Newtropics
Los Angeles got hit by a hurricane this weekend, except it wasn’t a hurricane, it was a tropical storm, which feels very fitting. LA cannot commit to a brand. Or a climate. The climate has changed, more Baja muggy than Southwest dry. Our wildfire season might be bookended by hurricanes. The new vibe shift: unnatural Tropics. Hurricane Hilary started as a Category 4, then became a tropical storm in just a few days. The humiliation a hurricane endures, I can’t even imagine. Its title stripped, its identity changed. Banished into exile somewhere over Idaho, where it breaks up into a million shards of hot air and sad lightning.
There is dignity in a tropical storm, though. A humble deluge across an unaccustomed city. My husband and I drove to Palm Springs on Friday with our dog to stay with a visiting friend, who’d rented a house for the weekend. We left hours later; the Hurricane Formerly Known as Hilary was in direct path for Palm Springs, and after several emergency alerts on our phones and our friend opting to fly back to New York the next day in case they grounded planes, we decided to leave. We saw Barbie at a weird empty movie theater and drove back to LA in darkness. Palm Springs got flooding and 84 mph wind gusts. Los Angeles got some rain and an earthquake.
I’m still not used to earthquakes. I don’t have a cellular understanding of them yet like I do of feverish humidity and other East Coast horrors. My response is delayed; my body feels them before my brain, until I come to and imagine myself swinging on a hammock. It’s not the ferocious vibration I always assumed it to be. It’s undular and wet.
I figured the earthquake was a tropical storm gust as I locked eyes with my Cavalier Spaniel across the couch. He was unfazed. He was born in Modesto, after all. He’s a true Californian just like my husband, who was born in Santa Monica and raised in Texas. I’m not used to fires and tremors. I’m a New Jerseyan who can’t parallel park.
Candace Cameron Bure posted on “Threads”—which I can only write in quotes—begging everyone to repent, citing the hurricane and earthquake double feature as evidence. I’m not religious, but I am willing to pray for Candace Cameron Bure’s home to be swallowed into the earth in an apocalyptic earthquake. I’m not saying she has to be in it. But if she is, she might make it work in her favor. There are mole people to evangelize down there. Maybe she can even add another channel to the Great American Media streaming network: the first Christian channel that caters solely to mole people. A win for Cameron and a win for Christ.
I’m not looking forward to a seismic reckoning, even if I support women in entertainment. Mentally I’m still on a subtle room-jostle that happened during a tropical storm that used to be a hurricane. Earlier last week, my husband told me about an article he read about the nearly dried-up Salton Sea, which is a little more than an hour from Palm Springs. Apparently if the ancient lake fills to capacity, it could stress the San Andreas Fault beneath it and unleash hell on Los Angeles. It’s like that old saying, if the Big One hits LA during a tropical storm, and no one’s around to hear it—I don’t know. I can’t finish that one.
If the Big One hits LA during a tropical storm, can we just call it a hurricane? That sounds better.