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Why don’t I just write the story? Why didn’t I just report each day’s journey? Why can’t the words come out straightforward?

I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Presumably it took shape some time in the past month, as I’ve done something akin to settling into a new home, while I’ve dragged out my move from Los Angeles to Portland, moving no longer across hundreds of miles and instead creeping slowly, randomly across my new home town.

For weeks I’ve been plotting maps, tweaking Google Earth settings, uploading and arranging photo slideshows, transcribing audio, adjusting WordPress themes, reinstalling broken databases, sorting notes, scrawling in journals, browsing help forums, maintaining computer files, arranging furniture, pitching stories, visiting labs, reporting, attending meetings, filing emails, postponing responses, mailing postcards, paying bills, signing leases, opening boxes and otherwise transitioning through life, both digesting and avoiding my recollection of my journey from Los Angeles to Portland.

It has been a mixed blessing. Sometimes I kick myself for not writing enough, not writing when the trip was fresh, not writing soon enough, early enough. Other times I realize something that K.C. Cole told my class of science writers at USC on more than one occasion, something I found incredibly encouraging. “Even when you’re not writing,” she’d say, “You’re writing.”

I wonder what I’ve written as I’ve not been writing, and as I’ve fretted each day about losing the memories that so recently burned themselves into me, that brought me, simply, from there to here. I don’t want to wonder about it too much, though, lest I get caught up in the pointless tedium of writing and reading about writing.

What I can recall distinctly is a sentiment I felt somewhere between Lassen and Modoc counties, when I emerged from a forest to see sunlight like I’d never seen before swirling across the tree tops. Then, I uttered the following into the digital voice recorder I babbled at throughout my journey:

I don’t know how quite to describe what I’m seeing and what I’m passing through and how to record it for permanence. I don’t know quite how to capture the sense of the sun on the line of trees up high with the trees still in shadow beneath, the changing landscape from thick fog and patches of snow to only small patches of snow and these, what I think are lava beds, pouring over the side now in a landscape becoming more rough bit by bit. I don’t know how to keep describing everything that I’m seeing, the complete emptiness of it all, the complete soloness of my drive at this moment.

I guess what I’ve written is what you see here. What I’ve produced is what you’ve found. What I’ve created is in front of you and, quite possibly, it is changing just as quickly, just as astoundingly as the light shifting and scattering and spreading across those treetops in a faraway corner of California.

The Mother Lode

I didn’t pan for gold.
I didn’t climb aboard a vintage railcar.
I didn’t sip local wine.
I didn’t read Mark Twain in Calaveras County.
I didn’t track every place I ate.
I didn’t always talk to strangers.
I didn’t program my route in a GPS.
I didn’t tag my coordinates.
I didn’t blog.
I didn’t care how many bars I had.
I didn’t log my miles.
I didn’t measure my footprint.
I didn’t keep this in order.

I wandered.

I listened.
I ate.
I visited old friends.
I overheard bartenders gossip with regulars about workplace drama.
I ate seafood in the mountains.
I stumbled upon the Mother Lode.
I gathered pretty rocks at turnouts.
I read about vanishing hotel investors in newspapers stacked on front desks of their erstwhile property.
I crossed the San Joaquin Valley.
I explored lava tubes.
I heard shotgun blasts and ducks quacking.
I listened to cows moo and sheep bleat in mist-enshrouded riverside farms.
I played blackjack with drunk Iraq war vets at tribal casinos
I ate freshly baked maple bars.
I got waylaid in fog.
I gripped my steering wheel on mountain passes with no one around.
I lost touch as I rose and fell into the gray, freezing blanket.
I got bad directions from teens but had fun trying to make sense of them.
I took an entire day to travel 100 miles and still felt like I was rushing.
I fell asleep to tales of California’s geology.
I kept the road ahead of me open.

I wandered.

“Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.”

Roger Waters’ voice floats through my car, settling among my backpack, torn bags full of clothes and piles of randomness stuffed on the backseat — as they have been for days and will be for weeks longer. The Pink Floyd bassist and singer’s first breath emerges from the stereo just as I turn from Highway 49 in Jackson, California, to Highway 88, headed toward Volcano, headed toward black chasms, headed toward forests and storm clouds, toward gravel roads, turkey flocks, store shelves groaning with ancient merchandise and through the valleys and hills of Gold Country.

By the time the ethereal opening of “Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI-IX”ends I realize how the first time I heard the song was 13 years earlier, in the dark kitchen of a lone cabin on a small island at one end of a lake in a landscape much like this. That earlier time, a mid-summer night, I relaxed with fellow trainee camp counselors, eating fresh-baked brownies covered in melting vanilla ice cream, savoring how well the music mixed with each sweet morsel (unaided, despite what the scene I’m painting might suggest, by chemical enhancement), feeling a sense of calm community and simple summer joy as our young charges slept on the island’s nearby beach.

Those early camp years helped first stoke the allure of the road when a treasured few of those summers included drives back from camp to Southern California. I remember descending from the Sierras into a landscape of rolling, golden hillsides dotted with oak trees. I fantasized about growing up to buy a home in a fold of one of the remote foothill valleys beneath us, about lazing in the summer sun in the high grasses spread out forever below, about the bluer than blue skies of those mountain summers. After the road flattened we’d skirt the monotonous cities of the Central Valley — still yet to explode with sprawling growth — and stop for lunch or a snack in quiet, tree-lined Downtowns I didn’t yet know were reminiscent of the Midwest towns I didn’t yet know I’d pass through on cross-country treks between California and Ohio while I was in College.

