Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  It was Thanksgiving morning, 1975. A Santa Ana wind was just dying after blowing in off the Mojave for three weeks and setting 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County on fire. Squadrons of planes had been dropping chemicals on the fires to no effect. Querulous interviews with burned-out householders had become a fixed element of the six o’clock news. Smoke from the fires had that week stretched a hundred miles out over the Pacific and darkened the days and lit the nights and by Thanksgiving morning there was the sense all over Southern California of living in some grave solar dislocation. It was one of those weeks when Los Angeles seemed most perilously and breathtakingly itself, a cartoon of natural disaster, and it was a peculiar week in which to spend the day with Dick Haddock and the rest of the Zuma headquarters crew.

  Actually I had wanted to meet the lifeguards ever since I moved to Malibu. I would drive past Zuma some cold winter mornings and see a few of them making their mandatory daily half-mile swims in open ocean. I would drive past Zuma some late foggy nights and see others moving around behind the lookout’s lighted windows, the only other souls awake in all of northern Malibu. It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea forty hours a week, and as the soot drifted down around the Zuma lookout on that Thanksgiving morning the laconic routines and paramilitary rankings of these civil servants in red trunks took on a devotionary and dreamlike inevitability. There was the “captain,” John McFarlane, a man who had already taken his daily half-mile run and his daily half-mile swim and was putting on his glasses to catch up on paperwork. Had the water been below 56 degrees he would have been allowed to swim in a wet suit, but the water was not below 56 degrees and so he had swum as usual in his red trunks. The water was 58 degrees. John McFarlane is 48. There was the “lieutenant,” Dick Haddock, telling me about how each of the Department’s 125 permanent lifeguards (there are also 600 part-time or “recurrent” lifeguards) learns crowd control at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Academy, learns emergency driving techniques at the California Highway Patrol Academy, learns medical procedures at the U.S.C. Medical Center, and, besides running the daily half-mile and swimming the daily half-mile, does a monthly 500-meter paddle and a monthly pier jump. A “pier jump” is just what it sounds like, and its purpose is to gain practice around pilings in heavy surf.

  There was as well the man out on patrol.

  There were as well the “call-car personnel,” two trained divers and cliff-climbers “ready to roll at any time” in what was always referred to as “a Code 3 vehicle with red light and siren,” two men not rolling this Thanksgiving morning but sitting around the lookout, listening to the Los Angeles Rams beat the Detroit Lions on the radio, watching the gray horizon and waiting for a call.

  No call came. The radios and the telephones crackled occasionally with reports from the other “operations” supervised by the Zuma crew: the “rescue-boat operation” at Paradise Cove, the “beach operations” at Leo Carrillo, Nicholas, Point Dume, Corral, Malibu Surfrider, Malibu Lagoon, Las Tunas, Topanga North and Topanga South. Those happen to be the names of some Malibu public beaches but in the Zuma lookout that day the names took on the sound of battle stations during a doubtful cease-fire. All quiet at Leo. Situation normal at Surfrider.

  The lifeguards seemed most comfortable when they were talking about “operations” and “situations,” as in “a phone-watch situation” or “a riptide situation.” They also talked easily about “functions,” as in “the function of maintaining a secure position on the beach.” Like other men at war they had charts, forms, logs, counts kept current to within twelve hours: 1405 surf rescues off Zuma between 12:01 a.m. January 1, 1975 and 11:59 p.m. Thanksgiving Eve 1975. As well as: 36,120 prevention rescues, 872 first aids, 176 beach emergency calls, 12 resuscitations, 8 boat distress calls, 107 boat warnings, 438 lost-and-found children, and 0 deaths. Zero. No body count. When he had occasion to use the word “body” Dick Haddock would hesitate and glance away.

  On the whole the lifeguards favored a diction as flat and finally poetic as that of Houston Control. Everything that morning was “real fine.” The headquarters crew was “feeling good.” The day was “looking good.” Malibu surf was “two feet and shape is poor.” Earlier that morning there had been a hundred or so surfers in the water, a hundred or so of those bleached children of indeterminate age and sex who bob off Zuma and appear to exist exclusively on packaged beef jerky, but by ten they had all pocketed their Thanksgiving jerky and moved on to some better break. “It heats up, we could use some more personnel,” Dick Haddock said about noon, assessing the empty guard towers. “That happened, we might move on a decision to open Towers One and Eleven, I’d call and say we need two recurrents at Zuma, plus I might put an extra man at Leo.”

