“What do you think of Arnold?” a young Pakistani asked me as we passed the time at a cricket match in Lahore in 2003.

“I like his movies very much.”

“I like his movies too,” I said politely, “but I don’t like him as a politician.”

“Yes. Now he is going to be governor of which state?”

“California.”

“Yes.”

“You know that California is the biggest state?” I asked.

“Yes, I know.”

“I think that if Arnold wins in California,” I ventured, “Bush will win California [in the presidential election] next year.”

I was wrong in that prediction: Bush won re-election (just barely, if that), but he failed to carry California despite Arnold’s governatortorial victory. I included the conversation in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, partly as a reminder to myself to stick to my principle of never making specific predictions, because the world – in this case California in particular – is more complex and unpredictable than we tend to allow for.

Eight long years later Bush is sort of gone, though his fell legacy lingers around America and worldwide, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has come and gone, trailing a stench of sexual scandal offscreen. But California, for better or worse, isn’t going anywhere. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Americans have long looked to California for omens and portents of where our country as a whole is headed. That felt good when California was thriving. These days we might be more inclined to avert our eyes, though it will be better for us if we don’t.

Tom Petty, who had the good sense and good timing to get the most out of California when the getting was good, composed a ditty around a clever couplet: “California’s been good to me / I hope it don’t fall into the sea.”

California hasn’t been as good to me as it’s been to Tom Petty, but that’s partly because I didn’t give it the chance. Less than 18 months after moving here in 1989 for the most time-honored of American reasons – because I had no good reason to be anywhere else and, well, because it’s California – I left, because my brother invited me to travel with him in Central Europe during the summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That eye-opening adventure led to many others, but the great what-if in the back of my mind ever since has been how my life might have turned out if I had stayed in California.Before I left, I lived in Berkeley and commuted to a tie-wearing customer-service job in downtown San Francisco, at a small company called The Information Store. The company’s business model – soon rendered hopelessly quaint – was to send a guy on a motorcycle to various university libraries every day, to make photocopies of articles from scientific journals to Fedex or fax to scientists at pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey.

The job was a job, but it was my early-morning commute across the Bay Bridge, with its glorious view of the bay and of the City’s skyscrapers as the AC Transit bus emerged from the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island, that I fell in love with. Ever since I left abruptly in 1990 without really saying goodbye, California has been like the girl I might have married.

I’m writing this, at the end of a weekend business trip to the Bay Area, in the kitchen of friends in Richmond, a scorned and neglected working-class town at the north end of the East Bay. Every American metropolitan area has a nearby place that serves the ostensibly better class of people as a scapegoat for their fear and ignorance; in the Bay Area, that role is filled by Oakland and other East Bay cities like Richmond. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a traveling writer, it’s that it’s precisely in such places that one finds the truest and most telling stories, if one makes the effort to look for them beneath the rubble and obfuscation.

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