The Ground Is Still Moving

Somewhere beneath the asphalt you are driving on right now, a layer of bentonite clay the consistency of wet soap is pressing slowly seaward, and it has been doing so since September nineteen fifty-six. The Portuguese Bend landslide on the southern face of the Palos Verdes Peninsula did not announce itself with a single catastrophic event. It crept. Road crews noticed the pavement buckling and shifting in ways it had not before. Cracks appeared in foundations. By the time engineers confirmed what was happening, approximately two hundred seventy acres were already in motion, and nothing since has stopped them.

The city of Rancho Palos Verdes spends approximately one million dollars every single year resurfacing the stretch of Palos Verdes Drive South that crosses the slide zone. Not one million dollars once, to fix it. One million dollars annually, because the road is never finished moving. The asphalt laid this spring will have shifted by autumn. Engineers manage the slide. They do not stop it.

What triggered the modern acceleration was construction. In nineteen fifty-six, fill material excavated during road-building was deposited on the hillside above the ancient slide complex. That fill weight, combined with irrigation water from new homes and the natural lubrication of a buried clay layer, pushed the slope past its threshold. But the geology here was always going to move. The peninsula is made of rock that arrived by submarine landslide millions of years ago. The instability is not an accident. It is the address.

The most affecting single object in this story is a chapel. Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son, spent his career designing buildings that dissolved the boundary between structure and landscape. Wayfarers Chapel, completed in nineteen fifty-one for the Swedenborgian church, was his fullest expression of that idea: redwood beams, local stone, and walls almost entirely of glass, designed to recreate the interior of a redwood grove. For seven decades it worked. Brides got married there. People drove from across the county for Sunday services. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in twenty twenty-three.

In twenty twenty-four, the chapel was dismantled. Piece by piece, carefully, each element numbered and boxed and placed in storage, because the slide underneath it had made the structure impossible to repair. The ground the chapel was built to merge with simply walked away. What it leaves behind is a foundation, a famous view, and the question of whether any institution, sacred or otherwise, can be permanent on a hillside that is always, quietly, in motion.