Not in My Backyard
Among the things my father never imagined his son might do, I recently spent $150 on a set of wind chimes. They would do credit to a Shaolin temple--six thick aluminum tubes, cut in lengths according to Pythagorean intervals, which when sounded by the wind ring pure, sustained and celestial. It’s the closest to the universal “om” as you are likely to find at the mall.
I hung them in the breezeway. The next morning, I padded out to the deck to watch the sun rise and enjoy a few moments of mindfulness in the spell of my new chimes. The wind rustled the trees. The chimes intoned. But not just mine. As the breeze picked up, I could also hear my neighbors’ large and expensive chimes ringing from every deck and eave and meditation garden, until the whole hill clattered like a xylophone tossed down a flight of stairs. Los Angeles: 1. Transcendence: 0.
One of the ironies of “outdoor living” as it is practiced in L.A. is just how small the outdoors actually is. There are days when I can’t get the smell of my neighbors’ citronella candles out of my hair. On sunny weekend afternoons, there are so many barbecues going it smells like a burning cattle car. And a friendly reminder to my deck-dwelling neighbors: Voices carry, you sluts.
I came late to the practice of outdoor living. I grew up in the Deep South, where the only water features I was aware of had bass in them. But since arriving in California, I too have joined the alfresco diaspora.
But not without misgivings. I wonder, for instance, how much mileage people are getting out of their Japanese-style gardens--the fastidious flower installations, the cement buddhas, the bamboo fountains, torii and trellises--artfully and expensively contrived to create a quiet place for reflection.
Which would be fine, I guess, except for the screaming din of weed-eaters as neighbors obsessively manicure their quiet places of reflection. And besides, are Americans particularly meditative people? I don’t know. I know I can watch koi for about five minutes, max.
Sometimes, when I tune in Home & Garden TV, I marvel that people go to such extraordinary lengths to make the outdoors habitable when it’s clear that what they really want is to be indoors. If you need four propane patio heaters to keep your dinner guests from developing hypothermia, it seems to me a perfect time to use the dining room.
Perhaps the most bizarre device of all is the propane-powered bug zapper that uses heat to lure any and all bugs into its tornadic maw. This is outdoor living for agoraphobics.
Nearly all of my neighbors have established some sort of horticultural retreat in their backyards--floored with pavers and carpeted with turf, walled with bougainvillea and roofed with pergolas. What they have constructed, whether they know it or not, is another room of their house. The longer I’m in Los Angeles, the more I see the beautifully uncomplicated wisdom of a screened-in porch.
This feels like the place for weighty sentiments about Man and dominion and Nature, some bit of erudition about gardening and the Enlightenment--did you know Rousseau loved to barbecue? And yet it seems to me people are furnishing their outdoor spaces mostly out of bored consumerism; they have run out of room in their houses and outdoor living is simply spillover from endless acquisition.
And thus the chimeneas that remain tragically unlit, the hammocks that crosshatch no backsides, the regiments of St. Francis statuettes with no one but the birds to keep them company.
When and where I was a kid, the phrase “outdoor living” didn’t exist, and if it had it would have carried approximately the same cachet as “outdoor plumbing.” People lived indoors; dogs lived outdoors (or under the porch). Cats, of course, lived in the barn. Nor could my parents--my nickel-nosed father, in particular--imagine spending good money on things that were to be left out in the weather.
And so our outdoor furnishings consisted of flower beds made with “repurposed” truck tires, split like daisies, painted white and half-sunk in the ground. Birdhouses were made from gourds. One of our neighbors did have a store-bought yard ornament--a black-faced lawn jockey that stood in front of his spectacular hovel. This was less ornamental than political.
I keep hoping that one day I will have the Zen for a Zen garden. I imagine myself as an older man--well beyond my full-lotus years--sitting quietly, listening to the chimes and birds and contemplating the mysteries of broadleaf weeds. The weed yields and withers yet cannot be conquered . . . .