Though our route varied each time we took the journey, at least once we kept to the backroads and returned home by way of Highway 33. On that journey, we crossed the San Andreas fault and soon afterward found ourselves at a remote shack somewhere between Maricopa and Ventucopa, in the southwestern reaches of Kern County. We walked inside for a Coke or a burger or just a chance to use the restroom. My mom noticed the small rack of postcards and thought about buying a few for her step-father, who she knew collected postcards and, more importantly, was an avid student of Kern County history. Rather than just sell the cards and see us off on our way, the person working the counter (I don’t remember if it was a man or woman) invited us to see their “real” postcard collection.

We were led out of the small cafe to a barn behind the building. It may have been dark and dusty. It may have been bright, with sun piercing cracks between the beams of the building’s aging frame. Whatever the case, it held what seemed like generations of family keepsakes. Really, it felt just as you’d imagine a barn turned storage shed in the so-called middle-of-nowhere might feel.

We were allowed and encouraged to paw through boxes and boxes of old postcards the family had received over the years, no matter that they featured the sentiment of their relatives and friends. We were fascinated, and I was enthralled by the hospitality of strangers, really something I never experienced in the alternative universe that was my exurban childhood.

That moment of spontaneous welcome embedded itself deeply. All at once it was a moment of connection, a moment of wonder, and a moment of adventure. It sparked in me a realization that beneath the surface of society, beneath our expectations, beneath all the rules and mores and standard ways of being there is another current, another way to live, another world.

More immediately, the experience taught me that there was so much going on that I had no clue about so close to my home. There, less than 100 miles away, was this quiet out of the way gas station. There was a back country no one ever talked about in this state so focused on coastlines and the urban landscapes spilling out of its core and across the edges of our nation. I’d later learn that all of Ventura County’s 10 incorporated cities together fill only roughly half of its geographical area, all of them gathered south of the Los Padres National Forest, a theme of dichotomy echoed in other regions I’d later live, and a contrast characterized by this country, by much of this world as a whole.

These journeys from camp to home and back each summer weren’t my only experience traversing the unseen landscapes surrounding my erstwhile home.

When I was even younger, my parents often dangled a tantalizing possibility for my brothers and I on our journeys to our grandparents’ house in Northridge: The back way. Though I suppose the route wasn’t so much our choice as my parents’ interest in avoiding freeway traffic, the “back way” has taken shape in my memory as an adventure along country hills with butterfly-inducing dips and tree-shaded stretches of asphalt. Though I know Highway 118 and the communities along it exploded with the cancerous growth of 80s, 90s and early millenial exurban expansion, I imagine my recollection of the journey is a bit more fanciful than it might have been had I grown up two or three decades earlier. Nevertheless, I remember the “back way” with fondness, now more so after this other alternate route has carried me from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon.

Waking Darkness

It takes the darkness to wake me up, the uncertainty, the presentness of the road after a meal.

I eat my first road dinner in Dos Palos, California at a small diner where beefy men in overalls talk about gang executions and tell Portuguese jokes and a young, expectant mother joyfully exclaims, upon reading the menu “They have a chili-cheeseburger!”

After dinner I feel reinvigorated by getting on these roads where I don’t quite know where I’m going. Where the San Joaquin Valley was getting exhausting, its endlessness has been replaced by a darkness through which all I can see are two white lines, some yellow dashes over and over again and a ditch off to the side. The glow of my headlights makes this valley seem so much more interesting. I have no idea what’s around me, although I suspect it’s a lot of nothing.

I like to imagine it’s a lot of something.

I’ve come to understand that there is so much so-muchness of this state, and of this country by extension. These roads must crisscross forever in this country, in similar ways, in different amounts of repair, I’m sure. So many resources. So many things that we just don’t conceptualize in our everyday life.

Sometimes, the repetition really does feel like something. As I roll through the town of Newman, California I think it’s just another main street, just like all the others I’ve passed through today and just like all the others that fill this country. Two story buildings, a grid, and struggling businesses half-filling storefronts for blocks around. But here, the lights are on. People are strolling the streets. An old theater marquee downtown announces the next showing in somewhat cryptic language: “Sneeky Pete is the word on the street.”

Sometimes, the words just come out, as they do when, suddenly, the Yosemite Highway turns a corner and reveals Lake McClure below me. On a day when I woke on the opposite side of the San Joaquin valley, still uncertain what direction I’d head, I delight in the serendipity that led me to catch this sight. I utter the following into my voice recorder:

It’s the discovery of a lake clearing like this that makes the decisions to take random roads and wander all the more worthwhile, it’s the not knowing what you’ll show up to, it’s the uncertainty of endless miles of empty farmland and repeating grids and the hypnosis of the road to suddenly let it explode in geology and weather and climate and forest and all of it, to see it, to see it fall apart, to see it recreate, to see it evolve and rise from nothingness into somethingness, that’s why uncertainty works.

Later, I have other, similar revelations and as I listen to my tape recorder I find as the journey progresses the utterances become longer, more contemplative, far less about the every detail of what I saw and more about the what I experienced, what I felt. I catch a scent of pine needles as the sun sets while I walk to Lower Yosemite Falls on my very first visit to the national park. Thoughts take shape and I record them minutes later back at my car:

It’s days where the story is everything you see. It’s days where sight takes a back seat to sound and smell, and the way what you hear, and what you smell, and even still what you see changes so rapidly by having and not having people around.

