(A little change of pace today, for all you oenophiles out there who thought the California wine industry started with Ernest and Julio Gallo. From our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, Executive Director of Plant The Vine, an urban landscape history and public memory project intending to create a greater awareness of L.A.’s wine-making past through the establishment of small community vineyards. Viticulture?! Everybody knows L.A. has no culture.)
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I had been researching a public-history project about Los Angeles’ first truly dominant industry, that of winegrowing and winemaking, when I realized that I’d been running across quite a lot of what I can only describe as an open and obvious bias against Los Angeles terroir. Continue reading →
(While we’re off visiting New York City, our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, writes a post about Dodger baseball, linking it back to Brooklyn and public transit. [Did you know them Dodgers got their name from Manhattanites derisively referring to their borough counterparts as ‘trolley dodgers’ because the Brooklyn streets were once filled with trolley cars?] The serendipity of things, huh?)
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There are times during baseball season in Los Angeles when I feel closer to my father’s Brooklyn than I ever did living in New Jersey or Manhattan, or even Brooklyn itself, which we’d pass through on our way to see my grandmother when I was a kid. Those times are when the Mets are in town and I am lucky enough to catch one of their games at Dodger Stadium.
“Pick you up at six?” my friend, a New Jersey transplant with season tickets offers one recent evening. Great seats at the game, a meal that comes with the seats, and door-to-door service as well? He’s a great friend, but I decline the ride.
“I’ll just meet you there,” I tell him, thinking that’s how busy people do it in a big city, even if Los Angeles long ago abandoned its urban rubric for a more suburban slant. My friend knows I’m on a transit kick, and now since my car was recently totaled, I just walk and take transit practically everywhere.
Still, I feel a sense of guilt at not taking the ride, as if I’m being anti-social, biting the hand that feeds me.
“I just need to walk a little, climb some stairs,” I explain, and he pretends to understand. We’ll meet up at Will Call.
I gather my things — my glove, my cap, my Lee Mazzilli shirt — and am about to leave when the phone rings.
“I can’t talk right now, Mom,” I say quickly into the phone.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“I’m taking the subway to the Dodgers game…” But even before the words are out of my mouth, I am struck by a mysterious, ghostly and disjointed nostalgia, as if I had spoken those exact words in that exact order countless times before.
But of course, I hadn’t.
The Dodgers left Brooklyn for the West Coast the year before I was born. Still, I would hear stories all my young life from the devout Brooklyn Dodger fan that would marry my mother and become my father. He would tell me stories about Pee-Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, the Duke of Flatbush and of course, Jackie Robinson.
But Pee-Wee was his favorite. I’d never seen my father do anything more athletic than mow the lawn or pull up his socks, but in clips of Pee-Wee Reese playing shortstop, I recognized my father’s own physicality – short, quick and tightly muscled – and imagined him as a kid in Bed Stuy playing stickball or handball against the wall.
I take the Red Line down to Union Station from my local stop in Koreatown. When I get to the game, my friend has just arrived. He smiles under his Mets cap, and sports the team shirt as well. I read the name on the back – Dykstra. Lenny Dykstra, nick-named ‘Nails’ for his toughness and unrelenting drive to win. I see my father in him too.
We enter and take our seats. The sun is coming down behind the palms that top the ridge out beyond the parking lot, and while the visiting players are out on the field, stretching and cracking jokes before the game, I am distracted by the swallows flying above their heads and feasting on the gnats. A breeze, fragrant with sage and mountain pine, comes down from the mountains and fills the stadium. There is no question that the Dodgers’ current home is a powerful place.
After the Star-Spangled Banner, the game starts. The Mets lose a pitchers’ battle on the last at-bat of the game. My friend drives us home in his electric car with the disembodied female voice telling him how to go.
“We’ll get ‘em next time,” he says, and we both know it’s just part of the game, what you say when your team loses. I thank him as I get out of the car and close the door. I am grateful for such a friend.
The next day, I’m waiting for the 206 bus to take me back to my office after a Chinese lunch. A man sits at the stop. He has curly, prematurely white hair and looks up at me, at the top of my head.
“How long you been a Mets fan?”
At first I think it’s odd that he knows. But then I remember I am wearing the team cap.
“All my life,” I tell him with a certain pride.
He reaches into his bag and pulls out his own crumpled Mets cap and puts it on.
The man starts talking. And he is a fast talker, mostly about the Mets and how he was there when Shea Stadium opened in 1964, and for some reason, he gets free seats to any game he wants.
I want to tell him that I was there in 1969 when the Mets won it all, in the fifth game of the World Series at Shea, when they beat the Baltimore Orioles. But I can’t get a word in edgewise.
He continues talking, mentions ‘clients’ of his and I wonder what kind of clients he means. He tells me he got a ball signed at the game at Dodger Stadium the other day and the Mets players who had signed it.
