Sunday, April 11, 2010

Life in LA Part I, A Drop in the Ocean


When meeting someone new here in LA, it’s perfectly acceptable to break the ice with “So, where are you from.” Even someone who’s lived here all their life will not balk at the question, simply answering “here”. That may be because it’s one of the more remarkable answers.

That being the case, my story is not at all a new one—arriving in LA and the culture shock that ensues. Moving to Canada—sort-of a foreign country—would have been less of an adjustment.

Measuring by the expatriate population, Los Angeles is Canada’s 4th largest city.

This transition is reflected in the music of the countless English rock bands who all seemed to move to LA in the late seventies and early eighties. “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp, “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac, “Aliens Ate My Buick” by Thomas Dolby. It seems everyone has their just-moved-to-LA album, just-moved-to-LA stand up comedy set, just-moved-to-LA drive-by shooting…

Everyone has an idea about LA and Hollywood before they get here that must be reconciled against the reality of the place once they arrive. Like most folks, my idea of LA came from TV and the movies: The classic low shot of a convertible cruising down a boulevard lined with rows of tall palms against a solid blue sky;  The Hollywood premier with the searchlights crossing the sky; the post-apocalyptic futuristic gangland where they play by their own rules… and it’s always nighttime somehow.

The first time I saw LA it was from the air. On my first trip in 1986 I was looking out the plane window during our initial descent to see desert give way to mountains then the mountains give-way to a medium sized city that I later learned was San Bernardino. I expected that city to end at some point separated from the next community by open spaces.

But it never did!

For seventy miles from San Bernardino to our touchdown at LAX, the developed space of residential, industrial and commercial land sustained itself the whole way without taking a breath. The vastness of LA was almost overwhelming.

California is home to lower 48’s largest and smallest counties: San Francisco at only a few miles and San Bernardino which stretches from bordering LA County clear to Arizona.

I could also see the Hollywood sign in the distance and we flew over that big concrete thing where they film all those car chases.

I later learned it’s called the LA River

Southern California started out like anywhere else, little towns with farmland or scrub desert in between. Then came the post war booms of first the twenties, then the fifties. All those little communities were like globs of cookie dough placed a bit too close together on a baking sheet; eventually they all grew together nearly indistinguishable from one another.

One big ass cookie!

The reality of LA is that it is the world’s largest suburb, or as some people put it “A 500 square mile parking lot interrupted by Seven Elevens."

When I arrived here to live in 1998 the vastness was intimidating in a different way, creeping along in a moving van bumper-to-bumper from San Bernardino to Hollywood for almost three hours. I began to wonder if I was making a mistake.

I was still wondering when I couldn’t find a safe place to park the truck overnight; a truck that contained everything in the world that I owned. LA seemed like a city of locked gates. From parking garages to private residences, everything seemed to have a gate and every gate was closed. The gates were also figurative: I had no job and knew absolutely no one.

Not long after I arrived I was driving on traffic-choked Santa Monica Boulevard on the gritty less fashionable end. It seemed to go on forever. I got this terrible claustrophobic feeling. I felt trapped in the middle of the tens of miles of city and traffic surrounding me in all directions.

That feeling was fleeting though and I experienced it only that once. I was also filled with wonder, a feeling that returns to me often. Here I was in the home of the modern fairy tale, my pen poised to write my own. There was ugliness and beauty everywhere I looked, and I was just a tiny speck in its midst.

It was hard not to feel small, but it was the fairy tale that brought me here and it was the fairy tale usually prevailed. No mistake, I was in the right place.

Next week, Part II of Life in LA, Settling In.

No comments: