At least somewhere will have a “rainy night in” tonight – with a nod to Brook Benton.
Captain Gooding checks in today from lands east of the Appalachains.
“”Here come those Santa Ana winds again…” from Babylon Sister, by Steely Dan
Southern California evolved to burn. The rugged hillsides around the Los Angeles basin, stretching north and south along the coastline after taking a short east-west detour around LA, are covered in chaparral and manzinita scrub. Making use of the almost randomly available rains to slowly grow, dumping leaves and discarded branches to the ground around themselves, their tough, hard wood clings tenacious to the hillsides. Their roots hold back at least some of the soil during periodic torrential rains, while the vegetative litter helps in a small way to prolong soil moisture during the all too often prolonged droughts.
Further northwards, from south of Carmel Vally and Monterey Bay to the fogbound coasts running up to southern Oregon, coast redwoods, the world’s tallest trees, reach their feathery fronds cloudward, scraping moisture from foggy skies, dripping on themselves, watering their own roots. But their thick, fire resistant bark is mute testimony to evolution hand in hand with periodic wildfires. Their cones open up and drop their seeds only after fires have cleaned up the forest floors beneath the lofty giants.
And that is as it should be. For tens of thousands of millennia, the geography of California has resulted in the periodic funneling of hot, dry winds from the interior deserts over the steep, folded hills and out towards the sea. Those winds have periodically fanned naturally started fires into conflagrations which have swept those coastal mountain ranges. From southern chaparral to more northerly redwoods, California’s coastal vegetation is considered pyrophitic. It coexists with wildfires. In many ways, it needs those fires. Those wildfires clean away undergrowth and open pine cones to release their seeds, or turn dead leaves and sticks into soluble ash, allowing the next rains to move the released minerals back into the soil, where those tenacious roots can once again use them to regrow new branches and regreen the scorched hillsides.
In California’s interior valleys, winter rains also moisten and renew verdant grasslands, which then parch, turn tan and dry out in the long summers, inevitably also burning and renewing the soils in a cycle of life, fire and regrowth stretching back into prehistory. The same cycle has shaped the giant sequoias on the western slopes of the Sierra mountains, which also have massively thick bark, protecting their huge trunks from wildfires which periodically clean up understory vegetation.
In short, California’s hills and valleys are clothed in vegetation which has evolved over the eons along with periodic wildfires. Unchecked sweeping flames, driven by those Santa Ana winds, are an integral part of California’s ecology.
In a strangely resonating way, Tinseltown – Hollywood – the cluster of people, products, and places that form SOCAL’s media industry – “the film business” – has an earily familiar ecology as well. Each movie grows from a seed, an idea, a pitch. If that falls on fertile soil, producers bring in the money like roots bring moisture. The script grows, the cast is found, the massive cluster of skilled trades persons weaves the complex structure of green room, digital inputs, actual physical sets and models, and paper, so much paper, from incunabla to laser printed pulp into what will become the final product. And then, like the wind driven flames light up the skies and fill the air with smoke and embers, comes the flurry of filming, where light and magic come together, their essence captured digitally (or even, still, sometimes on film,) and like a seed pod, become filled with the actualization of the idea. And once canned, and edited, and released to the world, it all goes away. The sets are dismantled – some hauled off to the dump, other parts sold off, or given away, some bits eventually reused. The cast and crews disperse. The musicians, like songbirds, fly off to other branches, other venues for their talents. And like a post fire, scorched hillside, that world awaits for the next ideas, the next rains, to recreate new life.
But the continued existence of an overall ecology does not mean any given bush or tree lives on. Sometimes the fires are too hot. The underlying soil is sterilized, not simply scorched. The smoke-filled winds sometimes carry away almost all traces of what was. Sometimes the wind fanned flames burn Tara as well as Twelve Oaks, and all that was is gone with the wind, never to return. Inevitably, the blue coats and the carpet baggers show up, as the survivors stagger about, dazed, in shock initially, and all too often subsumed with post-traumatic stress as time passes. What grows from those ashes often has little resemblance to what was, ante ignem (before the fire).
Just as generations of American Southerners clung to their memories of the Ante Bellum south in the aftermath of the War Between The States, it is likely that in the decades to come, some, perhaps many of those who inhabited and energized Ante Ignem southern California’s Tinseltown are equally likely to live in an unrealized dreamland that never will return. But Georgia awaits. Its movie sets, and massive studios and media friendly business climate and tax codes, not to mention a willing workforce, are poised to scoop up new talent set adrift from those Hollywood chains by the flames of 2025.
Will Silicon Valley’s digital currencies become the new Confederate dollars? The flames of the LA fires are destroying very real wealth. Lots and lots of very real wealth. Much of that wealth will never return to Cali. The underlying financing structures can, and likely will, go elsewhere. Money is, pretty much by definition, fungible. Treasure moves around. But that collection of talent, who made southern California what it was? Time alone will tell who remains there in the ashes, dreaming of Ante Ignem Tinseltown, and who drives or flies away elsewhere in search of greener pastures, gone with those Santa Ana winds, never to return. Sherman Oaks, not General Sherman, may soon be marching through Georgia, resumes in hand. Time alone will tell how this story ends, but we’ve seen those flame-filled skies before, and then, as now, they portended the downfall of a way of life, and an inflection point in the history of this nation.
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