The Shadow Catcher

Lunch will start in twenty minutes whether I’m there or not, and there’s nothing I can do about it, except to try to wait it out to the next exit and get off the highway onto ordinary (I hope) less congested surface streets.

One of the draws of living in the West is the lure of these dramatic landscapes, the pull of these wide-open spaces evoking narratives of ancient geologic time, narratives of passage, disappearance, death; persistence. Up to my right on the Mulholland ridge above Tarzana, there’s a scenic overview where you can park your car and sit on a bench and look out across the whole San Fernando Valley. Seven miles wide, at its widest, and twenty miles long, the valley’s like an island surrounded not by water, but by mountains, and I like to sit up on the Mulholland ridge and imagine what it looked like five hundred years ago before the Spanish came. I put my thumb up the way actors playing painters do, to crop the foreground, blot out the bank buildings at Sepulveda, the rides at Universal, the black glass Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters in Canoga Park, and I try to imagine what this place looked like before the horse. Before the train. Before the car. That’s the game The West invites, the game everybody plays out West: pretending we can see the past, here, in the present. Pretending we can call down the impossible, invalidate the present, and convince ourselves we’re in another time, another century. The West — true West — attaches to you like a shadow. I don’t think this happens in the East — I don’t think the landscape summons an imagined past the way the land does here. I don’t think people in Manhattan, Boston or Atlanta turn a corner, see an eighteenth-century graveyard and make an easy leap into imagining the past. In European cities, yes, you can come around a corner and intersect another century, stand in a limestone sanctuary and imagine you are seeing light through stained glass the way it looked six hundred years ago, but in the west, at the cities’ edges, there is the very real encroachment of the older Eden, the original one, the land in its unaltered state. You can see it from the windows of your car without leaving L.A. County. Drive out to Red Rock Canyon or the Vasquez Rocks or take a hike up Mt. Calabasas and you’re in the wild, in another time, entirely. There are places, here, in the valley, where you can go, where there’s not a building or another person within sight. Unlike the crowded basin beyond the mountains to my right, there are streets here that expire into dust beside an old adobe, but everywhere you’ll go within the confines of this valley, you will feel its thirst. The mountains block the cool marine air from the coast and pose a permanent rain shadow. Streams form in winter, but they rapidly evaporate in spring and by summer they are rock-strewn baked arroyos. Two stubborn narrow ones join in Canoga Park behind the high school football stands and it is there, in a concrete crib, that the Los Angeles River shapes its unlikely identity. It’s nothing, really — in any other town east of the Rockies it would be a joke, the kind of miserable low velocity ditch into which any city with a decent river would toss junk. Real L.A. is on the other side of the mountains to my right, and just like the L.A. River I need to find a way through their walls if I’m going to get to Bel Air at all, but because the faults tend north/northeast along the present coast, the coastal ranges follow that direction, slicing L.A. County’s loaf into individually prepackaged servings. If you’re on the 101 heading east — or not heading, as I am — and you want to get off the freeway and take surface streets from the valley side of the Santa Monicas over the hills to the other side, to the basinette of the real L.A., you can’t just zigzag, you can’t just improvise, you have to follow the geology, you have to take either the canyons or the passes, and, from west to east, you have only these six choices:

Take Topanga Canyon.

Take Sepulveda Pass.

Take Beverly Glen, Coldwater or Laurel Canyon.

Or take Cahuenga Pass.