Week 55 - Los Angeles

My next stop was Los Angeles, and since there weren't a whole lot of routes to get there, I decided to ride down the shoulder of Interstate 15. Getting out of Las Vegas was a little stressful, but once the road went out into the Mojave Desert it was smooth sailing. The shoulder was wide, so it was like I had a lane to myself, and just had to watch out for stopped cars and exits, of which there weren't very many. The first really interesting sight was the towers of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, which uses an array of hundreds of thousands of sun-tracking mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler to produce steam. The collectors on top of the towers gave off an eerie glow which reminded me of the Eye of Sauron without the polluting gas flames. The rest of the day's ride was pretty boring, although I did see some Joshua trees along the roadside, and in the afternoon I pulled into my first camping option on a rocky hill outside of Victorville. There was nobody there, but the place had an incredible amount of trash of all kinds from shotgun shells to clothes to mattresses to the hulks of abandoned cars. I looked for a nook where I could hide away but the place just gave me a bad feeling, so I looked at my map of free camping locations to choose another spot. The only other option was an empty lot behind the Victorville Walmart, not promising but I figured I might as well check it out. When I got to Walmart, a rough dirt road went by the parking lot in front and turned along a fence enclosing a large drainage ditch at the back. But it was actually a lot nicer than it sounds, because the other side of the fence was lined with poplars rustling in the breeze and pines giving off a pleasant smell, and both casting cool shadows on the edge of the road. I parked in the shade, set up my solar panels, took off my shoes, and sat down to do some blogging.

After a while, a man walked past pushing a jogging stroller loaded with camping gear, one wheel squealing periodically. He stopped, approached me, and asked if I was a cop (maybe it was my tactical laptop). I reassured him on that point and he introduced himself as LZ, a Mexican-American trucker with a drug problem (I'm pretty sure meth but he didn't say). We sat down on the ground and started talking. His account was a little hard to follow at times, but it seems that God had spoken to him and told him to go out in the desert for some time, stay celibate, and somehow atone for the sins of his father. He said he'd started seeing visions, like at one point he saw Jesus standing next to us but Jesus disappeared when LZ had a brief angry thought. I said that didn't really sound like his style to me, and he probably disappeared for some other reason. LZ talked about seeing an actual burning bush nearby and trying to put the fire out because he felt bad for the bush. It seemed like he was waiting for some guidance from me but I didn't really know what to say other than to listen sympathetically to his stories. After a while, he said he was going to make camp at another empty lot across the street, but as he walked away, a Black guy rolled up on a kid's BMX bike with no brakes. The three of us started talking as the sun set. Bike Guy recommended that LZ get laid, and also that he read some books. I asked what books, and he recommended James Patterson, and then Donald Goines, who was inspired by Iceberg Slim, whose autobiography it turned out we were both fans of. It turned out that Bike Guy lived just down the road, but his wife was hanging out with her friends from high school, they were too loud for him, and he had come there to chill and wait for his brother to show up. He offered some life advice about keeping things calm at home by doing whatever his wife wanted, and told a story about the neighbors calling the cops on him for a supposed domestic disturbance, and how difficult it was to get them to leave. He also recommended doing kid stuff with kids to stay young.

After a while I said I was getting sleepy, and they told me that although people would be walking by, I would be totally safe sleeping out there, although it would be unwise to leave my stuff unattended. Bike Guy said, "if this was the South, there'd be all kinds of weirdos out here, but we got rid of 'em. Blew all their heads off." I was pretty sure there were at least three weirdos present and accounted for but didn't say so. I said goodnight, pushed my bike a little ways out into the desert scrub so I wouldn't be swept by headlights, set up camp, and crawled into my sleeping bag. Around 10 pm, I woke to see LZ pitching his tent nearby. Then he started walking back and forth, muttering to himself, with his blanket wrapped over his head like a some old-time desert prophet grappling with demons. I suggested he get some sleep and he said he would try. I woke again at 12:30 am to the sound of him packing his tent. He said he'd slept for a little bit, but he could tell he was seeing things, and maybe it was time to give up on his mission from God and "hit the showers". When I went out to pee and came back, He said that as I knelt over my own sleeping bag, he briefly hallucinated that I was an attacker trying to harm the sleeping me, and he was worried that another hallucination like that might lead him to do something stupid. I said it was a good sign that he could still recognize what was happening, and he said he was going over to the other field in the hope that he'd feel more peaceful there. I said goodbye and wished him luck on his journey. After his stroller squeaked away into the night, I slept fairly well until dawn, only waking once when a man and a woman walked by talking in the wee hours.

