Released: December 1965

Album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes & Ears

---

---

“I’d be safe and warm
if I was in L.A.“

---

Throughout my childhood and when the funding allowed, the family would pile into my Dad’s pickup truck to traverse across Arizona, Nevada, and the Mojave Desert, making our way to Southern California. There we’d engage in the usual family outings at amusements parks, piers, and, of course, the beaches. It was during these trips that I would develop a deep love and respect for the ocean. So profound was this love that it would seep into my subconscious, my being soaking it up as a desert floor greedily absorbs the rain.

Coming from the Dine Reservation in New Mexico, I dreamed of seeing the ocean again, thinking about its sparkling expanse in the setting sun, the soothing shush of the waves on rock and sand, the smell of salt in the air. This was oceanside poetry punctuated with the sound of seagulls and beachgoers laughing, talking, living. If I’d had my way, I’d’ve spent the entire trip by the sea while the rest of the family went to Disneyland, Sea World, or whatever the itinerary was for that year. Give me just the ocean and I would have been the happiest boy on the West Coast.

California Dreamin’ by the Mamas & the Papas became one of my Californian anthems. Though it was originally released in the mid-1960s, its melancholy nostalgia appealed to me, a rez kid born in 1980, at a very deep level. Coming in at less than three minutes, California Dreamin’ summarized an unexplained longing I had for the West Coast. This longing became more evident especially during harsh New Mexican winters when the wind would blew its frigid breath across the cracked desert clay. Clear, winter mornings often meant bitter cold, dry air that felt like razors sliding across skin, scraping off layers to expose what lies beneath to the icy elements.

On those mornings, I’d long for the smell of palm trees and the sound of the beloved ocean, hoping that the next year would bless us with another long trek back to sunshine and sounds of the sea.