Planted in the Soil of Normalcy

We are headed to get dirt. A man and a boy bouncing down the road in a pickup. The birds are singing, the crocuses blooming. High spring in L.A., a day so perfect and timeless you’d think it was 1954.

“Gun it,” says Casey.

Do all 6-year-olds love speed? Maybe. I consider giving him a lecture on safe driving and then think the hell with that. I gun it. Casey puts his head against the seat and we are flying toward the deep Valley where a man waits with a skip loader and a mountain of topsoil.

Somewhere, far away, important things are happening. The Pope flies toward a Mass in Sarajevo. James McDougal sings to the special prosecutor. The reelected mayor plots his second term.

Why does it seem to matter not a whit here in 1997? You could argue it’s the spring and the crocuses. But something more is happening. America has sunk into quietus. The issue of good dirt has risen to the fore. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was Canada.

Casey and I find the man with the dirt. We need a lot of it. One of the great myths of L.A. is that flowers and broccoli and everything else grow like gangbusters here because of our sunshine and first-class dirt. The sunshine part is true enough but the dirt is mostly junk, filled with the alkaline salts of the desert. If you want good dirt, you buy it.

The man testifies to the quality of his dirt. It came from an old lake bed, he says. The very best. The lake was drained for a development and the soil auctioned off to the good-dirt industry. A big chunk of it, about the size of Splash Mountain, now sits next to the trailer that serves as his office.

I look at Casey. He shrugs. We buy two scoops.

The skip loader dumps the dirt into the bed of the truck, making it bob like a dory at sea. We tie a tarp over the back and head off into the sunshine, unburdened by popes or special prosecutors or the second terms of phantom mayors.

Between the loading of the dirt and tying of the tarp, Casey had climbed onto Splash Mountain and he’s now covered in a thin layer of topsoil. He’s happy. Driving along, I wonder: Is this what normalcy felt like in the ‘50s?

I doubt it. In some ways, I don’t think it felt this good. In the ‘50s, parents could never forget that their sons and daughters lived under the threat of quick extinction. The Bomb hovered over the barbecues and Tupperware parties.

And the ‘50s, lest we forget, more or less reinvented America. The pace of change was crushing. Los Angeles alone minted suburbia, the sitcom and the rest of prime-time television, fast food, the freeway system and, as they say, much more.

Nervous, that’s what the ‘50s were. Our peculiar ‘90s quietus, on the other hand, is something else. We have no Bomb, we are not growing particularly richer nor poorer, and we can list only the computer as our contribution to the cultural ferment.

In the ‘90s we go to the PTA, we grow crocuses and wash our cars. We are, in many ways, a truer version of the ‘50s than were the ‘50s themselves.

*

There’s a poem by Stephen Dobyns about death going on strike. Without death, people begin to lose their momentum. They wander the streets, or start following stray dogs.

The situation grows so serious that soldiers are sent out to dabble people with red paint, ordering them to fall down and pretend death.

“Maybe tomorrow, people answered, today we’re just breathing; Look at the sky, look at the color of the grass.”

Just like us, no? We have not been robbed of death, surely, but there is the sense we have been robbed of something in our quietus. And we, too, seem to be waiting for the missing thing to return.

Except for the 6-year-olds, of course. Casey was born in the ‘90s, has known only the ‘90s and believes they represent the eternal condition of things.

Wait till he finds out.

’ Somewhere, far away, important things are happening. . . . Why does it seem to matter not a whit here in 1997? You could argue it’s the spring and the crocuses. But something more is happening. America has sunk into quietus. The issue of good dirt has risen to the fore. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was Canada.’ ‘