The Palm Trees of Los Angeles: An Exodus

The palm trees of Los Angeles are dying. Their beards hang brown-grey along their necks, drooping in the trial of their lives, weary of the smog and sun.

What happened to them? And how can they all die at once?

Shouldn't these trees die out slowly, like patches of grass? Green here, brown there, depending on amounts of light and rain. Living where the living is still good...

But that's not happening. Instead, they are all dying, across the city and the surrounding area, just dying all together. I look around for the cliff they will jump off of like lemmings, making way for the next generation.

There won't be another generation though. The Hollywood imports will have to be replaced by new, non-native plants, shipped in from the islands somewhere in the Pacific. If the Hawaiian palms have died here, maybe the Tahitians will do better and survive for a full hundred years.

Obviously, these trees are not native to California. They've been transplanted here.

For a long time, the trees defined the city. Glamour. Shape. Color. Grandeur.

They curved gracefully; slim arcing towers lining the boulevards, finding their way into every photograph. The palm trees were works of industrial genius, not unlike the city they adorned, defined by the act of making things seem real which are not.

And now the illusion is wearing thin. The stalks are dying. The air is drying up. The photos are empty.

It feels like an exodus. Only, trees can't move. They aren't going anywhere, except maybe to tree heaven.

And everyone notices what is happening. People walk beneath and beside the palm trees to get out of their yards, to get into their cars; to get to the store.

All the planting is coming to naught now, and maybe people don't want to see it. So, no one talks about it, as if the trees have contracted a shameful disease. They've all got syphilis and we don't even whisper about it behind their backs. The trees are too good of friends to drag them through the proverbial mud with our gossip. Dying, leaning down, going grey: the remains of their fanned leaves fall to the ground as if this were their autumn, which, perhaps, it is.