This coming Saturday is California Coastal Cleanup Day, volunteers pitching in along our beaches, lakes, and rivers to pick up some of our mess. California Coastal Cleanup Day is held in conjunction with International Cleanup Day. Both happen every year. You've probably missed a lot of them. I know I have. It's an easy thing to shunt aside. We have so many other things to do. Maybe we'll pick up trash on our own next Saturday instead, or the Saturday after that. I am not imagining these excuses. They're the ones I've used year after year.
But the years, they are running out.
"Fifty years ago, we could not see limits to what we could put into the ocean or what we could take out," writes undersea explorer and crusader Sylvia Earle. "Fifty years into the future, it will be too late to do what is possible now. We are in a sweet spot in time. Never again will there be a better time to take actions that can ensure an enduring place for ourselves within the living systems that sustain us."
I quote Ms. Earle because she has spent her life studying the oceans. She knows what she's talking about. I also quote her because hers is a call to optimism in, well, what can often seem like a sea of pessimism.
I keep a folder of clippings, culled from newspapers, magazines, internet reports, and various other sources. This now bulging folder is marked, unimaginatively but accurately, "Ocean Dumping." This might seem a triflingly dark and pessimistic occupation, but I am simply an optimist who loves the ocean and believes we can turn things around. And knowledge can provide a nudge to action, although I'll be honest, some of what I've stuffed into my folder scares the willies out of me.
The ethnic restaurants that dot the multicultural Southern California landscape are perhaps the most prominent ways that people can either introduce themselves to a certain culture, or for others to maintain their own cultural ties. But just as visible on the streets, though overlooked and relatively uncelebrated in a way, are the presence of ethnic supermarkets.
Across the Southland, from Chatsworth to Panorama City, from Koreatown to Monterey Park, from West Covina to Westminster's Little Saigon, and even places in between, you will find them: Asian American supermarkets.
Though individual stores may cater to a specific Asian group -- usually the ethnic origin of their owner -- they have more in common with each other than the Ralphs, Vons, or Albertsons of the world.
Asian American supermarkets share the same DNA, in both physical makeup and overall cultural importance to their respective ethnic communities. Inside, you're likely to find an entire aisle dedicated to rice, another to noodles, another to spices and sauces (from fish to plum to a nearly infinite variety of soy), another to imported snack foods, along with a meat section, a very well-stocked seafood section, an array of produce with both common and not-so-common fruits and vegetables, and you may also find sections dedicated to teas and herbs.
I went over to Garden Grove because something odd is happening there, suspended in sacred time between the Rev. Robert H. Schuller's megachurch and what intends to be Christ Cathedral of the Catholic Diocese of Orange. The transition from one to the other is both fascinating and puzzling.
The former campus of Schuller's ministry is a complex of buildings, four of them by some of the 20th century's great architects -- Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson, and Richard Meier -- and a fifth by the lesser-known Gin Wong.
The buildings are surrounded by 34 acres of parking lots, landscaping going a little weedy from inattention, and massive sculptures of a beefy Jesus and a pissed-off Moses. There's a cemetery, too.
Conversations at Rancho Los Alamitos on Bixby Hill in Long Beach have been going on for more than 2,500 years -- in the voices of the indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva, the Spanish and Mexican settlers who followed; the Bixby family and their tenant farmers, and now in ours.
We are the 21st century inheritors of an essential conversation about the place in which we live. It's a deeply shadowed landscape today, where peoples and cultures are often hidden in plain sight and where some "ghost" populations have been relegated to margins we rarely see.
The suddenness of development during and after World War II has conditioned us to think of the region as an archipelago of enclaves and not as the multi-cultural community that the region has become.
As far back as the 1930s, East Los Angeles was among the most diverse urban areas in America. Coastal Los Angeles County in the first half of the 20th century mingled ethnic Serbs, Portuguese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and Chinese communities, among several others. Today, the Long Beach Unified School District boasts of being one of the most diverse districts in the nation.
Even the blue-collar suburbs of the post-war period and the gated neighborhoods being built today are trending toward maximally hybrid places. According to the Generational Future of Los Angeles report prepared by USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy, "Barely 5% of children in Los Angeles are foreign born, and yet the majority of children (60%) have immigrant parents."
This new demographic reality means that wherever I go in Los Angeles County, I'm likely to be a minority in the community that lives and works there.
I met a neighbor yesterday who I've known for the last seven years.
I've known him ever since I got my first dog and started walking it and started seeing this man regularly in the morning, sometimes late afternoon, sitting on the steps at the end of his walkway. We'd nod and speak, but I never knew his name, or he mine. It didn't feel really necessary; we had an instant, easy familiarity that black people tend to have with each other whether they are neighbors or not, a familiarity that allows conversations to go on for years without names ever entering into them.
I didn't ask the man his name yesterday. I stopped as usual with my dogs to say hello. He was sitting in his spot on the steps and the edge of the sidewalk. He nodded at the dogs and smiled, as usual, and then he said, "Do you know what happened to that young couple down the block? They used to be out a lot. I been wondering where they went."
Today, it's hard to imagine Southern California without palm trees. They line our streets, shade our gardens, and guest-star in films to establish Los Angeles as the setting. But before the lanky palm conquered the L.A. skyline, another tree played the same metonymic role: the pepper.
