To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Verlyn, a farm boy adjusting to L.A.
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 09:14:09 -0700
Waiting for the Warm Night Air of Los Angeles
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: March 11, 2005
Ever since I got to Southern California, people have been reminding me that
this part of the world has its seasons, too. I always agree. I can think of
at least four seasons in Los Angeles: rain, fire, escrow and the Academy
Awards. Some years the rainy season comes and goes without attracting much
attention to itself, but not this year. There's something a little
redundant in being told, in the midst of another downpour, that Los Angeles
does indeed have seasons. It almost sounds like complaining.
There's an old Midwestern guilt in that need to account for the seasons
here. I think of all the Iowa families who moved to California about the
same time my family did, in the mid-1960's. For most of them in that first
generation, lying in the sun - just lying there! - seemed an unaccountable
waste of time. They could barely allow themselves the pleasure of eating
outdoors without fussing over the pleasure of eating outdoors.
Telling the ones who stayed in the Midwest that there are seasons here,
too, was a kind of cultural negotiation, a way of saying, "We're not all
that different just because we live in California and dine on artichokes
now." The fact that the growing season is 365 days long felt like a plenary
indulgence, even if you were a Methodist.
Any place with as many climates - or as much climate, allowing the word its
salutary overtones - as Southern California doesn't really need seasons. To
drive from San Juan Capistrano over the Santa Ana Mountains on the Ortega
Highway and up through Riverside to the snowpack on the San Bernardino
Mountains is to cross any number of climatic zones, each of which is
enjoying a season unto itself. Southern California has a way of reminding
you that climate is a function of place and that season is a function of time.
A climatic zone may be tiny - no larger than a damp winter creek-bottom in
an otherwise arid landscape. And a season in Southern California may be
only a matter of days. One day feels like sodden winter, and by the evening
of the next day, the middle-school girls are playing soccer under the field
lights, the shriek of the referees' whistles cutting through the warm night
air. Summer comes over and over and over. As a result, everyone is equipped
to seize it the instant it appears. Back home - in New York state - the
winter coats are put away with a sense of reluctant foreboding, and only
after a good spell of hot weather.
I sense the encroaching season here readily enough - the way a plum-blossom
spring overlaps with the constancy of agave and yucca. But I miss the sense
of time. The days are longer than they were when we arrived in mid-January.
And yet it's hard to feel their lengthening. That's partly because of the
orange perma-glow in the urban sky at night. But it's also because of the
fact that light isn't the cue that my students, who are keenly and
hormonally sensitive to climatic disturbance, are really waiting for.
They're waiting - and the whole region with them - for warm nights. Here,
every night is a convertible night, unless it's pouring. But with real
warmth, the stoicism of keeping the top down will give way to the sybaritic
pleasure of merging with the biotic city, all those beings feasting on air.
Whenever I think of where we are in the year - on the verge of spring - I
think of home, of our farm north of New York City and the winter it's been
having. I can imagine the operatic movement of the light, the way each day
reaches a little further into the darkness of evening and morning than the
one before.
Those extra minutes of dawn and dusk are almost pure emotion at this time
of year, as if something had been reclaimed that was in danger of
disappearing forever. It's almost as if that place - its snowy pastures,
its huddled woods - were on a separate globe, pursuing a more elliptical
path around the sun than the planet Los Angeles occupies.
Emotion is the difference, of course. The irises are in bloom in Southern
California. But what is an iris? Back home it's something won back from the
cold and the snow, a rigorous assertion that winter may come again, but
only by going through summer first.
That is not what the irises are saying here. They are blooming with the
roses and the oranges and the birds of paradise and the rosemary and the
lavender and the camellias. To me it makes no sense, no matter how
beautiful it is. To the nectarivorous creatures here - to bees and moths
and hummingbirds - it merely seems, perhaps, like the slight swelling of
their circumstances. Much is blooming now, but then something is always
blooming here in this nectared city.
[Homestead] Verlyn, a farm boy adjusting to L.A.,
Gene GeRue, 03/11/2005