When the World Tips Over

Agriculture is a major component of California’s economy. According to the United States Census of Agriculture, the state contains about 4% of the country’s farms but produces 11% of the country’s agricultural products. Even when the infamous Gold Rush ended, immigrants continued to journey to the state, drawn by the promise of natural beauty and fertile soil. The success of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath cemented the idea of California as a destination offering a better life. In the 1930s, a period of severe drought and subsequent dust storms destroyed farms in the Great Plains, an ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. Many Great Plains families moved to California, like the Joad family of Steinbeck’s novel. Even though the Joads did not find their hopes realized, California continued to gain power in the American imagination as a promised land, in part because of fanciful, even magical associations with Hollywood and the film industry in Los Angeles.

The countercultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed widespread backlash to traditional norms, found a thriving outlet in San Francisco, particularly in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where poets and intellectuals continued the beat movement that had emerged in the 1950s. Detractors called these youthful rebels against consumerism and conformity “hippies.” While some hippies were political activists protesting the Vietnam War, others sought independence from social expectations and followed what they considered more spiritual paths, often supported through the use of alcohol or hallucinogenic substances.

Hippies expressed themselves through a bohemian aesthetic, avoidance of consumer culture, and a rejection of traditional expectations of sexual relations like monogamy. Marigold’s preference for a mobile home, frequent sexual partners, substance use, and insistence on freedom reflects her desire to embrace a hippie lifestyle; even the change of her name from Mary to Marigold marks her as a so-called “flower child,” as hippies were sometimes called. Marigold’s fascination with California as a promised land—consolidated in her wish to find The Town—arises from those early mythological associations of the territory as a place of opportunity and abundance.