Milk and Honey (Part One)

See, here’s the thing about Southern California.

We’re already locked and loaded for apocalypse here.

In so many ways, we’ve been dealing with End Times phenomena for a good many years now. Let’s call them ‘semi-apocalypses,’ or ‘little apocalypses,’ little in the sense that California’s frequent reminders of how fragile we humans really are, don’t spread beyond our borders to engulf the whole wide world. Yet here in the state, when the shit’s going down, city to city, ‘hood to ‘hood, it certainly feels like Ragnarok is nigh.

It often feels like what’s happening in our demilitarized zone might as well be happening everywhere. The sensationalism of unpredictable disaster either natural or man-made draws us to witness, and if we’re not in the thick of it, we’ll watch from a close distance, subject to our rubbernecking nature.

SoCal has no shortage of apocalyptic threats.

Fires.

Floods.

Earthquakes.

Urban decay and ruin.

Desertification.

Rising sea levels.

Drought.  

Air and ocean pollution.

Chemical spills.

Agricultural and industrial waste.

Not to mention our continued tribal worship at the altar of the goddess Discordia. That’s a fancy pants way of saying we seek out conflict and chaos, because we’re monkey-brained mammals entrenched in the sweaty, bloody corporeal rather than the dainty, leather-and-lace ethereal.

I’ll just focus on ever pending physical calamity for now.

An oft debated subject in California is where exactly the ‘Dixie Line’ is drawn, or where Californians generally agree the cutoff lies between Northern and Southern California. The oldest adage points to a landmark near Merced, a city just north of Fresno in the central valley, “where the palm meets the pine.” The precise, geographic center of the state is in North Fork, east of Highway 99 in Madera County. But most people ‘experience’ dead center California when they speed by a pair of trees directly embedded in the median of the north and southbound lanes of Highway 99, one of them a palm, the other a pine, representing the symbolic separation between Southern and Northern California. It’s said by a few curious Californian historians the original trees were planted in the 1920s to represent the midpoint of the state between the Mexican and Oregonian borders. In 2005, a storm topped the pine tree, and it was replaced with a cedar tree.

While the measures pan out in terms of miles, it’s hard for any born and bred Californians to displace the stark differences in Central California and apply them under the SoCal umbrella. Both the townships of the central coast and the central valley cities of Fresno and Bakersfield are decidedly different than most SoCal districts. But some insist there’s really no such thing as Central California, that the most proper crossing points between NoCal and SoCal are the city of Merced inland, and southern San Jose on the coast, which to most Californians is a ridiculous notion. Part of that viewpoint is based on the very real fact a whole lot of Californians never venture too much farther north than San Francisco or Sacramento, which does the northern part of the state a disservice (or a justice, depending on what socio-politico spectrum lens is being utilized). There’s a whole other world in the green forests of Lassen, Shasta, Mendocino, Klamath, and Six Rivers. That is, of course, where the Pac Northwest officially begins before Oregon and Washington.

Some claim Los Angeles and San Diego environs are the sole owners of Southern Californian title, from Ventura County about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, down to Imperial Beach 20 miles south of San Diego at the Mexican border.

Myself, being a born and bred ‘Central Californian,’ having resided in all three regions of Northern, Central, and Southern California, having repeatedly explored every corner of this fair land for the better part of fifty years, I think there’s a big difference in the cultural airs of NoCal, Cen-Cal, and SoCal.

I believe Santa Barbara is where the Central Coast ends and SoCal begins in earnest. The middle-class townships of Central California peter out once the Santa Ynez Mountains are crossed in the west or the Sierra Nevada range in the east, gateways to the basins of Los Angeles. In local terms, we pretty much see Northern California starting at San Jose in the west and Stockton in the east. Central California’s bulk lies in the agricultural flat lands of the Central Valley, marked in the east by Modesto, Fresno, Salinas, and in the west, Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur, Paso Robles, and San Luis Obispo.

Being a resident Californian, I see the delineation of SoCal in aesthetics. Santa Barbara is the first coastal region coming from Northern California that appears how pretty much everyone in the world thinks about California. The beaches, the supposed affluence, the palm trees and sports cars and celebrities, the highbrow pretensions, the paradise found ambience.

