California Dreaming

On such a winter's day

For the entirety of my lifetime, California (and Southern California in particular) has seemed like a mythical place. Led Zeppelin sang about goin’ to California, and so did LL Cool J (and I even wrote about that a few months ago in this space). The Eagles sang about the Hotel California, and Fleetwood Mac all but personified the state in their music. There were TV shows and movies, and all of it seemed to reinforce the idea of California as being a modern-day Shangri-La.

I visited California with my family 10 years ago, and took the picture above off of the pier in Santa Monica. How many of the people on the beach were tourists, and how many actually lived there is something that I’ll never get to find out. But they were all soaking up the California lifestyle that made Ocean Pacific a mindset as well as a line of clothing. I remember thinking to myself that living in such an environment must have been an amazing thing.

All of that seems to have come to a screeching and irreversible halt over the past four days. Whether some of the people in this picture are now homeless, again, is something that I can’t know. But those who aren’t, and who live in or around Los Angeles, almost surely know someone whose life will never again be the same.

It’s one thing when a person or a family loses their home in a fire. It’s tragic, yes, but the wider community can still pull together to help them get back on their feet again. But this is a different sort of tragedy, altogether. When entire communities are wiped away, as it seems to have happened in places like Pacific Palisades, the support just isn’t available. Rebuilding in the same place is an understandable goal, but when everyone wants to do that at the same time it leads to shortages in labor and building materials, which will then drive prices higher than all but the most privileged of people can afford to pay.

And then there’s the issue of whether rebuilding in the same place makes sense to begin with. With insurance companies pulling out of high-risk markets like California, and the droughts which caused this fire becoming more severe in the future, it just seems foolish to plow limited resources into a rebuild, when another fire could happen again at any moment. So where will all these people go, assuming that there are funds available to begin with?

I realize that I’m looking down the road a few months, as the fires are literally still burning at this moment. But the questions will need to be answered, as people sort through the rubble of the lives that they thoroughly enjoyed until the beginning of this very week. And those who were left unscathed are probably wondering about when their turn is coming. California Dreamin’ might not ever be the same again.