Revisiting Southern California with Richard Henry Dana


If you've ever been tempted to read the book "Two Years Before the Mast", I encourage you. Or not. If you're looking for a thrilling story, it will just be very long and tedious, without much happening. I'll sum it up for you: a young man in Boston takes a year off from college to be a sailor. There ya go.

If, on the other hand, you're like me with a fascination with Southern California, it's wonderful. He goes into wonderful detail about places that I'm familiar with, especially Santa Barbara, in 1835 and '36. And since I just finished reading it again, I've decided that he and I have a lot in common.

No, I wasn't a sailor, and I didn't go to Southern California in the 1830s. But I was a young man, and I spent a couple of years in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. By the way, the title "Two Years Before the Mast" doesn't mean that something is supposed to happen to the mast in that timeframe, it's just an old-fashioned expression which today we would say as "Two years on a boat, with a mast" - a mast being the thing that is used to hang a sail. He could have said "The two years I spent on a sailing boat", but it wouldn't have sounded as dramatic.

At the end of the book he adds what it felt like to him when he visited a couple of decades later. And his memories are a lot like mine, remembering when he was a young man, when he was seeking adventure, doing a job that he didn't particularly like, and while he was glad to have seen it, he was anxious to get back home.

In the book he spent a lot of time in an area that would have just been called California, when it was under Mexican rule. The names are the same for the most part, like San Diego, or Santa Barbara, but Ventura was still going by its full name San Buenaventura, and Los Angeles was still called the Pueblo. He spends time in San Pedro, and travels up to the Pueblo (LA) a few times, but remember that it was a long ride on a horse, and there were no freeways back then!

I can see Santa Barbara through his eyes. He naturally spent a lot of time outside (there were a few houses to visit in Santa Barbara, but not many, and besides he was a working man), and although I never did the type of strenuous work that he did, I spent a lot of time outside, too.

My memories are of people who wondered why I didn't really want to go into a building and sit there. I took my lunch to the beach, I walked along the creek with my neighbor's dog, I smelled the air, and I felt the ocean breeze. I was glad to leave, of course, like Dana was, and my memories are bittersweet.

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