Chasing California

View From the Zen Hotel

I am writing this from California. Palo Alto, to be exact, the city Sam and I left behind in the 80s. We are staying at the Zen Hotel, which is located miles from the sophisticated Palo Alto center, at the edges of College Terrace, where Stanford grad students and new faculty live. Cars in driveways, once reliably ancient Priuses or bikes, now include a growing number of Teslas or BMWs. The modest cottages that have been here since the 40s and 50s are being replaced by modern behemoths, all glass and right angles.

Every time we come to Palo Alto, we stay at the Zen, which is borderline seedy but we feel comfortable there. For one thing, the rooms all open to the outside, like a classic drive-in motel, which I suspect the Zen once was. Then, too, the windows open. This, for me, who hates recirculated air and is claustrophobic, is huge. They serve free breakfast, a full-on free breakfast, not just continental, and even though it’s no great shakes, nothing beats free. Last but not least, I get to wake up and take my morning run through our old neighborhood.

Palo Alto smells like eucalyptus and dust. RVs line up along El Camino Real because many people who work here can’t afford the mortgage or even the rent. The foothills that start out green from spring rain and turn to tinder every summer. It is paradise meets apocalypse. Bellwether of disaster, and anything feels possible. Wildfire, earthquake, fame and fortune. It’s a strange place to love, stuck in your head and slipping through your fingers. But love it here I do.

And when I go out for my run in a half hour, after the sun rises- I’m up early, still on East Coast time- I will leave my room to run through the grid of streets up into the foothills that look like a remembered dream I got slightly wrong. Then, back to the Zen, whose name, oddly, fits; a port of tranquility in the storm that is, or threatens, or is always promising to be my sweet, elusive California.