At dawn I ate a hearty breakfast at the Carl's Jr across the street, filled up my water at an open spigot behind AutoZone that LZ had told me about, and started riding the back roads connecting to the Angeles Crest Highway that winds across the San Gabriel Mountains. It was really lucky for me that the other end of that road came out right in Glendale, where the friends I'd be staying with lived, allowing me to bypass all the urban sprawl to the east. As the road started its steep climb out of the Victor Valley, there were more and more trees and the air got cool and crisp. Traffic was light and the switchbacks through pine-scented shade refreshed my soul. When I reached Big Pines, the road was blocked off, I believe because the Angeles National Forest was closed until the following Wednesday to reduce the risk of wildfire. Luckily I didn't need to backtrack, and was able to take an alternate route that traversed sun-blasted slopes stippled with gnarled shrubs. In one section, a wildfire had killed and blackened the sparse vegetation. A lone house stood among some tall green trees in the middle of the devastation, with a large sign out front thanking the firefighters. Eventually I joined up with the Angeles Forest Highway, and the road was absolutely lined with motorcycles coming out of the city for a Sunday morning ride. The shoulder was a mass of gleaming chrome, and sport bikes whizzed by at ludicrous speeds. Along with all the expensive-looking motorcycles, there were some expensive-looking sports cars; it seemed every boy was out with his toy (there was a very very small contingent of women). I puttered along through this scene for miles, and luckily most of the traffic was still coming in the opposite direction, because it made me a bit nervous to be passed at those speeds with such limited visibility and maneuvering room.

But the views were spectacular, especially when the road hooked around the end of a ravine so you could see it winding back into the distance. A group of bikers stopped at a hollow in the rocks raised their hands in the air to cheer me up the hill as I chugged by in second gear, my engine screaming just to make 25 mph, which made me smile and lifted my spirits. I reached the top and started the descent, pumping my brakes to keep to the sensible speed limit while cars and bikes screamed past me going even faster than on the way up. And the risks they were taking were made all too apparent when the opposite lane was blocked by an ambulance, the medics tending to a dazed and dust-covered biker who'd slid off the road under a rocky overhang. On my way down the mountain I passed seven other emergency vehicles going up, so I imagine that wasn't the only accident. I crested a ridge and passed into a wall of cool moist air, with a faint whiff of the Pacific that might only have been noticeable to a desert traveler. The mountains turned to hills, and then I was in the valley, riding on nice quiet flat city streets lined with lush vegetation. The change was so sudden that it took a few miles before the new landscape seemed entirely real. I navigated to where my friends NS and CK lived in the Atwater Village neighborhood, on a quiet shady street lined with massive oaks.

NS and I have been friends since childhood, and I've known his longtime partner CK for years too, but I hadn't seen them very much since they moved out to LA. After parking Sugar in the garage and meeting their friendly Siamese cat Misu (short for Tiramisu), I sat down to join them in watching the Tottenham vs Chelsea match (they are very dedicated Tottenham fans). After that we went out for a late lunch at a deli that had converted their parking lot into outdoor dining (a very popular trend in LA). Then we went grocery shopping in a building that had once housed the original Disney animation studio, and passed the little houses where the animators used to live, styled to look like a Snow White village, with painted half-timbering complete with painted patches of peeling whitewash. On the way back I got a driving tour of the area, NS being the perfect guide because of his knowledge of modern architecture and his old job delivering pizzas. We went by a high school that's featured in many films, crossed the Shakespeare Bridge, and rode up and down a terrifyingly steep street. I enjoyed the landscaping and the architecture of many styles and eras.

