The Sacramento airport was beautiful and ultra-new, pristine in the fields northwest of the city, with nothing else around. One rides a small tram to the main terminal.
I caught a cab into town---a ten minute ride on the Interstate past green fields of grass. The Indian subcontinent driver, a grey-haired grandfather who had lived many years in Sacramento by now, told me in his still thick accent that the green grass beside the road was very new. Until a week before, everything had been parched because of the long drought. But a round of rain had brought the land back to life.
My hotel---the Governors Inn---was on the north edge of town, off the Interstate. Inside the lobby was a cage containing two parakeets named Ronald and Nancy. I laughed at the joke. The guy at the reception was a German. He chided me for not using the free hotel shuttle from the airport. "And why didn't you call us?" he asked me in his own accent.
"C'est la vie," I told him. He repeated it back to me, as a means of saying "alas."
Sacramento has some poignant personal memories for me. I came through here thirty years ago on my first vagabonding road trip, on my way to see. It had been so cold in Colorado and coming across the Great Basin. I woke up in Sacramento as we came into the station around dawn and felt myself warm for the first time in months. I felt like I was really in California, and free, for the moment at least.
Also my grandparents were married here, during World War II, even though neither of them lived here at the time. I didn't even get the whole story about that until a couple years ago from a relative I visited back in Indiana.
In the morning I walked on the path along the Sacramento River into downtown, meandering through Old Sacramento, which is a living history district meant to recreate the days of the building of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was bustling with tourists on a week day, some of them snapping selfies with the bust of Theodore Judah.
Then after working for a while at a Starbucks in the downtown outdoor mall on K Street, I treated myself to something that had been on my list for a long time, during my travels around the state---a visit to the California State Capitol.
It seemed like the fitting thing to do, since I had covered nearly every corner of the state in the last few years, and had amassed some amazing experiences and met some extremely interesting people.
I've toured many state capitols around the country over the last ten years, and so I think of myself as a capitol connoisseur. In that spirit I lingered for a while in the rotunda absorbing the intricacies of the interior of the dome, and meandered past as many governor's portraits as possible.
I particularly enjoyed the 1950's era addition, and its row of period showcases, one for each county in the state, decorated in a unique way as a diorama to reflect the county itself. California has a lot of counties, so the display cases lined much of the hallway in the addition.
In front of the governor's office, a state trooper stood guard behind a giant bear statue and a velvet rope.
The highlight of the tour was a visit to the third floor gallery of the California State Senate, where I took a seat and kibitzed on a tour that entered right after me. The tour guide castigated a young man on the tour for jumping over a railing in the gallery. "This building deserves more respect," she told him.
I agree. It goes without saying, that in these buildings, I tend to be on my best tourist/vagabond behavior of course, no matter what I may think of what goes inside them.
It's important to remember, I tell myself, that the building, and the government it houses, is not California per se, but simply an institution that represents official functions, all by the consent of the governed. Without that consent, the institution has no meaning, and espite our secular populist religion that asserts "the government is just us, the people, doing things to ourselves," there is nothing mystical about this building that makes it any more "California" that any other edifice in the state.
California is not an official institution and its architecture. It exists independent of that, and of any beautiful palatial building to brimming with pomp and glory.
Of course this is one way in which California is not special at all, since the same is true of any State of the Union, and also America as a whole.
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