Shaking, Rattling and Rolling in the Dough

Los Angeles is dangerous. That fact is confirmed by Mike Davis in his recent book, “Ecology of Fear.” Davis fingers the usual suspects: earthquakes, mudslides, water shortages, fires, tornadoes, riots, mountain lions, automobiles.

Meanwhile, the region’s real estate market has entered a golden period. Prices have jumped more than 10% in the last year; the median price for a home is now more than $200,000. On basic economic principles, one would think that the risks involved in owning land or building structures would hold prices down. But on basic principles of human nature, the danger involved actually helps prop prices up. The tenuousness of the connection of people to the land in Los Angeles makes that connection more intense than it is in most places.

People value what is endangered, and they value even danger itself. In other words, one of the reasons that the geography of Southern California is so valuable is precisely because it’s dangerous. One thing that people pay for is the pleasure of danger. Danger is seductive. People shoot up heroin. They risk the presidency for sex. They decide not to use that condom. They drive 90 miles an hour.

Peril gives life a certain giddiness: It makes people “feel alive.” Women like dangerous men: The tattooed dude on the Harley is much more interesting than the considerate nebbish. Men like dangerous women: think Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential.” Southern California, too, has a certain femme fatale quality.

The beauty and danger exist in a sort of exquisite balance of opposites, a climatological yin yang. The dazzling surface disguises the deep faults; the comfort exists within the possibility of its sudden destruction. That makes the surface and your comfort within it all the more valuable, makes you aware of them, makes you love them.

Furthermore, people become conscious of how much they care about something when that thing is endangered. When people you love are terribly ill, for example, you become aware of how deeply you love them, and you want them to know that. To be continually in danger of losing something you care about--your home, for example--is to know continually how much you do care.

Southern California is beautiful and fragile. Paying large amounts of money for something is perhaps a rather crass way to express your love for it. But that doesn’t make the love any less real, and in a culture that values wealth almost more than life, money as expressed in real estate prices can indeed be an expression of love.

The Earth makes our lives possible and nurtures us. It creates us and sustains us; it gives us food, air, water. But in the long run, the world kills us all--wears us down, invades our bodies with microbes, blows us apart, reabsorbs us. So our relationship to the world is conflicted: We need it and it is fatal. It gives us life and makes us vulnerable to death.

Maybe the lure of Southern California is that people there live this relationship more intensely than in most places. Southern California warms people, feeds them, enriches them. It endangers them too, and that fact makes the connection to the land more poignant, like a relationship to a deeply flawed lover.

California is expensive because it is a good place in which to be alive. It is a good place to be alive in, in part, because it might kill you at any moment.