I also contemplate the transformative effects of the road, as I do somewhere between Grass Valley and the once-secessionist settlement of Rough and Ready:

This is like a grand reboot of my brain. Like someone hit the Nintendo that is my body to make it get its picture again (though I know the preferred method of my childhood for fixing an NES was to blow on its connectors). That’s somewhat what I feel. Um. Anyway. Here I am and I probably missed a few turns on my little record, but whatever, that’s part of my journey too, not saying, not remembering to record everything.

Theroux and Friends

“All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission …”

-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (As cited in Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 2009).

In the depth of winter, while the year is still an infant, I descend into a cave beneath Lava Beds National Monument. My footsteps echo across chilly cavern walls. In half a day at the park I’ve seen all of six or seven people and none for hours.

As I surround myself with quiet and rock, the thought cascading through my head without a name begins to leave its impression. I feel some inkling of what I imagine a walkabout to feel like. I know I am traveling in a car, but when I get out and about, as I have at the Lava Beds, or even when I wander the streets of some small, until-then-unknown-to-me, town, there is some sort of reconnection happening, a thought of the vastness of the world. My place in it is such a tiny part, but it’s just one mechanism, one moving mechanism, not in a hopeless “I feel tiny” way, but in a “this is all so grand” way.

First, I realize how grand and huge California is, and then I ponder the country, and how thoroughly so much there is in this place. Of course, then the how much there is in the world is my next thought, and then I consider the universe, and I find that constant constantness, the immensity of so much to be refreshing in a way. It’s not depressing. I don’t have a sense of ineffectiveness.

I wonder if that is an indication that I am losing some sort of need to have control, to have an impact on the world. Instead, I find myself accepting my impact as it is, at is now. I find myself accepting my place as it is now, that this is me and I will make the connection with the world that I will make with the world.

Though I’m rewriting this now, I was saying this to my tape recorder. One of the things I assure myself of — though it’s less a denial as it might seem if you are reading this — is that I’m not trying to convince myself of anything and I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. Of course, I know I’m not accurately capturing the definition of a walkabout. It is just a moment’s thought, but one stoking my curiosity.

Anyhow, I wonder whether the challenge for me, or the thought to consider when I finally arrive in Portland, is how to interpret the place, if it will feel like a big rushing city to me (it does). How can I both carry on the sense of peace that I have but also an acceptance of the city as it is and of my place in that city as what it will be, and not feel the need to somehow run to it, to run to this peace, to this sense of calm, to all of this.

I’m not trying to seek an answer to that, I’m just curious.

Meanwhile, I told my tape recorder, I’m very curious about my ability now to get this out here on this recorder without stopping, you know, and wondering what it would be like if I were trying to write these very same thoughts I’m trying to write at this moment, um, or trying to speak at this moment. If I was typing on a typewriter or if I was on a computer or by hand, would it be this stream of consciousness? I doubt it. It would most likely involve backslashes or deletions or scratchouts, depending on the medium I use. But, you know, I am speaking here openly. Then again, I’m speaking here, like on, you know, uncooked, or something, um, and, and, as much as I think I value honesty and openness and just stream of consciousness I do wonder though if, you know, just making a sea of words and thoughts that you haven’t contemplated also doesn’t work, but clearly I’ve been contemplating all of this for days now. Anyhow, that’s that.

I wonder what it is that changed my mood from recording the route to talking and thinking out loud and having ponderous thoughts later in the trip. What was it? Was it that they needed cultivation? Was it that it was more isolated? Was it that they had been cooking? Was it the landscape? Was it fatigue? Was I transitioning slowly in personality?

Sometimes you just roll through downtown. Sometimes you miss the downtowns, diverted by frontage roads and business bypasses while you’re not paying attention. Sometimes you miss entire towns. Sometimes you just don’t get to do everything you want.

Sometimes you speed through stories. Sometimes you forget to tell others. Sometimes you leave out the details. Sometimes you choose to keep them to yourself, simply because they are yours.

When a friend of mine recently wrote about her attempts to chronicle her own recent journey to Africa, she discovered she was:

“disappointed I couldn’t capture in real time all I was seeing and doing, so friends and family could travel vicariously alongside me … But a deeper, larger part of that disappointment came from the worry that without writing about them in a way that was publicly and immediately consumable, those experiences — my experiences — would somehow become more fleeting and less significant, something that could be put away, set aside, forgotten.

So really, it was about me, and my own fears.

And with that realization, the pressure evaporated. I traded my traveling companion‘s sleek MacBook for the solid, hard-bound journal a good friend gave me the day before I left. I was my only audience, the keeper of stories for the sake of memory, with no obligation to enlighten or entertain.”

Likewise, I was my only audience for my journey. I was the only one taking it, and this was the only time in my life I’d ever quite have this experience (though I did need a close friend’s reminder that this was the case, and that I needed to go easy on myself about what I’d write about it and that this was my story, mine to record how I saw fit).

A Sort of Homecoming

I traverse a mile or so of the rainy border between North and Northeast Portland, passing more buildings and more cars, and, presumably, more people than I had in a week on the road. I swing a gray coupe packed to the brim with bedding, boxes and unfolded maps into the last parking space of a former funeral chapel.

