California Authors

Spring arrives with the first warm breezes and fogless mornings in our Valley. On our 80-acre organic farm south of Fresno, I disk our soil, breaking winter's crust. The peaches and nectarines awaken with blossoms, initially revealing their pink buds, then blooming into a glorious canopy. Millions of pink dots blanket the landscape. A new year has begun.

The trouble with going blind is you begin not to see. No longer can you drive a car, browse through bookstores and libraries, or read a newspaper or the personal letter you don't want to share with anyone else. You can't see bridge cards, chess pieces, dust on the table, grease spots on your dress or lipstick on your husband's shirt.

I saw Sacramento for the first time in January 1979, when I was a struggling 22-year-old writer. I'd driven out from Ohio and had no money for a hotel. At dusk, on Highway 99 north of Lodi, I spotted a break in the freeway fence.
Watch videos of Bruce Springsteen talking about being inspired to write two songs after reading Maharidge and Williamson's first book. Also, see scenes from their first hobo trip for The Bee.

In 1971 my family moved to the Monterey Bay region. We were drawn to the mist-swaddled crags at Point Lobos, which whispered of our ancestral homeland. Yet we felt ourselves alien people, one of the first Chinese to have found a nesting place.

As I sit at my desk looking out the window and see the shimmering air rising at midday from the concrete, I note that my thermometer by the door reads a toasty 104 outside, and yet I feel none of the soul-draining malaise that used to mark my earlier days in the Sacramento Valley, days when I allowed my spirits to wilt, when I had not yet come to trust the regular arrival of the cooling relief engine from the west.

I'm old enough to have grown up in Southern California before orange groves were replaced by Disneyland, when walnut orchards reached almost to the shores of the Pacific, and when truck farms and orchards blanketed my childhood habitat of Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

Many don’t know what’s gleaming outside their region of the Golden State, and that’s not the only problem.