rebecca solnit Notes on California as an Island There’s truth in old maps Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 1. Islands are places apart, but they are not necessarily isolated. California has long exported ideas and values to the mainland. Its most important imports are immi- grants from across the country and the world who become Californians in various ways. Many of them also become the exports, the people who, transformed in some way, bring something of the Golden State with them when they return to India or Iowa as surgeons or poets or practitioners of some alternative mode of existence. 2. Major media outlets and politicians routinely refer to California as the world’s eighth largest economy, as though it were an independent country. New York is almost never mentioned as the world’s eleventh largest economy, perhaps because it is part of an interstate economic base that dilutes its identity, while California is flanked by comparatively unpopulated and states with smallish economies. Attached to the North American continent, it is nevertheless surrounded by deserts and mountains that isolate it as effectively as the ocean to its west and more so than the international border to its south. Equally cultural and political island, it is routinely distinct from or even in opposition to the rest of the United States, though its populous and liberal-to-left dominated coast obscures the state’s conservative interior from many observers; this is the state of Reagan and Nixon, and tax revolts, too. California is geographically and ecologically distinct from the rest of the coun- try and the continent. It is also culturally distinct. The geography shaped the society, or rather the myriad geographies shaped the plethora of societies, in precontact indigenous times and in the present. Geography is identity, even when those shaped by it forget it. ‘‘General and Particular DESCRIPTION of AMERICA’’ by Herman Moll, first published in London in 1709. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 4, Number 1, pps 36–45, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2014.4.1.36. 36 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ‘‘Paskaerte van Nova Granada, en t’Eylandt California’’ by Pieter Goos, first published in Amsterdam in 1666. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. 3. The description of California as a place apart persists, 4. One of the longest peninsulas on Earth, Baja is flanked though in many variations it’s not just that California is on the east by the Sea of Cortez, which early navigators an island but that Southern California is an island within sailed without reaching all the way to where it joins with it, and so is the Bay Area; and San Francisco is, in terms the mainland. For more than two centuries afterward, of both culture and climate, something of an island even theories of California geography were debated from afar: within the Bay Area. The place contains marked differ- it was a peninsula, an arm of a gigantic bay linked up ences within itself but as a whole is distinct from the rest with the also-mythical Northwest Passage (now a reality, of the country. Imagine it as an archipelago off the coast thanks to climate change), it was an island, it was many of the continent—many ‘‘islands’’ of distinct ecological islands. A beautiful map by Frederik de Wit of 1670 and cultural presence or as degrees of islandness, of sep- shows both the island of California, a perfect dagger arateness from the mainstream. afloat in the near Pacific, and a mythic Northwest 38 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ‘‘Nuova carta del polo artico secondo l’ultime osservazioni’’ by Isaak Tirion, first published in Amsterdam ca 1740. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. Passage, the strait of Anian. Anian itself perhaps got its one where the lowest point in North America (in Death name from a place in Marco Polo’s unreliable account of Valley) is very close to the highest point in the lower China. Eventually, California would yield up wonders forty-eight, Mount Whitney, where there are deserts in nearly as astonishing as those in the legends. which it hardly rains and winds skid rocks across hard, flat ground and another place, near Donner Pass, that is 5. If you can recover the sense of wonder of the old the snowiest in the country, not excluding Alaska, and explorers, you can see California as an island beyond the snow piles dozens of feet high at times, where there even their fantasies, an island that is a world in minia- are rainforests where your feet sink deep into moss and ture, this place about three-quarters the size of Madagas- ferns under ancient dripping trees, lush valleys, great car, a little smaller than New Guinea or Sweden, this rivers, salt lakes (or at least one: Mono), enormous grass- island with the tallest and the biggest trees in the world, lands, and perhaps the richest farmland in the world, BOOM | SPRING 2014 39 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 a world-famous wine country and an even larger shadow depth—materials ranging from hemisphere to world maps, economy of marijuana in the north, the world capital of title pages to celestial charts. The collection also includes cinema in the south, and technology in the center, multiple states of the same map, where minute differences enclaves of almost every ethnicity on Earth, and more. between maps are preserved in sequence. Through a combi- nation of a donation and a purchase, the maps came to Stanford University in 2011. Scanned maps are available Note on maps online through the digital collections at Stanford University These maps come from the Glen McLaughlin Map Collec- Libraries. The original maps are being accessioned and will tion at Stanford University Libraries. McLaughlin collected be available in the near future at Stanford. nearly 800 island of California maps over a period of forty The first mention of California as an island is in Garci years, assembling the largest privately held collection of Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandian´ ,pub- these maps known. The essence of his collection is in its lished in 1510. This rendering, coming from Montalvo’s 40 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ‘‘Nova & accuratissima totius terrarum orbis tabula nautica variationum magneticarum index juxta observationes Anno 1700 habitas’’ by Edmond Halley, published in Amsterdam ca 1730–1750. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. imagination, became firmly embedded on maps—Califor- maps—the maps lagged behind reality and became a carto- nia was depicted as an island on maps in the seventeenth graphic phenomenon that defied the science of mapping. The and eighteenth centuries. This cartographic blunder was not island of imagination won over terrestrial reality and resulted exposed until Father Eusebio Kino’s map, entitled ‘‘A Pas- in some of the most beautiful maps ever produced. B sage by Land to California,’’ informed by his travels between 1698 and 1701. Even so, it took another half century for — G. Salim Mohammed the island to attach itself back onto North America on Digital and Rare Maps Librarian, Stanford University Libraries BOOM | SPRING 2014 41 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ‘‘Bankokuzu Zen: [Complete map of the World]’’ published in Japan in the eighteenth century. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/36/381618/boom_2014_4_1_36.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ‘‘A New and curious map of the world illustrated with the constellations of the cœlestial [i.e., celestial] globe & systems of the most celebrated philosophers’’ by John Byron, published in London in 1764. IMAGE FROM THE GLEN MCLAUGHLIN MAP COLLECTION COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES..