SLO below, California. Even in a pandemic, you move too fast.
In this new year, perhaps Californians should decide to follow the example of the spirit of SLO, the acronym for San Luis Obispo County, perhaps the easiest place in California to catch their breath.
Joe Mathews
Opinion
SLO is fundamental to my COVID confrontation. Whenever work, distance learning or confinement at home seems unbearable, my family of five drives three hours north of Los Angeles to an empty, beautiful place in that beautiful empty county.
This escape strategy explores pandemic discounts on accommodation and a central truth about California. The Golden State is more exhausting in its limits, where most Californians live. If you want to find space and peace, you must go to the middle of California.
The paradox of San Luis Obispo County is that it looks like a place apart precisely because it is centrally located. Daniel E. Krieger, a historian for Cal Poly, called it the “Middle Kingdom” of California, where neither San Francisco nor Los Angeles dominates. Electricity comes from PG&E in the north and gas from SoCal.
This intermediate identity is profound. San Luis Obispo was the intermediate mission in the Franciscan chain. SLO is still proud to have invented the motel in 1925 to serve middle-class tourists who couldn’t afford better accommodations. Today, San Luis Obispo County, with a lower income than other high-cost coastal locations, maintains a relatively middle-class vibe. His policy, while tending to the left, is halfway to California standards.
Although SLO County may be small in people – with only 283,000 residents, almost as many as Chula Vista – it maintains a strong sense of self. In the past few weeks, his elected officials and the media have protested the new order to stay at the state home to place the county in the “southern California region” along with counties as far away as Riverside and Imperial. The San Luis Obispo Tribune editorialized, with unusual fervor for SLO, that “If Governor Gavin Newsom does not want a large-scale rebellion,” he will recognize the Central Coast as his own region.
Most of the time, San Luis Obispo, rather than a place of revolt, is an escape from the permanent revolutions of life in our urban regions. I love the place since childhood, when my family stopped there on the car trips to the Bay Area. As an adult, I dreamed of a summer vacation on the super cool SLO coast, but the prices for high-season SLO motels were too high for a nonprofit journalist. Until the pandemic arrives.
We certainly didn’t become SLOcals
We escaped for the first time in a stifling week in July, when there were more than 100 in Southern California and 62 on a hill outside Cambria, where motorized accommodation at $ 400 a night rates was offering $ 99 rooms. Social distance was easy – the chalet had no interior corridors and there was almost no one around. Only a few days there they looked restorative – mental health therapy much cheaper than any psychiatrist.
We certainly didn’t become SLOcals. We don’t drink wine or like olallieberries. But we started to appreciate the diverse principalities of the Middle Kingdom: the sunny beauty of the Five Cities area, splashing in the stream that runs through downtown San Luis Obispo, the stripped excellence of Cal Poly, with such high graduation rates I dream of sending my son older over there.
Still, all of these are places in South County, and we learned that we prefer to spend time “beyond the slope” – that is, above the steep Passo Cuesta that divides north from south into SLO. We prefer the North County oaks and gardens, cars along Highway 46, Mexican food and mini golf in Atascadero and cookies and coffee in Cambria.
For me, the least stressful day of a very stressful 2020 came on the cold late summer afternoon, when I left my wife with her job and children to take classes online, and walked alone for a few miles along the beach at San Simeon State Park . My eyes were delighted by the landscape – looking at the coast, the sea and then Hearst Castle, closed to COVID. For two hours, in the middle of California, this middle-aged journalist saw no one else and imagined that the Middle Kingdom was his.
I walked as slowly as I could.
About the author
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.