November 24, 2007
Back to the earth
Throughout my life so far, I’ve probably changed addresses slightly less than many adults. For 18 years I lived in the same very tall building in Manhattan, followed by three more in another shorter one across town. At 21 when I headed to the Great West to seek my joy, I didn’t know that I would spend the next 24 years in Los Angeles and its environs. Fully 20 of those were split between just three addresses: 10 years in the same place in Van Nuys, and the next 14 in Malibu. After renting a couple of places there short term, I lived in two that were very significant and dear to me, for 5 years each.
One of those very significant places, pictured above from my time there, burned to the ground today in Malibu’s terrible Corral Canyon fire.
The oddly shaped stucco and tile architecture clung to a steep, oak and eucalyptus laden hillside. With no immediate neighbors it offered me tremendous peace, and abutted one of the best hiking trails in the area. But what became most special about this place to me was that it represented enormously key personal and professional turning points in my life, each of which altered its direction for the better. The amount of drama I experienced at this address– very good and starkly otherwise– is indelible many years later. So indelible, in fact, that when I came across this sad photo on the L.A. Times website of my beloved former residence melting into the earth, I was flooded with details and memories of every room and all twenty seasons of my life that they sheltered.
I have written in these blog pages before about impermanence, and it is a constant truth. But despite my own imminent melting back to the earth someday, as long as I’m here and of sound mind, my memories remain. They are all that I truly possess.
…listen
…about the musicElegy for five years of memories.
Lisa Hirsch said,
November 24, 2007 @ 10:09 pm
Ooooh.
I was in Los Angeles last month and left on October 21, the day the fires were getting under way – I thought of you, knowing you’d left Malibu, and I thought of you again today. I’m sorry; I’m glad you’re well.
Alex Shapiro said,
November 24, 2007 @ 10:19 pm
Thanks so much, Lisa. Ironically, I was in L.A. the same time you were last month and wrote about that experience a little further down the page. Malibuites need a break! It’s been a very rough time for everyone in drought-ridden So Cal. I’m doing a rain dance….
Daniel Wolf said,
November 25, 2007 @ 7:30 am
While I understand your own loss completely (there’s not a day in which I lose myself to regrets about not being in California), I deeply believe that there are some places in California that simply never should have been allowed to be built up. The coast in particular should have been reserved as wild landscape with neither private property owners nor the military allowed to build. I’m even willing to suggest that my grandfather give up his house right above Morro Bay, despite it being there for 75 years.
The Pomona Valley, which is several orders of magnitude less spectacular than anyplace on the coast, but I happen to know best, was called the “valley of smoke” by the Serranos before the Spanish colonization, due to the regular natural burn out, which was a balancing force in the landscape and kept the topsoil fertile. Such a fire pattern was the norm throughout southern California, and we are finally seeing the net effect of urbanization on that pattern — small, naturally-occurring fires, with natural regrowth are now being replaced by massive fires, often caused by arson, and all the ill efects of artificial regrowth, irrigation, roads, and homes built precisely where they shouldn’t be are amplified when the rain finally does come.
V. said,
November 25, 2007 @ 10:52 am
The weirdest part of the fires for me is when the ashes start to fall. You wonder, what were they just a few hours ago? The bark of a California live oak? The grassland in Solstice Canyon? The planks of someone’s beloved back porch?
I’m sorry a bit of your history burned, but I’m happy to say your rain dance is bearing, if not precipitation, at least a marine layer that has calmed things down and cooled things off.
xoxo
Veronique
Alex Shapiro said,
November 25, 2007 @ 12:43 pm
My Malibu friend Hoagie emailed me something similar, Veronique:
“Interesting that your blog speaks of the house melting into the earth, when actually most of it went into the atmosphere. Which means that I breathed in at least a few molecules of it today. I wondered why I suddenly felt high for a moment…. must been a wee little toke of your past abode.”
I’m so glad that the humidity is rising! Paradise Cove dodged another bullet (for those reading this, the Cove– another major star of this blog– was evacuated as it faced a possible direct hit. A significant part of it burned in 1982).
Daniel is right: much as we silly mortals insist on living wherever we wish, there are places where nature will continuously win out. Beautiful Malibu is one of them. To live there means that one has to have an ability to let go at any moment.
Each day when I lived in that one-way canyon, I was painfully aware that my neighbors and I were taking a gamble. The same area– including the very spot where the house (ex-house) pictured here is, burned badly in 1982 as well. The neighborhood was fortunate to have a 25-year streak of good luck, but there isn’t a person living there who doesn’t know that every breeze brings with it potential peril. Humans are a strange species, in our arrogant insistence that beauty trumps reality. Because it does. Until it doesn’t.
Jaquandor said,
November 25, 2007 @ 2:44 pm
Wow, that’s fairly stunning. It’s an odd enough feeling that I’ve started having over the last four or five years — that places I frequented as a kid are no longer there — but to see your former home going up in flames like that must be stunning.
I, too, am glad you’re well!
ACB said,
November 26, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
Just sending hugs… and I’m glad you and yours are safe!