“I got Campbell and Syndegaard and Morales,” he says, then doubles back. “Actually, I already had Morales. But I got Wright and Cespedes and De Grom and…”
He goes on like this even as we get on the now crowded bus and sit next to each other, taking up seats you’re supposed to give up to the elderly and the handicapped.
I glean from his non-stop stream that he is a professional drummer, which probably explains the round canvas bag in his lap. He plays the clubs in Koreatown, he tells me, knows a whole bunch of people from the world of entertainment, including Stevie Wonder and Zsa-Zsa Gabor, and is traveling around the country come June with the Platters. Wherever he goes, he checks out a baseball game. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia…
We get to my stop and he gives me his card.
“Call me anytime,” he tells me. “We’ll go to a game.”
I nod and thank him and climb over a few people to get out of the bus. And then I realize I never got a chance to ask him where he was from. Then again, why would I have? It was obvious. As obvious as Pee Wee and Syndegaard, the Duke of Flatbush and Wright.
Admittedly, while living in Los Angeles, John McPhee’s 1993 book, Assembling California, may not be the most restful bedtime reading. It’s all about tectonic plate theory, earthquakes and volcanoes, and fault lines running hundreds of miles long. Things that go bump in the night. Or when you’re sitting at a red light under a freeway overpass at 2:17 in the afternoon. Or taking in a World Series game in the early October evening.
The very definition of bad timing is standing in a door frame, waiting out the 45 seconds of a toss around earthquake, your existence here on the planet not even blink of the hundreds of billions of years that geology operates on. Really? Now?!
Even taking into consideration a 250-350 year schedule that some of the more active faults tend to follow before needing to pop and grind and drop significantly enough to cause serious problems, living in California seems to be a reasonable risk management assessment. Yes, there’s going to be a significant earthquake. While you’re still alive, though, and sizeable to rearrange your furniture?
Don’t be surprised when an earthquake happens. But, inevitably, you will be because… Really? Now?!
Besides, earthquake prediction is a mug’s game, albeit one that’s become more sophisticated with the advance of technology. Gone are the days when we had to rely on the dog acting all weird-like to tell us the ground was about to shake. We can practically see the earth move now. Still, it’s all about X% chance of a magnitude Y earthquake happening by the year 20ZZ.
23 years ago, when McPhee wrote Assembling California, it was said there was about a 50% chance of a major earthquake happening along the San Andreas by 2020. Within a year, Los Angeles did have a major earthquake, but it wasn’t the San Andreas. It was a fault nobody knew even existed at the time!
So it goes. Keep your emergency kit stocked and a flashlight handy. You probably won’t need either (fingers crossed!) but if you do…
People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen. They look out on a scene like this and think, It was all made for us – even if the San Andreas Fault is at their feet. To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need. Leonardo Seeber…referred to it as the principle of least astonishment. As we have seen this fall, the time we’re in is just as active as the past. The time between events is long only with respect to a human lifetime.
This is a passage from Eldridge Moores, the geologist-tectonicist McPhee travelled around with for parts of 15 years before writing his book. I love this idea of a principle of least astonishment even if I haven’t fully got my head around it. In a non-programming sense, it’s akin to whistling past the graveyard, isn’t it? A land of mental make-believe we construct in order to cope with the nasties life throws at us, the sad and sometimes terrifying realities of it all.
But if you really don’t want to experience a pants-peeing type of earthquake, move to where the possibility is less likely to happen. Toronto, for example. Or Phoenix, god forbid. Places more geologically stable.
On the other hand, if you’re destined to find yourself in the midst of a temblor – the most benign sounding term for an earthquake ever!! – if that is what the fates have in store for you, where better than Los Angeles? Regulatory codes have endeavoured to make it as safe as you could reasonably expect in the face of a catastrophic movement of the earth. I like my chances of living through the Big One there more than I would in, say, a remote area of China or Iran.
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
The concept of terra firma is strong one for us, a solid foundation, if you will. And for good reason. The vast majority of humanity, to the point of a mere rounding error, really, past, present and future, will not be swallowed up by a giant crack in the earth’s surface or swept away by a tsunami or be crushed under the weight of collapsing building. The earth acts as a stable stage for us to live our lives upon.
I think it worth contemplating, however occasional or philosophical, on the fact that the ground beneath our feet is in constant motion. Imperceptible as it may be to us, as divorced from the timeline of our reality as it is, the plates we stand on are moving. Grinding, crashing into each other, pushed deep back down into the molten core to be entirely transformed. Given enough time, ocean floors become mountain tops. Permanence is an illuuuusion, Michael, a trick of our fleeting grasp of time. Impermanence and change are the norm. Rocks crack and become gravel.
If even the earth is subject to perpetual instability, why should we be immune from it? Inerrancy is neither possible nor desirable. It enshrines bad ideas and disallows good ones from ever becoming better. Continents shift. We should more readily humble ourselves to follow along with them, to follow the fault lines and see where it takes us.
