Many moons and tides ago, well before I found my calling as the coastal and ocean reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I was a lapsed economist who had been wooed into giving journalism a try. Holiday shifts on the city news desk were the norm, and my assignment one Christmas was a quick dispatch from one of the busiest homeless shelters in Downtown. It was there that I met Latoya, who had spent the night waiting in line for a toy giveaway with Madison, her seven-month-old daughter, who had just started to teethe. The backbeats of Skid Row had caroled them through dawn, but Latoya made do with a tender smile and held Madison while she slept.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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She had lost her customer service job at a local bank and found out only a month later that she was pregnant. Every day since had required immense fortitude, and that morning, she wanted to make sure Madison’s first Christmas didn’t just pass by. “As soon as I can, I’m going to give back,” she told me. “My daughter has a Christmas, and I will one day make sure someone else will, too.”
I had a tight word count and an even tighter deadline, but we ended up chatting the day away. Madison gave me a half-toothed grin when I finally dashed off to write.
Days later, a reader mailed me a $100 check for Latoya with a handwritten note saying that her story had struck a chord. “She radiates intelligence, resoluteness, and she’s got it together,” he wrote. “Please pass on the enclosed check to her with my wish that she’ll do something nice for herself and Madison.”
It was Latoya and this reader who first gave shape to what I later realized would be my approach to journalism. My word counts have gotten much longer, my projects more elaborate, but I continue to embrace writing as a daily practice of empathy. With every conversation and every new person I meet in this world, I marvel at the breakthroughs that are still possible when we take the time to reach out to one another—and when we slow down to listen. I write for these humbling moments of connection.
There is wisdom, too, in listening for the marsh wrens that trill at low tide and in reconnecting with the rhythms of the land. As we reel from extreme drought, rising seas, and the whiplash of flood and fire, I can’t help but mourn just how disconnected we have become. We have walled off the ocean, buried critical wetlands, and paved over rivers that once nurtured our now-vanishing beaches. The more I question all the ways we have hardened ourselves against nature, the more I need to write just to remember, to hope, that it doesn’t have to be this way.
These days, I also find myself writing to think, to process this all-consuming story of climate change. I write in search of a different ending than the one we’re barreling toward, and this also begins with deep listening. We have much to mend and much to learn from the messes of our past, and recalibrating whom we tend to center in these conversations, and whom we’ve historically ignored or forgotten, can also offer us a more compassionate way forward.
Is there still hope? For years, I wrestled with how much hope to give when writing about our overheating planet. Too much might diminish the urgency; too little can paralyze us to the point of inaction. But in the process of piecing together California Against the Sea, I discovered that it is not the feeling of hope but responsibility that keeps me going. We have a duty to cherish the air that we breathe and the water we rely on, and what I now find myself asking people to feel is courage—courage to care, courage to take that next step, however big or small. Like the reader reaching out to Latoya all those years ago and the Christmas Latoya will one day make possible for another child…every action, even a seemingly simple story on a holiday news deadline, can be a ripple that leads to a lot more good in this world.•
CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA: VISIONS FOR OUR VANISHING COASTLINE, BY ROSANNA XIA
