COLLEGE MAGAZINE SPRING 2014 3D GLASSES INSIDE Pomon a /CALIFORNIA / DEPARTMENTS FEATURES Stray Thoughts 1 THE ISLAND OF CALIFORNIA Letter Box 4 More than a century of old maps agree, Coming Soon 5 and admit it—you know it in your heart: California was and remains an island. POMONA TODAY BY MARK WOOD Campus Beat 6 Maptime 8 14 How To 9 Pomoniana 10 STATE SECRETS California has lots of fascinating but unheralded Back Stage 12 spots. Pomona faculty and alumni let us in on nine: Sports 13 Rim with a View | A River Runs Through It Reading the Desert | Nature, Science and Art LIVES OF THE MIND For the Birds | Digital History | A Church with a Bookshelf 42 Memory | The Dark Side | The Heart of the City Class Acts 45 Daring Minds 47 18 ALUMNI VOICES Making Waves 49 A SIMPLE PRESCRIPTION Alumni News 51 Dr. Juan Guerra ’85 has a simple prescription for Latino health care: Year One 52 more Latino doctors. Mind Games 54 BY AGUSTIN GURZA Last Look 54 33 THE TALE OF THE TREES The story behind Pomona’s beautiful-but-complicated campus canopy is also the story of California. BY MARK KENDALL 37 A Multidimensional Look at California From front cover to back, this issue of PCM is sprinkled strategically with 3D images (marked with the glasses icon above left). We’re providing the attached 3D anaglyph glasses to help you view them. Yes, it’s a On the Cover: gimmick, but one that we hope will add a 3D photo-Illustration little pictorial depth to this exploration of www.pomona.edu/magazine by Mark Wood California’s past and present. /stray ·thought s/ Sometimes I wonder how The California We Came To... it would have gone if this An Essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg ’74 country had been settled backwards, west to east —if those doughty Pilgrims, huddled praying among the ship’s creaking timbers, had anchored not in the crook of Cape Cod but, say, in San Diego Bay. Would the relentless push that drove us westward have driven us eastward just as fast? Would the Stereoscopic Eastern Seaboard have seemed as manifestly destined as the California West Coast (which somehow never seems like a “seaboard”) Story on Page 64 once did? What would all that light and warmth have done to the iron in the Puritan soul? Would the Atlantic states—coming late into our consciousness—have seemed enchanted? u The Island of California Story on Page 14 Clockwise from top left: The Tale sunlight in a California redwood forest; sunset of the Trees in Joshua Tree National Story on Page 37 Park; Yosemite National Park in the 1800s; high - way through Death Valley PHOTO BY CARRIE ROSEMA National Park; fall colors on the Pomona campus; 17th-century map of North America from Honnold-Mudd Library. A Rim With a View Story on Page 19 As it is, things have worked out nicely. California’s climactic geography came last, PHOTO BY MARK WOOD a necessary if unanticipated coda to what is often called the American experience. Knowing the end of the story—so far— makes it easy to grasp how incomplete this A River Runs country would have felt without California, Through It... Story on Page 21 the volatile edge, it seems, of all our na - tional imaginings. For much of the way PHOTO BY CARRIE ROSEMA westward, the story was about settling down, finding a homestead and improving it. But California was never really about settling down. Its very geology is transient. This is where you file a claim on the future and hope that events don’t overtake you. It’s hard to live in the everyday way and sustain a mythic consciousness. That’s what I learned going to high school and college in California. My family had crossed into the state over the Sierras, sluiced down 80 into Sacramento. In California, I expected to find a transubstantiated landscape glim - mering with intimations of Pacific immor - tality, and I expected to be transubstan- Clockwise from top left: the rim of Amboy Crater; sun - tiated in turn. What can I say? We had rise over the Santa Ana River; El Capitan in come from Iowa, and I was 14, an age Yosemite National Park. when the mere house-ness of the house we chose to live in and the car-ness of the car the ordinary. And yet, from time to time, California rises up and strange sensation, familiar to nearly everyone who comes this we drove seemed strangely disappointing. I smites you, and you find yourself re-dazzled. It may be the sun way. You seem to get farther and farther west—to get more and hadn’t expected to find so much ordinari - sinking out at the end of the 10—the “subtropical twilights,” as more western—and then you cross into California and the