Just back from Nashville, Albuquerque
Sunday night through Sunday night, so I knew I would have to get up Monday morning with a cup of strong coffee to counter a weak will for work, and crank out this column, in just a few hours.
I had already decided the topic (but not the details, and that’s where the devil lurks), some type of continuation from the previous column, where I showed an artist’s rendering of the 24-story residential tower set to go skyward at 6th and Colorado, the column crowned by the headline, "I’ve had it!" And the notion that if you extract yourself from the debates and quibbling about details and look at the big picture, you will be reminded that this is insane. Skyscrapers in Santa Monica? Who benefits from this? Who gets hurt? (— a very long list)
But then at the end of exhilarating encounters with music and master songwriters, and dear friends, in Nashville, and reconnecting with the cultural and geographical magic of "The Land of Enchantment" (state motto of NM), where I spent 30 years, and dear friends from decades ago to the present, I settled into my airplane seat for a quick trip home to Santa Monica… forgetting that sometimes, when you jet away from Albuquerque in the daylight, you cruise through the clouds and usually just above them, and it can be an enthralling sight.
The sky
A friend from New York, at the wedding reception, looked up and said, with a big smile, "I forgot how huge and wonderful the sky is here!" It really is. I remember being given a thin book while a student at UNM, possibly someone’s master thesis, with the seductive title "The Sky Determines," which made a surprisingly credible attempt to explain everything in New Mexico’s long history – by some aspect of the state of the sky. Where the pueblo tribes settled, and the Spanish, the gringos and others. Whether the rain provided for cattle country or farming, or mining. Or building and testing the first atomic bomb. Which political leaders emerged from various areas of this huge state.
Why Albuquerque came to hold nearly half the state’s population, but the Capitol went to Santa Fe. Where universities and "Indian schools’’ were built, and so many beautiful rural churches, constructed with adobe (mud and hay) bricks, giving NM architecture a unique and distinctive look. The Navajo Reservation covers 27,000 square miles (bigger than five other states combined) of NM, and extends deep into Arizona, and Utah.
So while I was not thinking of it, I was primed for the "cloud experience." I know, only little kids are supposed to be so fascinated with looking at clouds from an airplane window. But beauty is hard to resist. Few people tire of looking at a spectacular sunset or waterfall, or the massive gorgeous glaciers of Antarctica. Maybe we take the beauty of clouds for granted because they are always there, above us. But flying through them, close enough to touch, is different.
Lost the mood to complain
So as a final faerie touch, along with being primed by the rest of being wrapped in the spell of New Mexico, those heavenly billows pushed me right out of being angry about the rape of Santa Monica. I feel the same way, but not so inclined at this moment to rail against it. Again. Still. It’s not fun to be angry with something so bad and so hard to fix, you know. Yes, you do know. But fighting for what’s right has never been fun, just absolutely necessary. There’s chance if you keep hope alive, no matter what the odds or obstacles. No chance at all if you give up.
We expected, and got, temperatures in the 90s, and high humidity in Nashville. But oddly enough, as we waited for entrance to the Grand Ole Opry, the sauna turned very quickly to monsoon-force rain, driving everyone farther and farther back for cover. It was ferocious. Then in Albuquerque, after the outdoor wedding ceremony, we moved to a big barn (a very nice barn) for the reception, and the rains came again, so hard that people at the airport were talking about it the next day.
"We love to get rain here in the desert," one person remarked, "but not a year’s worth in a few hours." After the reception we rushed over to a downtown club to hear a singer named Hillary, and she was really good, but it was a bit distracting to see the conveyor belt of young men with buckets and mops trying to stay ahead of the deluge that was pouring into the second story venue from its outdoor terrace.
Weather report
Am I overdoing the weather report of my trip? Maybe. But it did affect me, and take me out of my urban despair. No matter where we are, we do live in nature, and sometimes nature forcefully reminds us of that. It reminds us the world is bigger than 8.4 square miles. And 24 stories.
I had another "moment" when I turned on the news Monday morning to find out the Supremely Corrupted Court sold democracy down the river. At the very least, Thomas and Alito should be removed, and probably Chief "Justice" Roberts too, for saying, this is all OK and normal. With lifetime appointments and no code of ethics, and the wannabe dictator who appointed the far right majority now running for the Oval Office again, it seems nearly impossible to change things. We’re screwed.
With a state government in Sacramento hell bent on passing laws to take away cities’ rights to determine their futures, with so many new laws giving developers carte blanche to build away at a time when CA is losing population and has too many vacancies already, we’re screwed.
So it might seem irrelevant who we elect to our City Council this November. But it isn’t. You now have three Council members who have come down firmly on the side of more and more development "needed" in Santa Monica — Jesse Zwick, Caroline Torosis, Gleam Davis. And you have all their power brokers bowing to developers — SM "Forward," SMRR, SM "Democratic" Club, and "The Community for Excellence in Public Schools" — all endorsing our worst nightmare, four pro pro rah rah mo’ mo’ taller bigger development candidates: Dan Hall, Natalya Zernitskaya, Barry Snell, Ellis Raskin. If even one or two of them win Council seats, we’re screwed. And right now, other than our incumbents —
Phil Brock, Oscar de la Torre and Christine Parra — we have no candidates running against them. No PAC money, no organization. WTHeck. Screwed.
But – I won’t go preaching here, I will just say — this remarkable city is very much worth fighting for. If Ukraine freedom fighters can hold off the Russians who want to destroy them, can’t we David the Goliath who wants to destroy precious SM with overdevelopment? Yes, we can. But we have to start something different and powerful — yesterday. But yes, we can.
Charles Andrews has lived in Santa Monica for 38 years and wouldn’t live anywhere else.
