Big Dreams (31 page)

“I couldn’t exist anywhere but in California,” he said in a quiet voice. “Except maybe around Boston.”

The route Lanier had followed to the Coast was composed of many eventful twists and turns. His parents were nomadic, possession-free sixties people, he told me, and they had moved from New York to the deserts of southern New Mexico shortly after his birth. Young Jaron went to grammar school in Juarez, across the border, the lone white kid in a Mexican classroom. He described himself as a “very, very strange child,” sensitive, bored with his teachers, and already leading a rich fantasy life.

His father, a science writer, set up a tent in the desert and began building a house around it with Jaron’s help. The house was enormous and eclectic, assembled from found materials. It had four geodesic domes, and through them you could see crystal shapes beaming and flashing.

At the age of fifteen, Lanier prematurely advanced himself by forging a high school diploma and matriculating at New Mexico State University. Music was his first love then, the hum of synthesizers
and the allure of keyboards, and he went on “an artist trip” and played his music at coffeehouses in New York, often destroying his instrument as part of a performance.

That got old after a while, so Lanier, not yet twenty, cycled back to the university and discovered the compelling power of computers. He liked the made-up quality of computer imagery, all the little worlds you could generate, so many of them vastly more interesting than the real world. The tragic thing about
actual
physical reality, he had learned, was that it was mandatory.

Silicon Valley summoned him to the Coast. To transport himself, he rescued a car that someone had abandoned in the desert after a drug arrest. Bullet holes poked through its hull in large numbers but, against the odds, the car made it to California and Lanier was launched on his career in the chipland of instant millionaires.

He designed a computer game, Moondust, which incorporated music and imagery, and won some awards and earned some money. For a time, he designed games for Atari and later, on his own, devised a visual programming language, Mandala, whose merits were touted in
Scientific American
as a major advance in software. When an editor phoned in 1984 to ask about Lanier’s corporate affiliation, he invented VPL Research, Inc., on the spot.

That was the essence of the computer business—to produce something out of nothing. Investors and would-be partners were soon knocking at his door, and he chose to establish his workshop in Redwood City because, he said, Silicon Valley was “too sterile.” Now Virtual Reality was Lanier’s main interest. He defined
virtual
to mean anything that existed only as an electronic representation.

Virtual Reality created an artificial environment, but that was nothing new. In the 1940s, NASA had used such environments for flight simulation. There were patents on record for whole techno-worlds. An engineer at MIT had built a prototype of a head-mounted unit in 1968, and an inventor had once come up with a Sensorama Stimulator that tickled the central nervous system with 3-D images, a binaural soundtrack, and smells from an odor cannister.

VPL’s most valuable wrinkle so far was a DataGlove (list price, $8,800) that NASA used. The glove was a sleek, form-fitting sci-fi item laced with flexible fiber-optic cables. When you put it on, it reproduced the motions of your fingers and hands in a computer-generated landscape. You pointed to something, and your virtual hand pointed.

The worlds to be explored were as diverse as the individuals drawing them, Lanier believed. All you needed was a good graphics program for your computer. You drew the world in full color—a jungle, a baseball diamond, the set of a porno flick—donned your gloves and your EyePhone (a head-mounted display unit with stereo sound), and entered your own brain, courtesy of the VPL RB2 Virtual Environment package—work station, tranceivers, software, and so on, at a list price of $45,275.

Those who had taken the journey often invoked the name of Walt Disney. The virtual worlds seemed real in the way of a cartoon. The psychedelic aspects of the trip were obviously enticing. For Lanier, though, the big payoff might still be somewhere down the line, with the Home Reality Engine.

As he imagined it, the Home Reality Engine would plug into a phone outlet. The owner would have display goggles with little stereo speakers to catch the noises of a virtual world. The goggles might also have sensors to relay facial contortions to a virtual face.

Lanier gave me an example. Suppose that you decided to be a cat prowling in some garbage cans. If you rolled your eyes, the cat’s eyes would roll. Or you might like to become a mountain range, a galaxy, or a pebble. The Home Reality Engine would have access to arbitrary physics, too, so that a saxophone could play not only notes but words or cities or comets.