very ness on display. It seemed as though the Joan Didion put it—or a day of purifying desert light. It may be meaning of “west” changes. You have to look pretty hard to find Californians who already lived here had lost chimney-stacks swaying slightly in a minor earthquake or the the “west” in California that’s continuous with the west in, say, the magical sense that they were in Califor - sight of the kelp-matted inshore, out beyond which the gray Elko, Nevada. But that’s one reason I like California so much—I nia. And then I lost it too. It faded away whales move. It may be nothing more than the scent of rain on keep discovering ways in which it’s discontinuous with anywhere like the San Gabriel Mountains after a hot asphalt in a dry winter. It hardly matters what it is. You look up, else, discontinuous perhaps especially with itself. autumn week without a breeze. look around, and see, again, what an extreme and beautiful place I settle in and remember what January smells like in Southern None of us would get much done if we this is, where the continent crumbles and slips and subducts and California. The place I left seems unimaginable, part of an old regularly inhabited a mythic consciousness, the weather blows in from the Pacific and the mountains seem world that seems to contain everything but California. And I and the traffic would be so much worse. So like a temporary arrangement, just waiting to slide down into the wonder again how it would have gone if it had all gone differ - much of life seems to require an ordinary Inland Empire. ently. What we have now are the myths that arise historically perspective, the sameness and familiarity of Over the past decade, I’ve come to Claremont and Pomona from the California we came to , not the California we came from . the normal. There are times when South - College every couple of years to teach. I always drive out from That makes all the difference, as the Pilgrims discovered in their ern California seems like a vast machine en - my home in New York because I always want to come into Cali - own way and on their own coast. gineered to produce endless quantities of fornia from the great emptiness of Arizona or Nevada. It’s a January 2014 2 POMONA COLLEGE MAGAZINE PHOTO BY TERRANCE EMERSON SPRING 2014 3 /letter ·bo x/ Pomona /coming ·soon / COLLEGE April 5 The 2nd Annual Honoring the March 30 Chamber Music of Aaron March 6-9 “Tartuffe” by Molière — MAGAZINE Elements Powwow —10 a.m.-9 p.m. Copland —8 p.m., Bridges Hall of Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m., family grows at local Spring 2 01 4 (grand entry at noon), Hammer Throw Music. Pianist Robert Thies and Seaver Theatre. First performed in Vote of Support farmers markets. In this SPRING 2014 • VOLUME 50, NO. 2 Field. A powwow with Native Ameri - members of the Long Beach Symphony 1664, in Molière’s comedy clever ser - can tribal leaders and drum contest. Orchestra. vants and wise wives help to keep a bal - sense, my entire adult life MANAGING EDITOR Lectures & Events I was very impressed and in - ance in a world threatened by maniacal has been occupied with Mark Kendall ([email protected]) spired by the fall issue article April 5 Symposium: The L.A. River: Re - April 6 Performing the Sacred: A Con - fathers and cunning knaves. EXECUTIVE EDITOR/DESIGNER March 8 Curtain Raisers of the Clare - “Scout’s Honor” about student activities Pomona College vival and Restoration —9 a.m.– 5 p.m., cert in Honor of Katherine Hagedorn — Mark Wood ([email protected]) mont Colleges Dinner and Theatre Rose Hills Theatre. Speakers: Lewis lecture, 2 p.m.; concert, 3 p.m., Madison Vorva's admirable did nothing to prepare me —6 p.m., Blue Room, Frank Din - April 10 Theatre for Young Audi - Night MacAdams (poet, president of Friends Bridges Hall of Music. Ingrid Monson —7 p.m., Seaver Theatre. A col - for, although I’m grateful ASSISTANT EDITOR ing Hall. The Curtain Raisers of the ences work on palm oil. of the L.A. River); William Deverell (Harvard U.) will give a talk, and fac - laboration between the Pomona Mary Marvin Claremont Colleges’ annual dinner and I was an anthropology for the wide worldview I (USC historian, authority on the L.A. ulty and guest performances will weave College Theatre Department, The theatre night, features a performance of obtained there. I wonder what CLASS NOTES EDITOR River); Mia Lehrer (architect, consultant together music and belief systems from Draper Center for Community Partner - major at Pomona and Perdita Sheirich Tartuffe with comments before the percentage of other graduates to L.A.