Now a pub, the building’s front room is quiet, somewhat eerily so for a Saturday evening here near one of Portland’s hipster hotbeds. I pass the empty bar on my way to a back room, where I find my brother and his wife in a crowd jointly celebrating her and a friend’s birthday. I greet my sister-in-law amidst a crush of mutual friends and beer and food and presents. Hungry and overwhelmed by the activity, I duck out to the main bar with her own brother. We try our luck ordering from a clearly overstretched wait staff, catch up over chocolate stouts, chicken wings and rice bowls until another friend of ours shows up and greets us. She steps close and hugs me warmly.

“Welcome home,” she says, echoing a sentiment others had already expressed to me.

“I told you you’d be back,” this friend continues.

Initially confused, I begin to recall how more than seven years ago, when I first left a temporary stay in Portland, she’d insisted how hard it would be to return to the city. As my memory of the conversation slowly returns I remember how I’d thought then that I wasn’t even certain I would come back. In the years since that first stay I’ve skirted the city, but barely been here, though I’ve really barely been anywhere.

Now, here I am. Home.

But the road, my other home — so often my home — still lingers. It’s not just the car packed to the gills. It’s the sensation that I’m still observing my surroundings. I’m still taking them in. I’m still thinking of how different I feel since I started my trip, how much slower my breathing is, how little I care about where I need to be when and how I’ll get there.

Later, when I leave the pub and pull into a rainy streetscape, the colors of an intersection’s traffic lights splash across my windshield. My radio is tuned to some random station I’d settled on as I drove to the pub earlier in the evening. A pop song about another city scatters through the night and into the corners of my car.

These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you.”

As irritating as the repetition of Gotham’s sense of its own centrality may be, I detach myself from the geographical reference and think about how the song itself has bookended my trip. I first heard it in the staticy haze of a distant radio station, the sort of station you only listen to on the road, the kind so lost in static that, no matter what it plays, you strain to hear it struggle through the static, hope for even the most vapid pop to overcome the static and arrive intelligibly into the car, perhaps only because it’s seemingly unattainable.

That first time I heard it, on a dry straightaway stretch of Highway 33 in the Cuyama Valley, at the remotest of corners of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, I heard the song at the first moment of radio alienation. It’s a term I used for that moment I realized I was finally escaping Southern California’s gravitational pull (though not before I’d also hear, for the first mind-baffling time, the utter jaw dropper that is Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex”). I passed a shack referring to itself simply as “The Place” and advertising homemade pies and other homemade food and knew I was far from big lights and any streets but the one I sped across, though I was already starting to feel brand new.

Hello/Goodbye

When I made it to Portland I felt like I was stumbling into town. I knew the journey was over. I rushed around Mt. Hood, unfazed by the snowbanks after days in the Sierras on far smaller, far more remote roads. By then I was exhausted and didn’t really know how I’d enjoy it by myself for half an afternoon, and figured I’d be back soon enough to enjoy the mountain fully. I made one last meandering stop at Smith Rock, but I could see Mt. Hood and knew Portland and the rest of my life was on the other side. For the first time, I felt a bit frazzled, though there had been few calamities during the trip. I never locked myself out. I didn’t get pulled over. I had felt safe and unhurried throughout the trip.

That morning, though, I woke up in Bend at McMennamin’s Old St. Francis School with a strong sense the trip was over, even though I only arrived in Oregon the day before. It didn’t help that I’d lost my wallet (Though a housekeeper found it in my room, despite my numerous searches and additional help from an attentive front desk clerk). Though a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme, it felt so clearly like an indicator of the journey coming to a halt. Feeling a bit strung out from the road, I didn’t very much want to deal with the variety of hassles involved in replacing my wallet’s contents when my home address and other details were as up in the air as I was.

Really though, it was just time to get to Portland even after I had more and more slowly made my way out of California.

Where I set out thinking this trip would allow me to discover the remote parts of a state that I would soon be calling home, I arrived in Portland realizing that the drive was not my discovery of an Oregon new to me. It was a sendoff to California, even if that sendoff included discovering parts of the state that hadn’t been part of my life until this journey. As the world comes back into focus, I realize I have much more time to discover the rest of Oregon. This was my chance to say goodbye to California.

Out of service,” the driver tells me as I step on the #4 in Downtown Los Angeles.

It is nearly 3 a.m. and Broadway‘s indoor swap meets, electronic stores and jewelry shops sit darkened behind me. Shadowed by the marquee of an ancient movie house my face betrays concern, perhaps even desperation. I’ve waited to catch a bus for nearly an hour alongside the vacant thoroughfare after staying out with a friend and missing the night’s last Red Line subway. It’s cold. The bus already carries about a dozen riders, so I don’t understand why the driver seems to be telling me I can’t board. Not wanting to linger on the street much longer, I pause on the bus’s steps.

“Out of service,” the driver repeats. I step back down to the sidewalk. She laughs, smiles, and rolls her eyes.

“I didn’t say you can’t get on,” she teases, as if she’s going to finish the sentence with “rookie.”

It’s the farebox that’s “Out of Service.” I jump back onto the bus and find a seat along the center of the bus, where its two sections connect like an accordion. None of the other riders pay me any heed. Each haggard face exudes fatigue. Two women, both dressed in identical white pants and white sweatshirts, sleep leaning against one another. Perhaps a mother and daughter, perhaps middle-aged sisters, one rests her shoulder on the other, who is slumped against a rattling window. Their long brown hair tangles together.

