New imaging of Nasa provides a better understanding of the slow and mysterious landslide of Palos Verdes. It shows the direction of the earthly movement – west, towards the coast – as well as the speed, up to 4 inches per week.
The analysis confirms what those of us who grew up on the superficially calm peninsula of Palos Verdes have always known: this is only a matter of time until the turbulent hill collapses in the ocean. But it happens faster than what I expected.
It was not until last year that the sanctuary where my mother's funeral took place, a remarkably misty June of 2015, was dismantled. Piece by piece, the Wayfarers in glass and wooden Woods in Rancho Palos Verdes – Designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright – WAS illegal so that he can be saved.
In front of the naked foundation of the Holy House, a house on the time of the writer Joan Didion is, given his location, probably in danger similar to fall into the Pacific Ocean.
Didion, who died in 2021, was a native of Sacramento who wrote on Palos Verdes with reverence. In the 1960s, when Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived in the peninsula in a Spanish style custodyDidion observed the “hill crisis” making its descent strange in the ocean. Later, in his 2005 Memoirs “The year of magic thought”, on the consequences of Dunne's death, Didion returned to Palos Verdes in memory.
The final paragraph of the book concerns the Ormeaux, the aqueous destination of the continuous landslide. Didion and Dunne had swam there, and Didion wrote on “the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the speed and power it has gained by narrowing through the rocks at the base of the point.”
“The year of magic thought” stands out like a paragon of unreliable narration. Didion sorrow declies back and forward while it fights to give meaning to time. But during his Inquisition in the events surrounding the heart attack of her late husband, his prose becomes clearer, more concise. Didion emerges from the fog of mourning and arrives, with clarity, to Palos Verdes and in memory of the Ormeau Cove. The landscape serves as a static but dynamic ship for its sorrow.
I wonder what the coast, with its Chaparral, its eucalyptus, its canyons in Grandenier and its thick seasonal fogs, will look like my return. I also wonder how I can cry my parents, both dead in Palos Verdes, without the landscape where we have created shared memories.
These questions apply more widely and acutely to South Californians after fires that have taken 29 lives and moved more than 13,000 households. For many, the return prospect is not achievable financially; For those who are able to return home, familiar monuments and much more.
So, what to do with this information – communities irrevocably lost against fires, the confirmation of NASA that the hill will soon fall back?
After fires ravaged Malibu in 1978, Didion wrote in “The White Album”, which she led to a nursery on the coast near Topanga Canyon. She found charred bushes, glass shards and melted metal where there were orchids once. “I lost three years,” the owner told Didion. “And for a moment,” she wrote, “I thought we would both cry.”
With this final gesture, Didion has had a disaster with his compatriot Angeleno. A memory that no longer has a landscape in which to live can be called by sharing it with someone else. Without the places to return – Moonshadows in Malibu, the Wayfarers chapel in Palos Verdes, our own houses – it is more important than ever to talk about what has been lost. This is how we keep it alive.
Ryan Nourai is a writer working on a dissertation on the shooting of his deceased mother.
