Short Memories of Nature’s Wrath

First it grew, then it dried out.

After it dried, it burned.

Now that it’s burned, the time is coming when it will slide.

Once it’s slid, then it will rain again and grow again, and dry again and burn again.

Never a dull moment, never a completely serene one, on Nature’s most popular E-ticket ride, Southern California.

The Forest Service has once again assessed the consequences of fire, this time last month’s blaze in the San Gabriel foothills. It is never just about fire, of course; it’s about what may follow it. In this case it could be mudslides, engulfing houses below the scorched hillsides if the rain gets brutish enough.

The report is one more play in humankind’s high-stakes game against nature: Man wins a few moves, gets cocky, then Nature runs the board. Last year, local builders sent cement mixers and lumber trucks deep into canyons and far up mountain ridges, out onto dry riverbeds and right up against forests, to build thousands of houses where no houses have stood before, and with reason.

The reasons have names like the Montrose flood and the Bel-Air fire and the Kinneloa Canyon fire, and after each 50-year flood or epochal blaze, we gird ourselves with more steel and more fire hoses and more concrete against the next time.

Yet when you patch a thing here, it tends to give way there. Get one part nailed down and something else buckles or pops loose. Debris basins stop the rocks and mud from crashing downhill. But then the sand that should move downstream to replenish the beaches never gets there, and the shoreline recedes like grandpa’s hair, and solving one problem has created another.

Douglas E. Hammond, an earth sciences professor at USC, always tells his students “the line from the old butter commercial: You can’t fool Mother Nature. You can try, but she’s very clever and persistent, and has lots of ways to accomplish her desires.”

Give mankind credit, of course, for being “a remarkably successful organism in terms of exploiting environments he otherwise wouldn’t be properly equipped to handle.” In other words, if we can open tanning salons in Lapland and frozen yogurt shops in the Negev, why not build our houses any old where? There hasn’t been a fire here in five years or a flood in 50, right? So hey, go for it.

“It’s that combination,” says Hammond, “of short memory span and how big a gamble you’re willing to take. It’s sort of like love affairs--you get burned once, but you always go back.”

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They say that real estate agents of a hundred years ago stuck oranges on the Joshua trees and sold the sands as prime farmland, to folks just off the train from winter.

But the truly big swindle, the most magnificent cheat, was the sales job that made Southern California out to be the capital of the dolce far niente latitudes, the land of sweet, placid idleness--when in fact it is as risky as a roulette wheel, undergirded with fractures, built among greenery that burns like acetylene torches, rimmed by mountains set at an alarmingly uncertain angle of repose.

So we sign aboard to life here, life with its unwritten guarantees and trade-offs: The pipes will not burst in winter. The highways will not be coated in black ice. In exchange, we take our chances with earthquakes and brush fires, smog and winter sunburn.

John McPhee was writing of the San Gabriels but it was really all of us that he described in his book “The Control of Nature,” a people who “would rather defy nature than live without it.”

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That maligned Los Angeles River whose great, broad alluvial plains the Spanish explorers so admired and coveted has long since been corseted by concrete into meager, invisible channels.

Barely a year ago, a half-million people living on that plain, in cities like Lynwood and Lakewood, people accustomed to finding water in no place the garden hose does not reach, were told they had to buy federal flood insurance. In the event of a hundred-year flood, the gelded river, it seemed, might actually become a river again.

But a few months ago, the area’s congressman got his hands on $50 million to keep the river under restraint, and his constituents from buying flood insurance.

The river will bide its time. The land, the frisky San Gabriel Mountains, with their adolescent nudging and growth spurts, are works in progress. Their architects are fire and flood--and the human hand.

In “Angels Burning,” poet Thomas Sanchez stands in the smoke of the Santa Barbara fire and swears he is leaving. “As I talked I realized what a liar I was. Of course, I would rebuild, plant the scorched earth. It’s a funny thing, when you are burned out of a place your instinct is to return, not to run . . . you become defiant, irrational, and very human.”

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.