  It did not heat up. Instead it began to rain, and on the radio the morning N.F.L. game gave way to the afternoon N.F.L. game, and after a while I drove with one of the call-car men to Paradise Cove, where the rescue-boat crew needed a diver. They did not need a diver to bring up a body, or a murder weapon, or a crate of stolen ammo, or any of the things Department divers sometimes get their names in the paper for bringing up. They needed a diver, with scuba gear and a wet suit, because they had been removing the propeller from the rescue boat and had dropped a metal part the size of a dime in twenty feet of water. I had the distinct impression that they particularly needed a diver in a wet suit because nobody on the boat crew wanted to go back in the water in his trunks to replace the propeller, but there seemed to be some tacit agreement that the lost part was to be considered the point of the dive.

  “I guess you know it’s fifty-eight down there,” the diver said.

  “Don’t need to tell me how cold it is,” the boat lieutenant said. His name was Leonard McKinley and he had “gone permanent” in 1942 and he was of an age to refer to Zuma as a “bathing” beach. “After you find that little thing you could put the propeller back on for us, you wanted. As long as you’re in the water anyway? In your suit?”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

  Leonard McKinley and I stood on the boat and watched the diver disappear. In the morning soot from the fires had coated the surface but now the wind was up and the soot was clouding the water. Kelp fronds undulated on the surface. The boat rocked. The radio sputtered with reports of a yacht named Ursula in distress.

  “One of the other boats is going for it,” Leonard McKinley said. “We’re not. Some days we just sit here like firemen. Other days, a day with rips, I been out ten hours straight. You get your big rips in the summer, swells coming up from Mexico. A Santa Ana, you get your capsized boats, we got one the other day, it was overdue out of Santa Monica, they were about drowned when we picked them up.”

  I tried to keep my eyes on the green-glass water but could not. I had been sick on boats in the Catalina Channel and in the Gulf of California and even in San Francisco Bay, and now I seemed to be getting sick on a boat still moored at the end of the Paradise Cove pier. The radio reported the Ursula under tow to Marina del Rey. I concentrated on the pilings.

  “He gets the propeller on,” Leonard McKinley said, “you want to go out?”

  I said I thought not.

  “You come back another day,” Leonard McKinley said, and I said that I would, and although I have not gone back there is no day when I do not think of Leonard McKinley and Dick Haddock and what they are doing, what situations they face, what operations, what green-glass water. The water today is 56 degrees.

  3.

  Amado Vazquez is a Mexican national who has lived in Los Angeles County as a resident alien since 1947. Like many Mexicans who have lived for a long time around Los Angeles he speaks of Mexico as “over there,” remains more comfortable in Spanish than in English, and transmits, in his every movement, a kind of “different” propriety, a correctness, a cultural reserve. He is in no sense a Chicano. He is rather what California-born Mexicans somet
imes call “Mexican-from-Mexico,” pronounced as one word and used to suggest precisely that difference, that rectitude, that personal conservatism. He was born in Ahualulco, Jalisco. He was trained as a barber at the age of ten. Since the age of twenty-seven, when he came north to visit his brother and find new work for himself, he has married, fathered two children, and become, to the limited number of people who know and understand the rather special work he found for himself in California, a kind of legend. Amado Vazquez was, at the time I first met him, head grower at Arthur Freed Orchids, a commercial nursery in Malibu founded by the late motion-picture producer Arthur Freed, and he is one of a handful of truly great orchid breeders in the world.

  In the beginning I met Amado Vazquez not because I knew about orchids but because I liked greenhouses. All I knew about orchids was that back in a canyon near my house someone was growing them in greenhouses. All I knew about Amado Vazquez was that he was the man who would let me spend time alone in these greenhouses. To understand how extraordinary this seemed to me you would need to have craved the particular light and silence of greenhouses as I did: all my life I had been trying to spend time in one greenhouse or another, and all my life the person in charge of one greenhouse or another had been trying to hustle me out. When I was nine I would deliberately miss the school bus in order to walk home, because by walking I could pass a greenhouse. I recall being told at that particular greenhouse that the purchase of a nickel pansy did not entitle me to “spend the day,” and at another that my breathing was “using up the air.”

