It’s time for summer vacation. I say: Do something new this summer. Do more. Add an entire new level of travel to your itinerary, an investment in sanity, serenity, creativity, and just plain joy in these very challenging times.
Because we’re all so different—some of us are on very tight budgets—I’ll propose various approaches, starting, this week, with a customizable trip into California’s past with the 1930s WPA California guidebooks as, well, your guide.
If you haven’t yet immersed yourself in the Federal Writers’ Project travel guides to California and other states, do it, and soon. Part of the Works Progress Administration’s efforts to get America back to work again during the Great Depression—writers, photographers, and artists needed work too, often desperately—the WPA guides are works of art, truly good reads even now, packed with answers to questions you never even thought to ask.
Just imagine it: Tillie Olsen collecting and sharing stories and folksongs from ethnic California, and the poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth writing about California’s national parks. At the heart of San Francisco Bay Area poetry from the 1930s into the 1960s, Rexroth was later lionized by TIME magazine as “Father of the Beats,” because he MCed at the famous October 7, 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading which led Lawrence Ferlinghetti to be arrested for publishing Allen Ginsburg’s poem Howl. Rexroth, one of Ferlinghetti’s mentors, testified on his behalf. But as for the rest, he reportedly said: “an entomologist is not a bug.”
Though its cultural insights are priceless—a very few are racist—the WPA California guide is rich in natural history and conservation, with a deep appreciation for environmental beauty and diversity. That section starts with an excerpt from John Bidwell’s 1841 journal, when, as a very young man, he led the very first wagon train into California:
“Joyful sight to us poor, famished wretches! Hundreds of antelope in view! Elk tracks, thousands! The valley of the river was very fertile, and the young, tender grass covered it like a field of wheat in May.”
The book dispatches delightful detail and trivia in every sentence, introducing Petaluma’s Chicken Pharmacy and describing Mark Twain’s restored cabin at the summit of Jackass Hill. All kinds of cultural history, including a first-person account of a Klamath ghost dance, and a Cannery Row tour focused on the gritty days of packing sardines rather than packing in tourists. And wouldn’t anyone want to know more about the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth, a lumber collective in what quickly became Sequoia National Park? After the Commonwealth dubbed Sequoia’s largest the Karl Marx Tree, Congress sent in the troops and routed those socialist foresters.
The tours are the real treat, though—specific sections trace every highway, informative and detailed but also an imaginative challenge, because today—whether you’re coming or going—you have to figure out where the old road went within a wholly transformed landscape.
That’s how you can spend your summer vacation—and countless weeks and weekends to come. Pick an old road and try to follow it.
Dive even deeper into the WPA’s 1930s California in other guides, too—San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, even the Monterey Peninsula. Enjoy!
