When word spread that the cloud had finally left the city, Los Angelenos slowly began to reemerge from their underground weather-induced ennui shelters, and I grabbed my camera and set out to survey the damage.
I was not prepared for what I saw this morning.
Soil from my neighbor's rosebush planters had seeped down onto the sidewalk, now virtually impassible with dirt and debris as far as the eye could see.
Note the treadmarks, no doubt left by garden looters, most likely members of the neighboring South Central Malibu senior citizen gang/watercolor club, "Las Floristas Del Diablo."
And... you may want to cover your children's eyes for this next close up. It's quite graphic and not suitable for sensitive viewers.
Oh, the humanity! The cruel, cruel winter wind had orphaned a petal from its mother rose. With the roads the way they were, all gross and splashy, there was no telling how long it would take for cleanup crews to arrive and remove the petal, this gruesome reminder of mother nature's wrath.
Passersby averted their eyes in horror and pulled up the necks of their t-shirts to cover their mouths and noses from the vile stench of one less rose petal than there had been before the storm.
With the 12-second power outage our neighborhood sustained, electric driveway gates remained open and once domesticated animals ran feral through the streets of Santa Monica. Labrador retrievers, yellow labs, black labs, chocolate labs, Labradoodles, Lab Blablabs, Golden Labhuahuas, every kind of lab and lab hybrid imaginable roaming the streets, disoriented, carrying rolled newspapers in their mouths and offering handshakes indiscriminately to anyone who would accept them, delirious from starvation.
I encountered one of these newly-feral animals, and attempted to rescue her.
Suffering from shock, she ran the other way when I called out to her. I chased her for a few feet, but soon arrived at an impassable roadblock. As you can see from the photo below, the water had accumulated on the sidewalk to the point where the pavement had just buckled under its weight, creating a sinkhole of rainwater between us, and I was unable to follow her without the aid of a canoe or life raft.
GOOD DOG! RUN! RUN AS FAST AS YOUR LITTLE FEET WILL CARRY YOU!
I called Animal Control, and they dispatched a helicopter to rescue the dog from where she was stranded a few houses down in the front yard of her own home. They quickly strapped her into a harness and airlifted her to the front door, where her family was waiting anxiously for her safe return.
A mixed breed of unidentifiable origin, who witnesses confirmed had "wide-set eyes that implied descent from a line that was probably not a champion of hardly anything" and who "took a bite of grass like some kind of animal" and who "didn't give me his paw when I asked for his paw" was shot with a chamomile dart and transferred to a mixed-breed dog sanctuary, just in case, before he could wreak more havoc than the havoc he had undoubtedly been rumored to have probably wreaked.
After an hour or so of walking, my shoes and pants were absolutely covered with filth and debris from trudging through the wreckage.
Now I know how the workers at Ground Zero must have felt.
Great. My pants and shoes were ruined. Completely unsalvageable.
I was forced to remove them and make my way home pantsless and shoesless. In earlier times, 45 minutes of yore, I might have felt embarrassed at my predicament, but I soon realized that most of my fellow Los Angelenos had also deemed their filthy shoes and pants unwearable, and had converted them into iphone koozies and windsocks, respectively.
The most tragic loss was that of our neighborhood's great old trees. The mist and drizzle that had befallen our great city had soaked right through their bark to whatever's underneath the bark, increasing the contrast of the trees' natural tones into something very tacky and overstated-looking.
Get over yourself, Liberace.
Women everywhere rubbed their temples and complained of migraines from the visual overstimulation. Many citizens were so upset by this development that most of the trees were quickly put out of their misery, felled at once by roaming tribes of interior designers and color consultants.
Others, reaching deep within their hearts to look past the hideously garish, bourgeois look of the bark, rallied together, and teams were quickly assembled in an attempt to revive the few remaining trees, using hair dryers, upright tanning beds, and tender hugs.
Other, very teeny weeny trees, lined the gutters and sidewalks. People gathered to stop and stare at these heretofore unseen mini-trees.
"They're kind of like branches, but kind of not like branches, because you can hang a Hammacher Schlemmer hammock swing from a branch, but you can't hang a Hammacher Schlemmer hammock swing from one these things, no way," said one witness.
"The tree is molting its feathers," said another. "We should hold hands and sing to the tree."
"Don't touch it, it could be a bomb!" shrieked a concerned mother, pulling her child away.
Suddenly, a street sweeper rounded the corner and glided along the curb, disappearing the mysterious objects. Following closely behind was a convoy of military vehicles, which pulled up next to us, the men inside looking down upon us with a solemnity that chilled us to the bone.
"You didn't see anything here, am I understood?" the man in charge said. We nodded.
"Things don't fall from trees in Los Angeles. If things fell from trees in Los Angeles, people might get scared. There's no telling what people will do when they're scared. Desperate things. Unthinkable things. Are we all on the same page here?" We nodded.
They were gone as quickly as they had arrived.
Rumors about the Tree Feather Coverup of 2010 floated around for a while but were eventually forgotten. Sometimes I see that concerned mother pushing her child on the swing in their front yard, her gaze empty, her cheeks gaunt, her mind full of images she can't escape, truths she dare not speak. We make eye contact, not a sound between us save the haunting, rusty squeak of the swing's chain... reeee, oooo, reee, oooo... and we remember.
Yes, we remember.
