What's wrong with San Diego

especially in this season

Dear potential future San Diegans,

This is probably the worst time of year to come to San Diego County to decide if you want to live here. The two weeks after Daylight Savings Time ends are the roughest. The days are shorter and growing ever more so, but unlike in more northern latitudes, there isn’t much cooling in the day time temperature or deciduous trees flaming into winter dormancy. My outfits still consists of t-shirts, shorts are a plausible option most days and the landscape is still blanketed in verdure. Nothing but the light’s quality and duration seems to change. It’s discombobulating to my Northern European genes.

When I left this place, fall was the thing that I enjoyed the most about living elsewhere. I loved the crisp evenings that necessitated whole additional categories of clothes I could own: sweaters, scarves, and coats. Coats became an obsession: I was enthralled with the ways that a good, interesting coat could transform me into a stylish, well-heeled person. With the right wool coat—one with clean lines and expensive buttons, I could look like a person who belonged walking underneath the trees of the university that I went to, not some bumpkin from a rural nowhere 3500 miles away. The right coat could allow me to pass in some spaces as a person whose family discussed the evening news and whose high school curricula included classic Greek and Roman literature in translation.

Growing up in San Diego County, the holidays and the traditional food seemed like a torture devised by the judge who mediated my parents’ divorce.¹ There was the obligatory two Thanksgivings in one day, in which all parties would be insulted if we didn’t eat a full plate at both meals. The food was better at my dad’s family, the heritage dishes of lefse and rømmegrøt my only exposure to Norwegian-American culture. The conversation with my mom’s family was more entertaining, sick burns flying from my teenaged cousins at the adults and returned third degree by my mom. My mom always overcooked the turkey, but she roasted those boys to perfection. Neither family ever thought to serve the meal outside, despite the strong likelihood of a perfect day to do so from year to year. It would have made the day less a holiday and more a backyard barbeque, a thing we did many weekends, without pumpkin pie. It would have made it a thing I could have said “No thanks” to, and read a book instead.

In a latitude where the weather cooled with shortening days, of course you’d want to stuff yourself silly: the thickening of body fat provided insulation through the cold winter. And talking with people over food was essential; with chilly evenings and long cold nights, storytelling seemed de rigueur entertainment. The holidays and their attendant rituals of gathering and eating made more sense to me living in places with true autumns.

And though the rituals of autumn are ones of gathering and settling in, I enjoyed moving through the newly changed landscapes, too. How a park that you had spent summer evenings lounging in its grass under the shade of two-hundred-year-old trees could be rendered foreign, carpets of browning dried leaves covering the grass and the bared branches hinting at the architecture of evolution, the fractal codes hidden in our genes. Fall in those other places hinted that dormancy wasn’t wasteful, but necessary for future production—of leaves and words and dreams. Rest comes in many forms and some lucky organisms take a full season of it.

Here in my natal latitude, though, the shortening of days as the sun makes its path through a more southerly position awakens only the need to move in me. I grow restless, concerned that I’ve not moved enough, still stuck in this place where the few deciduous trees won’t give up their leaves until January, and then immediately go into bud.

I enjoy one thing about fall here, a rare experience you can see nowhere else: the feral parrots move away from the coast, roosting noisily in palm trees inland. Catching a flock on the wing at sunset, cawing and screeching away, I’m comforted that these animals, the descendants of escaped pets smuggled from the equatorial regions, have also made a home here so far from the environment where their green wings and red crowns were adapted. You can be at home here and not from here is the lesson I receive from the parrots.

Potential future San Diegans, if you love your autumn colors and crisp breezes, now is not that the time to visit me. Come in February, when you need a break from winter and want to see some green. Come when the tropical plants that thrive here on our imported water bloom and when the hooded orioles flash their mustard-colored breasts amongst our palm trees. Come then, when this place feels the most like the paradise that those first East Coasters wanted to make.

Until then, though, we should talk about the stories that will get you through these next months of long nights. At the very least, I think I’ve got some movie recommendations for you.

Your formerly migratory friend,

X

1. Being contractually obligated as a minor to spend holidays with certain people is why I suck so much at them and am so good at future planning.