NS works for a film production company doing screenwriting, concept art, and development, but he also has a side hustle buying and selling antiques, with an expertise in mid-century modern furniture and ceramics. So the apartment was like a museum of cool pieces and curios, some on their way to being sold someday, others just things that NS and CK really like. It was a lot like staying over at NS's house as a kid, since his mom had a similar business and his dad is a keen collector of natural and historical artifacts. The animal skulls on the wall of the room I slept in (European-style mounts from the 20s and 30s), also reminded me of the creepy zombie-like sculptures NS made as a teenager and hung on the walls of his room, but luckily I don't get freaked out as easily these days and slept amazingly well on the firm sofa (a vintage piece of course). On Monday CK went off to her job as a librarian and NS and I hung around the house and worked remotely. It was fun overhearing some of NS's story meetings, with grown people digging into the existential nuances of a children's puppet show. I worked a little outside on the sidewalk, and got some funny looks, but LA is full of oddballs so most people paid me no mind. We went out to some more outdoor restaurants, and one night went out for drinks with TG, another childhood friend who also happened to wind up in show business. It was fun hearing about how the industry looks from the inside, and also catching up and reminiscing a little.

I figured I should touch the Pacific so as to have properly crossed the country, but I wasn't about to ride through LA traffic any more than I had to, so I took the bus, which it turned out was temporarily free. I was told that Zuma Beach would be nice, so I rode to Santa Monica and then took another bus north from there, and it was a long ride so I did some work on the way there and back. When I arrived, everything was blanketed in a cool fog, which started to burn off as I walked toward the beach. I dipped my feet in the water ceremonially and sat watching the waves for a bit, then took the winding inland road up to Point Dume, where rocky cliffs tower over the ocean and present spectacular views across the bays on either side. There was a group of stunt people rappelling down a cliff face-first, so it appeared as if they were walking straight down. The day had grown bright and the ocean was sparkling. I'd been told you could sometimes see whales from up there, but unfortunately I didn't, although I did see some container ships in the distance, waiting their turn to unload at the ports. I hung out up at the peak in the sun and wind, and then came back along the shore, having to scramble over rocks to get around the reconstruction of the washed-out road. At one point I had gotten a little hot climbing a hill in the sun and contemplated a swim, but the water was very cold and the wind was intense. From Zuma Beach, I walked along the highway to a little French Cafe in a shopping center, ate a late lunch, and got on the bus back to town. During the bus ride, it was time for a Zoom meeting with some friends, so I decided to hop off the bus and join the meeting while walking, which ended up adding another eight miles to the day's total, but I got to make a transect through the city as the sun went down, smell the cooking from Little Armenia and Thai Town, and pass through vibrant night markets. When I got back I was good and tired, but I'd officially crossed from one ocean to the other.

I decided to stay Saturday as well so I'd have time to do some more work on Sugar. I mainly just rebuilt the carburetor and put in an oil additive to try and stop the slow leak, but I also made some progress in processing the kind of anxiety that comes up when there's a chance I might do something wrong and stop the bike from working. This was especially triggered when it wouldn't run right after I put the carb back together, but it turned out that I just didn't understand how to use the safety interlock on the gas can, and was only putting little dribbles into the tank (first thing to check always: is it getting gas?). But my troubles drifted away when we had a nice brunch at a Mediterranean place and went to the farmer's market, where I bought some apples and dates for the road (deglet nours, which the farmer told me were best for travelling). Coming from the east coast, the variety of local produce you can get from a farmer's market in LA is kind of mind-boggling, and I really regretted not being able to take more of it on my motorcycle. After one more night, it was time to turn around and head back east.

Things I Learned

• I got introduced to Baja Fresh (and fresh-Mex in general) back when I worked in LA circa 2005, but hadn't eaten there since. After some thought, I figured out what I used to order (the roasted veggie burrito with guacamole) and it was still just as tasty.
• I passed by the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the bus, and it struck me how many of those stars there are on the sidewalk, and most of them you wouldn't have heard of. My hosts' friend and neighbor showed me his beautiful old boat of a car that was first owned by Rock Hudson, who most people my age would probably only know as the first celebrity to die with AIDS, if they knew who he was at all. Fame is more transitory than we like to think. Well, unless you start a popular religion, or kill or oversee the killing of a really large number of people, then it can last for thousands of years.
• The homeless population of Los Angeles is up to more than 66,000 people by the official count, and it's pretty hard to ignore although I'm sure many are doing their best. I hope someday our country can find its way to something more humane and helpful than just clearing out their encampments.

Wonderful Things

• Weather where you pretty much only ever need to put on or take off a long-sleeved shirt over your t-shirt.
• Eating home-style chana bhatura and bhel puri at the Indian grocery/restaurant down the street.
• Gorging on a delicious pav bhaji that CK cooked after I bemoaned the fact that said grocery only served it on Sundays.