Day 30, Thursday March 14: Los Angeles, California to Santa Barbara, California

Carnegie libraries visited: Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, California

It’s National Pie Day (3.14) and Los Angeles graciously offered me the House of Pies Family Restaurant. I accepted this gracious offer with an order of peach pie with vanilla ice cream. For breakfast. It’s important to celebrate the holidays.

Like Sheryl Crow, “All I wanna do is have some fun until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.” Like her, “I like a good beer buzz, early in the morning.” Today I waited for the sun to come up, and I skipped the beer buzz. Instead, I enjoyed a southern California high while I drove along the Ventura Highway.

The Santa Monica library is the kind of blue that makes it almost disappear into the sky, and it is trimmed in the color of a white sand beach. The library is no longer open for walk-in traffic; instead, it is a ‘self service’ library where patrons can, by prearrangement, pick up the books that they have requested. A few deeply tanned individuals were sitting on the bench in front, their worldly possessions piled high in the shopping carts by their side.

The sun had already set when I parked on Quarantina St. in Santa Barbara for the night. iOverlander reports that many vehicles appear to be parked permanently there and that no one bothers them. I slept well.

I had visited Santa Barbara a couple of times. In 1973 a group of my Boy Scout friends and I attended the National Order of the Arrow conference there. We stayed in a dorm, with each room having a basin of solvent in front of it. We were instructed to wash our feet there to remove the clots of tar that stuck to our feet from walking on the beach. That was my introduction to environmental disasters. January 1969 witnessed a massive blowout of an oil well that spewed four million gallons of crude oil into the waters off Santa Barbara. It was the largest spill in US waters at the time, and since then it has been exceeded only by the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Exxon Valdez wreck in Alaska. Despite urgent efforts to clean up the spill, Santa Barbara’s beaches felt the impact for years. Out of that disaster came some good. Although the spill was not the only cause, that event and other environmental concerns led to the establishment of the EPA in 1970 (under the passionate environmental stewardship of President Nixon), the California Environmental Quality Act in that same year (under Governor Reagan, likewise) and the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972. I wore the UCSB t-shirt, light blue with dark blue ocean waves, that I bought there until it would no longer block out the sun.

When I was a postdoc at Berkeley, I was invited to give a scholarly talk at UCSB. John Woolley was my host; he was one of my graduate school heroes when I was at the University of Wisconsin, where he had also received his Ph.D. At my talk, he was quite apologetic. He forgot to advertise it until the day of the event, and no one showed up. No problem, I told him; I was used to audiences of no one.

Ayse and I stayed one night in Santa Barbara on our honeymoon. We smoked cigars on the brown leather lounges of Santa Barbara Cigar and Tobacco, and had a grand time. Our bed and breakfast was tasteful and comfortable, in ways that Goldfinger is not.