Three Strikes
Joan Didion's evocative list of the three sentences that come to mind when she thinks of California (from her "Where I Was From"):"Point Conception to the Mexican border. The Range of Light. Beautiful country burn again, / Point Pinos down to the Sur rivers."(I won't try explaining their origin -- if you're Californian, the first two (at least) are almost genetic). As she says, in a state largely overrun by people and sprawling suburbia, if you actually live here, it's still natural geography -- landscape -- that mostly comes to mind with "California".
These sentences work the same way for me -- California has that sort of hold on some people, and all three have strong meaning and connections in my mind -- but there's another California lurking here, the California that's both more interesting and more troubling, and that Didion aludes to inter-alia. Three sentences from that California:
Freeway drive-by shooting kills two. Four dead in East Palo Alto gang violence. Three strikes and you're out.Or, a three sentence meditation on the flip side of landscape:
Mud slides in Malibu. Oakland Hills firestorm kills 25. Five dead in Sierra avalanche.And you could say almost as much (or more?) about California with just three sentences like this:
Interstate 5. The Orange Crush. The Rosedale Highway.Didion's original three sentences sound like an ellegy for a California that both never was and still is. Three strikes and it's out...
(Part of California).
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