In a virtual world, anything was possible. Lanier, who accepted the seer’s mantle with a minimum of protest, felt that Virtual Reality might be used someday in biomedicine and communications. It was, he said, the ultimate gadget, and its skin had barely been peeled. At moments, he thought that VR would breed a successor to the telephone—he’d
been having enthusiastic talks about this with Pactel, in fact.

Lanier was not without concerns about his brainchild. He knew how an innocent technology could be corrupted. The best Virtual Reality units in the country belonged to the military. Then there was the problem of information replacing experience. He also fretted that Virtual Reality might mutate into a kind of mega-television in the wrong hands. The idea was thoroughly repugnant to him. TV watching, he said, was a clinical form of death.

S
OUTH, SOUTH
, down the peninsula. Say it’s the year 2008, and the average commuter has sailed home to Palo Alto from his San Francisco office in just under three hours, not bad for a Thursday in July. He unlocks the door of a two-bedroom bungalow that he and his wife, Judy, have paid a million dollars for, financing the mortgage through Osaka Securities. She’s still on the road, working her way back from Contra Costopolis (elapsed time, ninety minutes), so the average commuter—let’s call him Ed Hastings—pops open a cold brewskie and thinks about some dinner.

Ed’s up for a barbecue, but it isn’t his allotted monthly burn day. Besides, barbecuing hasn’t been much fun since the sky turned that funny color, and the water department outlawed lawns. Ed lifts a Venetian blind, stares at the weeds out there, and ponders whether or not he should haul in a truckload of crushed rocks from Yardbirds, like the Farquarsons did next door.

In the fridge, Ed finds some nice tomatoes, beautifully irradiated. It’s incredible how long the damn things last. He slices one, sprinkles on some virgin olive oil from Napa, and eats it al fresco, the way old Alice Waters suggests. That Alice is something—she must be nearly a hundred. The tomato has an off-flavor, but Ed grins and bears it. He’s not about to shell out thirty bucks a pound for those vine-ripened beefsteaks over at Real Foods.

The clock ticks, but there’s still no Judy. Ed pops open another
brewskie and falls into a reverie about his impending vacation, three days at Yosemite. Don Farquarson said that they were lucky to get in, but, hell, they’d tried the lottery for nine straight years without even scoring a campsite.

Ed shuts his eyes and dreams about fishing the Merced River. It’ll be turned on that Monday and Wednesday. He imagines a romantic dinner at the new John Muir Hotel and Spa, and his heart skips a beat at the prospect of all the neat nature that they’ll see, great birds long gone from the Bay Area, bluejays, robins, and even crows.

Eight o’clock and no Judy. Ed pops yet another brewskie, lifts a Venetian blind, and hears a familiar buzz all down the block, the sound of Home Reality Engines being switched on. He’s been hoping to cut back on the time he spends at his workstation, but with Judy stuck on the freeway—and why do they call them
free
ways, anyhow, when you have to pay a toll?—there’s no point in being a martyr.

So he toddles to the entertainment center and gets into his virtual suit. Darn, but the fiber-optic cables are giving him a skin rash again! He flips on the Apple Mac XXXXIV, fits it with a graphics package, and starts sketching.

He doesn’t recognize what he’s drawing at first. It’s got a little dog, a lawn, some willow trees—hey, it’s his boyhood home in Levittown! Those were the days, all right, way before he met Judy and before he knew anything about California, back when there were no burn schedules and you could fire up the Weber whenever you wanted to, when tomatoes actually grew in suburban gardens.

Gee, Ed thinks, it was a regular paradise out there on Long Island.

S
URELY ED AND JUDY HASTINGS
would be subscribers to
Sunset
, “the magazine of western living,” which had its offices in Menlo Park, not far from Redwood City. Any doubts I might have had about
Sunset
’s success at spreading an image of California as a place from
which controversy, black moods, impetigo, ugly people, and plain old trouble had been banished was put to rest by the grandeur of its corporate headquarters.

Lane Publishing Company sprawled in hacienda-style over seven-and-a-half acres. It was lunchtime when I arrived, and everywhere employees were hurrying to get in some exercise before their break was over. They could attend a company-sponsored aerobics class, join in a basketball game, Nautilize themselves at the fitness center, or simply go for a jog. The hardcore jocks headed for Stanford, where they ran up and down the steps of the football stadium.

