A Tragic Sense of Life : Southern California adjusts to recurring disaster

We flee to the suburbs for safety--and a firestorm engulfs us. We flee to the suburbs because we believe the human factor in the city has reached a critical mass of deficiency. In the city, there are too many criminals, too many sociopaths, too many homeless and marginalized. And then a transient--another way of saying marginalized--lights a fire in the suburb of Altadena, and 115 homes fall victim to the firestorm in the San Gabriel foothills.

We know Los Angeles is combustible. We saw it burn in April-May, 1992. In that instance, the social factor--a volatile populace in certain sections of the city, an unpopular verdict, a contagion of criminal behavior spreading like wild fire--ignited the flames. And yet, in the case of the firestorms that engulfed neighborhoods in Altadena and Sierra Madre, in Laguna Beach, in Villa Park and the Anaheim Hills, in Thousand Oaks and Malibu, the human factor--a careless transient and as many as three, perhaps more, deliberate acts of arson--initiated the catastrophe.

Los Angeles has become aligned with its prosperous suburbs in tragic knowledge. City and suburb alike now know, each of them, how vulnerable our society is to sociopathic behavior. True, suburbs have long since realized that they are not exempt from gangs, drugs, juvenile delinquency, violence in the schools, child abuse in day-care centers. Yet, something in the Southern California mind-set, something in the collective imagination of the state, has always clung to the possibility of the suburb as Edenic release. No matter how bad things got in the city, there would always be the suburbs, where the California Dream had a better chance of coming true.

In its essential formula, its DNA code, if you will, Southern California possesses three driving chromosomes--nature, technology, the human factor.

If we can ascribe intent to nature, we can honestly say that nature never intended this many people to live in Southern California. This “Island on the Land,” as Carey McWilliams described it, while incomparably beautiful, is also harsh, dry, semi-arid. In ages past, it supported far fewer than 100,000 Native Americans. Had there been photography when the Spanish arrived in 1769 and pushed northward from San Diego, photographs of Southern California in the late 18th Century would have revealed a predominance of sparsely vegetated hills and crackling-dry chaparral that periodically consumed itself in spontaneous firestorms. The Latino founders of the region built dams and aqueducts and planted vineyards and olive trees, but, in the main, they preferred to run cattle across the hills.

When development came, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southern California was reinvented through engineering. Thanks to public works, a semi-desert was transformed into a semi-paradise of cities, suburban towns and agricultural landscapes of olives, vines, date palms and citrus, Virgilian in serenity and sunlight.

Yet, engineering--be it irrigation or social--has its limits. The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and the Firestorms of 1993 each attest to how fragile is the Southern California experiment in both its physical and human premises. Symbolically, the Santa Ana winds involve both environmental and human dangers. These hot, dry winds from the northeast create the conditions of fire, and, once the fire is started, fan it into firestorm; but they also engender disorientation and violence in human beings living on the edge. The murder rate, incidence of domestic violence, misbehaviors of all sorts tend to increase sharply once the Santa Anas blow, like a breath from the inferno.

Those who choose to live here must take their chances in terms of both society and the environment. Remain in the city, and you facecertain risks. Flee to the suburbs, and these risks follow you, albeit with a different emphasis.

Gunfire predominates in the city. A casual reading of Monday morning newspapers makes this obvious. The firestorm predominates in the suburb. If you doubt that, just look at the recent record of suburban conflagrations in Southern California: Desert Hot Springs in Riverside County, Apple Valley in San Bernardino County, June, 1988; the San Carlos section of San Diego, September, 1988; Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, December, 1988; the Cleveland National Forest in San Diego County, June, 1989; the Ortega Highway area in Riverside County, the Lake Elsinore district in Orange County, Turnbull Canyon in Puente Hills, the foothills of Mount San Jacinto in Riverside County, July, 1989, and Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties, June, 1990.

There is a stereotype out there, especially in the East, that postulates Southern California as one great big Disneyland and Southern Californians as, by and large, naive hedonists, vacuously grinning at life through Ray Ban sunglasses. Like all stereotypes, there is some truth to this perception--but only on the surface. Things are changing. Constructed on a fragile and volatile environmental basis, sustaining persistent problems in its human component, Southern California is now learning to internalize what the Spanish philosopher and literary critic Miguel de Unamuno has described as the tragic sense of life.

The tragic sense has tended to be suppressed in Southern California because it clashes so directly with the myth of a new Eden. Notice how rapidly, how disjunctively, Southern Californians are wont to move from Eden to despair, with nothing in between. Either California is the greatest place in the world, a perfect paradise, a dream; or it is finished, a nightmare. The tragic sense of life, by contrast, demands that we integrate good and evil into our thinking, sensibility and myths, with some weight given to the possibilities of disaster in human experience. From the perspective of the tragic sense of life, Southern California is neither utopia nor dystopia, neither a dream nor a nightmare.

It is a struggling human community in real time, live, not on tape for editing and later release. Environmentally, Southern California constitutes a rearranging of nature, a defiance even, through engineering. Southern California has used technology to materialize an imagined society of garden cities and suburbs. Now and then, it must pay a price for its reordering of the environment. That is part of its dialogue with nature, along with the gardens and the beaches.

Southern California grieves for those who have lost everything--their homes, their tangible memories (precious photographs, family records, a book collection), not to mention their economic well-being. At this moment, all seems lost. So, too, did it seem lost, gone forever, an abyss with no future, to those who were similarly destroyed by previous fires and floods in Southern California, by the Loma Prieta earthquake, by the Oakland firestorm of 1991, by the Berkeley firestorm of 1923.

Yet, these Californians rebuilt their homes and their lives. The vast majority chose to return to the exact spot where they had carved out their special piece of the California Dream. They returned in full knowledge of the risks. It can always happen again in California. The state, after all, rests on fault lines and so many of its arid hills were not meant to be settled with close clusters of homes and planted with dense groves of trees. And in terms of the human component, California has long since learned that not everyone is fully up to the possibilities of the community, that California represents no exemption from misbehavior and criminality. After all, San Quentin was opened as early as 1853.

But isn’t this knowledge of vulnerability--to the environment, to a problematic human factor--part of the cutting-edge dynamic that has made California so creative amid its persistent uncertainties? And isn’t it time that we combine this willingness to take a risk with a tragic sense of life, which can come to our aid when we lose the gamble?

Poised equally between the dream and the nightmare, the myth and the sometimes terrible reality, the problem and the struggle for solution, Southern California prepares for the next great phase of its history, strengthened and matured in its willingness to internalize the tragic sense of life, while continuing to dream of a better way, a better life, a home of one’s own on a hillside, surrounded by palm trees and roses.