The Shadow Catcher

I’ve pretty much got it down to a system where no matter where I’m going outside my neighborhood I’m going to need an hour in my car to get there. There are a few exceptions, but even they harbor the potential for delay. I can get to the beach and the Pacific Ocean, to Malibu, in half an hour but only if a massive block of siltstone hasn’t splattered overnight in the roadway off the rock face of the canyon or if Topanga Creek hasn’t made a mess of itself, gorged, like a bulimic, and thrown up. I can get to a back lot at Universal Studios in forty minutes, but only if there are no breakdowns or other minor irritations on the 101. But to get from my house to Beverly Hills or UCLA, USC, LAX, the Burbank Airport or Union Station, I’ve got to plan on being in my car for at least an hour. There’s a bus route a mile and a half from my house that services Ventura Boulevard, and if I were a better human being and lived by my principles vis-à-vis the depletion of this planet’s fossil fuels, I would walk the mile and a half to the bus, as legions of day workers do, but what I do, instead, is I try to limit how many times I use my car. Which is why I hadn’t used my car this week, hadn’t driven since last Friday, four days ago, and why I failed to notice the slow leak in a front tire until I got in the car this morning to go to the Hotel Bel Air for a lunch meeting with my agent and a producer, right on schedule, with what I thought was an hour-plus time to spare, when halfway down my street, I feel the barge tow on the steering. By the time I top the tire up, I’m still on schedule, because I always factor in a five-to ten-minute buffer zone when I plan to wander far (2 or more miles) from home.

And then I hit the 101.

Well, hardly “hit” it. I zip up the ramp into a horizontally stacked parking lot, into a line of steaming metal units coupled end to end like discarded boxcars shunted to a siding, waiting for a train to happen.

And now another Realization dawns:

Jon, my agent at Creative Artists, has exhausted a quantitative amount of accrued goodwill to land this lunch for me with a woman who’s the head of a star’s production company who claims to have read my work (doubtful) and says she’s interested in developing a project based on a novel I’ve written about the photographer Edward S. Curtis. Most writers who have no film credits to their name (like me), no actual films produced from their screenplays, would probably admit they would have spent the night in the front seat of their car in the parking lot of the Hotel Bel Air to make certain they would be on time for an opportunity like this, unlike me, who gave herself only an hour (and a little +) and who is now going to be very, very late.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, as so often happens, this will start to thin for no apparent reason and I can still get there on time. This valley, the San Fernando, holds several million people at this very moment, of which at least a hundred thousand are with me on this highway; stalled. Passengers on plates. 240 billion years ago the west coast of America was somewhere slightly west of what is now Las Vegas and Vegas was the city by a sea. The coastline ran north/northeast from the Mojave Desert past Las Vegas, past our national Nuclear Test Site, into Utah. The great American craton floated uneventfully on the great North American plate, and everything within eyesight from where I sit, here, moldering in traffic, was at the bottom of an ocean, until wham. Two tectonic plates collided, pushing up these coastal ranges in crescendo — the Los Padres, Verdugas, Santa Monicas, San Gabriels, San Bernadinos, Panamints — climaxing in the Sierra Nevadas. From where I sit right now looking east toward the Verdugas, the San Andreas fault is ahead of me, its two opposing sides making better surface time than I am. I and my fellow stalled commuters sit on the Pacific Plate, drifting, even while we sit here, two inches a year toward San Francisco. Between us and the San Andreas there are three other major faults — the Elsinore, San Jacinto, and Glen Helen — but it’s the San Andreas fault that defines California more than any other natural feature, more than the half domes at Yosemite or the fumaroles above Mt. Shasta or the beaches at Big Sur. San Andreas is right lateral, which means no matter which of its two sides you’re on, the other one is moving to the right. San Francisco, up the coast to my left four hundred miles, is on the North American plate, along with Fargo, North Dakota; Albany, New York; and Tampa, Florida. L.A. is on the Pacific plate, drifting north. In two hundred million years, L.A. will pass the Golden Gate and Nob Hill, L.A. on the western side, San Fran on the east, which is more than any two seemingly immobile masses will be doing soon in any of the eight lanes on the 101.

And now: I’m very very late.