The Island of California
There was a television advert airing a while back for the Nestle Crunch candy bar featuring Shaquille O’Neal. He is causing, through the mighty combined power of himself and the Crunch bar, the separation of California from the rest of the North American landmass. “Nothing crunches like a Nestle Crunch!” says the commercial. Indeed.
Actually, scientists have discovered that thanks to plate tectonics, the western part of a Shaqless California will be whacking into Alaska in a million years or so.
What’s ironic about all this is that mapmakers were convinced for a long time that this wasn’t just a funny idea:
“One of the most notable of all cartographic errors, and one of the most identifiable, is seen on those maps which show the North American west coast with California as an island. Numerous maps exist which demonstrate this theory which was seriously held by many mapmakers for approximately one hundred years after 1622.”
Interestingly, the name of California existed before the Europeans stumbled across what would become California the place:
“The first known mention of the legend of the ‘Island of California’ was in the 1510 romance novel Las Sergas de Esplandian by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo, who described the island in the passage: ‘Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.’” It took a royal decree to declare California part of the mainland in 1747. No word on what happened to the women.
Now there are probably some people back east who would prefer it very much if California were in fact an island, separate from the rest of America. There are also plenty of Californians who would prefer being at a safe distance from the freaky folks back east. But no matter what, the metaphor of California as a unique place goes back to its very beginnings.