Oh, you’re
happy, coming back, away from three years in crowded, constricted New England,
where the landscape is small and always tree-obscured. Some motor deep inside you
turns over because you’re heading west, toward sand and stone, tough old
cactus, the ocean beyond – heading home to Los Angeles. Not even bad weather can
make you slow down. As you drive into the steel gray vortex of a thunderstorm,
banked clouds suddenly part and fingers of silver sunlight stream down. Now you
slow, as if you could stay under that light, live inside it, and you wonder if
the trucker you’ve been playing tag with for the last hundred miles is looking up
at those rays and thinking the same thing you are, the only thing you can
think: God shed his grace on thee.
You’re eager for
LA but you need a big jolt of the West so you take a detour to Zion National
Park. Heading out of Flagstaff, you go up and over pine-covered mountains that
give way far below to the northern rim of the Colorado and the almost-mirage of
Lake Powell flashing liquid in the cradle of all that rock. This landscape
comforts you; in all its monumentality you don’t feel puny but right-sized, in
sync with the natural order. You’ve hungered for these desert colors, not the
pale pastels of Santa Fe pop, but vivid variations of deep greens and molten
terra cottas against a piercing blue sky. Back east, when you tried to explain
to people what it is that kept the western landscape so vivid behind your eyes,
you’ve talked about the immutability and permanence of a desert vista, a
timeless stability without the franticness of leaves. And the concept of big: big valley, big mountains, big
canyons. And wildness, its possibility. In New England all roads lead somewhere
while in the West they can go nowhere, lead to nothing at all, fade away as
gradually, or as suddenly, as the human impulse that began them. On this trip,
pulling to the side of the road for the tenth time so you can photograph the
view in what you know is futile attempt to capture what you see, you finally
put the camera down. You want nothing between you and the view. You hear the
silence and you want to listen. This land speaks the truth.
The main part of
Zion is dramatic, a lunar landscape of striated sandstone and thousand-foot
stone walls carved by the Virgin River, which on this day is no more than a
creek. But frankly you’re disappointed. The park is crowded, narrow and closed
in. So when someone tells you about a back road leading up to a high lookout, you
make the time to take it. For a half hour you climb up a winding strip of
blacktop, up past alpine meadows and fattened sheep and aspens already turning
gold. You hit gravel at around 7900 feet and when that ends you leave the car
and wander through scattered bushes until the path too abruptly stops. Another
step and you’d be Wiley Coyote just before he realizes he’s walked off into
space.
Up that high,
winter has already come. You’re cold but it’s a small price to pay for what you
see. Mountain ridges fall away, one after the other, until they fade away into
the early morning haze of gold and lavender. Huge black birds are circling far
below. You strain to hear their calls but the wind is a wall of rushing sound –
you don’t so much hear it as feel it vibrating through your shoes. It’s
intermittent, though, and when it stops you’re flooded with silence, the familiar
silence always contained in wide vistas, a suspension as in meditation, and as
much a part of what you’ve longed for as the visual expanse.
You let go to
it, float out, and it feels as if you’re climbing up on a promontory inside
yourself, a stable shelf from which to see the world. There is movement
everywhere – in the wind and the trees it’s shaping, in the granite spires of
the ridges, pushed up by the motion of glaciers and earthquakes, the clouds,
the birds – movement and signs of movement everywhere. You, too, are in motion.
You think about how far you’ve come, across the continent and across the years.
You feel all that is unresolved in what you’ve left behind and all that is
unknown in where you’re going, and for a moment you sway as equilibrium shifts.
What is there to hold on to? Then you remember a line from the great Japanese
haiku poet, Basho: every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. You catch
the stillness at the heart of those words, the safe place in the center of the
whirlwind. You remember an image you once had in mediation: you’re playing
tennis against a ball machine and, even though you have no idea when a ball
will come or from where, you have no doubt you can return whatever comes. You
see now the calm center at the heart of constant unpredictable movement, of
everything that life brings and takes away – it’s the confidence that you have
the resources to handle it. And something even more: the faith that you will.
Here, now, you
feel this faith. You hold it suspended inside you and you close your eyes,
trying to memorize what it feels like in your body. You know it won’t last, but
that thought isn’t your usual negativity ruining something good. You feel it now, it’s real, and the memory of
this strong and certain calm, this equanimity, will remind you time after time,
and no matter what, that it is always a possibility for you. You let yourself unfold into it; you breathe
it in and out; now you have it deep inside.
