Turning on the news yesterday I couldn’t help notice that LA is on fire…again. All my life it seems LA has been on fire–in one way or another. Floods, fires, mudslides, celebrity antics and the slow disaster of constant traffic—a theme park of natural, and un-natural, disasters. I’m not too worried when I see Southern California’s flirtation with the apocalypse continuing, because I know it’s prepared. I’ll never forget, growing-up in North Hollywood, all the preparedness drills we went through in school.
Earthquake drills were my favorite. The school bell would ring in short bursts, teacher says earthquake drill, and in no time we were under our desks. Grateful for any break from learning, we snickered while holding the desk legs, shaking them for effect. When the bells (the shaking) stopped, all the classes gathered on the play yard to be accounted for. Even at home my parent’s and I had a drill: get to a doorjamb (the safest place). Afterwards, I would fill the tub with water, dad would turn off the gas main, and mom would turn on KNX1070 news radio while we’d ride-out the after-shocks. I good at telling if it was going to be just a small quake: a roller; freaked the dog out, but never me. It’s the shakers I feared: windows rattling like an angry haunted house, things flying off shelves, and shakers could get worse. At my grandma’s house one night after a brief shaker, she came into my room and told me to knock it off—I was looking between giant the mirrored closet doors on one side of the bed, the large picture window on the other and the huge mirror hanging near the foot of the bed and realized I was in a death trap. Something only a Californian kid would notice.
Then there were the rains, boy were there rains. Canceled school was actually a bad thing. One winter the entire 5th, 6th, and 7th grades had to shovel sand into sandbags to help shore up the sliding mountain and rivers now running through the playground. Coldwater canyon earned its name that day. I’ll never forget looking up at the houses on stilts way above us on the sliding hillside and wondered if that, if this, was a good idea. The LA river, normally an ugly concrete snake winding through the city like a lost highway, where rats and shopping carts go to die, became a raging torrent of dirty water. Each heavy rain, firemen would string lines across to catch people who somehow fell in trying to take a picture in a whole other neighborhood.
Then there were the Santa Ana winds, boy were there winds. It was like staring into the business end of a hairdryer with someone throwing sand in now and then for effect. The air was brown, bringing in the desert, pieces of trees sailing past. Palm frawns would fall on deserved cars in the 90210 zip-code. And the air was SO dry. It meant being shocked every time you touched something. And as a kid that was a fun thing. I would put on my father’s enormous penny-loafers and shuffle along the carpet, stopping just behind my mother. Then, reaching out like E.T., I would touch her butt. Sometimes the spark would leap from my finger before I made contact, the scream came even faster.
Then there were the fires. All around, but never IN the city, save for the occasional riot. Growing up in the hills, we kept the brush down and cleared the dry and dead. Fires attacked the gates of the city from all sides, but rarely seen except on TV. The sky itself seemed to be on fire when smoke from endless desert fires would rise up, turn sideways, and drift over the city turning the sun a brown orange. If the wind was right, and it often was, ash would cover everything like dandruff.
Growing up in LA, I shared the same opinion as many people in the world: that we were the center of the world—it’s how so many around the globe know the zip-code of Beverly Hills even if they don’t know what a zip-code is. My childhood was spent at the Paramount studio lot where my father worked, and his father before him. LA is not the capital of California, it just thinks it is. Even the governor is a favorite Action hero. This also means that there are lots of cameras in one place, and they’re always rolling. When the REAL world around the studios resembles the world of disasters they create on the big screen, they can’t help themselves. It appears on everyone’s TV screens, all around the world from every angle. LA is doing what it does best: looking at itself, breaking briefly from celebrity disasters to natural ones. But instead of broadcasting around the world back-to-back coverage of fires, it might be time soon to turn some of those lenses outward. When they do, we’ll learn that, in some way or another, the whole world is on fire. That people are dying in conflicts, starvations, droughts and floods in other places and on a much greater scale.
I rest assured however, as I hear of disasters hitting LA, that, no matter what happens, it will still be there. I survived my own childhood in Southern California, and am stronger for it. I know that LA will continue its sensationalistic flirtation with the apocalypse, but I’m not worried because, after all, it IS the City of Angels.
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