Christmas Odyssey

It's getting close to the time of year when a pilgrimage is in order, and I'm all up for an adventure. Four Christmas seasons of my childhood were spent with my mother and sister on Interstate 15, between Interstate 80 in Salt Lake City and the point where it merges into Interstate 5 in National City, CA, home of the Mile of Cars. Subsequently, there isn't an 800-mile stretch of road in the U.S. that means more to me.

From the smoky inversion of the Salt Lake Valley to the high, clear, pungent air around Cedar City, down through red-clay-bluffed St. George and clipping the parched corner of Arizona at the mouth of the twisted Virgin River Canyon. Through balmy Mesquite to my beloved Vegas, a childhood icon of all things cosmopolitan, maybe to spend an exciting night or maybe to drive straight through and watch the vast twinkling fade into the abyss of desert night out the rear windshield.

First the silver diesel Chevette and later a cozy caramel Toyota Corolla wagon nicknamed Nelly ran I-15 south from Vegas, past the joshua trees and pink sand and somewhere later intersecting Zzyzx Road (a must if you intend to complete the alphabet game), stopping in Baker, or maybe Barstow, for overpriced gas and the do-it-yourself sundae bar at the AM/PM. Then, just after Victorville, dropping down into California in earnest, slipping into continuous urban landscape, mall after mall, palm and pepper trees, townhouses, pools and perfectly landscaped, paved eternity. My sister and I, juvenile asthmatics, gasped for a good thirty miles while adjusting to the damp. The lower you got down into the San Bernardino valley the easier it was to find oxygen, but the more smog there was to burn your throat and lungs and sting your eyes instead. Greener and wetter, after our grave Wyoming winter landscape, brighter and warmer, shedding layers of winter clothes as we got closer to the Pacific.

Somewhere before Hidden Meadows and the Lawrence Welk Resort, a magnificent concrete arch spans the freeway, and the urban landscape gives way to soft mountains covered in dense green brush and sprinkled with massive yellow boulders. People have carved vineyards and orchards in ordered steps on their rocky slopes, and it always made me think of Italy to look at them. Then farther south, to Escondido, back to mild coastal desert, between neatly developed suburbs, past the Air Force base at Miramar and through the busy college area of San Diego. Bypassing the heart of downtown and the bay, we connected with I-5 after the Coronado Bridge, down by the Navy base, then the river and the beginning of east/west Highway 54, distinctly dividing National City and Chula Vista. A few blocks in from the highway, past Target and up the hill and there was Dad, after six or so months of no Dad, somewhat grizzled but cheery, ready to share with us the place in the world he thought of as very nearly perfect.

Tall and strong, simple, fun-loving Dad, befriended by the kindest landlords, David and Jane. David smoked a pipe with the strangest sweet tobacco, and Jane handed us a long tool with a claw-like basket at the end to pick lemons off the tree in their backyard. A real fruit tree! To mountain-and-desert children it was the greatest novelty. And what times! Theme parks and museums and wooden carousels, puppet shows, restaurants, Mexico, Balboa Park and Old Town, movies, malls, horseback riding, and our favorite, the beach. After Wyoming's glacial Fremont and Utah's chilly Bear Lake, the storm-churned winter Pacific was never too cold for us. I remember the locals surveying us skeptically as we splashed in the green water, comfortable even without wetsuits, and happily built sandcastles in gray December sand. Years later, when San Diego became our permanent home, it became our tradition to stroll quietly on the beach on Christmas afternoon in our shorts and flip-flops, so we could tell our Wyoming relatives when they made the holiday calls later in the day.

Christmas is wherever my family is, but this time of year I still start to think about a holiday parade in the coastal fog, playing a light brass arrangement of Feliz Navidad along Orange Avenue in Coronado, the Crown City, a beautiful soft pink city with green parks and shaded lanes and walled mansions dripping in ivy and jewel-bright bouganvillea. I remember parades of lighted boats reflected in the nighttime harbor, viewed from the stone wall of quaint Seaport Village. The San Diego Wild Animal Park, a worthy attraction any other time of year, is extraordinary at Christmas time, as are Sea World and the San Diego Zoo, Chula Vista's Candy Cane Lane, Horton Plaza and the Hotel Del Coronado, and resplendent at the city's heart, San Diego's elegant cultural and historical hub, Balboa Park. One Christmas I played with the symphony at a gala at the San Diego Museum of Art at Balboa. It was a holiday spectacle with a Dr. Seuss theme, featuring a massive enclosed tent set up in the courtyard in front of the museum. It was filled with dining tables artistically decked out to emulate Seuss's whimsical work, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. There were masses of cotton snow and quarts of glitter, hundreds of garlands of tinsel and miles of green and white silk and rich red velvet, red linen napkins and real silver and china glinting in mellow candlelight. I have seen nothing more opulent and theatrical before or since.

I love Christmas lights. I love to be visually dazzled, and aside from fireworks, I can't think of anything I'd rather gaze at than Christmas lights (except possibly some walls in the Louvre, a place I may never see again). From many parts of San Diego, especially Imperial Beach, which was my home, you can clearly see the glittering expanse of Tijuana spread out on the hills past the Mexican border. It seems like this time of year, even that blighted region glows brighter, sparkles with extra energy. Traditionally every architectural detail of the Hotel Del Coronado is lined with lights, making it almost painful to look at, and the five crowning rings of a downtown building constructed of five cylindrical towers are lit up in alternating red and green neon. Horton Plaza, the massive, multi-level mall downtown goes all out with massive garlands and bows and lights, and the tasteful lattice-work palace that houses the botanical garden in Balboa Park gets a mantle of lights that glow twice again in the reflecting ponds in front and fountains at either side. The baroque trim on the park's organ pavillion for once are buried in evergreen and gold bulbs, and Cabrillo bridge, which spans Laurel Street onto El Prado over downtown Hwy 163 (quite possibly the most beautiful stretch of urban freeway in the world), is lit triple when every lamp along its length is spiraled by strings of lights, which are also strung between each lamppost.

My first Christmas in San Diego, I lamented: how can we have Christmas without snow? And yet, it was, and every year moreso, until sometimes I look around winded, weathered, occasionally bland Wyoming and wonder what special glitzy ingredient is missing. I suppose in reality it's money, but I'd rather think of it as that peculiarly San Diegan way of going the extra mile to make people stop and stare, stunned, open-mouthed and statue-still at the extraordinary beauty of your city. I think it's community pride personified, and I'm grateful for it.