LA Pt 2: Drive

 Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere

We’re in LA 

Ask any Angelino for driving directions and he or she will tell you what freeways to take.

No really. We were driving out Sunset Boulevard headed for Century City when I was overcome by severe “are we there yet” anxiety. At a light we pulled up next to a police car. I rolled down the window and asked for assistance. I expected one of two possible answers. “Keep going.” or “You’ve gone too far.”  But no, the officer started off on what freeways I should have taken and which ones I might head for now. “What if I keep going this way?” He allowed as how I could do that but his look told me he thought was loco.

But I prefer driving Los Angeles overland, or as Angelinos would have it, driving on “surface streets.”  It’s the ever changing scene that takes me that way. One moment you’re driving past funky junky strip malls and the next you amidst gleaming steel and glass high rises. From a low end neighborhood you quickly pass into a high end one. There are residential streets here that look for all the world like tree lined streets in New England at mid-summer.

This is, I’ve noted before, a post-Fordian city, a city built concurrently with the era of the automobile. It stretches, if you count the scant water surface, over five hundred square miles divided into over eighty districts and neighborhoods. (Buffalo by the same measure covers a titch over fifty square miles.) Within and wherein that vast space, all of it accessible by car from the earliest days of the twentieth century, this city growed randomly. It made little difference where anything or anyone was. Hop in your car and drive there. By the forties congestion ruled; construction of the freeways commenced. And if you build a system to rapidly move cars, the drivers will all head there and rapidity become a memory.  While all those drivers are jammed up out there, I cruise the generally broad streets.

Jennifer was flying in from San Francisco. I plotted an overland route to pick her up in Burbank at Bob Hope Airport. Garminella is along on this trip; I’d shipped her out here in advance. I hadn’t as yet had a chance to utilize her so I saw this ride as the opportunity. We set out together. She was intent on getting me onto a freeway. Ignoring her set off flurries of “Recalculating”.

{Garmenilla speaks: It was nice to be out of the box after two years on a shelf in the closet. It was nice to be up on the dash doing what I was meant to do once again with Jack, with whom I’ve had a long and er, complex relationship, behind the wheel. And he totally ignored me! My job is to quickly and efficiently get us to our destination. And in LA that means getting out on the freeways. He never took a single turn I directed him to. Knucklehead! }

There are times when freeway driving is just unavoidable. We set out for Long Beach to take a whale watching three hour cruise. (We watched the hell outta one whale.) It’s a haul from here to there. Only taking freeways made any sense. While Bill drove Alvaro navigated. That meant that while one was behind the wheel the other wielded a smart phone apped to continuously update traffic.

Summing up: A poem by Bill:

                Getting There

                        by William Tutton

 

Cars

cars  cars

cars cars, cars

cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars

including ours.

 

             

 

LA Pt. 1: Lights

Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere.

We’re in LA.

We’re invited to Molly and Heather’s house to view the sunset from their patio. The house is about half way up the side of a hill above Silver Lake, the actual lake (Soon to be drained we’re told. Wouldn’t that be awful.) not the neighborhood although it’s in the neighborhood which extends to include our apartment which isn’t near the lake at all. Got that?

It’s a lovely home built in the California cottage style in 1927. The first homeowners here worked at the Disney studios. They could take the stairs that climb the hillside down to the trolley line that delivered them to the studio doors.

Bill and Alvaro are with us. Mark Weinstein stops by. Glasses are filled and refiled. Molly proposes a toast, “To Kenmore.” Indeed five seventh of us are from there, none regretting not being anywhere near there now.

Reaching the patio involves climbing a coupla short flights of stairs up from the backyard. The patio is built into the hillside above the house. No, really, the patio is higher than the roof of the house. The view is fabulous, down the valley, west over Hollywood, down and out over the LA basin.

The sun does its firey ball dropping below the horizon thing. Colors emerge in the southwestern sunset style. It’s all so beautiful. As the colors fade away, Venus emerges, brighter than the lights of the helicopters, two or three of which seem always to be airborne over Los Angeles.