It’s becoming clear that the age of the automobile is coming to an end, or, at the very least, changing. Los Angeles, like other cities, loses billions of dollars each year just because of people stuck on the region’s tangled roadways. Scholars, politicians, activists and numerous overlapping government agencies each offer often-competing solutions for how to get the region moving. All the while, the solution might begin not with expensive upheavals and construction of vast new transit networks, but instead with better cooperation, education and mobilization of the surprisingly robust transit network that already exists in the metropolis.

What’s certain: voters in Los Angeles County are fed up with traffic. Confounding expectations, they accomplished an extraordinary feat in November, 2008 and gambled that an investment in the region’s transportation network would pay lasting dividends. Despite an economic downturn, more than two-thirds of them chose to tax themselves to pay for Measure R, a $40 billion expansion of the region's transit system. Since July 1, the county has collected a half-cent sales tax to pay for new rail lines, expanded bus routes, and improvements to existing infrastructure. But a debilitating state budget battle earlier this year put transit in a precarious position across California, including Los Angeles, whose position among the world’s great cities could be at risk.

“We’re going to fight tooth and nail for every penny from the state,” Richard Katz said in January. Katz sits on the governing board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Metro, by far the largest transit agency in the region. A former state assemblyman, Katz was appointed to the board by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and was a key architect of Measure R. “I think we make a mistake if we don’t recognize that the voters made a clear choice in November. They said transportation is the number one issue in the county. We’re going to give you the resources to fix it and we expect you to fix it. They don’t expect us to be whining about losing $200 million a year.”

As the #4 bus carries me past Union Station it turns westward on Cesar Chavez Avenue. I notice how the prerecorded voice announcing each stop perfectly pronounces the deceased farm labor organizer’s name. A few blocks away, after Cesar Chavez Avenue becomes Sunset Boulevard, the recording stumbles over a cross-street’s name, uttering Micheltorena like a Gringo. The sleeping sisters are oblivious to their surroundings, until a few blocks later, when the bus stops at Sunset and Alvarado. Two middle-aged men drunkenly babble to one another as they board. They stumble in search of a seat, startling the women.

The bus turns down Santa Monica Boulevard. I disembark at Vermont Avenue, where I can connect with the #204, a North-South line with a stop a block from my apartment. A light drizzle falls as I wait in the dark along Vermont. A dozen or so men line the curb, peering north up the street. A few step into the road. If only they could spy the bus, it seems, they could will it to carry us out of this uneasy wait sooner. It’s about 3:30 a.m. The only passing cars are taxis hoping to pick up a few desperate fares. The drunks who earlier boarded the #4 stand next to me, talking about the relative morality of stealing bicycles versus cars and beds. They reminisce on times they’ve had to pull guns, what it felt like with the finger on the trigger and the experience of staring down the barrel of a friend’s firearm. Illustrating one such experience one of the men mimes a pistol with his fingers outstretched.

“Those days are gone,” he says.

Profit and loss

Three months earlier the stock market was crumbling. News of layoffs increased in frequency. Home foreclosures ticked up. A historic election took place. But it wasn’t Barack Obama who delivered a nail-biter in Los Angeles County. It was Measure R.

It took a month for elections officials to certify the close vote. The requirements were stricter than ballot measures that only need a simple majority to pass, because state law requires new taxes to pass by two-thirds majorities. Measure R barely cleared that higher bar, winning just a bit more than 67 percent of the electorate.

Most of the $40 billion the measure is expected to generate over the next 30 years will go to Metro, which operates about 200 bus routes in the county, the Red/Purple line subway, the Orange Line rapid busway, and three light rail lines (See Transportation Terminology). Each of L.A. County’s 88 embedded municipalities will also get a share for transportation projects. Metro officials are currently hammering out exactly how their share will be spent and when, but it’s expected to pay for new light rail lines, a long-anticipated Subway to the Sea under Wilshire Boulevard, and other projects.

Preliminary estimates from the Federal Transportation Administration suggest the massive economic stimulus package passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in February could pay for about $190 million of transit improvements throughout Los Angeles County.

Yet gains from the stimulus and Measure R may be thwarted by news at the state level. Only days after the stimulus package passed, lawmakers in California ended long-stalled budget negotiations in the state. As many transportation advocates and agency officials feared, in the weeks and months leading up to the deal, millions of dollars in assistance to transit agencies throughout the state were slashed from the final budget.

For hundreds of thousands who rely on the region’s buses (about 75 percent of Metro’s bus riders make $12,000 or less annually), any cuts sting.

“They’re the reason the agency exists,” says Katz. He says government should focus more on transit, especially in a city as sprawling as Los Angeles. “We have people in L.A. who, were it not for our system, could not get to work, could not get to school, could not pick up their kids, could not get to health care. Public transit is an integral part of the fabric of this city.”

Los Angeles’ love affair with the automobile is a myth. It’s not the nation’s most car dependent city, nor does it have the worst transit network in the U.S. (See “Does L.A. Really Love its Cars?”). But while it might be a myth that Los Angeles residents own more cars than inhabitants of other cities, or that the city has no public transit, the metropolis faces harsh realities. Angelenos may not love cars, but they’re stuck in them. Many studies show the metropolis’ traffic is the worst in the country, a situation explored by an Oct. 2008 RAND Corp. study called Moving Los Angeles: Short-Term Policy Options for Improving Transportation. Traffic costs Los Angeles dearly. Each year, the area’s economy loses more than $9 billion simply due to the 490 million hours drivers collectively spend sitting still in their cars. To put it another way, each driver in the region spends three days stuck in traffic annually. During those three days, individual drivers burn 57 gallons of gasoline without going anywhere.

