Helicopter down in the Hudson

Two thousand, eight hundred and 99 miles from LA

I once knew a gay couple, one of whom was middle-aged and the other was in retirement. They were very adoring of each other and they had recently moved to Palm Springs in California. Palm Springs is one of the so-called Desert Cities, of which there are nine¹ in the Coachella Valley, which is accessed from the west coast via the San Gorgonio Pass, by following the I-10 motorway from Los Angeles, across via San Bernardino and Riverside, through a gap in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As the valley opens up at Whitewater, which Art Garfunkel may like to note is precisely 99 Miles From LA (the I-10 actually follows the path of the former Route 99), one has a vista of seemingly hundreds of wind turbines, and, with Mount San Jacinto towering to one’s right, one knows that one has reached the Colorado Desert. Dry and dusty, into which civilisation has poured the modern amenities of highways, air conditioning, pornographic film-making, and an aerial tramway. Welcome to the resort city of the Hollywood stars, where Gene Autry and Frank Sinatra lend their names to the 111, and are thus the easiest ways out of town.

Image: the settlement of Whitewater and, in the distance, the peak of Mount San Jacinto (named for Saint Hyacinth of Cæsarea, 10,834 feet ASL and 8,319 feet prominent).²

The reason why this couple had moved to Palm Springs was also easy: arthritis. Arthritis sufferers come to the Coachella Valley precisely because it is dry and dusty (although sprinkling from the 2,000 golf courses in the valley has upped the humidity somewhat in more recent decades). Palm Springs does a very healthy trade with tourism, especially tourism from the cold, damp north. It is an excursion and retirement mecca for the inhabitants of San Diego and Los Angeles and, particularly, northern Californians from San Francisco, but they come from even colder climes as well, with large numbers of Canadian tourists during the snowy northern winter: you can have a pool party in Palm Springs in late November. The city was the first ever to elect an entirely LGB council and mayor, and it guards its status as a preferred destination for the gay community, despite the offputting greeting that is being extended by their federal president in Washington, D.C. at this time. They are erecting We love Canada signs all across the city.

Image: Arenas, the street that forms the focus of Palm Springs’s boystown. Gay Canadians are being asked to divide their loyalty between the LGB community of California and their home country’s confrontation with Washington, D.C. Personally, I only ever went there to admire the Bougainvillea.³

In the somewhat quirky 1981 film My Dinner With André, directed by Louis Malle and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, two avant-garde New York theatre directors and actors, Gregory tells of how he has met an octogenarian backpacker who, upon learning Gregory is from New York, opines that New Yorkers all want to quit New York but never do so, having been persuaded to build their own concentration camp, in which they now find themselves both inmates and warders, and therefore unable to leave. If that is true, perhaps that fact cushions New Yorkers from the horrors that occur outside their city. But, then again, like in a penitentiary, it doesn’t cushion them from those that occur within in. That gay couple did leave New York, and ended up in the Coachella Valley, 99 miles from LA, where they cushioned themselves from the 50° heat by installing air conditioning.

A family was killed outright in a few seconds in an accident over the Hudson River in New York. They were visiting from Spain. They’d done nothing wrong, they were just out for a fun trip to see a great city from the sky, and their aircraft got into problems that it could not get out of. Papa was a wealthy executive for a major German company. His wife was celebrating her 40th birthday. Their three children were not yet in their teens. It is a tragedy of vastly human dimension.

I cannot choose between mourning this heartbreaking loss of nuclear family and mourning the loss of families in Palestine or Khartoum, in Brikama, The Gambia, or in the Darien Gap. Between Siemens executives on pleasure trips, and air force pilots navigating their way into a collision course with an American Eagle airliner. Between those killed by accident and those killed deliberately.

Can you? If you can, then, tell me, how do you decide what accidents are deserved and which ones are not? Which deliberate acts perpetrated on the innocent have been warranted, and which have not? And which outrages, like the murder of a health insurance officer, are permitted and which are not?

I could preserve myself from all this mourning by simply switching off the news. The way dryness and dust would protect me from my inherent ailment of arthritis. But I live where I live, and what happens in the world happens in the world, and I mourn what I mourn, and isolating or insulating myself will not dull my humanity. Because I will not permit it.

1. Cathedral City, Coachella, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, Indio, La Quinta, Palm Desert, Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. Unincorporated settlements include Fortynine Palms and Twentynine Palms (which I think someone must’ve counted), and Thousand Palms (formerly Hundred Palm Spring, and which sounds more like a vague approximation).

2. By Z3lvs - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=163447630.

3. https://flipboard.com/@latimes/entertainment-u0ke31qcz/-/a-SgpJ81GtQV-RF4jTmV4IhA%3Aa%3A460011909-%2F0.