Giving the direction of inland when living in Southern California


I was history adventuring a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine here in Arizona when he used the expression "inland". We were traveling north on I-17 towards Flagstaff from Phoenix, and were looking for an exit to go to the right, and of course he meant "east". He had grown up in Southern California and I lived there in the '80s and neither of us gave the expression any thought - we both knew what it meant. And then it hit me what he had just said.

Southern California is considered from San Diego to Santa Barbara. No one really pays attention to the exact geography, it's just a given that San Francisco is in Northern California, and Monterey is in Central California. And while overall the coast of California goes north and south, the cities that are built on the coast aren't necessarily at right angles to the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking for myself, I'm pretty good at North-South-East-West, but anytime you're close to the Pacific Ocean, it's confusing to picture it as anything but the west coast. So going from Malibu to Calabasas, which is going north, is really better expressed as inland. That way you're just getting a general feeling that you're moving away from the ocean, and going further into dry land.

If you follow me here, you can see why exiting east from the I-17 freeway is inland. Well, it makes sense to me, and was so obvious to both my friend and I that at first we didn't even notice that he'd said "inland".

The opposite of inland is seaward, although I'd never heard of any using that term when I lived in Southern California. In Los Angeles, south of Santa Monica, anything inland from Sepulveda was called "the trees" and west of it was "the ocean". There you could have just said East and West, but since my friends lived on the oceanside, they were snooty about it, and "the trees" was a slightly derisive term.
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