Joan Didion - The White Album

There was as well the man out on patrol.

There were as well the “call-car personnel,” two trained divers and cUff-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. EL. 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 sometimes 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 often. 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.