Along a scenic highway, a road map of California's hopes and anxieties

The men say they have no interest in discussing the election or politics in general.Instead, as they linger in the shade of their matching straw hats, they relish the chance to talk about how it’s still possible to live the American dream along rural California’s isolated byways.

The road soars and dives through increasingly nerve-racking turns before coming to the edge of a sheer cliff. Around here, people have learned to ride with the boom-and-bust rhythm of the oil business. Times are especially hard in McKittrick, a blip of a town farther north that spans hardly one block, surrounded by oil rigs whose silhouettes resemble dinosaurs grazing on the plains in the late-day sun.Annie and Mike Moore first visited in 1961 as newlyweds. McKittrick was booming then and Annie had relatives in town, but Mike wasn’t impressed.

It’s a towering cutout of Hollywood legend James Dean, inspired by his movie “Rebel Without a Cause.” Dean wears a red jacket and blue jeans, with his legs crossed, and he stares down on the highway with a look that says he’s trouble. In the mountains, the air fills with the scent of pine and brush, and on the plains, dust. Around Coalinga, the funk of cow manure signals your arrival into one of the biggest cattle ranching regions on the West Coast.“Jesus is Lord of Coalinga,” a rainbow sign proclaims just outside town across the highway from a field where a herd of buffalo grazes.

As a solidly conservative community, far from urban centers whose problems attract more attention, “we have no vote,” the rancher says. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Rudy, who preferred to describe himself as a conservative rather than identify which party he tends to vote for, says he reflects on that phrase in the Declaration of Independence every day.

California’s housing crunch has made the former “Apricot Capital of the World” both attractive to bargain-hunting outsiders from the Bay Area 80 miles west and increasingly costly for the longtime residents.

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