The Continent's Edge

Two young friends of mine are on the last third of a see-the-USA auto tour. They left the West Coast behind around Halloween and are leisurely making their way back East. They should be back in NJ in a couple weeks. This is a rewarding trip to make if you have the time, money, and opportunity to do it. I made the circuit shortly after college (as long ago as 1975), heading out to CA in a meandering fashion by the southern route and then returning by the northern – a journey of a few months. (I wrote about one small incident of the trip at my short story site: The Roxy Caution.) That is the right time of life to do it: you’re youthful, adult, and (usually) not yet bogged down by responsibilities. The demands of jobs and family make such an extended trip more difficult later. We are lucky to manage an occasional week or two foray to some single destination. Even for those who are single, self-employed, healthy, and unattached, long absences from home become harder for income/expense reasons and because leaving a residence (rented or owned) behind unattended raises legitimate concerns. We grow less mobile. We dig in.
 
In my case, the trip itself rather than a place was the destination, but of course there were cities and sites I wanted to see that served as benchmarks. In particular I remember rolling into Los Angeles because… well… it meant I had run out of continent. After skirting the coastline northward, I’d be headed back. My sister Sharon (d. 1995) lived in Hollywood at the time, having moved there from San Francisco where I had visited her a year earlier – a trip made by air, not road – so we were able to visit. She liked LA. “It’s not an attractive city,” she said. (It wasn’t and it’s not.) “But everything is here. It is much more livable in every way than SF.” So it was. LA is always a contradictory hodgepodge and is always in transition, of course, but in the 70s the mix was particularly strange: the city/region was tawdry and decaying yet somehow still glitzy and full of opportunity – and socially far more free-spirited than today in ways that are hard to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. (The detective dramedy movie The Nice Guys, whatever its other qualities or lack thereof, did a pretty good job at catching the flavor.) Today LA has troubles (blame whom you will) beyond what existed four or five decades ago – affordability alone being a big one – yet the promise of possibilities has not entirely faded. I’m too dug in (and frankly too old) to consider answering the call of that promise by relocating, but many younger and more adventurous souls are still drawn to it. For them, I’ll give Sharon the last word:
 
 
Hollywood, Hollywood,
I could live here forever in a tiny white house
And watch the stormy winter sunsets
Spread pink rays over the palm trees.
 
I could be a movie star chick
In a white fast Mercedes tooling down Sunset Strip.
 
I could be a biker’s lady
And I’d live on the beach in Venice
Collecting shells and driftwood for my windowsill
While jogging in the evenings.
 
I could be a Laurel Canyon hippie
And live on a hilltop among the pine trees
And make silver jewelry.
 
I could marry a mechanic from the Hollywood flats
And cook a lot of pie and grow fat
And stroll with my babies down the Boulevard on Sundays.
 
In Hollywood there are a hundred lives for me to see.
A hundred different bodies I could be.
The California sunshine is my stagelight
And the Walt Disney blue sky my might.
                                                Sharon Bellush (1975)

Sharon

 

Arlo Guthrie – Coming into Los Angeles