“Reducing congestion should help to improve quality of life, enhance economic competitiveness, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, improve air quality, and improve mobility for drivers and transit patrons alike,” the report read.

So why can’t Angelenos get anywhere if they don’t own many cars and there’s such an incentive to cut down on traffic? The answer can be found by dispelling one more myth, that L.A. is a mecca of urban sprawl.

R WE THERE YET? continues on page 2

Click on the thumbnails for a peek at what I saw.

After an evening in Pasadena I board the Gold line at Fillmore Station. I complete a phone call as the train heads southwest, away from the San Gabriel Valley toward Downtown Los Angeles.

As we stop at the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park station I see the lights of thousands of East L.A. homes twinkling out the window beside me, as if Christmas had lingered a little into the New Year. A green half moon hangs heavily in the sky above the 10, so close to the ground it seems one could reach it by car. A minute or two later I look out the opposite window of the narrow train to see the blue and red neon outline of pagodas marking the next neighborhood I will travel through.

“Approaching Chinatown Station,” a man’s recorded voice announces, the volume on the car’s speakers too loud for the last train of a midweek evening. Riders hold their ears and momentarily interrupt phone calls. In one corner, a woman, who for the past three stops bobbed between slumber and what seems a trance-like state jolts awake, her hands grasping the white, curved handlebars of the bike she has propped in front of her.

In the same moment a wave of familiarity washes over me here alongside the L.A. River. As the street lamps and billboards and taillights fade into the darkness I slip away from the Los Angeles I know, jostled into a new awareness by the thought of the path I am threading through the urban fabric.

I find myself all over the world. Now I am headed toward downtown Portland, Maine aboard the #6 bus, gazing at the B&M Baked Beans factory standing starkly against the gray skies and grayer waters of the Casco Bay. A moment later I find myself on Portland Oregon’s MAX, where I see a net of concrete and steel and iron bridges crossing the same Willamette River I ride above. Then my thoughts shift and I cross the Rhine, I cross borders and history on thebus from France’s Strasbourg to Germany’s Kehl to buy Turkish Doner Kebab and American peanut butter. I find myself back in Strasbourg, listening to Tunisians and Moroccans joking in the center of Le Tram, the wide steel tube they ride day and night from the banlieues of Meinau and Neudorf and Elsau toward the broad Place Kleber at Strasbourg’s heart.

Familiar memories vector across my neural network, stitched together to form my life, as has begun to happen here, where I left my car at home, here, in L.A., the supposed Eden of automobiles.

I reach my destination, spill out of the train and linger in Union Station as I finish my phone call. This night the station is falling asleep, like the quarter-dozen overladen travelers waiting for the late night bus to Bakersfield. Janitors mop the day away between the old tan leather and wood chairs, the solid, welcoming remnants of a grand past.

Just yesterday I lingered on one of these chairs watching dust dance through streams of sunlight. I gnoshed on a messy bagel sandwich as I processed a Metro committee meeting I had just visited.

There, Metro board members brimmed with impatience and frustration, frustration that grand plans to clear the stifled circulatory system of this creature sprawled across hills and valleys and long forgotten scrubland. As I watched the workday wander by, the wide-eyed midwestern families, the men in suits, the women in silk blouses and heels, the tired college students, even the silent, red-faced man who furiously stuck a flier about aliens in my face or the young Asian-American movie star surreptitiously posing for a magazine photo shoot I thought I felt a pulse. A light shudder here, a straining beat there as I watched the station catch its rhythm.

“I’m here,” I tell the woman I’m speaking to on the phone. I grope for change in my pockets and descend beneath a sign reading “Metro Red Line.”

“I have to get on the train now.”

How do you answer that question? Unlike perhaps any city in the United States, Los Angeles is definitionless. Some might even apply Gertrude Stein’s famous statement about Oakland, that “there is no there, there,” to Los Angeles.

What I find so interesting though, is that there are, in fact, so, so many here’s, here. My question for readers: How do you share these here’s with others? How do you define Los Angeles for visitors, for out of town family, for distant friends?

I’ve been wondering this for months. If a friend were to visit from out of town, what kind of tour would I give her or him, especially if we only had a short time to explore?

Northwestern Inspiration

Please excuse a touch of digressive background before my call for L.A. tour ideas (but click here if you’re impatient). Though I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time,  a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest finally inspired its composition. Though astute readers of Lascher at Large know my feelings about Portland — feelings only reinforced this last visit — they might not know this was my first trip to Seattle. As a vacation it was wonderful. My traveling companion and I rode the train to the Emerald City and explored with little rhyme or reason and scant attention paid to time’s constraints.

