In and Around L.A.

8.31.2014

I grew up with a car, but not the same kind of driving that you have to do in Los Angeles. In my hometown in the woods in the middle of Connecticut, you also have to drive to get anywhere, yes, but it was mostly up and over winding hills, through dark neighborhoods without sidewalks, alone with the off-brand NPR radio station. In L.A., where I had to rent a car to undertake a reporting trip, something I am terrified of both because I’m not that good of a driver and because of the constant risk of fucking up an expensive machine that doesn’t belong to you, driving is fundamentally communal.

Highway space is shared between dozens of lanes that are constantly spiraling off and joining on to the thoroughfare like one of those swinging-ball office toys. The motion is ceaseless, except when it isn’t, and the traffic lights at on-ramps admit one car at a time. I had never before considered the length of time one car needed to get on a highway, but in this case I was forced to, over and over again. Yet the drivers in and around L.A. were improbably kinder than their east coast counterparts. I thought that they wouldn’t be given the stereotypical traffic, but instead as I coasted down long stretches of tarmac into the setting sun thinking only about how L.A.-as-fuck this experience was I felt a sense of mutual well-being with my fellow pilots, like how I imagine individual fish feel in a school as they traverse some ocean current, or maybe that’s just Nemo. And turtles. Cars sped up or slowed down to let me switch lanes with impunity, which I did because I had no idea where I was going.

In fact despite the confusion of unfamiliar highways, the best times I had in L.A. were on the road. For the story I was doing (TK next week), I had to drive north of the city into the scrubby desert hills and intermittent jagged piles of brown rock that make the landscape so different from New England. The road moves with the ground. Driving is less like mountain biking and more like slaloming down a ski slope. If urban L.A. has a mediocre density that feels uncomfortable given the welcoming, walkable crush of New York City and Brooklyn, its outskirts are immediately and impressively empty. The environs allow room for the cars; no forest need be cut down for roads. So we drivers are in our element.

The cover of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead has this terrifically cliche photo of a rear-view mirror, outside the windshield a blurred-out vista of trees and, presumably, road, soaked in the warm yellow light of sunset. It’s a great cover because it speaks to Sullivan’s intrepidity. The writer will go anywhere! Despite the symbolic heavy-handedness, you want to follow along on whatever Great American Roadtrip unfolds between the covers. Writing equates to travel equates to driving equates to cool, a formula heightened by the hand-scrawled lettering of the punky title. Yet this was how I felt driving in L.A., or how L.A. driving made me feel: a witness on the road, moving toward the light.