On my LAX descent I look down and see Identical broad squares, packed with little peaked roofs. Covering the flat plain, running up to the mountains, lapping up the sides.
So beautiful, I think. That we have found a way to construct a world we could be happy with; that we could put down stakes in history’s unfolding narrative, stop the careening, and feel strong chins. That we could build this immersive web of comfort I’m looking down on, air conditioners and smooth roads and swimming pools, and think for one minute that the circumstances of history, whether the old fires of right-wrong tyranny, or the actual fire of climate and ecological collapse, wouldn’t grow up and loom over that nice existence that we birthed right here, in these valleys far to the east of Los Angeles, like the mountains I can see behind them. From the ground, it feels like the calm surface of a happy pond.
From the sky, it looks like a tiny raft in storm, about to get tossed.
Yet when I see the narrow gray cable of a freeway, little black beetles gliding up and down, splitting these broad blocks of suburban living, I feel love. Love that this seething mass of the innocent and well-meaning humans, none of them who asked to exist, dared to make the clinging leap and grab onto a sense of rootedness, of life without pain. And dared to dream that it might remain.