I’ve been enjoying this view again from my mother’s balcony. The morning and evening light catches the trees in this grove of blue gum eucalyptus trees wonderfully and they have a gentle, ghostly look at night, with the long stripes created by the peeling of the bark uncovering layers of yellow and white in subtle gradients.
It’s a view that always makes me think on the passage of time, though, as we’re all likely to do when we’re back where we grew up. Those trees been a permanent part of my life. From the balcony, if I look left, I can see the edges of one of the neighborhoods that we lived in when I was a kid, and still more eucalyptus trees tower above the homes there as they did when I was young. We would grab the long spears of fallen bark to mock-swordfight with. The hard acorns, shaped like cut gems, would poke into your bare feet if you walked outside, pressing into flesh like so many arboreal Legos.
And yet the years in which I have looked on what seems like an ancient landscape, with houses quietly nestled imperturbably within it, is about a third of the entire time that landscape has existed here in any form at all. These trees are new arrivals in California. They are a marker of a rapacious get-rich-quick capitalist impulse built on top of a mineral rush, a thought that this tree from Australia might grow fast and provide timber and a host of other useful products. In the end the eucalyptus provided none of that to the men who planted millions of them. It brought a new kind of fire danger to a fire-driven ecology. It catches the light in the grove outside this balcony, in many such groves, partly because it pushes so insistently into an ecology other than the one it evolved within. It has been a witness to settlement, to land theft, to the murder of indigenous people. In some ways it is a kind of spirit twin to the settlers. They brought it here and it spread alongside them.
It is not that hard to see what a bluff above the Pacific Ocean would look like without the eucalyptus, for all that it has spread so far.
I can imagine it because elsewhere at the western edge of North America you can see it largely as it was. Around here, it was southern coastal shrub down to the edges of the cliffs and beaches. Look down as you take off from LAX and you can see a bit of it that’s left. Walk along the Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains and you’ll see more.
Those places also catch the light beautifully enough. If southern coastal shrub were all that there was, it would also be beloved. But I would not then be sitting where I am this moment, seeing the dawn that I am, knowing these places as I do.
I’d trade that if I could. But now? There is too much eucalyptus to cut down and I cannot deny that it is lovely to look at, and lovely to look from where I look. But you have to learn to see the landscape that no longer is outside this balcony, to unthink the seat where you sit, if for no other reason to remember that what was done to others might someday be done to you, because we have done little to keep this from being the kind of world where some new group of people chasing some new pot of gold might buy—or simply seize—all of what they see before them and remake it as they see fit, according to their desire, regardless of the follies that might contain. Some day perhaps there might be no balcony to look out from because some billionaire will have demolished buildings and trees alike and built a high wall to hide his own stately pleasure dome within.
There will be this photo still, as long as digital images last, but it will mean nothing of great import once my pleasure in the sight of it is gone.