What Didion was describing, after all, is not denial but determination, or even more, the gritty edge of will. Such will is what defines Los Angeles as a city and Southern California as a region. You might say the same of the entire state. The will to persist, to hold the perimeter, to keep moving into a future that’s uncertain, in a physical environment that, out of nowhere, can become catastrophically harsh.
Many of the homegrown Californians I know recognize this, but it was one of the first, and most important, lessons I as a transplant had to learn. It came in research for a book about earthquakes I was writing at least in part to alleviate my fear of them. At the time, I had the impression that, if I had enough information, I could tame my anxiety about the state’s brittle geology. What I discovered, however, was the opposite: that to live in California meant to understand that disaster could strike at any instant, which is to say that there is nothing we can count on, nothing that will guarantee safe passage through the world.
The only solution is to assess your risks and keep on living. That is what Southern California teaches everyone. It’s not a trade-off that to live amid such beauty requires recompense. No, it is something like an acceptance, or even an embrace, of everything we cannot and will never know.
For me, such a dynamic is essential in connecting us to place, to landscape; it is a crucible in which belonging is forged. I became an Angeleno in the wake of the Northridge earthquake and the disruptions of the early 1990s: the Rodney King riots, the 1993 Malibu wildfires. I began to understand the stakes of living there. Such events resonate as a set of shared inflection points, bringing me together with my fellow Southern Californians and, as it must be, with the region itself.
I also remember the midsummer night in 2013, when my wife and I drove two hours from Los Angeles to Hemet, to retrieve our then-14-year-old daughter, who had been evacuated from camp because of an out-of-control wildfire. I felt a grim satisfaction that evening as we headed east; we were on a necessary mission.