Instead, we experienced the city on our own terms, at our own pace. We had a late breakfast in Queen Anne. We lingered in the splendid Olympic Sculpture Park and loved it so much we happily returned the next day at the end of a stroll through the pouring rain. We sampled salted caramels beloved by Barack Obama and eschewed overpriced omelettes in favor of straightforward but unbelievable fish and chips and chowder from Jack’s during our breakfast visit to the Pike’s Place Public Market. Some friends scooped us up and enlisted us in a trivia challenge over beer in Wedgwood (We can proudly boast we helped our friends to victory and a free pitcher for their next visit). We strolled down Pike Street From Capitol Hill to Downtown, dodging gamers attending Pax as we chowed on streetside crepes (food played a major role in this vacation, as it should in any) before stopping for fantastic martinis at an eclectic Downtown bar and grill.

My point here, though, isn’t to recount every minute of our weekend. Instead, it’s to note how subconsciously we took Seattle in. Though we know we didn’t see nearly the entire place, I think we can both agree the sheer bliss of wandering semi-aimlessly delivered a sense of the town’s rhythm.

Could a visitor have a similar experience in Los Angeles? Certainly, its sheer size might inhibit a weekend visitor from ever knowing this place. Then again, what if a visitor to Los Angeles accepted that they weren’t going to see it all, that they never could, that even those of us who live here will never fully understand this place? What if they just let go and enjoyed seeing what they could see?

Your L.A. Tour

I’ve been wondering this for months, as I’ve also been wondering what it would be like to share this place with friends and loved ones from out of town. How would I do it? What would I show them? In what order would I show it to them? How could I even begin, knowing what I must be leaving out?

How would you give a tour of Los Angeles with only a short time to do so? What would you show? Why? What do you think is quintessential L.A.? What can be ignored? Do you have a universal trip you’d share with every visitor or are there certain ones you’d reserve for certain people? Would there be a specific flow to your tour?

Would you use the strict geographical boundaries of the city, or would yours be more a tour of Southern California with Los Angeles as its center of gravity? If you’ve had visitors, tell some stories of the tours you’ve taken them on. List a few places that have to be visited. Give a sense of the route you’d take, of how one might move between landmarks and why you’d go that direction, why you’d take that path.

If you’re not from Los Angeles, what would you want to see here if you only had a few days to do so? What is this place to you? Why would you want to visit? What type of tour would you want?

Spread the word about this post. I’m not just looking to crib some ideas for when visitors come to town, but I think the discussion that could occur here would offer a look into the myriad images society has of LA. Please share this post with your friends and get them involved. I imagine the conversation that might ensue will be indicative of the variety of neighborhoods and populations and landscapes and experiences that only can be had here.

Why I care

I represent the fifth generation of my family to live in this city, though, unlike previous generations, I wasn’t raised here, but 60 miles and a world away in Ventura County. Though I’m not yet convinced it’s my permanent home, I’m a great defender of this city. I react strongly when those who haven’t been here rail against its supposed faults, or when those who have extrapolate one negative aspect to explain the entire town.

Where New York City is often depicted as the center of the world, L.A., even with the California Dreaming, even with the starlets hoping to make it big, seems consistently portrayed as a broken soulless, placeless place. Yet, beneath its surface millions of places coalesce to become Los Angeles, millions of paths lead through the city, layering one on top of another. Though it can exhaust even the most focused mind to make sense of the knotted, scattered landscape, the patient will uncover gems both buried in the most distant corners of Los Angeles and shimmering in the bright glare of starlight.

Such facts might be true of any city — really, of any human experience — but at this moment I’m asking you to dissect L.A. and offer up your discoveries. Doing so is not a new endeavor. Nevertheless, how would you share Los Angeles?

Some of my own ideas

To get things started, here are a few ideas of the Los Angeles I might share, though these are some of the more obvious suggestions and there are so many gems I know I’m leaving out (specifically in the Valley, South L.A., the South Bay, and East L.A. — so give me your ideas from these neighborhoods):

• A Los Angeles Conservancy walking tour of Downtown architecture followed by lunch at Grand Central Market
• A bike ride from Santa Monica to Venice Beach
• An afternoon lazily strolling around Vermont and Hillhurst Avenues before catching the sunset, and maybe a planetarium show at the Griffith Observatory
• A ride on the Gold Line to Pasadena (and to East L.A., whenever the extension opens)
• Watching the city transition along its spine on the Wilshire Rapid 720 Bus
• Stopping over at the LA River Visitor’s Center
• Biking to Heliotrope and Melrose for dinner at the Pure Luck Restaurant followed by ice cream at Scoops
• A walk around the Silverlake Reservoir before a meal on Hyperion, Silver Lake Blvd. or Rowena and a show at Spaceland
• Riding the Red Line to Hollywood on a Sunday for the Farmer’s Market and some touristy wandering
• Oaxacan lunch — including fried crickets and a michelada — at La Guelaguetza
• A lazy Saturday afternoon on Larchmont
• Catching a film revival at the New Beverly Cinema before a late night nosh (especially dessert!) at Canter’s
• $2 PBR at the Shortstop before a Dodgers game (p.s. I’m no hipster — despite the PBR and Echo Park, Silverlake and Los Feliz references)
• Bar-hopping Downtown at the Edison, the Must, Cole’s, the Hotel Figueroa and the Library bar, to name but a few stops
• Wandering through LACMA before a dinner in Little Ethiopia

Those are but a few of my ideas. What are yours?

P.S., who wants to buy me tickets to this?

I have to admit Streetsblog beat me to posting a picture depicting this sign (others may have as well), although I took this picture May 29.

