Gliding on the freeway, on a smooth path through the leaf and concrete tangle, countless palm trees sticking up and scattered into the distance.
Most palm trees -- in America, like in San Francisco, or I’m pretty sure, South Carolina -- are ornamental, meaning they were placed someplace by some authority with financial upside attached to whether the place is seen as being tropical.
In Los Angeles, it is organic. I know the irony: palm trees are not native here. Their ancestors were as much crude bait for tired, cold, rich white children from the East Coast with exotic fascinations.
But now, not just planted down the middle of a boulevard, or in front of a hotel, university, or other mansion-like structure. But also in the yards of some whose great grandparents were from Alabama, others whose great grandparents were from cold part of Korea and who hadn’t heard of California, and other people of every race and class, washing in like a broken wave from the Pacific Rim and Mexico and Iran and Armenia and lots of other places.
Many live in single story houses whose backyards, seen from the 10 above, are strewn with fallen gutters or other entrails of semi-decaying late-20th century home life, or whose pools have leaves sunk to bottom, whose front yards are patched and sparse. All around them, a refugee camp of commercial architecture from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. Sharp angles like the arrow on the In-N-Out sign; garish signage; strip mall parking lots. Other marks of our lack of urban planning, collective infrastructure, pleasingly-designed structures and spaces. The bright sun exposes all this, what folks from cities with “civic cultures” might call barrenness, “a wasteland,” I’ve heard ventured.
It’s not New York, or Washington, and all their fine statuary and manicured towers. But it’s the deposit basin of the world’s middle class aspirations; the remains of a crashing wave of the world’s collective idea of what America can offer; a shamble of dreams of common people, spread richly across the plain like icing, with palm trees sticking up.
So walk outside and feel the sun’s breath; a constant reminder for the anxiously attached that the basic force of life is not going away. And look at all those palm trees, not constructed artificially by tourist trappers, but part of the physical landscape, monuments to warmth and welcome, of everything from everywhere.