The Story of the Valley

1. None of this was her idea. The California clan is not trustworthy. The whole family is questionable, especially the Southern ones. They create fairytale princesses who never grow up into women. They perfect make-believe movie stars built of real people who are frequently suicidal and anorexic. They cheat you out of dreams you haven’t even had yet. They’re practically vampires. They cash in people’s futures for fifteen minutes of fame or one good hit. They can devour the strong as well as the weak, but they prefer the lucky.

2. The Southern Californias were the Kardashians before the Kardashians were Kardashians. Like the rest of the family, San Fernando Valley California or “The Valley,” is the daughter of Don Pio de Jesus Pico, the Afro-Latino patriarch of the Southern Californias. He was the favored son of the mythical Aboriginal African warrior and Queen, Califia, for whom the whole family is named. Don Pico was renowned for his extravagant lifestyle of fine clothes, expensive toys, and excessive gambling. Don Pico never denied his children much of anything.

3. San Fernando Valley California is the only redeemable member of the whole Southern clan. One might think that being the child of one of the wealthiest cattlemen in the West would make The Valley as prone to excess as Don Pico’s other children, but it hasn’t. Unlink Don Pico’s other children, The Valley wasn’t born on the family homestead. She was born in the South.

4. Even with her close proximity to Hollywood (the coked and coquetted darling daughter) and Los Angeles (the fast-moving, self-obsessed, heir apparent), The Valley is just different. She’s dustier, wilder, more open, and more sincere. She wraps her mountains around her like a protective wall and only allows folks in if they manage to take one of her passes.

5. She’s clearly been hurt before and can hand you a map of her active faults. On her bad days, she’s a weekly wild fire. Her rage with shake the ground and level buildings. She’s definitely as dangerous as her siblings, but she’ll never really make you feel that way.

6. She disarms folks with her relentlessly sunny disposition, her unashamed reliance on the word “like,” and the way she always ends her statements by raising her tone as if she’s always asking a question.

7. The Valley is too affected by her small-town roots to seem callous, so she is both likable and genuine. Her mother was the daughter of a former sharecropper and a Spanish missionary that came up from Florida. They watched the California clan expand their fortunes (after getting annexed by the United States in 1848) before sending the leggy, slightly awkward, deeply tanned, sandy-haired girl west, alone.

8. She has enough good-natured ditziness to always have good timing. The Valley waited out the frenzy of the Gold Rush, then took the Southern Pacific Railroad over from New Orleans. She arrived just in time for the oil boom of 1892. The entire family noticed the convenience of her timing, but there was more than enough profit to go around and she was a kinsman, so Don Pico allowed it.

9. Despite her airheaded habits, The Valley has always been smart. Within two years of the start of the oil boom, she commissioned a good number of the over 500 oil wells pumping across the county. She then diversified into agricultural developments leveraging her many water springs and the fertile silt deposited by her changeable rivers.

10. The Valley will always be the underdog. After the death of their father in 1894, her brother, born Pueblo de Nuestro Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, shortened his name to Los Angeles and sought blood. He wanted to consolidate his California holdings and solidify his rule of the Southern kingdom. He attacked her first. By 1935, he annexed most of her land, forcing her to become a member of the City of Los Angeles in order to secure any rights to the draw municipal water from the newly finished California aqueduct system. This move cost her her ultimate sovereignty and lost her Burbank, San Fernando, and Universal City.

11. The Valley took the World Wars as an opportunity to double down on diversity in every sense. Having lost her sovereignty and control of her tax revenue, she created local revenue cycles and expanded into agriculture, aerospace, manufacturing, and construction. She also focused on luring ethnic residents from L.A. and the Southern states to work in these industries. Her punchy 1960s advertisements featured orange trees, shiny cars, pretty ladies, and victory gardens in every yard.

12. She’s unsinkable. It took her a while to get the hang of the regional political mayhem and she took definitely took some giant losses from the family’s maneuvering, but her comebacks have been pretty epic. In the period between 1965 and 1995, she survived two riots (spilling over from L.A.), two earthquakes of 6.5 or more, a recession, and the crack cocaine epidemic.

13. The Valley is a weird combination of foreign and familiar. You’ll know you’ve seen her somewhere before. Of course, you have. She’s sheltered many folks clamoring to get into Hollywood’s elusive good graces. From the 1980s to the 2000s, they learned the secrets of her valley girl ways: the patterns of her speech, the universality of her teenage angst, and the wide-eyed optimism of her every crush. Then, they prostrated before Hollywood, offering glimpses of The Valley’s life in script after script for Hollywood’s misuse. For a time, these vagrants dined heartily at the breakfast club and pretended they were clueless.

14. She has creative ways of telling her haters to “suck it.” From 1997 to March 2008, The Valley’s median home prices more than doubled from $155,000 to $500,000. Then, the housing market crashed. Adding insult to injury many of the subprime loans that caused the crisis came from banks headquartered in L.A. rather than local lenders. Killing two grudges with one stone, the Valley crafted lucrative partnerships between relatively fancy, unsellable real estate; unemployed, independent film workers; unemployed actors; and the underutilized distribution warehouses. From San Fernando Valley to San Porn-nando Valley, she became the undisputed capital of pornography for the United States.

15. She’s one of the most resilient and innovative (and maybe a little petty) broads you’ll ever meet. The Valley is the well-dressed, non-descript ethnic woman you meet at the senior center during your internship there. She smoked cigarettes from an enameled metal case before she quit and you know she’d drink bourbon. She is spry and flirty and somehow still elegant. She tells you stories that only narrowly avoid having cuss words in them and are always about her doing something she wanted to do with beautiful people she has long outlived. She helps you understand what women are made of and why the ones that came before us fought for a better life. She changed you for the better and you know you’ll miss her when you leave.