Back to LA, Pt. 2

It’s hardly possible to consider Los Angeles, indeed pretty much all of that huge hunk of territory known as Southern California, without confronting traffic. LA is, after all, the city that grew from a pleasant place under the warm California sun to a megalopolis after the introduction of the automobile. It must have seemed so simple back then: put anything any place. It won’t matter because all you have to do to get there is climb in your car and drive off. Fair enough, but as the city sprawled in the post war years, despite the broad streets that wound through it for astonishingly long distances, getting about by auto became more and more difficult. The ingenious solution was freeways. Limited access multi-lane highways weaving through the city to move traffic along swiftly.

And as has been known forever, make something easier, more convenient and folks will flock to it. Soon enough the freeways jammed up. The solution: more of the same. Now flyovers fly over ten lane with an additional four commuter lanes roads. And of course, that’s where all the drivers head.

SoCal freeways are never not busy, not day, not night, not in the still hours before dawn. The speed limit may be sixty-five but don’t expect to drive that speed for long. Cruise control is useless. Drive, just drive. Speed up, slow down, change lanes, and stay alert. Watch out for those motorcycles that ride the white lines between the lanes.

Throw that many drivers zipping around as fast as they can go and inevitably accidents will occur. Lots of accidents. The first thing to do when heading out on the freeways is to tune the car radio to the news station: traffic and weather together every ten minutes. And accident updates because there’s always accidents somewhere on the system. The traffic reports may, if there are any, suggest alternate routes. Take the advice and you find yourself driving the “surface” streets along with everyone else who has harkened to the same advice plus the locals who are there anyway. Stop at traffic signals and deal with unfamiliar traffic patterns. Better yet, just stay on the freeway and crawl along bumper to bumper. It may seem eternal but nothing ever is.

So I found myself on the most notorious of all, I-5, headed south from LA to visit my friend Jim in San Marcos. Five lanes abreast we’re moving slower than the tides. The news radio clues me into to the neigh apocalyptic reason, a car on fire further on down the road. Looks as though this particular jam is gonna last a long time.

And I reflect. A few weeks back Dale and I were among the dozen or so who turned out to hear singer songwriter Ray Bonneville at the Sportsmens. Ray talks up the audience between numbers and always has something amusing and thought-provoking to say. This night he reflected, “People complain about the airlines. But they fly me at three hundred miles per hour and get where I want to go in hours rather than days.” So it is. We’re all out here jammed up, creeping along because we can be. It’s no great fun but it’s better than it might be.

Back to LA, Pt. 1

Every trip to Los Angeles has been memorable. None more so than my first.

It was the summer I turned fourteen. My father piled me, my two younger brothers and my younger sister in the car and headed out early in the evening. Travel in the west then, it was the mid-fifties, was not so simple. There were no interstate highways. Our route from our home in Carson City, Nevada to Southern California meant crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Mojave Desert almost exclusively on two lane highways.  Our early evening departure was part of dad’s plan. We’d cross the mountains before dark then cross the desert at night.

We headed south from Carson City across the eastern slopes of the Sierras. By nightfall we’d reached Bishop, California, where we stopped for dinner. And then we went to a movie!

No really. And it was a great movie, “The Killing”, an early Stanley Kubrick flic. Even at that tender age when I didn’t know Stanley Kubrick from Stan Lee, I was riveted by its cinematic technique, flashback after flashback all tied to the start of a horse race and an ingenious plot to rob the racetrack.

When the theater let out we rode off across the Mojave. Somewhere in the dark before dawn hours, my father stopped for coffee. Up till then coffee for me was laced with milk and enough sugar to qualify as a dessert. But l felt that under the circumstances that wouldn’t do. Instead I ordered mine black. I’ve had my coffee that way ever since.

We arrived in downtown LA very early in the morning. We checked in to the Biltmore on Pershing Square where my father had reserved. But we were so early there was no room ready for us. We were put in a pallor on the mezzanine. And I had my introduction to 50’s LA smog. The windows faced east up Olive St. At first the view up the street was clear. But as the morning traffic grew haze began to form. It thickened and began to turn greyish orange. Before long, maybe an hour or two, we could no longer see up the street. We went out of the hotel to get breakfast. The smog made breathing difficult, my eyes watered, my throat hurt.

My father was there on business, government business. He was with the Interior Department Bureau of Indian Affairs. Which meant he had to leave us, although briefly, to attend to business. So later that day he directed us to Pershing Square to wait while he took care of whatever it was he had to take care of. Look at Pershing Square on Google Maps today and you’ll see it described as “The most singularly ugly public space in LA.” Back then it was a vibrant central city square, all palms and grassy swards. And it was then the Hyde Park of Los Angeles. Free speech was celebrated.  Orators abounded. Communists! Atheists! Shocking and yet intriguing to a young boy raised in a devout Catholic family. I went from one speaker to another soaking it all up.

What else? We went to Disneyland, of course. And on the trip home we stopped again, this time in Riverside, California for another movie though not a memorable one this time, a western I seem to recall.

I’d grown up a city kid. Then mid-way through seventh grade my family was plunked down in Carson City, Nevada. By the time we visited LA, it was becoming ever so clear to me that I didn’t belong in a Podunk little town. I wanted to go back to a city, a city like Los Angeles.

It would be twenty years before I got back.