The Nike missile site LA96C on San Vicente mountain, seen from the Mandeville Canyon fire road.
During the cold war, the Los Angeles basin was ringed by sixteen missile and radar silos whose job it was to defend the city by intercepting the feared incoming Soviet nuclear attack. It never happened, but ruins of the abandoned sites still linger, and the one atop San Vicente mountain is even maintained as a tourist destination. I had planned to visit this piece of Angeleno history for some time. What I hadn’t planned was to do it the day after the country was rocked by an assault from the enemy within.
Time to pause breathe walk
meditate find the center--
yesterday was mad--
blessed by swirling prayer flags
where missile silos once stood
Tiny yellow bloom
in brown grass and mustard field
afternoon sun glow
alone flutters in the wind
joyful prayer rain dance
“Come with me. We may find that home lies in re-membering–in piecing together the fragments left–and in reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory and to be one.”
Lauret Savoy, “trace”
It’s a human thing. We are obsessed with leaving traces of our being in a certain place at a certain time. We leave unintentional footprints, like horseshoes stamped in the dirt, and grooves in the rock from stage coaches, horse carts and wagons, and piles of trash: people are pigs and do not abide by the “Leave No Trace” rule. But mostly we deliberately make marks on our environment, ‘something to remember us by?’: abandoned carcasses of cars, trucks, lawn chairs; dates, names, declarations of love carved in sandstone boulders or, more currently, spray-painted tags nearly everywhere; post-modernist cave paintings on “the edge”, lime green acrylic boulders in caves, swastikas, not surprising; a padlock in an abandoned burrow, token of eternal love or lost object for future archeologists to marvel at?; sparkly dreamcatchers guarding a pond; wood, metal and tile plaques that commemorate, direct, prohibit or warn; railroad tracks and freeways that slice through eco systems; hearts pierced by arrows carved deep into the trunks of oaks, alders and sycamores; tunnels blasted into canyon slopes in search of bonanzas; and let’s not forget, video clips that seem to have no purpose at all, thankfully.
I had hard-to-beat views all day on this ramble through the Hacienda Heights/Puente Hills. Panoramic views of the San Gabriels to the north, San Gorgonio and San Jacinto peaks to the east, on the trek uphill, then of downtown LA to the west from the ridge, with a large buddhist temple in the foreground, and later the silhouettes of ships and cranes in the LA harbor to the south, as I descended into Turnbull canyon. The well-trodden trail cut a wide, packed-dirt swath in the hill that was easy to follow, and still soft and moist, especially in the shaded sections. A pack of crows circled overhead for a while, until distracted by a lone hawk they promptly chased away. Sumac and Toyon berries saturated the trailside with raucous red patches in an otherwise grey-green-brown palette. In short, I had little reason to look down, like I would on a Paris sidewalk, to skip around dog doodoo. My eyes, however, could not avoid the bright orange turd that lay in the middle of the path, less than a mile from the trailhead. Now, you see plenty of fecal matter on most trails in any kind of wilderness, it’s the wilderness. There are coyotes, bobcats, deer, squirrels, even the occasional bear or puma who may not follow the same trail etiquette as your average hiker who scoops before they poop, to bury the deed, usually a few yards off the trail. Depending on the offender’s diet, these piles of shit come in a variety of brownish hues, but orange, bright california poppy orange is not one of them. Red, sometimes, filled with hardly digested berries, or green, even white, when it’s been sun baked long enough. Was this the product of a giant rat feeding on nuclear waste? After all, the area was formally the site of a landfill. Might a dog have discovered and devoured their owner’s stash of turmeric root, only to reject it during their morning constitutional? Or a possum followed and ingested, obsessively, every scrap of orange and tangerine peel that inevitably litter heavily-used trails? I certainly don’t mean to make a meal out of this encounter, and will gladly return to admiring the views, if you don’t mind.
It’s an arduous climb from the foothills of La Cañada to Bee Flat. The views from the Teepee overlooking a misty Southland, and the company of a gazillion bees visiting my shaded resting spot made it worth every drop of sweat. The fire road ramble to Mt Lukens is gentler, gradewise, but looong, and exposed pretty much the whole way, which is perfect, and even more so thanks to the abundance of spanish broom perfuming fun, giddy stretches of what could have been a boring walk.
Descending into Haines canyon, via the blue bug I’m happy to note someone has freshly painted, was a welcome breezy, green stroll through a lush canyon that buzzed like a giant beehive, home to at least one rattler who rattled so late and sheepishly I almost stepped on it.
Another great day walking along the northeast edges of Tovaangar, the world originally inhabited by the Tongva we broadly call the LA basin.
“Aweeshkore xaa.” (We are happy, in Tongva, according to an LA Times article).
Rough year to be homeless in Los Angeles, especially if you’d taken up residence on the islands of dirt and debris occupying the center channel of the LA River between Burbank and Figueroa. A year ago, a resident of the area told me they’d moved to the islands when the city dislodged them from the higher, safer, gated zones between the 5 freeway shoulder and the bike path. Where did they find refuge this winter, during our exceptional rainy season? Some have built shacks on the cement shore, in the mouths of smaller drainage arteries, but that can only be a small portion. A man loaded with a grocery bag slips through a breach in the fence next to the Griffith Park tennis courts. The brave soul who had settled halfway up the ridge leading to Beacon Hill, in Griffith Park, has vanished. Not surprising, the hill is invaded by black mustard (Brassica Nigra), or is it shortpod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana), tall and dense, and quite pretty in full bloom like today, but not habitable. They say you can eat the greens and flower though. I won’t try it. Not today. Today, I’m surrounded by the color of this invasive, non-native plant and I’m thinking of a Mingus tune, “Orange was the color of her dress, then blue silk.”
Evidently, it’s the colors in the title that prompt the connection–or is it ‘conection’?–but I also find that the many tempo changes, the many conversations that take place between the players, the sense that at any moment the thing can unravel into anarchy but doesn’t, the drive of Mingus’s bass, somehow fit a good ramble across Griffith Park. The many changes of pace–fast going downhill, slooow uphill–the subtle changes in scenery, the inevitable urban incursion–“Cristo Viene” spray-painted on rocks, trash piles and the need for a multitude of signs forbidding entry, marking property lines–all contribute to a complex composition that gently comes together during a nap near the wisdom tree. So, yellow was the color of the hills thanks mainly to the sprawling mustard, and then blue made an appearance in the shape of a single flower at first, then patch of lupines.
On the album where I thought I’d heard “orange was the color of her dress…”–memory lapse, it wasn’t–there is another superb performance of another tune fitting the occasion, “I’ll Remember April”. A classic, with a memorable Bud Powell piano solo, full of reverence for the music that Mingus, in much of his work, pushed forward, beyond its comfortable boundaries. This ‘conection’ didn’t occur to me until later, long after I’d exited Griffith Park proper, skirting its southern perimeter along Mulholland, and I’d run into a library of sorts, which, in typical LA fashion was nothing but a facade, or rather a cleverly decorated garage door. Some titles of note: Marx and Hegel, Think, Conections of the world, and my favorite, Aphorisms.
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.
John Fante in “Ask the Dust”
“…to protect the city’s parks, neighborhoods and quality of life, you must be vigilant and you must organize.”
Grace Simons, quoted in 1985 LA Times article by Sam Mall Kaplan
Find out more about Grace Simons, activist without whose effort Elysian park would have been turned into a convention center. As if LA had too many public green spaces.
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