Of course, California isn’t really how it’s mostly portrayed in the media, but Santa Barbara does emulate that myth if you’re looking at its designed tourist trap attractions and its jaw-dropping costs of Californian real estate.

Santa Barbara ranks among the most expensive places to live in California, along with Palo Alto, Malibu, Marin, Sausalito, Laguna Beach, Beverly Hills, Coronado, and La Jolla. But in reality, it’s really only one enclave of many, many more similar ‘burgs to come, little different than other predominately white Southern Californian towns. If you’d never been in SoCal before, you’d have a tough time distinguishing localities, landmarks, or significant distinctions between Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Santa Monica, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano, Carlsbad and Leucadia and Encinitas, Cardiff-by-the-Sea and Solana Beach, Del Mar, La Jolla, and Coronado. They’re a web of white affluence (each hosting a lower middle class living in outer fringe, suburban, east basin regions like San Fernando, Lancaster, San Bernardino, Riverside, El Cajon, Escondido), comprised of the same sorts of strip malls, imported palm trees, luxury boutique stores, car dealerships, weed dispensaries, spa resorts and hotels, tourist attractions, restaurant rows, and nightclubs.

Here’s another factoid about apocalypse in Southern California. We’re already a barren wasteland. We’ve just prettied the joint up. We Martha Stewarted the shit outta this place, constructed oasis after oasis, with water and concrete, and we paved endless highways in between those road stops of fuel and fast food. SoCal is the fountainhead of the coastal extension between the meetings of the Mojave and Colorado deserts. Without the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada, which helps slake the thirst of NoCal, and the Colorado Aqueduct, which brings SoCal’s drinking water from the Colorado River, almost all of central and southern California would fade like a dusty fart in a rocking chair. That’s because the American West is drier than it’s been in over 1,200 years. Despite our recent rains, we’re still experiencing a megadrought that isn’t going away anytime soon.

It’s not like we didn’t have a clue, back when we crafted policies and foundations concerning the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin. The 1922 Colorado River Compact remains the primary source of governance concerning water use in most of the west. The problem is, that set of laws was established during a brief period of time when it was the wettest in recorded history, leading land management of that era to believe that was the way it was going to be, when the truth was exactly the opposite. A hundred years later, we’re still squabbling over how to change that, what with corporate competition, increased numbers of humans in the west, not to mention ongoing Indigenous dispossession of water rights on their lands.

We haven’t yet found the guts or the funding to fire up expensive desalination plants, though they seem to be the logical option for ocean-adjacent existence. Our landscape reflects our creeping desertification, waiting patient at the edges of our cities, drought resistant thorny chaparral, dogwood and manzanita, thick oak and tinder-dry eucalyptus. Beneath our feet and under the concrete, there is only hardscrabble, alkaline desert.

We don’t have the lush Pacific Northwest forests of Mendocino and Humboldt counties up in NoCal, or the evergreen foliage of Shasta and Lassen counties. We’ve got desert, and lots of it, same as the rest of the American southwest, as well as all the water shortages that come with desert rat living. Naturally, that leads into the biggest apocalyptic bent Southern California faces each year…fire, a great and deadly preponderance of it.

Wildfires are the great equalizer of California. Like Covid-19, tornadoes in the Midwest, or hurricanes on the east coast, fire doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor, Black or white, upper class or lower class. They burn trailer parks and McMansions alike. A couple lungs full of wildfire smoke will lay you low slicker than snot. I’ve crossed paths with several fire survivors in my travels, permanently scarred from being caught unawares or trapped in a Californian wildfire maelstrom. Fire does awful shit to the human body. If you ever tour a burn ward, you won’t soon forget it.

The state has a sordid history of burning, as evidenced by lake bed charcoal deposits ten thousand years old, and ring scarring in the eldest of our redwood trees. Recent years have upped the ante, hallmarking a combination of California’s perennially dry windy conditions, humans’ increasing deforestation and incursions into wilderness, and careless negligence of utility grid maintenance (downed or malfunctioning power lines are a frequent culprit of wildfire ignitions).

