom pressed for this occasion, on a 747 bound for San Francisco—all my worlds are coming together.
With a great scream, the leviathan is airborne. At cruising altitude, the engines and I sigh with relief. This spring, while taking off in Tenerife, a 747 crashed into another 747 parked on a runway, killing 582 people on the two planes, the deadliest accident in aviation history. It’s not until we’re over the Continental Divide, when we hit turbulence, that I have to say a silent “Hail Mary” and sing in my head the happy song (complete with backing vocals) that becalms me in the basement during tornado warnings.
C and H (C and H!)
Pure cane sugar (Pure cane sugar!)
From Hawaii (From Hawaii!)
Growing in the sun (Growing in the sun!)
When you cook, when you bake
For goodness sake
Use C and H (Pure cane sugar!)
C and H (From Hawaii!)
C and H (Pure cane sugar!)
That’s the one.
San Francisco is only five months removed from its strongest earthquake in twenty-one years, but my fear of calamity recedes as the 747 sharks in over its famous bay and its minor bridges. The ground flanking the runway at SFO is dun colored. It reminds me of Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine. I might as well be on a distant planet, arriving by rocket ship, touching down in California on a 747.