Back when I was editor of the Ventura County Reporter and still penning (or is it “keying”) the Fir & Main blog, I wrote enthusiastically about the possibility of mass transit options linking to Dodger Stadium. As the Dodgers fans and Angelenos reading this site know, later in the 2008 season the City of Los Angeles paid for a free shuttle service linking Dodger Stadium to Union Station. This allowed riders of multiple transit services — particularly Metro’s Red and Purple Line subways — to easily make it to Chavez Ravine without a car to watch the boys in blue. Sadly, as these same observers also understand, the Dodgers refused to help pay for the service for the 2009 season. Now, the best way to get to Dodger Stadium by public transit remains taking the #2 or #4 bus along Sunset and hike up Elysian Park Ave.

This week, a number of local media outlets have noted that the Dodgers are allowing visitors to park for free at the stadium from June 16-18 while Joe Torre’s squad faces off against the Oakland Athletics.

Meanwhile, some of those who do choose to drive to Dodger stadium have made a habit of avoiding parking there, both to avoid the $15 parking fee and the headaches of trying to get in and out of the stadium on game days. Some lucky souls park right on Sunset while spaces are still available. Others park along nearby Lilac Terrace, Douglas St. or Sutherland St., or even put their faith in their parking brakes as they find a spot along the ridiculously steep Quintero St. (being that this is the direction from which I approach the stadium even if I take the bus — now that there’s no trolley from Union Station — I don’t know the situation in Chinatown or other neighborhoods east of the stadium).

In recent weeks, though, most of these options haven’t been available to most Dodgers fans. Signs reading “local access only” have popped up at the entrance to every street on the north side of Sunset between Lilac and Portia Street. Responding to inquiries I made June 9, Julie Wong, L.A. City Councilmember Eric Garcetti‘s communications director, and Monica Valencia, councilmember Ed Reyes‘ Press Deputy told me that the signs were a result of “concerns we heard from the Elysian Park Task Force and meetings with local residents who asked for assistance with alleviating activity such as speeding, drunk and disorderly conduct by people leaving Dodger Stadium, and tailgate parties on the street in front of residences — complete with blaring speakers and beer kegs.” Garcetti’s 13th district includes Douglas, Quintero and Sutherland streets. Lilac Terrace is within Reyes’ District 1.

The Dodgers paid for the signs and their installation on the three streets within Garcetti’s district. Councilmember Reyes’ provided the sign on Lilac. The city is not incurring any additional parking enforcement costs on gamedays, Wong and Valencia’s said in their email.

Not counting paying up and parking in the ravine, this leaves four options for Dodgers fans: access the stadium from a different entrance (thus promoting extra fuel burning and increased congestion), park further away from the stadium and walk further (thus moving the problems residents complain of to other neighborhoods), take the aforementioned buses and walk or bike to the gate (thus further underscoring the need for a trolley to shift demands on already pack Metro buses), or bike the entire way to the stadium (which isn’t the easiest task — and not because of pedaling up so many hills).

While I didn’t inquire as to the cost of the no-parking signs, I imagine they cost less than the few hundred thousand dollars the Dodgers Trolley was expected to cost before this season began, let alone how much it would cost to pay for an abbreviated schedule. Still, with the Dodgers saving a significant chunk of change after Manny Ramirez’s 50-game suspension — albeit money that probably cannot easily be transferred from payroll to other needs — it’s inexplicable that the Dodgers resist supporting access to Los Angeles’ baseball team. Of course, I can only imagine that the team was all too happy to oblige the city in restricting access for drivers to streets surrounding Dodger Stadium. Sadly, as long as transit options to the stadium remain so limited most of these drivers are likely to pay the $15 (or just stay home, turn on the TV and listen to Mr. L.A., Vin Scully, wishing he would call the entire game on the radio too).

I love the Dodgers. I have since as long as I can remember. When I was in 3rd grade I even dressed up as Orel Hershiser for Halloween right after the 1988 World Series. But that doesn’t excuse the Dodgers for not taking sincere efforts to make the Dodger Stadium experience a more inclusive, accessible one. Such an action would be a far more effective, neighborly and community-minded (not to mention green) action than renaming the neighborhood Dodgertown and giving it its own zip-code. More importantly, perhaps, at least from the Dodgers’ point of view, it would pay off with committed fans ready to spend more on tickets and food and drinks at the stadium.

– Posts on production and consumption versus conservation;
– Environmental critiques of train travel;
– The ultimate (if not particularly green) multi-modal vacation;
– Dodger Stadium gets even less accessible;
– Privacy, chatting and (in)visibility.

To keep you sated, I’ve been meaning to post some of my photographs from my time handing out beer with the Los Angeles County Hash House Harriers (A decent description of the hash is available on Wikipedia. A more complex, compelling history is available here.) at the 21st mile of this year’s Los Angeles Marathon.  Click here or on the photo to the left for a gallery. It was my first time ever seeing the marathon in person and it really is an inspiring sight. More than anything, as the hours passed it struck me just how many kinds of people of seemingly wide-ranging fitness levels (all far more impressive than my own) ran the marathon. Knowing a few people who have run this or other marathons I know how much training and preparation goes into the endeavor, and the payoff was evident on every runner, walker and wheel-chair operator (I can’t think of an adequate term to describe the efforts of the wheelchair racers) even as some struggled to make that last 5.2 miles. Some smiled, some grimaced, but all carried on.

Anyhow, this description from Yirko at LA Blogitudes, who ran the race himself, is far more moving than anything I could ever write, so pay it a visit.