early in the movie Chinatowna Southern California coroner named Morty laughs after examining the corpse of the city’s water director.
“Isn’t that right?” Morty says. “Drought water chief drowned. Only in LA.”
Of course, it’s not just LA. As this winter reminds us, all of California has a knack for devastating paradoxes.
Atmospheric rivers are flooding our communities, forcing neighbors to evacuate and claiming dozens of lives, even as we suffer from dangerous droughts and severe water restrictions.
We are a state that surpasses wealth and has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. We are flooded with her nearly 40 million people battling an epidemic of loneliness. We’ve all invented the suburban ideal of America’s home, and it still can’t accommodate people.
Our clear skies – wonderful – keep us alive, but ultimately bring darkness. It overheats, burns, destroys precious landscapes, homes and dreams along with our winds.
In fact, the greatest paradox of all lies in California’s beauty. One of the most breathtaking places in the world also creates extreme ugliness.
The latest storms and floods have targeted our finest sites. A flooded river turned the Monterey Peninsula into an island. Lightning strikes the Golden Gate Bridge. The County of Santa Barbara has ordered Harry and Meg and Oprah and all the beautiful people of Montecito to evacuate before their magazine-beautiful home slides down toward the ocean.
The logic of this place is unacceptable. But here it is:
Nothing is more dangerous than beauty.
And nothing is more beautiful than California.
This may be the most dangerous place on earth.
Show me something beautiful in California. Let me show you the killer. Coastal waves you can surf for hours? they swallow you whole. A cliff overlooking the waves? they are collapsing. Forested mountains we love to explore? So much fuel for the next Firestorm.
Southern Californians love to boast that they can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon. That’s true, but you can also escape the morning tide flooding at Newport Beach at breakfast and a fire on a hiking trail in the San Bernardino Mountains at lunch.
In reality, the beauty that makes it so wonderful to live here makes it difficult to live here. Albert Camus said, “Life is grand and overwhelming. That is tragedy.” “Without beauty, love and danger, life is almost easy.”
The greatest wisdom Californians may have is their disbelief in beauty. The smartest of us don’t marry actors. They don’t buy hillside houses.
And they learn not to trust their eyes. Beauty draws us into danger and keeps us away from it, so we miss the big problems. Reports across California have developed tricks for when you’re in an interesting location. I close my eyes and just try to listen — listen to nature and people.
With a deadly tragedy unfolding in California, when is not such a time? It may sound like we are forgetting or even blaming the human victims of our floods, fires, earthquakes, and yes, our beauty.
But those who are offended by such stories are at risk just like the rest of us and need warning. am. “I admit here,” the form may say. I don’t trust those glorious peaks I want to climb, the waves crashing on the beach, or the glamorous blondes.”
Of course, acknowledging the danger doesn’t mean you can prevent everything. And behind our catastrophic carnage lies a real and enduring California problem.
Robinson Jeffers, perhaps the iconic 20th-century Californian poet, lived in the splendor of Carmel and concluded that human presence here (and the planet at large) was a real problem. Worth remembering. He advised all of us, including his fellow Californians, to: It is the only way to be cleansed. “
“The beauty of things is born before our eyes, and is enough in itself,” writes Jeffers.
You may love California and all its rocks and valleys and waterways and luxury.
Not even on your corpse.
Joe Mathews writes the “Connecting California” column for Zócalo Public Square.
