Fighting fire on borrowed time
LOS ANGELES - Twisters of pernicious plumes of smoke swirl out seaward toward the lustrous Pacific Ocean, as if semaphores from Mother Nature about the future that lies ahead for us. “She” is suggesting it will be hot.
On the very landside edge of the ocean, just on the western crest of the Pacific Coast Highway, the famous artery through Malibu, where entertainment figures among others live, is a restaurant called Duke’s. Its big bay windows grace one of the largest uninterrupted runs of beach to be found on the entire West Coast.
During the past few days, Malibu residents have been clustering at Duke’s for comfort and reassurance, as if replicating a town meeting in a rural country store, while brave battalions of near-exhausted firefighters scramble up hills and into canyons to fight the fires raging all over Southern California.
The overall attitude is fatalistic and optimistic. It has boiled down into an odd collective personality that seems to be emerging most noticeably on the West Coast, and of course you see it most clearly when observing people under stress.
The optimism part comes from the endless-summer feeling otherwise prevalent in Southern California, perhaps epitomized by the restaurant’s namesake, Duke Kahanamoku, the original Hawaiian celebrity surfer whose triumphant but now-faded black-and-white photos drape the eatery’s walls.
The fatalism part comes from knowing that we have rudely decamped on land and live in a time frame borrowed from Mother Nature, whose iron laws of destruction and regeneration cannot be trifled with by mere humans, even firefighters. No one blames the firefighters when the houses burn. There’s not too much anyone can do when Mother Nature gets like this.
The Malibu mob knows that there will always be such times. If it isn’t the desert wind embedding sparks of fire into tinderbox patches of parched earth, it will be the sudden swirl of storms and mudslides that kill. Then, just when everything seems calm, the earth will shake and turn the ground into jelly.
Malibu residents know there is almost nothing anyone can do about these forces of nature except to try to contain the damage and wait it out. The magazine-cover image of the American spirit believing that virtually anything is conquerable is no longer the real U.S.
We know, as a society of mere humans, there is only so much we can do about forces we cannot control. The Malibu crowd knows that China is destined to rise and probably challenge us, no matter what the Pentagon may dream about or hope for. They know that Iraq is a disaster area and will remain so for the foreseeable future, no matter how long American soldiers are there. Silently, they worry to themselves that 9/11 wasn’t one of a kind and that a poisonous strike of terrorism against U.S. civilians somewhere on the continental U.S. is inevitable as is the next wildfire.
America is no longer the virgin territory of old. There are parts of Malibu, to illustrate the metaphor, that have burned over before, are burning now today, and will burn again. The children of the adults congregating for comfort at Duke’s will be congregating at Duke’s when they are adults. The city of Malibu can vote to raise taxes and double the firefighting force if it wants, but that will not stop the fire next time or necessarily even reduce the damage in property and lives substantially.
There is on my office wall a framed quotation attributed to Mohammed Ali, the champion heavyweight fighter, now fighting an enemy even beyond his formidable powers: Parkinson’s disease. It reads: “Too many victories weaken you. The defeated can rise up stronger than the victor.”
Malibu figures we have lost in Iraq, but knowing it, and accepting it, will make us stronger. It surmises that China and Asia will rise to challenge America and Europe, but knowing and accepting it will strengthen our ability to cope with it. We know and accept that the fire next time may well be worse than the one this time. But we also know that by continuing to push in the face of Mother Nature - whether by where we live or how we live - we are going to be pushed back, and pushed down. And then we will get up again.
At their best, after all, Americans - even Malibu-ans - know they are only human.
Professor Tom Plate, a board member of the Burkle Center on International Policy at UCLA, lives in Beverly Hills.