Kirkus Reviews:

Jack is living his dream. For the last couple of years, the 50-something has had regular music gigs in two bands. He’s a long way from his corporate job back East, having gradually made his way to California. Now he’s doing what he loves—jamming on guitar and bass for a paycheck and surfing whenever he gets a chance. Jack’s life hasn’t been without tribulations. He mourns the partner he lost to cancer, regrets leaving a girlfriend when he took a mountain rescue job in Colorado, and, most recently, seems to miss another girlfriend whose job called her to New Zealand. Still, he revels in his freedom. He has no worries about taking care of a family—an ideal that his drunken father had long ago tarnished. Sadly, Jack’s current and reliable love, California, undergoes big changes. Wildfire evacuations upend his peace, and a planned resort threatens to demolish the homes in his beachside community. Jack, meanwhile, can’t help but reflect on the “girl” in “Sunset Road,” one of his band’s most popular songs. “There is no sunset road,” Jack muses. “There’s just a road, and no one at the end waiting for you, unless you ask them to.” But he soon meets Eve, a schoolteacher and a single mother. Jack, a free spirit on stage, suddenly finds himself immersed in Eve’s extended family, an unfamiliar terrain that he willingly braves.

Das’ novel brims with lively descriptions of its sunny locale. Characters watch glorious sunsets, drift off listening to the crashing tides, and endure high temperatures that wildfires make even hotter. Jack, though, spends a lot of time in his head; a recurring scene shows him zoning out while stuck in California traffic (with honking horns bringing him back to reality). But even when he ponders abstract ideas, details remain concrete. For example, Jack contemplates the Presence, aka God: “The Presence is nowhere more intensely present than above treeline, at the top of a mountain, with all of creation spread out before me; or at the very bottom of a desert canyon, with all of Time…or pouring in off the ocean, in pulsing waves of consciousness beyond my consciousness.” As the story progresses, readers catch glimpses of Jack’s fascinating life—his troubled childhood, past loves, and the incident that led to his rock ’n’ roll–filled days. Jack maintains an intriguing serenity, especially under pressure—his “eye-of-the-shitstorm mode.” He’s a believable character; his calm exterior sometimes breaks, like when he takes an understandably aggressive tone with “surf punks” bullying others at the beach.

An enthusiastic, profound coming-of-age tale for an older generation.

Jonah Das is the editor of Illahee Rising, a geographic information non-profit that identifies lost and neglected Native American historic and cultural sites for inclusion on our maps and in the historic record. He wrote That Golden Shore while living, surfing, teaching yoga, and playing music in Half Moon Bay and Encinitas, California. He is also the author of Dudeville, a coming-of-middle-age adventure story about a corporate dropout turned backcountry snowboarder and mountaineer. He currently lives and works on a native tree and plant farm on the land of the S’Klallam and Chemakum on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.

It gives me no satisfaction – two years after starting That Golden Shore while living in the surfing and yoga mecca of Encinitas, California – that its first plot twist would be so painfully prescient.

The book starts out with an anguished love letter of sorts to Big Sur, one of the world’s most spectacular coastal landscapes. Two years earlier, a huge swath of this reclusive jewel of the California Coast had been consumed by wildfire, and the rains that followed swept the top of a mountain and a whole stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway down to the ocean below.

Stuck “back East” for the first 30 years of my life, Big Sur was the site of my first adventure west of the Mississippi. It was the first place in the American West that ever mattered to me, and had become a frequent refuge since moving to California. Friends who homesteaded up one of its rugged, redwood-filled canyons had lost everything in that fire. And all of it was suddenly cut off, from the north and the south. So when I sat down to write That Golden Shore, I wanted to memorialize Big Sur’s transcendent beauty and anachronistic cultural history, to mark the size and scope of those natural disasters on a human scale. I wanted to describe how the place truly felt, taking the reader out for an idyllic sunset surf in one of its isolated breaks – on an oddly hot evening.

Two years later, as I prepare That Golden Shore for publication, I’m writing from another surf mecca far to the north. We have been evacuated to a hotel on the Oregon coast, under a blood-red, mid-afternoon sunset sky, after smoke from down in California – along with our own fires – has forced ten percent of the Oregon population to flee our homes.

To our south, wildfires have consumed four million acres of the Golden State this year, so far – double its next worst year – an area the size of entire states “back East.” What has turned the midday sunset sky out over the Pacific such a menacing color isn’t just the particulate ash of ten million trees: it’s what has become of five thousand homes, schools, barns, and businesses. It’s the California dream, gone literally up in smoke.

We moved up to Oregon a year ago, our own version of the California Dream finally succumbing not just to the fires, landslides, droughts, and maniacal traffic, but to the soul-crushing extremes of wealth and poverty. The shantytowns lining the crumbling freeways. The great voids where communities ought to be. A populace of 40 million people consumed by long commutes and financial stress or striving, and lost to self-absorption, youth-worship, and the latest shiny spiritual object.

That Golden Shore is the measure of my disappointment, a bittersweet love letter for a place that has been breaking my heart since I first pitched a tent in Big Sur 30 years ago. It is a work of nostalgia for everything California used to be, or at least pretended to be, an examination of all the false promises it ever made and the countless other hearts it has been breaking not just for the past few decades, but for centuries.

I wanted to capture the collision of history, culture, and spirituality that have seduced people to California for centuries, and to memorialize its fragile, vanishing, impossible beauty.

