Goldberg: Land of the lost

By Tod Goldberg

Over the course of my life, I've lived in two states, California and Nevada, and four metropolitan areas--San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Palm Springs--and in that time I've decided that I am a city boy through and through. I like the sturm and drang of traffic, the availability of Thai food at 4 a.m. and the odd chance that I might see a member of the "Real World" cast applying for a job at Bebe.

The cities I've lived in aren't all that different from each other--the portion of the Bay Area I grew up in, Walnut Creek, could have been cut and pasted over the suburbs of L.A. I called home--Woodland Hills, Northridge, Sherman Oaks--and Summerlin is nearly the exact same city I live in now outside Palm Springs, La Quinta, right down to the preponderance of those infuriating roundabouts.

It's a homogenous life, I suppose, and that tends to be what people want: a natural sameness, so you know within reason what to expect from life. I'm thinking this as I stare out over the Southern Appalachian Mountains from my lodge room at a remote retreat center in Highlands, N.C. I've been here for the last two days teaching a writing course to a group of environmental leaders and have begun to think that I could live in a place like this, where I have no TV, Internet or access to my cell phone. Imagine the great novels I could write, I think. No longer would my characters be burdened by the weight of civilization, their lives colored by emotional experience and interaction with nature vs. whatever it is I burden them with now. Hell, I wouldn't be burdened by these things, either. I'd throw out all but the necessities and just live of the fat of the land.

Many of the people I'm here to teach are already doing just that, or at least providing protection and introspection of the nature I'm witnessing. I had breakfast this morning with an anthropologist named Jim whom I find fascinating. He's tall and imposing-looking--he has deep-set eyes that have a lazy menace to them, as if he's seen things you haven't and that he'd be happy to tell you the grisly details. In truth he's a calm and laconic sort, filled with stories and observations and contains a depth of interest in the human heart which I admire. In these ancient mountains of America, here was someone who might very well have an evolutionary insight into why I've begun to feel a kinship with this natural world, when, admittedly, the closest I come to being a good environmentalist involves using recycled paper. Somehow, though, we end up talking about the epic Saturday morning show "The Land of the Lost" instead.

"When you look at the Sleestaks," Jim said, "you're seeing a culture that has devolved to the point that it has forgotten its own lore. A broken branch on the evolutionary tree. Chaka? He might be one of the first links in the Great Ape line."

It was early in the morning, but it all seemed to make sense. Yes, I thought, and maybe Marshall, Will and Holly are really a parable for the Holy Trinity. It was all becoming clear. These darkened woods, the family of Saturday morning explorers who fell through a fissure in time, my resolved sense that I wanted to throw it all away to live in a log cabin; it was all related.

"Yeah," I said.

"Or maybe I meant the Grape Ape line," Jim said. Jim smiled then and I realized that I'd been had a little--that Jim knew I would be fascinated by his de-evolution of classic children's programming, or that at least I'd find it funny that he'd actually spent some time thinking about it, and that my sleepy state was probably a conducive conduit to my enjoyment.

I just shook my head and laughed, both at him and at myself. What was I thinking? That because he understands the literal and figurative roots of man and nature that he'd be in different than me in a pop cultural way?

"Is this going to make it into your column?" he asked.

"Probably," I said, though the reason is in all probability different than he imagined, at least contextually.

What occurs to me now, thinking about this conversation, watching mist roll over the mountaintops, imagining how many e-mails I'll have to answer when I get home, remembering how I need to renew my domain name, contemplating how much gas will cost at the airport, vaguely craving an espresso, figuring exactly how much battery I have left on my laptop and whether I'll be able to watch the DVD of 13 Going on 30 on the plane before it goes out somewhere over the Midwest, is that returning to nature and returning to the city have their own small appreciations, and that even living a solitary life of personal consumption and conservation would become homogenous, too. Home is where I want to be, I decide, wherever that might be.