You take one
last look and, as you head back to the car, you feel you’ve been given some
internal solid ground to walk on, some armor against the bad times that will
undoubtedly come. You open the car door and hang on it for a moment, taking in
one more time everything you see around you. It’s beautiful and wild and every
bit of it is part of the natural order – just as you are, a beautiful,
irreplaceable part of it all.
You head across the Mojave southwest of Las
Vegas. Cresting one of its steep grades, the highway is thrown out in front of
you, a thin concrete track poured up and over shifting desert sand. Gradually,
even though you’re on the Interstate, pulled along with the heavy traffic of
gamblers, lovebirds and pill-wired truckers, you lose all sense of safety. This
is the only place on this western journey you think you couldn’t survive. If
you break down, if somehow you’re stranded out of sight of the Interstate, ten
minutes alone in that baking desolation will undoubtedly do you in. The road
becomes not a hallmark of human ingenuity but a certain sign of human folly
because chances are an earthquake or flash flood, just wind and time alone, will
sink the road deep and out of sight. You
shudder and pull your attention back to the gauges on the dash board as the car
struggles up the latest grade. You turn the air conditioning off to help it
along; you’re sweating anyhow. The Mojave makes you work for LA.
You get past the
worst of it. Edgy with relief, you speed past Victorville, down the Cajon pass,
going faster now because you can smell Los Angeles, even pull in the flickering
signal of a familiar radio station. Then you hit the smog. The light is yellow,
thin and reminds you of dried out rubber tubing, the kind that used to prop up
dying patients. Your first impulse is to turn around – why on earth would
anyone want to stay here? – but you have 3,000 miles of momentum behind you and
a hunger for the coast. The yellow fades, turns to hazy gray, but it doesn’t
quite disappear. After a few days, it’s your noticing that will fade, your
registering what you see.
And so you’re
back. You do the things that let you know it: hike in the hills and stand
looking out at the huge basin below, drive up to Santa Barbara and eat at La
Super Rica, a much-missed taco stand. When you take Sunset out to the sea, you’re
stopped by the light at Fairfax. You look at each of the four corners and feel
a rush of gratitude that in all the years you’ve been in LA, these corners have
stayed almost unchanged.
But everywhere else
you look new buildings are going up, new houses on lots you thought were
unbuildable, and some days that’s all you see. You think the perspective of
your three years away ought to give you something original to say about all
this, engender new insights, but maybe you’ve been away too long, or not long
enough, because you can’t make Los Angeles snap into place, become something
you can get a handle on.
Then, one day,
as you’re heading north on the 405 toward the Valley, you slow down to change
lanes so that you can fall in behind a dusty red horse trailer. This is the
West you’ve wanted, following a brown horsetail rhythmically swishing from side
to side, ambling along at fifty miles an hour through the Sepulveda Pass. Just
to say the syllables is to be showered with romance: Sepulveda Pass. You reach
the crest. The Santa Anas have been blowing for days and when you look out over
the Valley, your eyes widen. – you’re certain you can count the trees on the
opposite hills twenty miles away.
Time stops while
you breathe in the clarity of that view. Suddenly, the handmade city is only
foreground. You see past it into the landscape, the plain facts of the land:
the surging hills tumbling down canyons to the coast behind you, the Valley
floor unfolding to the snow-covered mountains beyond. It’s all vivid, clean and
precise, bathed in golden white light beneath a blue and cloudless sky.
There is a text
spread out before you and as you try to decipher it you realize that this
varied geography is the real glamour of Los Angeles. It offers a description of
a city that takes its cue from its own natural underpinnings. It’s as gorgeously
diverse as its landscape, in all its variety and perpetual renewal. It’s a city
that derives its richness from contrast and interplay, just as mountain is set
off against valley or shoreline against incoming wave. What you see is simple,
unadorned, a natural possibility and what it gives you is hope.
The car tips
into its descent, back into the haze, the congestion and conflict, all that
attitude. But what you’ve seen is no mirage or momentary transcendent glimmer.
In fact, it comes to you that this hope is rock solid, embedded in landscape,
accessible, always resurrecting and you know it’s what you’ve been looking for,
the Los Angeles you’ve wanted to come back to. The haze deepens but your
clarity remains. You’ve seen the land, the bedrock behind all our human
failings. And you know at last you’re home.
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