When you arrive at Los Angeles International Airport, like here at Logan, you are greeted over the intercom by a local elected leader. In L.A., it’s Mayor Karen Bass, welcoming you to the “entertainment capital of the world.” At Logan, Boston Mayor Wu and Governor Healey gamely try to excite visitors with odes to biotech and the birthplace of basketball. We have, or at least had, Damon and a couple of Afflecks. Oh, and Moderna. They have everyone else. Advantage: California.
On a recent almost weeklong road trip from south of L.A. to the Central Coast, I wasn’t consciously comparing Beantown with Hollywood, et al. But competitiveness comes naturally to we of the city of champions and its North Shore environs. So how do we compare on issues of utmost importance (to me, the audience of one)?
Let me get the easy seasonal wins for the Golden State out of the way. Palm trees or bare-branched maples? Green covered foothills or hills of dirty snow? Fresh picked berries that still taste of sunshine or the plasticky variety around here that taste every bit of the hundreds of miles they’ve traveled? Gardens bordered by trees dripping with lemons or by last summer’s hydrangeas dripping with dead brown flowers? Not even close. Advantage: California.
Roadside signs on the freeways boast of the ubiquitous opportunities for higher education on the West Coast. I drove through Pomona and Scripps colleges in Claremont, and I don’t know how those students concentrate, between the beauty of the Spanish-style architecture, flowering trees, swaying palms and artisan coffee offering distractions from Economics 101.
But aren’t most scholastic TV and movie dramas set on New England campuses? Even Hollywood knows serious educational endeavors require windswept quads, gray stone veneers and gray skies perfectly matched to gray moods as well as a Stah-bucks or Dunks on every corner. Advantage: home.
Speaking of freeways, the traffic was as I expected. Absolutely horrible. Just like home. Advantage: tie.
I saw two self-driving vehicles in the time it took me to get from the airport to a friend’s house downtown. As in, no one at all in the drivers’ seats. As in, vehicles so adorned with cameras and sensors that it seemed ET had returned to earth to become a car designer. It was creepy. It felt unsafe. And unhinged. Advantage: home.
Speaking of tired actual human drivers after hours in said traffic? They need a glass of wine. Preferably from a Vineyard an hour or so away. Owned by a couple who the bartender personally knows. A bartender who also can speak confidently about the soil the grapes were grown in and, by the way, the vintner’s brother is a farmer and his fresh lamb and seasonal roasted carrots are on the menu today, too. Local extraordinary wines and farm-to-table offerings year round? Advantage: California.
I’m starting to feel guilty about the scorecard, so let me find some easy wins for our home turf. Starting with vibe. Theirs is all breezy, creative, surfy, smiley, easygoing, “I came here 10, 15, 20 years ago and never left, dude.” Ours is double parking, middle-fingering, “my mothah was born in the same house I live in, why would I evah leave, and it’s not my job to shovel your part of the sidewalk, a-hole.”
Um, maybe let’s not talk about vibe.
Sunrise over the Atlantic versus sunset over the Pacific? Tie.
Ah, I got this. Earthquakes and wildfires. Didn’t I grow up hearing, “Don’t move to California; someday it’s going to drop into the sea?” We don’t have those. Oh, shoot. We do. Never mind.
As I write this I am winging my way across the country and will land some time before midnight. I’ll hear the entreaties of Wu and Healey that I’m really, really going to like it here. And against the odds, I do. Better than California. It’s home.
And by the way, on my recent road trip, I was accompanied by my daughter, a college senior, who wanted to spend her last spring break with her mother. Sunshine year round? Bah. Advantage: me, spending time with my girl and coming home to my Shubies-purchased California white.
Virginia Buckingham is the president of the Current’s board of directors. Her column appears every other week.
Virginia Buckingham
Virginia Buckingham is a former president of the Marblehead Current board of directors, a frequent commentator on WCVB’s On the Record and author of “On My Watch A Memoir.” She is working on a second memoir, “As This Mountain” in her newly empty nest and writes a biweekly column for the Current.
