Escape From LA

Southern California, June, 1979

We rushed out of the valley into the final blast of a fire-red dusk, the color of the hills a blank khaki. Here life is guided by only two seasons, first the long dry brownish one that is dominated by extreme heat, intense smog, and excessive drought. Then in its brief glory, the green season, when fields of crayon green grass shoot up all over the foothills and surrounding canyons. It all happens in the short span of a few brilliant spring weeks. The hills come alive with giant grass blades that explode three feet skyward in a hurried exaggerated life. Then it all dies as quickly as it appeared, leaving the terrain covered with a blanket of dead, dry brush.

Lifeless now, it all sits and waits in explosive silence as the summer heat staggers on; it waits for the fall and the Santa Ana winds to whip through, igniting often by any means possible (a careless cigarette, an arsonist) into destructive storms of brilliant fury. It is a season of annual brush fire chaos. Massive waves of amber and orange havoc cloud distant skies. The days end with layered sunsets of purple ash that confirm smoking ruin somewhere in the midst.

LA burns, it slides, it shakes, and it kills, and it does it all over again, year after year. Yet people keep coming to LA which says something, although I'm not sure exactly what.

We headed up and over Tejon Pass, toward Gorman, and the famous Grapevine that hurls you into the central Californian desert. We pass several carloads of Mexican farm workers standing on the side of the road, their outdated vehicles obviously ill-equipped for the climb. Groups of befuddled bedraggled men, some in crooked straw cowboy hats, stand around scratching their chins, staring drearily out at the world from behind the open hoods of their road weary rides.

A silence settled in as the car moaned and groaned up through the old pass. We sat silently staring at the miles of empty California hills aglow with the dying light of day. That brief moment immediately after the sun sets when the last stretches of light explode directly up and over the horizon in one last splash of fiery celestial brilliance.

We cleared the grapevine and descended into the San Joaquin Valley, the I-5 taking us to Bakersfield were we’d then head east on the 178 to the 14 and then the old 395 up through real California, ancient Cali, Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine, Bishop and then into the mountains near Mammoth Lakes. The 395 was old California and it was like going back in time.

After some initial flatness and dark desert night, we began flying through an endless stream of tiny main street towns that welcome you with "Speed Zone Ahead" signs, most with less than one hundred as their posted population. Towns where the gas stations and Coke machines haven't changed in forty years and where old folks sit in rocking chairs on rickety porches, watching the travelers whisk by in all manner of new and expensive machinery, all of them on their way someplace, passing through, trying to escape the inevitable crest of urban decay.

The highway becomes a gradual incline after you clear the Grapevine to start the northward trek through central California. First the low desert, with its dead brush and flat blank terrain, then into the wonderful high desert with it’s wide open vistas.

We screamed across the nighttime flats, the big gas-guzzling American car in its element, straight ahead and humming at a calm seventy-five. The dog with his snout out the window, his cheeks blowing up like Dizzy Gil­lespie­'s into the oncoming wind, slit-eyed joy on his face, tongue hanging out and flopping around as he feverish­ly bit the in­visible menacing breeze, leaving streaks of windblown dog spit all over the half-rolled window, he oblivious in his canine hap­piness, and me oblivious in my wonder­struck freedom of a long nighttime drive, speeding out of the city, being on the road in the middle of the silent immensity of a clear starry night.

(c) A.C. James