Americans And Their Things: June 2026

Monday, June 15, 2026

California's Lie

California told me it was different and I almost believed it.

I arrived in Los Angeles in late April 2022, at the end of the first long leg of the road trip. I had driven from Virginia through Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. I had seen the Grand Canyon and stood at the rim and understood for the first time why Americans develop the specific reverence for that particular hole in the ground. I had driven through Las Vegas, which is another kind of hole — a hole in the argument that desire needs to justify itself.

Los Angeles presented itself as the place where the rest of America’s rules did not apply. The diversity was visible and genuine — not the diversity of adjacent clusters maintaining their geometry at close range, but something that looked, from the outside, like actual integration. The Griffith Observatory at dusk with the city below it. The Grammy Museum with its argument that American music is the product of every culture ever imported and put to work. Streets where the signage ran in four languages.

I stayed three days. The lie revealed itself gradually.

California’s diversity is real. I want to be clear about this before I describe the lie, because the lie is not about the diversity. The diversity exists. Los Angeles contains more versions of human origin than almost any city on earth.

The lie is the implication that the presence of diversity constitutes the resolution of its tensions. That the Mexican restaurant next to the Korean restaurant next to the Ethiopian restaurant means that the people inside them have worked something out. California presents its diversity as an achievement when it is more accurately a condition — a thing that happened because of geography and economics and history, not because California solved a problem that the rest of America has not.

Every immigrant has encountered the California argument, which is usually delivered by Californians and goes: it is different here. The subtext is: the rest of America has a problem that we have moved past. What the argument cannot survive is the inquiry into housing, into the distribution of wealth, into which communities live along which fault lines. California has the most beautiful face of any American state and some of the sharpest structural inequities. The beauty is partly funded by the inequity. The diversity is partly the product of a labour history that California has not fully reckoned with. I loved Los Angeles. I did not love it uncritically.

I stood at the Griffith Observatory and looked at the city. Eleven million people in the greater metropolitan area. The second-largest city in the richest country in the history of organised human settlement. Below me were the homes of people who had come from everywhere on earth and built lives in the specific California light, which is real and unlike any other light I have encountered.

I drove back east through the Mojave and Nevada and Kansas and Indiana and arrived home in Virginia having covered roughly five thousand miles. I came back with a more complicated map than I left with. California was on it, larger and more nuanced than I had expected, neither the utopia it advertises nor the hypocrite its critics describe.

Just a place. Extraordinary and flawed, like all the rest. The lie was the exceptional claim. The reality was more interesting.

These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Sunday, June 7, 2026

The Mountain Doesn't Ask

I have loved nature since before I could articulate what nature was. The Rift Valley. The coast at Mombasa. The particular green that comes to Kenya after the long rains when the hills look as though they have been repainted overnight. These were not scenery growing up — they were conditions of the self, environments in which I became a version of myself that I did not become in rooms.

I waited eight years before I drove to Shenandoah.

The park is ninety minutes from Northern Virginia. I arrived in Virginia in June 2011 and first went to the Blue Ridge Mountains in October 2019. The delay has a simple explanation — the first years were the years of building, of Walmart and the military and the workforce programme and the slow construction of a professional life, and the building did not leave much room for the optional. But I also know I waited too long. The mountains were there the entire time.

The Skyline Drive runs the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains for a hundred and five miles. I have driven it in October, December, and September. Each season is a different mountain. October gives you the colour — the American autumn that appears in photographs and turns out, when you are inside it, to exceed the photographs in the way that almost nothing else in nature does. December gives you the stripped skeleton of the forest and a cold that has character the lowland cold does not have. September gives you the deepest green, the trails still warm enough to hike in a T-shirt in the afternoon.

At the South River Falls trailhead I followed the path down into the gorge where the waterfall drops eighty feet into a pool. My legs knew about it the next morning. I did not care.

The thing that nature does that human environments cannot is hold no opinion about you. The trail does not ask where you are from. The mountain does not require you to explain yourself. The waterfall has been falling for longer than the concept of nationality has existed and will be falling after the concept expires. In this specific sense, wilderness is the most democratic environment I have found in America. The entry requirement is the willingness to arrive and the physical capacity to be present. Nothing else is asked. I carry no accent into a forest. The forest does not hear one.

Americans go to the mountains to escape their lives. The immigrant goes to escape something more specific: the transaction of being an immigrant. The constant negotiation of legibility. The taxonomy of the self.

I love Shenandoah in the way I love Mombasa and the Rift Valley and the Grand Canyon — not as separate loves but as expressions of the same one. What I love is the quality of attention that a large natural thing demands. Not the performed attention of a museum, but the absorbed attention of being inside something that does not care whether you are paying attention or not, and whose indifference is the source of its peace.

After fifteen years of being asked, repeatedly and without malice, in a hundred rooms and offices and social contexts — the mountain does not ask. It is still there. The asking does not reach this far. I keep going back to confirm.