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.
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