Never before had I seen so much Lycra and spandex in a business environment. The workers made me uneasy. They were doing too much oxygen.

At
Sunset
, the myth of human perfectability still seemed to be in ascendance. If only you ran fast enough, ate healthily enough, thought chastely enough, and so on, maybe you could occupy a special plane in time and space that would be like Michael Jackson’s hyperbaric chamber and keep the aging process at bay.

For eons, the magazine itself had been selling a similarly unblemished vision. Once a month, the editors served up an ideal blend of perfect gardens, perfect meals, perfect vacation trips, and perfect antidotes to dry rot. The formula could drive a person over the edge. You looked at the food on your plate, and it did not look like the food on the plates in the photograph,
even though you’d followed the recipe perfectly!

Lane Publishing had a library where visitors could peruse back issues. The earliest ones dated from 1898 and bore the imprimatur of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose promotional geniuses had founded the magazine to encourage tourist travel on such trains as its
Sunset Limited
. Even as an embryonic venture,
Sunset
had a creed. Its editors hoped to supply “publicity for the attractions and advantages of the Western Empire.”

Yosemite Valley was the first attraction it pushed. In a featured
article illustrated with the photos of Joseph Le Conte, a Berkeley geology professor and a “member of the Sierra Club,” the merits of the park were touted in heroically banal prose that relied heavily on certain adjectives that would cling to Yosemite forever—majestic, inspiring, sublime. The old warhorse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was even trotted out for a testimonial.

“It is the only spot I have ever found,” Emerson said, “that came up to the brag.”

A roundtrip train ticket from San Francisco cost thirty-eight dollars, and the final leg of the journey involved a “picturesque” stagecoach ride through the Sierra Nevada foothills.

In 1914, Southern Pacific sold
Sunset
to its staff, who turned it into a literary journal and thereby insured its unprofitability. It limped along until L. W. Lane, an advertising man, bought it fourteen years later for sixty thousand dollars.

Lane was an innovative thinker. He saw the West as a nation apart from the rest of the country, with its own special climate, mores, history, and family arrangements. The West had a tradition of independence, he thought—a pioneering spirit and a how- to attitude. He insisted that articles should be practical as well as charming. His editors were also instructed to concentrate on areas of expertise that were crucial to an understanding of life on the Pacific Coast, such as gardening, cooking, travel, and home building and remodeling.

Above all,
Sunset
was intended to be useful, targeted at an audience that was laboring hard in its spare time to turn their little patch of backyard into the New Eden. The magazine lost money for a while, but it was in the black by the mid-1930s, with subscribers avidly awaiting such helpful stories as “Weekend Homes for Woods-Loving Westerners” and the best recipes for chipped beef pudding.

In a brilliant editorial stroke, Lane eventually split
Sunset
into four separate editions, each catering to the needs of a distinct bio-region. The fuchsia grower in Crescent City, say, faced different challenges than the one in San Diego. The magazine’s circulation
soon topped a million a month and hundreds of books were spun off from it, addressing in glossy fashion such questions as the building of decks and the pruning of fruit trees.

Sunset
held family values dear. Written by an in-house staff, it developed a bouncy, insular optimism. In all the volumes on the shelves in Menlo Park, there was never a hint of darkness. Instead, flipping pages, I stood face to face with the perfect fern, the perfect hot tub, and the perfect avocado.

E
DWIN BRYANT HAD NEVER VISITED
Menlo Park and Lane Publishing, of course, but a tall tale that he had related in his book came into my mind. As an example of the rumors about California that were flying around Kentucky, he offered the story of a poor Californian who had lived to be two hundred and fifty but had not yet died.

The old man was beside himself. He’d had quite enough of being alive, but the “youth-preserving” climate on the Coast had kept him in perfect health. He became so unnerved that he thought about suicide, but the holy padres at the nearest mission advised him that he would fry in hell. At last, deeply upset about continuing to exist, he had accepted some advice from a relative—possibly an heir, Bryant remarked—and moved away into the Nevada territory, where he promptly expired.