Well, I thought, here I am. Might as well see what the fuss is all about. I was in Los Angeles. “City of Angels” is what they say, right?
I’d just come from Yosemite: Land of Hippies—furry girls, guys who wear flannel. It’s a good scene but it’s different. Whenever I told the hippies I wanted to go to L.A. I always got the same reaction: “Really? Have fun.” As if I’d just said I wanted to go to a concentration camp reenactment. Whatever, I thought. I intended to have fun.
Los Angeles beckoned to me, and I would heed its call. I didn’t know why I wanted to go. I didn’t know anything about the place. L.A. was just an idea, vague and ill-defined in my mind. I wanted to flesh it out, find out what those words—Los Angeles—really stood for. And now here I was.
Actually, I wasn’t quite there. I’d overshot the mark and ended up in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles County. I’d gotten a ride with a co-worker from the park and wound up at her parent’s place in Huntington Beach.
Not one to be easily daunted, I determined the best way to get my sightseeing in would be to buy a bike and ride the L.A. coast. Google Maps told me to expect 60-80 miles depending on my route, and with some digressions I planned to take, I was expecting about 100 miles of travel on a fixed gear bicycle, all told.
I set out early in the morning and began to wind my way toward the coast. I expected smells of salty air to waft for miles, heralding my impending arrival at the sea’s edge. That was just a quaint, Ohio-boy notion, I discovered. I knew I’d hit the coast when I saw the beach, and the sky expanding away from me. Somewhere far away it met an invisible horizon, and came shooting back to me on the waves of the Pacific Ocean. What a vast space, I thought. It was empty in the way a big box is empty, or a large canvass blank. The emptiness suggested possibility to me. Possibility—potential—always on my left side, I began riding north into the fabled city, a sea of a different kind of potential.
I didn’t know what roads to take, or where my route would lead me. I knew I wanted to end up at the top of L.A. I was on the bottom. The biking was kind of boring, as biking is wont to be. Just pedaling, pedaling… all day. The scenery was good, the air was polluted and so were the views. But this was the experience.
The first day was uneventful. A stop at a taco truck, a walk down one of the city’s many fishing piers. I even went and watched a movie, just to have a comfortable chair and some cool air to breathe for a while.
That night, I bedded down beside a cemetery. I spent a lot of time in cemeteries as a part of a military funeral team in the Army. I feel pretty comfortable, pretty familiar, in a place like that. I wish I could say I was just another sleeping soul, lying with the others for a night. The truth is: I was restless, wary of being discovered, and uncomfortable. I kept thinking: they’re going to find me, though I didn’t know who “they” were.
I had only the clothes on my back; long pants, t-shirt, long sleeve thermal shirt. This wasn’t an oversight—I’d intended to travel light. I brought only a backpack and the barest of necessities. I was riding a bike, and a large pack would have marred that experience; impeded me. Avoidance of impediment. It’s a persistent thread that runs through the fiber of my being. It’s why I don’t wear underwear and the reason I prefer to boulder or free-solo instead of roped climbing.
Huddling on my side to conserve my warmth, lying on the bare ground now, the dead stalks of grass poked my back and I would startle awake to the slightest sound.
Around 2:30 in the morning I awoke because I felt a presence near me. I looked around frantically. With an admixture of relief and apprehension, I saw a raccoon not two arm’s lengths away. At least it’s not a person, I told myself. On the other hand, my time in Yosemite taught me that raccoons aren’t your friend. I tried to scare him. I hissed and pantomimed throwing something at him. He stared at me, unfazed, daring me to do something more. I was lying next to a tree—the better to hide my lumpy silhouette. With insolence the raccoon circled to the other side to try to get to the backpack I was using for a pillow. He moved in that middle-of-the-night way. I hissed and growled at him, and to my relief he relented. I got the sense that it wasn’t because I had scared him, but because he wasn’t willing to put up with my childish antics. He didn’t come back that night, but he was successful in making sure I slept even less soundly until the pre-dawn hour I had determined I would rise (O’dark-thirty, they called it in the Army).
That next day, I took a couple of good pictures of a city steeped in industry and overcrowded with buildings. Beautiful in its own way, I was quite enjoying the experience. I ate donuts for breakfast and biked as close to the coast as I could. Often there was sandy beach on my left, concrete landscape on my right.
I found Los Angeles to be everything the hippies loathed: crowded, bustling, polluted, rough. It was a new chaos to me that acted as counterpoint to Yosemite’s supreme sense of order and its undeniable correctness of being. Yosemite exists, and you say ‘of course’. Los Angeles exists, and you say—what? I still wasn’t sure, so I biked on.
I found an answer later that day. I’d ridden upon concrete and asphalt to the top of a magnificent testament of human endeavor. In the second to last stop I made I found Santa Monica Original Muscle Beach (OMB) and its attendant community. There I found the rings, which I’ve described a little elsewhere and will not now describe. In the people that peopled this place I finally met the face of the city, or at least, what I wanted to believe was the face of the city, Los Angeles.
Beach culture—the idea lightly rattled in my mind, but had no supporting connections to anchor it to any solid idea. Here “beach culture” wasn’t an idea, it was a reality of people. These people were like the climbing culture, but maybe a little more careful of their tan lines. Still, they were accepting, and interesting, and focused on their health. They were awake and alive, and so was I! I recognized this immediately, and decided I had to stay and explore this idea to make sure I had not misread it.
I spent the next two days there. I slept on concrete at night, behind a building under construction. I slept poorly and the nights were cold. I spent them by myself. During the day, I would soak up as much sun as my skin could hold. My nose burned and swelled and my whole body became pink. I reveled in the pain because of where it came from.
I spent all my daily allotment of sunlight at the beach, and it was a complete validation of my initial impression. I’d found my tribe, my people. Or, as close as I might find (I don’t think I really belong to any one people). I felt belonging, and I resolved I would come back and stay as long as I felt like I belonged there.
Los Angeles, I think, the people.
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