Soot and Loot

I’m including this side segue in the annals of The Road because I did in fact come upon two new descanso shrines when I took the PCH down through Malibu last week to tender a pressing errand in the fire burn scar areas just north of the Palisades.

Highway One was only partially reopened, I’d soon discover. Emergency response teams, Army Engineer Corps, and demolition cleanup crews still swarmed the area, along with a fair police presence about north and central Malibu and a continued National Guard presence at the borders of the Palisades. It was a gaggle of soldiers in desert fatigues outside their armored humvees who eventually turned me and Mayday around, with our lack of resident access clearance to enter the Palisades sector. I’d hoped to drive all the way through to reach Santa Monica and Venice Beach after delivering my goods to an outpost at Duke’s in Malibu, but no dice. I had to go back the way I came. Still, there was enough to see at the coastline.

It was a disheartening sight. I spoke at length a few weeks back about the fires in a segment called The ‘Bu is Burning.

These fleeting images don’t nearly convey the reality therein. Malibu is a place imprinted upon me for decades running, all the way back into my teen years. I can’t imagine what the Palisades street-to-street might invoke, and plenty of celebs who own homes there have tried to relay their impressions, which probably fall short of the actual mark. It is indeed like a huge bomb went off there.

Climate change doesn’t care whether you’re rich or poor, girls and boys.

The plywood placard seen in the header photo above got me dark and deep in my feels. There are surely more posted warnings within the bounds of the Palisades, and that’s why the National Guard remain posted thereabouts. It is a clear totem of our human condition when we have folks who take opportunity when others are down. Looting during disasters is nothing new in human history, of course, but what it clearly reveals, once again, like we saw in New Orleans after Katrina or other devastated regions, is the byproducts of our American class system.

The have-nots will always look for ways to feed or bolster themselves while our groupthink guard is down and there’s life and death distraction at hand. One enduring social media viral feed showed a woman being arrested in the Palisades for looting, while she was wearing a tee shirt with a Palisades Strong logo. Crafty. But sad. Yet you have to see the forest for the trees there all the same. If we properly shared resources with one another, looting and riots might be a thing of the past. Am I a cock-eyed optimist? Maybe. It’s more that I’m a student of how humans tend to follow supply and demand patterns and their sociological responses to temporary breaks in established systems.

Anyhoo.

I came upon this first set of descansos while en route to Duke’s, just short of Mugu Rock. It turned out they were more recently added supplemental shrines to an older descanso I’ve already rendered hereabouts for four different decedents: Mario, Annabelle, Nora, and Carmen. The new placements were a disquieting array. How humans might process a sudden loss of multitudes from a single event is something we’ve spoken of many times in this sector. It’s compounding. It’s agonizing. It’s incomprehensible. It’s a lifetime burden of grief. Such is the nature of fragile corporeality. What can be done? Only to continue on, resting just a slight bit easier in the knowledge we’ll see them again someday. Sometimes, someday seems a forever thing. But it’s not. Someday comes soon enough.

The four newer crosses were lined up next to each other, adjacent to the older descanso. Two of them were toppled over from the winds. I righted them, figuring their constructors wouldn’t mind.

This next epitaph-less descanso was placed on the mountainside of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Low roads, high roads, busy roads, the roads less traveled.

All roads lead to the Big Road.

Watch that last mile. It’s a doozy. But fear not the unknown. It’s not what you think. It’s actually far more than what you think. :)

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