Because like its namesake, Calafia – the mythic warrior goddess in a popular 16th-century European romance who ruled the vast, wild, golden “island” north of Spanish-held Mexico – California seduces with her raw, physical beauty. The back roads through the Sierra Nevada, the fog rolling in through a redwood grove up north, the transcendent power of standing on an empty beach and watching the sun set, there are countless landscapes in California that look and feel like heaven on earth. In That Golden Shore, I wanted to capture the emotional power of all that, of a place so beautiful and ephemeral, it is almost painful to behold.

I have been fortunate to spend much of my life running around the most spectacular landscapes in America – Alaska and Hawai’i, the Rockies and Desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest – and I can say without hesitation that there is no greater compression of raw physical beauty in America than what you will find in California. Half a day’s drive takes you from Yosemite Valley to Napa, from Pismo Beach to Joshua Tree, from the Marin Headlands to Mendocino. These are not only the most beautiful places in the country; they rival the most beautiful places on earth.

But those half-day drives will also make you insane: the mind-numbing traffic jams in the middle of nowhere; the grinding poverty and garbage lining the roadways; the stench, depletion, and mono-cultural desolation of the Central Valley; the hair-trigger road rage of every hothead late for work in his jacked up truck or day-glo muscle car.

California wasn’t like that 30 years ago. Yes, there were slums in L.A., San Francisco, and Oakland. There were miles of migrant camps lining the agricultural valleys, and the Central Valley was well on its way to a desiccated oblivion under a relentless sun.

But there was still room: rolling farmland up north, actual orange groves down in Orange County, empty country roads laced through the foothills of the Sierra. You could still view the mountain from Mountain View, before Silicon Valley filled it with traffic and smog and so many people that wage workers, teachers, and nurses had to commute from two hours away, before Stanford grad students and entry-level computer programmers were forced to live in their cars for miles along El Camino Real.

In 30 years, San Francisco went from storied hippie and gay bohemia, to dotcom start-up boomtown, to tech giant monolith – from a town of funky, edgy neighborhoods, to a fortress of extreme wealth girded against Lord of the Flies streets drowning in human waste, used needles, lost souls.

Was all this just an historic inevitability? Is this what happens when a place so naturally seductive seduces so many for so long?

Because it really did start out as “that golden shore.” No place in America, or the world, hosted the raw diversity and abundance of so many natural resources, in such a nurturing climate, as California before European contact.

In my research for the last third of That Golden Shore, when the story ventures into what remains of California’s “Indian Country,” I ran across this heart-breaking passage about the Ohlones, the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Living in a land of great plenty, the Ohlones – unlike those who lived in a more hostile environment – did not feel that life was a dog-eat-dog affair, or that each day was a grim test of survival. Not at all. There is no record of starvation anywhere in central California. Even the myths of this area have no reference to starvation. All around the Ohlones were virtually inexhaustible resources; and for century after century people went about their daily life secure in the knowledge that they lived in a generous land, a land that would always support them. — The Ohlone Way, Malcolm Margolin, p 40.

That was the real California Dream: a place where, for those restless kids back east, facing another dreary winter, they could go and “be safe and warm, on a winter’s day,” as The Mamas and the Papas sang back in 1965.

It was one more siren song heard down through the generations and around the world about California – “where the water tastes like wine” – going all the way back to the gold rush. Come to California, the land of the “big rock candy mountain,” with its “pastures of plenty.” Your own place with orange trees making fruit year-round, your face on the silver screen, an aerospace job and big new house in a brand-new town going up in the desert, your face on TV, Haight-Ashbury, Silicon Valley.

None of it was impossible because California was, as people around the world knew, endless summer. It was the place where time stood still, where you would never have to grow old. It was a blank canvas for re-inventing yourself, the chance to write and play your own script, a place to pretend at agelessness, start a religion, re-imagine the entire cosmos. No place in the world has made bolder promises of personal liberation and transformation, unleashed such creativity, or inspired so many freaks and fools.

This is why my narrator Jack ends up here, fifteen years after he fled back East for Colorado and Dudeville, the first in my planned trilogy that ends with That Golden Shore. (I’ll get to the middle book next, though the seeds of it are planted in the middle of this one.)

Because I’d originally conceived of Jack as Huck Finn let loose in the modern world, where else would America’s original rebel road-tripper end up, after “lighting out for the territories,” but on a beach in California, watching the sun sink into the Pacific?

The California Dream has always been the American Dream, in overdrive, free from the baggage of history, class, or concern for the commons. No place denuded its landscapes faster in the mad quest for money. No place slaughtered its indigenous people with the same speed or viciousness. No place in the world has drawn so many foreign cultures to one place, not to co-habit in adjacent ghettos, but to collide into a socio-economic free-for-all, to mix and mutate into a wholly new culture that would in turn impose it fantasies about itself on the rest of the world.

The California Dream, from the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, has always been a fairy tale, with a great soundtrack of road trip songs playing on radios around the world for half a century. And for the duration of its slow-motion apocalypse, its self-absorbed masses will keep spinning that fairytale, for themselves and the rest of the world, because they have no choice but to believe that it is only one more freeway exit, or one more pitch meeting, or one more spiritual awakening away.

In That Golden Shore, I wanted to capture the madness of all of that, of the desperate, manic musicality of California in one sprawling story about a place I have come to love, and hate, and love. It’s a literary working-through of an gnawing inner conflict, of what happens when you run around California’s mountains, and surf its waves, and sleep every night next to the amniotic pull of its ocean, with your eyes and your heart wide open.

I wanted to state for the record the mad frustrations of trying to live in a place collapsing under the weight of its own mythology. I wanted to see what it would happen when you punctured that dream, what it would feel like to stand where the road reaches its end, on the cliffs looking out over the Pacific Ocean, and everything around you catches fire.

Jonah Das
Cannon Beach, Oregon, September 2020