Once a pattern appears, I find it hard not to see it. The way jokes have three parts. Crescent dunes in a desert. How sitcoms all use the same structure.
Patterns cause a pause, the way they’re wrapped around revelation. I remember feeling mesmerized the first time I saw farms from an airplane and noticed how they seemed like quilts, or circles drawn with a compass, part of something bigger in a way I’d never noticed from the ground.
There’s a town outside Los Angeles called California City, a desert community about 100 miles north of Dodger Stadium, surrounded by a matrix of empty streets, grids upon grids that look from a plane like they were tattooed on the land by a civilization that once loomed colossal, then ghosted us without a trace—as if a family of tornados swept across a sand empire of several million people and ripped up every building, mailbox and shrieking child and violently funneled them all away, leaving behind only crop circles of vanished suburbia.
Begun in the late 1950s, California City had been meant to be a rival of Los Angeles, even bigger than Los Angeles. For various reasons it never really materialized, but they cut the roads.
Patterns of audacity. Patterns of hubris.
A couple years ago, I spent a day cruising the geoglyph, to understand the history of Los Angeles a little better, and slammed my car into a sand dune—how’s that for a metaphor. After a lot of rocking and sweating, finally able to drive home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that California City suggested what the United States might become if it fails. Not the ceaseless night of Blade Runner, but the brown noise of the desert. The echo of an interval briefly realized.
Smoke blanketed California this week. We’re barely into fire season and millions of acres have burned, an all-time record—wildfires larger, wildfires more severe. Friends describe being woken up in the middle of the night by fire nightmares. Several days, the sun looked deeply red behind the haze, like the pulp of a blood orange beaming through its rind.
Some patterns hurt to see.
California City by Noritaka Minami, from WIRED magazine
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