Contributor: From the Palisades to Palos Verdes, L.A.'s altered landscapes challenge memory itself

New imaging from NASA provides a amended knowing of the slow, mysterious Palos Verdes landslide. It shows the absorption of the earthy question — west, toward the seashore — arsenic good arsenic the velocity, arsenic overmuch arsenic 4 inches per week.

The investigation confirms what those of america who grew up connected the superficially quiescent Palos Verdes Peninsula person ever known: It’s lone a substance of clip until the turbulent hillside crumbles into the ocean. But it’s happening faster than I ever expected.

It was conscionable past twelvemonth erstwhile the sanctuary wherever my mother’s ceremonial was held, connected a remarkably foggy June time successful 2015, was dismantled. Piece by piece, the glass-and-wood Wayfarers Chapel successful Rancho Palos Verdes — designed by Lloyd Wright, lad of Frank Lloyd Wright — was taken isolated truthful that it mightiness beryllium saved.

Across the roadworthy from the beatified house’s bare foundation, a onetime location of the writer Joan Didion is, fixed its location, astir apt successful akin information of falling into the Pacific Ocean.

Didion, who died successful 2021, was a Sacramento autochthonal who wrote astir Palos Verdes with reverence. In the 1960s, erstwhile Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived connected the peninsula successful a Spanish-style gatehouse, Didion observed the “slump of the hill” making its unusual descent into the ocean. Later, successful her 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” astir the aftermath of Dunne’s death, Didion returned to Palos Verdes successful memory.

The book’s last paragraph is astir Abalone Cove, the watery destination of the continuing landslide. Didion and Dunne had swum there, and Didion wrote of “the swell of wide water, the mode it changed, the swiftness and powerfulness it gained arsenic it narrowed done the rocks astatine the basal of the point.”

“The Year of Magical Thinking” stands retired arsenic a paragon of unreliable narration. Didion’s grief ripples backward and guardant arsenic she struggles to marque consciousness of time. But implicit the people of her inquisition into the events surrounding her precocious husband’s bosom attack, her prose becomes sharper, much concise. Didion emerges from the fog of mourning and arrives, with clarity, successful Palos Verdes and the representation of Abalone Cove. The scenery serves arsenic a static yet dynamic vas for her grief.

I inquire myself what the coast, with its chaparral, eucalyptus, wide-mawed canyons and heavy seasonal fogs, volition look similar erstwhile I return. I besides inquire myself however I tin mourn my parents, some of whom died successful Palos Verdes, without the scenery wherever we created shared memories.

These questions use much broadly and acutely to Southern Californians aft the fires that took 29 lives and displaced much than 13,000 households. For many, the imaginable of returning is not financially feasible; for those who are capable to travel backmost home, acquainted landmarks and overmuch much are gone.

So what to marque of this accusation — of communities irrevocably mislaid to the fires, of NASA’s confirmation that the hillside volition beryllium folding successful connected itself soon?

After fires ravaged Malibu successful 1978, Didion wrote successful “The White Album,” that she drove to a nursery connected the seashore adjacent Topanga Canyon. She recovered charred bushes, shards of solid and melted metallic wherever erstwhile determination were orchids. “I mislaid 3 years,” the proprietor told Didion. “And for an instant,” she writes, “I thought we would some cry.”

With that last gesture, Didion experienced the catastrophe with her chap Angeleno. A representation that nary longer has a scenery to unrecorded successful tin beryllium called up by sharing it with idiosyncratic else. Without the places to instrumentality to — Moonshadows successful Malibu, the Wayfarers Chapel successful Palos Verdes, our ain homes — it is much important than ever to speech astir what was lost. That is however we support it alive.

Ryan Nourai is simply a writer moving connected a memoir astir his precocious mother’s shooting.