The poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote of a “seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.” He was describing a state of being afraid to love others, but he could have also been referring to Orange County.
We do get an autumn of a kind here, but other than a subtle shift and dimming of the sunlight, and the appearance of some crimson-orange berries on trees and bushes here and there, it’s provided by human beings. At Saddleback College we get what some of the locals call “flocktober,” a period of a few weeks in early autumn when massive murders of cawing crows orbit the campus and descend to pick apart the remains of overpriced cafeteria wraps left out on the lunch tables. This has started happening because the constant land development around here means there are fewer owls to prey on them.
The autumn and winter months in southern California are mostly words and numbers. They offer little reprieve from the oppressive June heat. We may want weather for pea coats, scarves, and gloves, we may want everywhere dead-leaf carpeted sidewalks for crunching under bike tires and shoes, but this year global warming has let the genus locus of Southern California give an even more surreal, flippant middle finger to any hopes of discernable season changes by providing us with triple-digit temperatures after Labor Day. Sometimes, it’s especially taunting; over the weekend we got a very Gothic twelve hours of wind, rain, dusk-at-noon iron clouds, and thunder and lightning that almost got me in the mood for Halloween before giving way to toasty beach weather. We tell ourselves its autumn here less with changes in nature and more with consumer products, like plastic skeletons and pumpkin spice lattes.
For better or worse, the seasonless eternal April of Southern California adds to its feeling of being a dream. It adds to the sense it’s easy to get here of being cut off from the rhythms of nature, or time itself, suspended in a pleasant simulacrum. This is certainly the case in town where I currently live, Ladera Ranch, a dreamy town on the edge of a wooded canyon that feels like a theme park version of a 50’s suburb, or the Easter-egg colored dystopia from the social media caste system episode in the new season of Black Mirror.
As I’ve said before, Los Angeles and Orange County are fantasy worlds in the real world, because they were created by, out of, and for human dreams. In fact, they’re like an inverted Narnia, where it’s always spring rather than always winter.