Lights go on all around us. I’m in mind of those iconic pictures of LA at night, the foothills all around the basin set alight by houselights from the homes that cling, often precariously, to the hillsides. We are, it occurs to me, one of those lights.

Aboard the Southwest Chief

The Southwest Chief, successor we learn to the legendary Santa Fe Super Chief, is a step up, a significant step up from the Lakeshore Limited. It starts when we check a bag at Union Station in Chicago and are directed to the Metropolitan Lounge, set aside for sleeper car patrons and others of such a distinguished lot. Unlike the general waiting room, the lounge offers comfy chairs and complimentary stuff. Had we arrived on time instead of over three hours late, it would have been a pleasant place to spend a long layover. But soon the Chief’s conductor walked through the lounge scanning tickets. He then led us over a circuitous route to an imposingly large two story train.

Back on the Lakeshore Limited we occupied what Amtrak calls a roomette, emphasis on the ette, a tiny compartment in which, when it wasn’t made up for berths, two people could sit opposite each other knees touching. Boarding the Southwest Chief, porter Joseph Washington lead us to the compartment that would be home for the next coupla days. The prospect was a pleasant one, modest size yet ingeniously comfy.

By early evening we were rolling over the plains, snow covered furrows, roads laid out with a ruler.

We wake up the next morning in southwestern Kansas, still on the plains but now no snow on the ground. This will be a full day so after breakfast in the dining car followed by showers back in our compartment we, suitably enhanced, head to the observation car and stake out seats. The day just gets better and better. In the southeast corner of Colorado the plains become scrubby high desert. The train begins a slow ascent. As we climb we’re enveloped by fog. We breakout into sunlight as we enter New Mexico. Herds of antelope sport in broad green fields. Still we climb. And as we do the scenery becomes ever more spectacular.  Hillocks rise, become pine covered hills that become craggy mountains “That trail you see cut into the side of mountain is the remains of the Santa Fe trail that wagon trains took west in the 1880’s,” the conductor informs us. Higher still, we enter the tall Aspen grandeur of the Carson National Forrest.  

In late afternoon we plunge down to Albuquerque, a major stop for Amtrak. It’s a chance to step out, stretch our legs and toss the stands along the platform selling mostly junk jewelry and ersatz Indian gear. Then “All Aboard” and we depart into the fiery southwestern sunset.

My dislike of the vasty desert is no secret. When driving to southern California there’s just no way to avoid crossing it. There’s no way to avoid crossing the desert on the train either but mercifully the crossing is at night. We sleep through it and awaken in the far flung ‘burbs of LA.  

 

Aboard the Lakeshore Limited

 

Late morning, rolling across snow covered fields thirty minutes or so west of Toledo. We were scheduled to be in Chicago by now. We’d told anyone who cared to listen, well, just about anyone, that we were taking the midnight train. Indeed, departure time from Depew was 11:59. We’d called for a cab to pick us up at ten leaving lotsa time to spare. But knowing that a train originating in New York City could well be delayed passing through the winter storm that had earlier dumped a foot of snow on Buffalo, I checked the Amtrak web site around nine and, sure enough, the train was running an hour late.

“Hi Kenmore Cab. Pick us up at eleven instead of ten.”

Check the internet.

“Hi, Kenmore Cab. Pick us up at midnight instead of eleven.”

Check the internet….oh, you see how this is going.

We arrive at the station at 2:20, board the train at 3:05. The cute blond porter makes up our beds. I climb into the upper berth. Sleep soon settles over me.

A shaft of light from the rising sun wakes me. Clearly Cleveland. Back to sleep.

A few hours later breakfast in the dining car.

This is gonna be ok. Had the train been on time we’d have faced a long stretch, five hours or so, in the Union Station waiting room in Chicago. Now it’ll be a quick change to the Southwest Chief and on into the western night.