Life in a Landscape of Beauty and Pain
Last week, on one of those lush afternoons that can make you wonder whether we have such a thing as fall, our neighbor on the corner stepped onto his porch and hung out a pumpkin flag. Taking the cue, the people across the street unfurled a harvest cornucopia. Within days, as if by some prearranged signal, autumn porch banners were fluttering all over the block.
That was last week. This week, the winds reared back and unleashed the flip side of October in L.A. The brush fires returned to scour the canyons and lay bare the hillsides and flatten Malibu. Again.
Far from the fire line, as most people were, we got to watch the recurring autumn ritual on TV. Back came the Super Scoopers and the exhausted firemen, the shellshocked homeowners and the camera crews.
Back, too, came that familiar sense of the schizophrenia of this place. One minute, you’re wondering whether to plant sweet peas or pansies; the next, somebody’s block is on fire. It’s a feeling that is, like the winds that bring it on, both irritating and halfway enjoyable. Which neighborhood of Joe Sixpacks or Richie Riches will be drafted by circumstance to play Nick Danger this year?
It used to be hard to reconcile, this feeling. Southern California was paradise. No, hell. No, paradise. If you didn’t keep a keen eye on the cover of Time magazine, you’d forget whether we were up or down.
Then came the ‘90s, and such an onslaught of big events, the whole duality thing stopped mattering somehow. It was like that scene in Chinatown where Faye Dunaway gets slapped upside the head until everyone finally accepts the sordid truth. My daughter and my sister. Both.
Acceptance can be liberating. The upside of taking a clear-eyed look at your contradictions is that you can finally admit that they are a big part of what makes you so interesting. On Monday night, a Westside friend whose house was just to the safe side of the fire line, a man who has lived here for 30 years, found himself talking about the wall of flame marching toward the Pacific the way people in Buffalo talk about getting snowed in.
“My wife called to say the roads were closed, but the sunset was absolutely beautiful,” he said. Catching himself, he couldn’t help but laugh.
“These things,” he confessed, “are actually kind of thrilling when they aren’t happening to you.”
I know what he’s talking about. On the first night of the 1992 riots, I got off the scorched freeway at 3 in the morning and drove home along surface streets. Just beyond my rearview mirror, whole neighborhoods were going up in flames.
I was crying. I was frightened. I was worried about my kids. Yet outside my car windows, night birds were nesting in a canopy of jacarandas, serenading block after sleeping block of ranchettes and bungalows. I couldn’t help it. It was so lovely, I rolled down my windows. The air under the street lights was almost surrealistically sweet and clear. That landscape, that simultaneous beauty and pain, spoke volumes about the essential topography of L.A.
When my mother called the next morning from the East Coast, frantic at the mayhem she’d seen on TV, I tried in vain to explain the way the scale of this place can cut even catastrophe down to size. In this careening pinball machine of a metropolis, I told her, the steel ball of danger catches up with everyone someday. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t yet.
What I didn’t tell her was what I realize now: To live here, at this particular intersection of place and time, is to come to terms with complexity. This is the biggest, loveliest--our teenager would add boring-est--collection of suburbs in the nation, and it is also the capital of urban calamity.
How much have we weathered these past few years? C’mon, say it with me now: Riots, brush fires, earthquakes, trial of the century. Downsizing. Real estate slump.
And yet in the wake of all this, we cultivate such perennial normalcy, it can break your heart. In backyards, October roses are defying the Santa Anas even now with shameless displays of late bloom. We give birth to babies in hospital rooms that look out onto the Hollywood sign. Our house burns down, or falls down, we rebuild. If we can’t sell it, we repaint the trim.
This is a land of abundant tragedy, but that tragedy is spread out. It’s a crapshoot, a flip of a two-faced coin. Live here long enough, you get used to it. There’s a big crack down our back patio from 1987, when our house was at the epicenter of that year’s quake. The other day, I caught myself joking to someone it was a sign that we’ve been disaster-proofed. What were the chances of it happening twice?
You can believe in normalcy here, when you understand the odds. This is why people stay. You know your turn is bound to come, that it’s a matter of time until you’re the one huddling in blankets at the Red Cross command post. But until then, you play the numbers. You savor the rush of narrow escape.
And if it’s a morning like this one, fine and brisk, you head out to the porch. Soak up some autumn sun. Ask yourself, sweet peas or pansies this year? Maybe unfurl a nice pumpkin flag.
