Gambling With the Equinox

I was sitting in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Virginia. This was last Saturday night. I had come to Virginia to see my niece married. Over in the corner of the kitchen, she was ironing her wedding dress. The hour was late, and we were discussing the future.

Weddings tend to produce many discussions of “the future.” In this case I was trying to persuade Sydney that she and her soon-to-be husband should consider a post-wedding move to Los Angeles.

I was making the traditional argument for L.A. Which is to say, the money argument. Sydney’s intended happened to be a more-or-less unemployed artist. But the kid was good. I had seen his drawings.

So what they should do, I said, was come out and talk to the studios. The animation business was booming. Artists in their 20s were making a hundred grand a year drawing cyborgs and mutant turtles. They could stick it out for a few years, pack away a nest egg, and move on to the next thing. This was the wonder of L.A.

Years ago, my argument might have had some pull. Once, people came here by the trainload on the promise of much less. But not this time.

Sydney knew about L.A. It’s too big and too filthy, she said, and so expensive that a hundred grand might not mean much. But the real problem was something else.

What’s that, I asked.

No seasons, she said. Don’t take offense, but I need a place with seasons.

The conversation more or less stopped at that point. I could have launched into a defense of L.A. and its own, peculiar seasons, but I didn’t. Sydney was talking about leaves that change color, about snow and about summers that are the grand relief from snow. She needed it and would not have accepted our seasons.

On the plane trip back, you could see Sydney’s version of the passing year taking shape below us. All across America, autumn has come. In the Appalachians and in the Rockies, the landscape is turning yellow and red. The air is cool and the sun has lost its authority.

But not here. When the plane glided over the L.A. basin, all you saw was bright sunshine and heat. Here, October has brought not the end of summer but summer itself. If the seasons of L.A. were designed by an ironic god, then October is his biggest joke.

I got off the plane and wondered what Sydney would have thought of our autumn. Around LAX, the inversion layer seemed to be screwed down to about 200 feet. The temperature had pushed somewhere beyond 90 and the place reeked sweetly of jet fuel.

Our own gritty, edgy October. If this month reminds the rest of America that winter is coming, it reminds us that we live with a desert at our back. It reminds us that we can never, ever be sure that the winter rains will come to wash away the filth and the ozone.

Somewhere out in the Pacific, another El Nino supposedly is gathering itself. Floating northward from South America to warm the ocean and bring us the rains that we have missed for half a decade. But October has yielded nothing of that. October has kept its secrets about the coming winter.

Soon enough, of course, the real test will come. Our desert-born October will pass and November will arrive to put up or shut up on the rain question.

We do not know which way it will go. You might argue that this condition of not knowing has become the most intriguing aspect of our seasons. We just had a summer that really wasn’t. And our winters haven’t been, either.

It’s come to resemble a poker game. You never know. There’s nothing predictable, nothing secure about these seasons. At the equinox, we draw cards and wait to see what they hold for us.

This year, of course, the stakes have grown huge. We’re like the player who’s been losing all night and finally has the chance to draw to an inside straight. If he doesn’t pull the right card, he’s goners. He sells the store.

Perhaps Sydney would like these seasons after all. Maybe she would grow fond of gambling with the equinox. But I doubt it. In her world, winter is winter and that’s that. The regularity of the seasons is the whole point.

For us, there is no “whole point.” It is never that simple. Out here, the gods play with us for their sport. And we play back.