To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other’s whisper’d speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray…

Forget about Tennyson’s setting for his poem “The Lotos-Eaters.” The amber light, the ease of the wave-watchers; I don’t see Spain, Tennyson’s inspiration, or the African coast, where Strabo described an altar to Odysseus that still stood in his day. It is late summer in Napa Valley and my husband and I are on watch for the golden light. It has been summer here since February, when we received our last rainstorm. Since then the sunlight here has increased in intensity.

The grapes ripen and we bake. The afternoon sun crisps the western side of the Christmas tree we planted in January, giving it a sunburn. But if we wait until September, we will see it: the light will soften and the whole atmosphere will take on the sfumato and patina of an old oil painting.

With the amber light comes the harvest: apples, pears, and figs. First white wine grapes, then the red ones. The heady aroma of crushed grapes fills the valley. The light and the fermentation conspire to make life here appear fine and grand. No matter what your homeland was, why would you return?

When I set out to explore the idea of California as lotus-land, I had in mind a gossamer piece of writing, a distillation of that harvest radiance. I would keep it light, spinning with spider’s web instead of wool. Once I translated the references and reflected on what the land of the lotus-eaters meant for the Greeks, I found the analogy apt in deeper, unexpected ways. The Lethean place I sought at the outset became, out of necessity, tempered by reality. California is a new world lotus-land, and like the place of Greek myth, it partakes of a forgetfulness that is destructive.

The comparison between the land of the lotus-eaters and California goes as far back as the nineteenth century. The residents of Monterey were described as lotus eaters living in “lazy splendor.” In the last century The Eagles wove the theme into their song, “Hotel California,” and David Duchovny’s character Hank Moody recently made the metaphor in the series Californication: “Good morning, Hell-A. In the land of the lotus-eaters, time plays tricks on you.” We pass the time in this dreamy, hazy land, forgetting whatever might disrupt our idyll.

There’s an obvious parallel between the two places, of course — the one my high school students immediately sensed when I read the Odyssey with them during my first year as a teacher. “Duuude, want some… lotus? It’s hella sweet.” They thought this was hilarious, and I dared not crack a smile. Some survival instinct told me that my success as a 22-year-old teacher depended on it. So yes, there are the drugs, and they are an element. But not a necessary one; drugs cannot complete the analogy, as there is no substance that is specific to California as dates or fruit were native to the lotus-eaters’ land. 4/20 happens in California, or Oregon, or Colorado, and place becomes less and less relevant.

California is lovely and fertile in ways that set it apart from other places on earth, and these realities could be enough to enamor a person. We have not been content with what is real, however, and have created an image of California that is intoxicating. We have long relied upon the illusion of California as promised land and forgotten the inconvenient realities that attend our life here.

So there is no harm in yielding to California’s natural splendor, for this is its reality. One can feel the pleasant effects of this place without the lotus’ side effects of forgetfulness. Rather than dimming the past, in fact, exposure to the beauty of this state seems to intensify it. All senses are on alert. John Muir, apostle of California’s wild places, best explained this phenomenon:

This is a glacier meadow. It is about a mile and a half long by a quarter of a mile wide. The trees come pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly like soldiers on parade… With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling yourself contained in one of Nature’s most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial, human love and life delightfully substantial and familiar. The resiny pines are types of health and steadfastness; the robins feeding on the sod belong to the same species you have known since childhood; and surely these daisies, larkspurs, and goldenrods are the very friend-flowers of the old home garden. Bees hum as in a harvest noon, butterflies waver above the flowers, and like them you lave in the vital sunshine, too richly and homogenously joy-filled to be capable of partial thought. You are all eye, sifted through and through with light and beauty.

That beating, warm love and life must flow through the valleys and fields of California, for there are few places that rival its agricultural fertility. Practically anything can grow here, with some crops flourishing year-round. As a country, we have come to rely on California as the sole provider for crops such as artichokes, walnuts, kiwis, plums, and garlic, and it is the primary producer of many others. The value of California’s agricultural exports reached 21.24 billion dollars in 2013.

On the smallest level, my own family eats what we grow, sowing lettuce and carrots during every season. If we wanted to completely commit ourselves, we could feed ourselves primarily off of our two-and-a-half acres. My daughter, at four years old, forages in the garden when she is playing outside and wants a snack. There is always something to eat.

People who grow up in California take its bounty for granted. As a child in Montana I knew fruit could grow on trees, but there wasn’t much of it once the frost began and snow fell. One year, our family garden yielded solely rhubarb, which was fine, except for the poisonous leaves.

Imagine the astonishment of someone who moves here, having lived where agricultural endeavors require so much toil or resignation. Homeowners grow grapefruit, lemon, and orange trees, olive trees, fig trees, apple and pear trees, and a variety of nut trees. Some of it goes unharvested, ripe fruit falling to the ground; there is just too much.

This abundance historically extended to the seas. When the French explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse arrived in the Monterey bay in 1786, he was astounded at the variety and quantity of ocean life that he observed. “No country is more abundant in fish and game of every description,” he wrote. He was also perplexed as to why the Spanish had not already profited on this bounty, especially in the fur of the sea otter.

Those days ended quickly when the Russians and Americans soon began trading in otter furs. Then whalers came, followed eventually by the canneries in Monterey. The proliferation of sardines led cannery owners to declare that the sardine population in Monterey Bay could not be exhausted.

The reality of California’s soil, climate and natural resources has inspired an image that has long been ingrained in American culture. If you needed a better life or had aspirations of health and wealth, California would deliver. WC Fields famously portrayed this longing for the California dream in his film It’s a Gift. Hen-pecked Harold Bissonette toils away in New Jersey, scheming to get to California and own an “orange ranch.” His dream, despite his ineptitude, comes true, of course: the final scene places Harold in the shade, surrounded by his groves, squeezing fresh-picked orange juice into a tall glass of alcohol.