  And yet back in this canyon near my house twenty-five years later were what seemed to me the most beautiful greenhouses in the world—the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers—and the person in charge, Amado Vazquez, seemed willing to take only the most benign notice of my presence. He seemed to assume that I had my own reasons for being there. He would speak only to offer a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning. Occasionally Arthur Freed’s brother Hugo, who was then running the business, would come into the greenhouse with real customers, serious men in dark suits who appeared to have just flown in from Taipei or Durban and who spoke in hushed voices, as if they had come to inspect medieval enamels, or uncut diamonds.

  But then the buyers from Taipei or Durban would go into the office to make their deal and the silence in the greenhouse would again be total. The temperature was always 72 degrees. The humidity was always 60 per cent. Great arcs of white phalaenopsis trembled overhead. I learned the names of the crosses by studying labels there in the greenhouse, the exotic names whose value I did not then understand. Amabilis X Rimestadiana = Elisabethae. Aphrodite X Rimestadiana = Gilles Gratiot. Amabilis X Gilles Gratiot = Katherine Siegwart and Katherine Siegwart X Elisabethae = Doris. Doris after Doris Duke. Doris which first flowered at Duke Farms in 1940. At least once each visit I would remember the nickel pansy and find Amado Vazquez and show him a plant I wanted to buy, but he would only smile and shake his head. “For breeding,” he would say, or “not for sale today.” And then he would lift the spray of flowers and show me some point I would not have noticed, some marginal difference in the substance of the petal or the shape of the blossom. “Very beautiful,” he would say. “Very nice you like it.” What he would not say was that these plants he was letting me handle, these plants “for breeding” or “not for sale today,” were stud plants, and that the value of such a plant at Arthur Freed could range from ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars.

  I suppose the day I realized this was the day I stopped using the Arthur Freed greenhouses as a place to eat my lunch, but I made a point of going up one day in 1976 to see Amado Vazquez and to talk to Marvin Saltzman, who took over the business in 1973 and is married to Arthur Freed’s daughter Barbara. (As in Phal. Barbara Freed Saltzman “Jean McPherson,” Phal. Barbara Freed Saltzman “Zuma Canyon,” and Phal. Barbara Freed Saltzman “Malibu Queen,” three plants “not for sale today” at Arthur Freed.) It was peculiar talking to Marvin Saltzman because I had never before been in the office at Arthur Freed, never seen the walls lined with dulled silver awards, never seen the genealogical charts on the famous Freed hybrids, never known anything at all about the actual business of orchids.

  “Frankly it’s an expensive business to get into,” Marvin Saltzman said. He was turning the pages of Sander’s List, the standard orchid studbook, published every several years and showing the parentage of every hybrid registered with the Royal Horticultural Society, and he seemed oblivious to the primeval silence of the greenhouse beyond the office window. He had shown me how Amado Vazquez places the pollen from one plant into the ovary of a flower on another. He had explained that the best times to do this are at full moon and high tide, because phalaenopsis plants are more fertile then. He had explained that a phalaenopsis is more fertile at full moon because in nature it must be pollinated by a night-flying moth, and over sixty-five million years of evolution its period of highest fertility began to coincide with its period of highest visibility. He had explained that a phalaenopsis is more fertile at high tide because the moisture content of every plant responds to tidal movement. It was all an old story to Marvin Saltzman. I could not take my eyes from the window.

  “You bring back five thousand seedlings from the jungle and you wait three years for them to flower,” Marvin Saltzman said. “You find two you like and you throw out the other four thousand nine hundred ninety-eight and you try to breed the two. Maybe the pollenization takes, eighty-five per cent of the time it doesn’t. Say you’re lucky, it takes, you’ll still wait another four years before you see a flower. Meanwhile you’ve got a big capital investment. An Arthur Freed could take $400,000 a year from M-G-M and put $100,000 of it into getting this place started, but not many people could. You see a lot of what we call backyard nurseries—people who have fifty or a hundred plants, maybe they have two they think are exceptional, they decide to breed them—but you talk about major nurseries, there are maybe only ten in the United States, another ten in Europe. That’s about it. Twenty.”

