It’s been raining now for over 36 hours, so I think it’s fair to say that the garden has had a good drink. I see that L.A. is already under threat of flash floods and mudslides, particularly in those areas that are dealing with severely scorched earth (literally). For the rest of us, this rain and these raindrops are still feeling like a good thing, especially because the rain looks to be scheduled to stop mid-morning and return to otherwise dry conditions. I had an appointment with my irrigation guy for later in the day and have suggested a postponement. I want to walk the property with him and adjust my sprinklers as needed to address the succulents that look like they have had all the juice squeezed out of them. There is no getting around the fact that the lack of rain has made for some highlighted arid patches in the garden, but I somehow feel the rain may have shielded that for the moment. I would rather reschedule for some drier and more normal moment.
I notice this morning that the AI world is in a tizzy over a report issued by a Chinese AI start-up called DerpSeek that unmasked some degree of ease in advancing the AI ball downfield. This would seem like a good thing, but there are lots of tech companies benefiting by having the world think this is a very heavy AI lift requiring billions in infrastructure investment. Learning that this might be easier and less costly (not by a little, but by a lot , 3% of the cost!!!) than thought, has knocked some stuffing out of the NASDAQ momentarily while Wall Street remembers that when it rains it might pour and the rain might just be hitting saturated ground and simply cause some infrastructural mudslides rather than productive growth impetus. Such are the lessons nature regularly likes to teach man as he gets out ahead of himself from time to time. To carry the gardening analogy to an extreme, it might be time in the AI world to postpone further irrigation until a proper and balanced assessment can be made.
It’s hard not to think about our friends up in L.A. these days and wonder when things are likely to get back to normal after this protracted and unusually timed fire season. I’ve been planning out our granddaughters’ summer visit with us this coming July and it will include two trips north. The usual two-day trip to Disneyland is a must for them (there is literally and figuratively never oversaturation of that ground), so that is a given and will not likely involve Kim or me. The other is a family road trip, which geography dictates must run through the L.A. basin since there is simply no getting around the beast from where we live. L.A. is a garden that has overgrown itself so greatly that it extends from the ocean to the mountains and leaves only the most barren of routes (like the Pearblossom Highway) that skirt its edges. That means that one has to just put one’s head down and barrel into L.A. in order to punch through the line and get to the interesting places to its north. The big variable for this summer will be how the fire devastation to the East, West and North will affect that passage since the rebuilding efforts are bound to be underway and more than a little substantial. We have decided for several reasons to be very cunning and sneak up on the whole thing by spending a day and a night right in the exact middle of the fray by going to Universal Studios, located off the 101 smack dab between the Hollywood Hills and Sennett Canyon. This feels like us thumbing our noses at Mother Nature and saying that our humanly fun cannot be deterred by mere fires or floods.
We will then calmly head north to Ojai, pretending that the several fires in the Santa Susana range this season have had no impact on the beauty of the area north of San Fernando, nor the need for Angelenos and visitors to recreate themselves in the hills to the north. At that point we will be in the golden prairies that give California its nickname (The Golden State) as we wend our way up through Paso Robles to see where James Dean ended his short but memorable stay on earth. The objective will be to go see Sensorio, a famous outdoor light show that turns that valley into a magical nightscape that eirily mimics the look of a California wildfire minus the smoke and Hot Shot crews. Man is a funny animal. We gasp in horror and dread at a visage of fanned flames racing across the wilderness, and yet we pay to go see an artificial recreation of the same sort of show done with LED lighting and call it performative art. We will end the trip with a visit to Solvang to show the kids what an out-of-place Nordic village might look like had the Vikings ventured this far in their travels a millennium ago. Something tells me that Leif Erickson would have found all this attempted manipulation of nature and history rather strange. We clearly have too much time on our hands as a species that we choose to do all these things and test all these limits of the natural world in the hopes of garnering a pocket full of experiences and a few thrill rides. I think Leif would have preferred a quiet night at home to any of this excitement. But then Leif didn’t have AI to help him overthink his existence the way we do.
I am hoping that our July is both fire and rain free this year. It will be our third year of hosting the granddaughters for their summer fling and we do so enjoy the time with them. They are 12 and 9 this year and will be too old for these trivial pursuits sooner than we hope they will be. The fleeting nature of our modern existence is probably what causes us to overplan and overwater our familial landscape. I have long held tight to my own sense of Carpe Diem and it is probably that same feeling that caused L.A. to build itself out from ocean to mountain and to ignore the constraints that nature’s logic gives us through these natural disaster warnings. The awareness that we only go around once clearly overwhelms the caution to expect the worst in building on the Pacific Palisades and up into the San Bernardino mountains. We want it all and we are prepared to irrigate our way into gardens where God intended only dirt and rocks.
What that should tell us is that when we see the sparks start to fly and the raindrops start to fall, we need to be more nimble than not and just remember that it was all worth the precious moments when we pretended that we were the masters of our universe and that it never rains in California…but man it pours.