January 16, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (83A)

Photo credit: Tiffany Rose, Newsweek.

LA, AYE, LA…

My old hometown, my heart’s true home, Los Angeles, has of course been much on my mind, and everyone else’s, these past few weeks. A phrase has kept thrumming through my head, I can’t remember from where exactly—I vaguely recall its being from a New Yorker piece about the police emergency war room in the basement of downtown’s Parker Center, sometime in the ‘80s (though I can’t seem find it)—where the reporter’s source patiently explained to him how “There’s just not supposed to be a city here: every square inch of Los Angeles has been wrested from nature, and—fires, floods, slides, droughts, wind, quakes—Nature . . . wants . . . LA . . . back.”

And there’s something to that (something, too, to the fact that similar things could increasingly be said about the world as a whole these days as human-induced climate change truly starts kicking in all over the place). But people are always asking me how, what with all those patently recurrent calamities in LA specifically, people can stand living in the place, and all I can reply is how, still and all, not every day but many days, it’s one of the most beautifully beguiling places in the whole world.

Returning to town by way of the American Airlines terminal at LAX a few months back, I was entranced by a yards-long panoramic photo mural strung along the side of one of those seemingly endless pedestrian conveyor belts connecting the arrivals hall to baggage claim (here again I don’t know who took the picture or how they did it and can’t seem to find anything about it online, though if you happen to know, do please provide details in the comments section below). Anyway, I pulled out my IPhone and tried to capture the scroll’s effect, and maybe it will help you see what I mean.

Click video here.

John McPhee had a lot to say about all this in his superb capricetti of a piece, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” back in September 1988 in the New Yorker. (Back in those days, he was engaged in the decade-plus-long geological passion, comprising the five separate multi-part sequences that would come to constitute his monumental Annals of the Former World—people at the magazine would see another McPhee series looming up ahead on the magazine’s master calendar and ask what it was going to be about this time and get told, “Rocks. More rocks.” But what rocks! And in any case, the true subject of that whole series was never ever just rocks so much as time—deep deep time. Anyway, between courses, as it were, of that master project, McPhee would occasionally slot in palate cleansers around the theme of puny-man-vs-massive-nature, there’d be three of those in all, of which that LA piece was one, and you can find them all in his Control of Nature collection, and should!)

For that matter, I myself presently contributed to some of the literature on this theme when, on January 16, 1994, I’d happened to fly back into town (“back home” I was about to write), only to be shaken simultaneously awake and clean out of my bed at 4:30 the next morning by the biggest quake the city had seen in a long while (“Good god,” I found myself thinking ever so forensically, “What’s that? Oh, that’s the sound of me hitting the floor. And what’s that? Oh, that’s the sound of every book in this house flying off its shelf. And what’s that? Oh that’s the sounds of the house’s rafters groaning one against the other. And that? That must be the boulders underground smashing away. But that other sound, the loudest most insistent thing I had ever heard, what was that? Oh, I realized at length, that’s the sound of me screaming.”) Anyway, long story but I ended up covering the quake for Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik’s Warsaw-based post-Solidarity newspaper in Poland,

with a piece that was subsequently gathered into my Vermeer in Bosnia collection, and that piece ended like this:

The first weekend after the quake was incredibly beautiful. They’d predicted an incoming storm, which would have complicated matters considerably, but it was holding off, and instead the offshore breezes were wafting in glorious high cumulus clouds, the air was soft and balmy, the violet mountains in the distance were startlingly clear, the bay heartrendingly blue, the light (that wonderful, wondrous L.A. light) as graciously limpid as I could ever remember.

I sat on the Santa Monica palisade, reading the papers—specifically about the incredible, record-setting cold snap that still had most of the rest of the country in its scary grip (in fact, that week far more people died of the cold back east than as a result of the Northridge quake). I was also reading a perceptive op-ed piece by the L.A. writer Carolyn See. “A lot of people are saying that the quake was ennobling,” she was telling the readers of the New York Times. “I think it’s the sourest of disasters. Nature shakes you cruelly, meanly: it makes it clear that you count for nothing. And then it makes you clean up your room.”

There was a lot to that, only you could take it even further. California lavishes you with ease and comfort and light one day, only to beat you senseless the next, and then pleasure you all over again the day after that. Hell, it indulges and savages you at the same time! Back in the sixties, we used to have a term for that kind of parenting. We called it crazy-making.

And, alas, I’m still crazy about the place.

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See you next week!