  Twenty is also about how many head growers there are, which is part of what lends Amado Vazquez his legendary aspect, and after a while I left the office and went out to see him in the greenhouse. There in the greenhouse everything was operating as usual to approximate that particular level of a Malaysian rain forest—not on the ground but perhaps a hundred feet up—where epiphytic orchids grow wild. In the rain forest these orchids get broken by wind and rain. They get pollinated randomly and rarely by insects. Their seedlings are crushed by screaming monkeys and tree boas and the orchids live unseen and die young. There in the greenhouse nothing would break the orchids and they would be pollinated at full moon and high tide by Amado Vazquez, and their seedlings would be tended in a sterile box with sterile gloves and sterile tools by Amado Vazquez’s wife, Maria, and the orchids would not seem to die at all. “We don’t know how long they’ll live,” Marvin Saltzman told me. “They haven’t been bred under protected conditions that long. The botanists estimate a hundred and fifty, two hundred years, but we don’t know. All we know is that a plant a hundred years old will show no signs of senility.”

  It was very peaceful there in the greenhouse with Amado Vazquez and the plants that would outlive us both. “We grew in osmunda then,” he said suddenly. Osmunda is a potting medium. Amado Vazquez talks exclusively in terms of how the orchids grow. He had been talking about the years when he first came to this country and got a job with his brother tending a private orchid collection in San Marino, and he had fallen silent. “I didn’t know orchids then, now they’re like my children. You wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come. Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it. You never say, ‘that one was prettier.’ You just love them. My whole life is orchids.”

  And in fact it was. Amado Vazquez’s wi
fe, Maria (as in Phal. Maria Vasquez “Malibu,” the spelling of Vazquez being mysteriously altered by everyone at Arthur Freed except the Vazquezes themselves), worked in the laboratory at Arthur Freed. His son, George (as in Phal. George Vasquez “Malibu”), was the sales manager at Arthur Freed. His daughter, Linda (as in Phal. Linda Mia “Innocence”), worked at Arthur Freed before her marriage. Amado Vazquez will often get up in the night to check a heater, adjust a light, hold a seed pod in his hand and try to sense if morning will be time enough to sow the seeds in the sterile flask. When Amado and Maria Vazquez go to Central or South America, they go to look for orchids. When Amado and Maria Vazquez went for the first time to Europe a few years ago, they looked for orchids. “I asked all over Madrid for orchids,” Amado Vazquez recalled. “Finally they tell me about this one place. I go there, I knock. The woman finally lets me in. She agrees to let me see the orchids. She takes me into a house and …”

  Amado Vazquez broke off, laughing.

  “She has three orchids,” he finally managed to say. “Three. One of them dead. All three from Oregon.”

  We were standing in a sea of orchids, an extravagance of orchids, and he had given me an armful of blossoms from his own cattleyas to take to my child, more blossoms maybe than in all of Madrid. It seemed to me that day that I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved. He had told me earlier that he had never become a United States citizen because he had an image in his mind which he knew to be false but could not shake: the image was that of standing before a judge and stamping on the flag of Mexico. “And I love my country,” he had said. Amado Vazquez loved his country. Amado Vazquez loved his family. Amado Vazquez loved orchids. “You want to know how I feel about the plants,” he said as I was leaving. “I’ll tell you. I will die in orchids.”

  4.

  In the part of Malibu where I lived from January of 1971 until quite recently we all knew one another’s cars, and watched for them on the highway and at the Trancas Market and at the Point Dume Gulf station. We exchanged information at the Trancas Market. We left packages and messages for one another at the Gulf station. We called one another in times of wind and fire and rain, we knew when one another’s septic tanks needed pumping, we watched for ambulances on the highway and helicopters on the beach and worried about one another’s dogs and horses and children and corral gates and Coastal Commission permits. An accident on the highway was likely to involve someone we knew. A rattlesnake in my driveway meant its mate in yours. A stranger’s campfire on your beach meant fire on both our slopes.