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Upstate New York to California

  • Alden Mudge
  • Chenango County, New York
  • UNITED STATES
  • 57
I was born in 1951 in a four-room hospital in a rural village of 950 people along the Susquehanna River in central New York state. My father’s family, dairy farmers and feed and grain merchants, had settled in the vicinity shortly after the American Revolution. My mother’s family had settled a generation or two later 14 miles away, over the river and through the trees, in a town called Deposit, which took its name from the fact that early loggers had used the spot to float timber down the Delaware River to sawmills and paper mills. My brothers and sister and cousins and I grew up feeling deeply connected to our village and its history. Like our great grandfather, grandfather and fathers before us, we often spent summer afternoons hunting for arrowheads on plowed floodplains below town. We roamed the hills behind our house looking for the holes Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, dug in an unsuccessful search for the Golden Tablets of the Book of Mormon, before moving west to Palmyra, New York. Old farmers in the meat market and the donut shop told us stories of their grandfathers who had fought in the Civil War. Our parents and grandparents were very well educated, very well read, and very well traveled. They expected all of us to go out into the world. And to come back. My brothers and I grew up thinking we would enter the family business. California wasn’t even a whisper of a possibility for me. In my early teens my father died, altering my family’s landscape. Shortly thereafter President Nixon’s Russian grain deal and the government’s buyout of small dairy herds altered the region’s economic landscape. The small farms in the hills above the Susquehanna winked out. So did my family’s feed and grain business, along with many other once-thriving businesses in the county. By the time we finished college, my brothers and I understood that we would need to find work in other places. I moved to western New York, then to Massachusetts and finally to New York City. There I learned and often repeated a joke that likened California to granola, which I thought pretty well summarized a place I had visited just once. Then at my youngest brother’s wedding in New Jersey I met a California native, a woman born and raised in Cupertino when its Apple orchards were just beginning to give way to Apple computer. We liked each other. A lot, as it turned out. In March she came East to find work. She took one look at the brown snow and bare trees and returned to California. A few months later, to my utter amazement, I packed my bicycle and books into a blue Chevy Chevette and drove to San Francisco. I cannot quite express how thoroughly displaced I felt at first in California. Where was the corner greasy-spoon that opened at 5:30 a.m.? With all the forests in the Sierra, why stucco? Who were these Californians, so friendly on the surface yet so hard to get to know, the polar opposite of New Yorkers? Could my wife really believe that the dead, dry, treeless hills outside of Palo Alto were “golden and beautiful”? Luckily I very soon found work that I enjoyed and that helped me experience California in profound ways, first at the Commonwealth Club of California and then at the humanities council. I slowly developed a thick network of friends. I found a group of cyclists with whom I rode happily into the northern California landscape. I cannot name the moment when I began to think of myself as a Californian. But years later, after my divorce, my family urged me to return to the East. Without a minute’s hesitation I told them that leaving my home was the farthest thing from my mind.