Nine of the ten most destructive fires in Californian history have happened since the turn of the millennium, six of them in the last four years.

The 2003 Cedar Fire in San Diego, spurred on by Santa Ana winds, torched 110,000 acres, destroyed 2,820 structures, and cost 15 lives.

The 2007 Witch Fire, also in San Diego, burned over 80,000 acres and destroyed 1,200 houses.

The 2019 Carr Fire in NoCal’s Shasta County burned 230,000 acres and 1,600 homes.

To date, the granddaddy of all Californian fires was the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire up in Mendocino and Lake Counties, which became a convergence of the Ranch and the River Fires. The ensuing conflagration burned for nearly two months straight and torched a staggering 460,000 acres.

The 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, home of my undergraduate studies in Chico, fried 62,000 acres and completely destroyed the small town of Paradise. 88 lives were lost. The route out of Paradise is a one way bottleneck. A number of folks died right there in their cars trying to escape.

I was unsettled, not just by the loss of life, but by the fact that Paradise was a touchstone of sorts for me. During my undergrad tenure, I’d often ride my mountain bike up to its nearby canyons. Apart from its residents’ majority politics, it was a lovely place of buttes and pines, situated on a plateau overlooking the San Joaquin Valley basin. The news footage after the fire was shocking. Nothing left but blackened chimneys and ashen waste. Like a neutron bomb had gone off. Leveled the place to the ground. Apocalypse had come to Paradise. They’re still rebuilding, years later, brick by brick.

Relativity rears its ugly head here; bad as it was, in no way did it compare to what Australians experienced in their self-titled ‘Black Summer,’ another notch in 2020’s belt of misery, where a massive series of brush fires brought on by lightning strikes, extreme heat, low humidity due to climate change, and even a few arsonists, engulfed the continent, burning over 46 million acres, destroying nearly 6,000 structures, killing 34 people directly and another 400 via smoke inhalation issues, and dispatching over one billion animals, an extinction level event. One billion animals. As my gunfighting sorceress Monday might say, gods and never-gods.

In Santa Barbara, locals are used to the constant threat of fire. California doesn’t typically get seasons near the coast or the interior. You have to head up to the Sierras to see changes in foliage and temperate climate. But we coastal citizens do have a year-round fire season, and it usually comes with loads of airborne ash and smoky red sunsets. One of the first great fires of my Gen X lifetime was the Painted Cave Fire of 1990, which I wasn’t present to witness, as I was attending school in Chico at the time. We watched the national newscast coverage in our ratty college apartment as the fire incinerated a good portion of our hometown.

Before the heavy, climate-change influenced rains of 2022 and 2023, there was an unsettling surge of fire activity in the Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. The 2017 Thomas Fire, crossing county lines between Santa Barbara and Ventura, torched 114,000 acres and burned over 1,000 structures, lasting 40 days until full containment and running a tab of 2.2 billion dollars in losses and costs of suppression.

The apocalyptic ambiance in Santa Barbara was at an all-time high, with ash fall raining down on local communities 24-7, full of embers and vegetative particulates, everything we owned inside and out covered in ash and smelling of wood smoke, ruining car paint jobs, coating cities in grainy black and white grime. Massive smoke plumes wafted over mountain ranges, where fires consumed back country old growth, one-hundred-foot-high walls of roaring flames lighting up the night in a glow of orange nightmare.

It was then I first learned, via necessity, to adopt the daily use of face coverings, mostly bandannas, any kind of breathing filters were better than none, and so too did most everyone else, and hey, whaddya know, nobody politicized the need for masks back then, nobody went off the rails touting bipartisan conspiracy, they just fucking did it. Know why? Because there was tangible, touchy-feely, visual evidence to back up the need for masks, like giant towering flames erupting on nearby mountainsides and perpetual ash clouds covering the cities each day. When humans personally corroborate the face of potential doom, they get in line tout suite.