An import from South America's Andes mountain range, the Peruvian pepper tree (Schinus molle) is instantly recognizable for its fragrant, lacy leaves, drooping branches, and knotted trunk. It also produces bunches of small, pink berries that resemble peppercorns but are not the stuff of common table pepper; though they can be used sparingly as a seasoning, the berries are poisonous in large quantities. (The Peruvian pepper tree does have a cousin in the Brazilian pepper, or Schinus terebinthifolius, but neither is closely related to the true pepper plant, Piper nigrum.)
In its native Peru, indigenous South Americans found many practical uses for the tree, from firewood to medicinal applications. More than 1,000 years ago, brewers in the Wari Empire produced a spicy beer from the tree's berries. Much later, Spanish conquerors cleared entire forests of pepper trees for their timber, creating wagon wheels and posts from the wood.
But in California, the pepper tree has been planted almost exclusively for ornamental purposes.
The espresso bar is a gleaming silver airplane wing, from a Cessna 150 that ran out of gas and crashed years ago on McKinley Street in Riverside. Steffen Sommers recounted how, after he and business partner Allen Andra had decided to open a coffee house, and after they'd decided one day driving down from Big Bear that it would be called Lift, for the lift given to humans by coffee but also for the element of flight, they figured they wanted a plane wing.
So they went to Flabob Airport, in Rubidoux, knowing it was a historic spot, and they met a pilot, of course, who said he had a plane wing in his backyard, adjacent to the Box Springs Mountains. It was painted white, with thick primer over that, and they painstakingly stripped and repaired and polished the wing, with the help of a craftsman. Now, the little green light glows just beside the counter where people order, and the metallic gold of the siphon brewers is reflected below the hands of people waiting for their lattes.
Key West, Florida is a long way from Ventura County in the same way that Cuba is a long way from Key West, Florida, but not really.
I speak literally -- and first -- of Diana Nyad who, as anyone with internet access and a pulse now knows, completed a 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida that took her both 53 hours (that's two days and two nights) and 35 years. Since we are a country obsessed with first, let's get that out of the way first. By completing a swim many thought impossible, Diana Nyad became the first to swim the Florida Straits from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage (Australian Susie Moroney completed the crossing in a shark cage; the cage, towed by a boat, provides a mild draft making swimming somewhat easier). Plenty of swimmers have attempted the Cuba to Florida swim; all but Nyad have failed. Last year Australian Penny Palfrey swam 79 miles until strong currents felled her. I'm not exactly sure how a feat like that qualifies as failure, but record books are only interested in completed tasks.
When Nyad staggered ashore at Smathers Beach in Key West, her puffy-faced words were, "I have three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team." Nyad might have said something else. It's hard to know. Someone who has been immersed in salt water for 53 hours talks like they have been serving as Mike Tyson's personal punching bag for an equal amount of time. Nyad might have also asked for a massage and a half dozen cheeseburgers. I know I would have.
The moment she stepped ashore, the cyber-world exploded with congratulatory messages, including one from the President of the United States. "Congratulations to Diana Nyad. Never give up on your dreams," tweeted Barack Obama, no stranger to long haul efforts himself. "If there is an Aquaman then she is Aquawoman," proclaimed another tweeter. Not everyone was impressed. "Why spend so much valuable time... on the marginally interesting but ultimately selfish pseudo- adventure of Diana Nyad?" groused one Twitter tweeter.
Our annual block club party promised to be a slog this year. I suspected it back in March but was sure of it by about June. The biggest problem was that while everybody wanted to keep up the tradition of a day-long summer picnic in the street, the ranks of those willing to put in the work -- the picnic committee -- was shrinking steadily.
Grumbling about the trend had gotten louder at our monthly block club meetings, where attendance had drifted down to a hardy handful. Our block captain, W.G. (who in nine years has never told me what the initials stand for) was getting visibly annoyed by what he said was a disgraceful lack of unity. Truly, he couldn't understand it. Tough as things were these days, neighbors needed to band together. People needed to be jumping at the chance to be involved as something as affirming as the picnic, the block club's signature event. It was also a chance for people to get out from behind their doors and meet other people they didn't know. Our block is pretty closeknit, but no one knows all forty households. W.G. may know half of them, at most. We'd had lots of turnover the last couple of years what with people moving, selling or renting out. And dying. The week before the picnic, one of our neighbors, a woman about my age, succumbed to cancer. She and her family had lived on the block close to twenty years. Her funeral was scheduled the morning of our picnic; not a good omen. I tried to suggest to W.G. at the August meeting that we at least dedicate the event to the neighbor, but he wouldn't hear of it. A terrible shame, but he clearly didn't want to cast a pall over the big event. No use in that. It was just unfortunate timing. The show goes on, etc.
The city council of Menifee in Riverside County, after initial reluctance, has approved an ordinance allowing residents to build a survival shelter in their backyard. Builders will be issued permits, and city inspections will ensure that the bunkers of Menifee will be up to code.
Unlike the shelters of the Cold War, which were commendably Spartan, the current era of survival aims at relative comfort. As the Los Angeles Times reported recently, one Menifee resident plans to excavate a shelter with space to house 20 people, enough for his extended family and perhaps a friend or two.
I Am Los Angeles: Strings of Success
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