|
Roadmap to Peace: Beauty and Silence
|
|
|||
I was shocked to read the sensationalizing in The Times-Picayune's front-page coverage about recent drug-related shootings in the Hollygrove and Pigeon Town neighborhoods. I've lived for many years on Belfast Street. My neighbors and I were surprised to find our comfortable, down-home street on the front page of Saturday's paper as part of a "battlefield," where people were calling off their barbecues and birthday parties for fear of violence.
This is an unfair characterization of the neighborhood's pride and resilience. I'm writing this Saturday afternoon after walking my dog around the neighborhood, and I am happy to report plenty of joy and play, even at the sites of last week's crime scenes.
Through graphics and timelines, the article pushed too hard to suggest there's something exciting and special about these recent deaths, as though they are isolated from crime and death elsewhere in the city, even a few blocks outside of the tidy confines of the reporter's fantasy gangland. Hollygrove is a very pleasant neighborhood, and it has no greater or lesser portion of New Orleans' problems than the city's other neighborhoods.
Yours truly,
Ed Skoog
Two months later, we moved to California. I took a job at a boarding school for the beaux-arts. Peace out, suckers, we thought at the time, waving goodbye to the good friends who helped us pack up and load the truck.
If you wish to follow, there are two routes, southerly and northerly. Using the southern manner you don’t leave I-10 until you reach Palm Springs, then take an hour of winding roads up 5,000 feet of desert mountains past tall ocotillo and stubby cholla. At the very end, you pass out of the desert into a pine forest nestled in a box canyon, and that’s where we live now, a quiet mountain resort town of 2,000 people and no bar. Nary Markey, nor Snake nor Jake, nor Mimi, Saturn, Mick, Mayfair, Handsome Willy, nor Pal.
The northern route is the same mileage, really, due to the curvature of the earth. You stop first at my brother’s place in Longview, Texas, then get a speeding ticket up around Lubbock, get weirded out by the Grand Canyon, think about how wise it would be to stay in Flagstaff instead of continuing west, then cut south to burning, fiery Phoenix and into the high California desert through the Chuckwalla Mountains and then to Palm Springs.
Our new town doesn’t have a bar, but Palm Springs does, and I’m financially afraid to drink in them. It would take a third FEMA check to drink properly in Palm Springs. One can take some comfort, however, in close proximity to Frank Sinatra’s simple grave. Farther south is the Salton Sea, which the Enola Gay crew used for practice before bombing New Orleans’ newest sister cities. For some reason, everyone associates the Salton Sea with methamphetamine, but even the tweakers seem to have abandoned its barnacled shores. Everyone here has a favorite Salton Sea statistic. Mine is that in 1997 the feds were about to de-list the Brown Pelican from the endangered species list, just as 14,000 pelicans landed in the sea and promptly died, killing of a third of the bird’s population. That is priceless, my friends.
Just north of the Sea is the center of date palm cultivation in North America. There turn out to be dozens of varieties. My favorite is the Basrah, which is native to Basrah, Iraq, which has just been added to New Orleans’ sister cities. Other sister cities: Troy, Ur, and the caves at Lascaux. But back to dates. They’re delicious; they taste like escape and rum.
That’s an hour away. Los Angeles and San Diego are two hours on the other side of Idyllwild. I’d never been to either before September. Eh.
San Diego is the true city of the dead. I was frequently puzzled by Mad magazine’s repeated accusations that Philadelphia was sleepy—having hardly ventured outside Topeka until college, the idea of differences in fun levels between Big Cities was hard to believe. Now, at thirty-four, I have been to Philadelphia, and yea, I have been to San Diego, and, Fugees, San Diego is the new Philadelphia. Everywhere I looked, someone was yawning. They just wait for death there. And it will not come.
Los Angeles has its pleasures. Watts. The Alameda Strip. Compton—all of south L.A. is kin to the Dirty South. In west L.A. there are several good bars, but still, with the clientele, they seem after years in New Orleans rather pale. Fairfax is okay. So is Silver Lake, except that back in Kansas there was also a Silver Lake, which dried up every few years. The rotting catfish stunk up all of Shawnee County. So I regard the Silver Lake neighborhood with some suspicion. We haven’t been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology yet, but the way my buddy Rob describes the place, it sounds like a less folksy U-C-M Museum.
Instead of hurricane tracking maps, we’re learning the traffic patterns of Southern California, and are fascinated by “Sig alerts,” which are what the radio traffic reporters call a delay of thirty minutes or more. Apparently “Sig” was a traffic broadcaster from the past (what, you think I’m going to do research for NOLAFugees.com? Do it yourself, at these prices). Therefore his legacy: Sig alert. This fondness for the messenger of doom reminded me, obviously, of the way that New Orleanians act like a deer has entered the room when you mention Nash Roberts’ name.
Where we live, Idyllwild, is sort of like Abita Springs. Although we’re not far from the major populations of Southern California, it’s an hour of nasty mountain driving to begin to get anywhere, so we’re pretty isolated. Everyone here is crazy, of course. People come here to escape the cities, and they usually have a secret reason. So it’s like New Orleans in that respect, except that since they drink at home instead of in public, you never learn the secret. We have no secrets. Our trash and recycling pile up on the front porch. The dogs run loose; I step out in my boxer shorts to call their names. We leave power tools in the yard just because no one will steal them. Not one of my neighbors so far has waved a gun at me. They don’t even wave. Californians are invisible to each other. No mutters “all right” as you pass on the sidewalk. No grins. No one grins. Their faces can only grin at bad things. Many people I’ve met here have violent revenge fantasies. I miss the predictable rolling shootouts of the Hollygrove. I miss the crap games on the corner, the whorehouses, the sound of the church organ on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.
I missed the flood. We had five feet of water on Belfast, a foot in our house. Back at Thanksgiving and Christmas to work on it, my neighbors told me their stories. Many of them escaped to the second floor of a garage until the boats came. About the flood they said, even though it destroyed their homes, how beautiful it was, and how quiet. Idyllwild’s the same way, beautiful and quiet.
What then ought one to conclude about beauty and silence?
Our first disaster concern in Idyllwild is forest fires. The second is earthquakes. My new school was kind enough to accommodate eleven students from NOCCA, all brilliant kids and certified Fugees. Within hours of arriving on campus we had a disaster drill in anticipation of the catastrophic fires we were assured would happen eventually and consume the whole town. A few weeks later I had my first earthquake, late at night in the middle of a mountain thunderstorm. It was a 4.4, not major but the largest in a few years up here. Because of mountain geology, you can hear the earthquakes coming, rumbling up through the miles of granite. This one arrived between blasts of thunder, and I could only tell the difference because all our art tilted on the wall, but nothing fell. It was a great relief, though, to learn about earthquakes as a way of trying to forget hurricanes.
I was going to say something about Beauty and Silence, which we have obtained in our peace-out destination. But I’ll let Robinson Jeffers, that other California poet, say it better:
Fire On The Hills
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.
Ed Skoog writes and works in California.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
 |
||||||
| Robinson Jeffers, that other California poet. |