Covid wasn’t a visible bugger until you already had it. It was a creeper. Fire is a smash-and-grab kind of home invader, no subtlety or finesse, a bull in a china shop. News reports, vicarious sources, or anecdotes aren’t enough to convince the diehards of individualism to alter their expected routines. They need hands-on authentication if they’re going to change their ways. I have known folks who stayed with their homes and ignored evacuation warnings not because they were trying to protect their property, but because of their absolutism. Some few of them bear skin grafts for that conceit.

Many of the fire issues we have in SoCal are proliferated by our local phenomenon of the Santa Ana winds, or ‘devil winds.’ They’re an integral part of SoCal life. They’re strong and dry, created by cool high pressure air masses from the eastern basins and canyons. They make everything hotter than it already is, they cut the humidity to zero, and they fan regional fires to critical levels. They’re often precipitated by what we call ‘sundowner’ wind events, which are smaller in scope but similar in nature.

Because of perpetual drought and burn scarring, when our rare rains do finally come after fire season, it can result in flooding and mudslides. Landslides are also part of the array of natural world options conspiring to whittle down our Californian numbers.

In 2005, a landslide killed ten people and destroyed a dozen homes in the seaside community of La Conchita, a surf outpost on the flats of the Rincon stretch between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Back in 1995, the hill behind La Conchita failed during a wet season and covered nine homes in seconds. No loss of life then. But in 2005, after two weeks of continual rains, that same hillside still loosely packed from the slide ten years previous, let go again, and the incurring mudslide did its dirty work. If you can imagine how it’d be, one second sitting in your living room watching the tube, the next crushed under an inescapable quicksand of mud forcing the air from your lungs, you’re a braver soul than I am.

In 2017, fire reigned across California. Over 9,000 wildfires burned over a million acres of land and killed nearly 50 people. Spurred on by the Santa Ana winds, the aforementioned Thomas Fire destroyed considerable vegetation and topsoil roots across much of the hillsides of the Santa Ynez mountain range that borders Santa Barbara to the east. Montecito is the most affluent borough in Santa Barbara, with many celebrities calling it home over the years including Oprah, Ellen, Rob Lowe, Steve Martin, and John Cleese.

In early January of 2018, a half inch of rain fell within five minutes on the burn-scarred mountain sides above Montecito. While residents at higher elevations had already been evacuated, the already taxed ground let go, resulting in massive debris flows full of boulders, trees, and mud moving at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour into the lower Montecito villages and beyond, inundating one of the major travel byways in California, U.S. Highway 101. Thirty miles of freeway and parallel Amtrak train rails were shut down for two weeks to clear the debris flows, some of which had reached the ocean.

The only way to get into Santa Barbara from the south was either to fly in, charter private ferries via sea from Ventura, or to take Interstate 5 from Los Angeles all the way up to Bakersfield, then cut over to the 101 south, around 300 miles for a usual 70 mile trip. Back in Montecito, the mudslides destroyed 100 homes, made several hundred others uninhabitable, and local officials were faced with a stark reality that some bodies might be irretrievable, either washed out to sea or buried under tons of mud. 23 lives were lost. One child remains unaccounted for to this day.

After the 1993 firestorms that razed Malibu, that fabled seaside community experienced similar levels of flooding in ‘95, closing down the Pacific Coast Highway and imposing chaos on the usual day-to-day of mistress starlets and trust fund producers. I was in the area at the time, in fact. I watched the creek overflow at Cosentino’s Flower Shop same as everyone else was doing on the national news.

Bottom line? Most of the time the southern part of this state is as dry and roasted as a Peking duck. On the rare occasions we do get rain, our sloping terrain often can’t absorb all the water, tends to slide, and many of our coveted communities turn into soup.

Santa Barbara, quaint picturesque beach town, oasis of old monies and poster child of SoCal tourism, has suffered more than enough mini-apocalypses. They’re acquainted with the end game. It’s taken many of us already, most of us are well aware we could be next, through fire and flood, rising sea levels or dirty bombs or wayward asteroids, lah dee fucking dah, just another day at the end of the world.

Continued…

*Compiled from August 7, 2020