Life was similarly easy and bounteous in the land of the lotus-eaters. When Odysseus recounts his travels to Penelope, he describes the home of the lotus-eaters as rich (pieiran) arable land (arouran). Herodotus also describes the land of the lotus-eaters in his Histories, saying that the dwellers there eat only this sweet fruit, and also make wine from it. Surely this can’t be a bad life; couldn’t it even be a good one?

For Odysseus, however, and for later Greeks, consuming the lotus meant abandoning identity and embracing a forgetfulness that was little better than death. In Odysseus’ case, he and his men arrived at the land of the lotus-eaters after being driven off course by north wind for nine days. They had survived Troy and, doing what they seemed to do best, moved on to sack the city of the Cicones. Odysseus’ men lolled about after their conquest, drinking and eating, and were then caught and nearly destroyed by the Cicones’ allies. They took to their ships, but only just in time.

Once safely on shore in the lotus-eaters’ land, the Greeks ate again, but this time out of hunger. Then Odysseus sent three men to discover what sort of men lived there. These three encountered the lotus-eaters, who “did not devise destruction for our companions, but gave them lotus to eat.” The effects of consumption were immediate: “Whoever are the honey-sweet (meliedea) fruit of the lotus/ no longer returned, nor departed, / but desired to remain there, eating the fruit with the lotus-eating men,/ and to forget his homecoming (nostou).” Meliedea is a word that is used for fruit, wine, and homecoming; for the men in their altered state, it only applies to the lotus.

Odysseus then goes on to narrate how he led these three, weeping, back to his ships against their will (anagke). He kept them on board by dragging them under the benches in the hollow ships and tying them up there. They had to set sail right away, lest any of his other men eat the lotus and forget their homecoming, and they plied their oars, “grieving in their hearts.”

We are not sure if the men forgot their identities, their names, fathers’ names, and homelands — those scraps of humanity that all Greeks had clung to throughout the Trojan war. It is, for the modern reader, the details of home and family that set the warriors of the Iliad apart from one another; they make the soldiers individuals. As a student once commented, “It would be more fun to read about the killing if we didn’t know about the guy’s mother and children back home.” The tragedy of war is revealed on a human scale.

Whether or not they forgot their identities, they seemed not to care for anything but consuming the lotus. They would not return to their homelands after surviving war and the wrath of gods. Forgetful of their homecoming, their fate would be little better than that which they all dreaded during the Trojan war: a headless corpse on the beach, forgotten, food for dogs.

Later Greeks would recognize that forgetting who they were and their “Greekness” was, at the very least, inappropriate. As Xenophon and his men found themselves stuck in Persia, after Cyrus’ death, he spoke to them about the necessity of finding their way back to Greece. “I fear, if once we become accustomed to living life in laziness and plenty, and sleeping with the fair and tall women and maidens of the Medes and Persians, that just like the lotus eaters, we may forget our way home.” Xenophon is ribbing his men, of course, but the basic message is clear: this is no life for us Greeks.

We don’t eat lotus, and we can steer clear of good-looking Median women if we must; what danger is there in forgetting, in embracing an image that seems to only enhance reality? We have been trying to improve on nature in California for at least a century.

We have, however, made California into something it is not, a place that could produce and give and deliver without end. Yet once we forget the reality of limited resources, the illusion threatens to destroy what has inspired it. We hunted the otters to near extinction; they did not come back for a century. We harvested gray whales until their numbers dwindled, and their population has not boomed, despite their protected status. The sardine population collapsed because of overfishing, leading to the closure of the canneries in Monterey.

Californians have taken a similar approach to water. We pull it out of the earth and drill more wells if we need to. Lawns give the desert some variety and remind us that we are living the American dream in the land where dreams come true. We also cross our fingers that it will rain and snow quite a lot. For decades the true climate of California was ignored and forgotten, and Californians came to expect that their crops, pools and lawns would never run dry.

Now California is in its fourth year of drought and the lotus dream is over. The ground is subsiding in the fertile San Joaquin valley, cracking and sinking; we have pumped water beyond replacement level for the past hundred years.

When faced with drought, rationing and shortages, some Californians simply cannot accept reality; they are addicted to the image. They have to be led, so to speak, down to the ships and tied there, by force. An article from the Washington Post has made the circuit among my friends because it contains some mightily out-of-touch howlers from residents who cannot accept that water is limited. “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” one Californian says. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” Another resident sums up the plight of the former lotus-eater: “California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom…It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everybody else how they think everybody should live their lives.”

Here we are, at the ships, weeping and grieving in our hearts. We don’t grieve what we should, however, which is the destruction of species and resources in the place we love. And yet, as in the case of the sea otter, it might not be too late to preserve what is real and good. It is time to leave behind the lotus and embrace this land for what it is: part desert, with fertile but limited resources on land and sea. The Greeks knew what it meant to live in a dry, beautiful place, worrying that their wells might dry up. Yet they longed for their rocky, sea-swept homelands, no matter how far they wandered. We need to make our homecoming and tend to the land that nourishes us.

Abigail Palmer lives with her family in St. Helena, California, where she translates, teaches and writes. She is fascinated by ancient viticulture and enology and the longstanding connection between wine and poetry, and has translated short passages of Ovid’s poetry for Ovid Vineyards. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about growing up in the recent American West. Raised in Colorado and Montana, she is always trying to get back to the mountains.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Karl Maurer, who first made me aware of the sensitive antennae that a Classicist must grow. I often wished I could share passages of John Muir’s work with him as I wrote this piece. requiescat in pace.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.