Often when you’re visiting Los Angeles, you walk up the 282 steps to the Baldwin Hills scenic overlook. You pass the sagebrush and the primrose. The high rises of downtown come into view. Then, as you stand under a live oak and take a swig of water, you notice the oil wells, those nodding donkeys pumping grease out of the ground, symbols of the oil-hungry economy that birthed this sprawling city and now makes it more flammable.
You don’t dwell on the oil wells. You know they’re there. They’ve always been there. You focus your gaze elsewhere. The Santa Monica mountains reveal their crowns as the marine layer lifts. You see a flash of the Pacific. You are distracted by a monarch butterfly.
This seeing and not seeing — this knowing and not knowing — for me, is the essence of inhabiting Los Angeles. You believe in its golden story, or else how could you possibly live here? Perhaps this is also key to rebounding from this latest calamity.
I am a child of Los Angeles. I’ve run away from it. I’ve come running back to it. My family refuses to leave Los Angeles, which makes it forever a part of me.
It’s not like we don’t know the hazards. The road rage, the heat rising from the pavement, the insane housing prices, the strung-out kids on the Metro, the tents of misery that you drive past when you drop your kid at school. It’s not like we don’t understand that if a hillside is on fire, there’s only one skinny, winding road that leads to safety.
My friend bought a house on one of these hillsides, in Hollywood, in 2022. Last week, she evacuated. She is well aware of how climate change is supersizing fires. She didn’t think it would be so fierce, so fast. “This is happening a lot sooner than I ever thought,” she texted. “tho I know you had an inkling.”
I didn’t really. I had been afraid for her.
Los Angeles is no stranger to ash and wind. The fires of 1961 destroyed Bel Air; Zsa Zsa Gabor surveyed the ruins of her home in a fur coat. Watts burned in 1965. More of Los Angeles burned in 1992, after the televised beating of Rodney King. The Santa Ana winds fanned the Woolsey fire in 2018, which torched a swath of Ventura. In its wake, the “Ventura strong” yard signs went up, as though any of us have dominion over fire, particularly those living in a dry woodland.
You’ll hear a lot of bromides about resilience in the coming days.
Every great city prides its ability to rebound after ruin. Mumbai after the 2006 terror attacks. New York after Sandy. Paris after the fire at Notre Dame.
And every great city dips into its own story in order to rebound. In the case of Los Angeles that includes a considerable amount of scenic overlooking.
The fire this time, though, is likely to force a reckoning over what lessons we should learn from the past about living in a hotter, drier, more incendiary city. Even if the homeowners of Pacific Palisades want to rebuild, should they, so close to the fire-prone wildlands? Should you build homes with only a single solitary road to access them? What should we do about trees that shade homes in hot summers but become tinder in fire season?
Scientists who study resilience in nature say the memory of one trauma helps build fortitude against the next trauma. Certain species of corals are able to withstand bleaching after they’ve experienced one or two bleaching events in their lifetime, a recent study found. Maize that suffered drought in early life is better equipped to handle it later.
Living creatures carry memory. What matters is what we do with it.
Psychologists say humans who rebound after catastrophes share certain habits of mind. One of them is optimism. Not a delusional optimism, but an ability to focus on problems that can be solved.
Los Angeles will have to focus on the problems it can solve in order to save itself. The scenic overlook has its limits.
We who carry Los Angeles inside us know that our survival on a hotter planet requires overlooking the hazards sometimes and staring hard at the delights. This is how Los Angeles beguiles us and sustains us. The delights. The cherimoyas in December. The tube-light taco stands along Centinela. The yucca blossoms that will shoot up on the Santa Monica mountains in April, as though to say, “Look at me, look at me.” And you will turn your gaze away from the burn scars on the hills.
The post The Push and Pull of Los Angeles: Beauty and Danger appeared first on New York Times.
