On a Day Like Last Thursday
Climate . . . spell it with a capital, and then try to think of an adjective worthy to precede it. Glorious! Delicious! Incomparable! Paradisiacal!!!
--from an 1893 guide for Southern California traveler
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On a day like last Thursday, it no longer seems a mystery why so many millions of people have been lured to the desert that is the Los Angeles Basin, and why they remain. A day like last Thursday--so clear, so warm, so exotic, so perfect--comes around only a few times a year. It is to be savored.
On a day like last Thursday, baseball at once seems imminent. The people who shoot postcard photographs race to the helicopters, seeking to capture a smog-free city framed by snowy mountains and the Pacific. The quest for feasible electric cars takes on new urgency: See how beautiful it all could be.
On a day like last Thursday, a sort of osmosis occurs. The sun seeps through the skin, warms something deeper. More things seem possible. It becomes conceivable that the screenplay in progress might actually be made into a movie, that the last resume and head shot mailed to yet another casting director might for once be noticed.
On a day like last Thursday, downtown suits emerge from their high-rise caves, blinking at the brightness of it all. At the outdoor cafes, the lunch-eaters keep their faces tilted toward the sun, as if to receive the full measure of its restorative powers. Old people flood the sidewalks and beach paths, stretching their necks, rolling their shoulders as they walk. They look like cats being stroked.
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Wind is needed to create a day like last Thursday, to blow the smog out to sea. The breezes carry with them the scent of jasmine. The orange and lemon trees that decorate sideyards droop with ripe fruit. The palm trees seem less tacky, their suggestion of a tropical paradise not quite so absurd.
On a day like last Thursday, the regional topography takes on a dramatic texture. The mountains, typically a faint line in the haze, rise up higher, steeper, closer. Little hills arranged across the basin floor are noticed for the first time. The string of cluster cities for once appears connected in an almost logical way. In short, the city makes sense.
The relationship between Los Angeles and its weather is a ripe target for satire. This is a city where drizzles are reported as news, where television stations pay star wages for pretty people to peer into the camera every night and say: “Sunny and warm tomorrow.” And yet weather is of peculiar importance to the city.
As so many historians have noted, Southern California was the creation of boosters selling, more than anything, climate. Judith W. Elias, in “Los Angeles, Dream to Reality,” is succinct: “There was no obvious reason for a city such as Los Angeles to develop. . . . It stood in the middle of a desert, without a natural port, without a navigable river, without a commercial product. Nevertheless, the use after 1884 of unprecedented promotional methods by various interests magnified and pyramided the legend of Los Angeles. From 1870 on, it was heralded, in one form or another, as an accessible dream.”
On a day like last Thursday, the invention of those long-buried promoters of real estate and railroads--”Prophets of the Promissory Land,” Frank Norris called them--seems less of a shuck. Maybe they ignored the earthquakes and aridity; the pitch at least was based on one fundamental truth. There was, on many days, good weather, and on a few days, days like last Thursday, something quite extraordinary. There always will be a market for such days.
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People appeared almost frantic in their desire not to waste it. They don’t last long, these days. Sometimes, they are gone even before dark. At noon last Thursday on Mt. Wilson, it was possible to watch smog begin to form and rise off the basin floor below, like a tule fog. On the radio, the chat was, as always, fixated on the murder that ate Brentwood, the racial divide, the never-ending fracas over a police chief and on and drearily on.
At least on a day like last Thursday, the daily rundown of urban struggle seems less important. It is a moment for rest, for catching the collective breath before the next calamity. And so in the late afternoon, a large and diverse crowd was assembled at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. It was comprised of tourists, retirees, high school students, mothers pushing strollers, pier fishermen and assorted beery idlers.
They lounged in the sun like sea lions on a common rock, serenaded by a man dressed in flowing robes and spangled boots. He played steel drum and sang one chestnut after another in a sweet, almost melancholy tenor.
Smile, he sang, though your heart is breaking.
Our day will come, he sang, and we’ll have everything.
It was perfect.
