There are moments in a young driver's life that are truly monumental. The ability to navigate a tricky lane change, bumper to bumper, at the speed limit. The shift in one's sense of time where you can accurately judge distances to destinations in minutes, not miles, rush hour or the middle of the night. The way the chest swells in triumph when crossing the invisible border of having driven farther in any direction than ones parents, as if recognizing for the first time: Yes, it is possible to escape!
But the personal memories while driving, those moments in a car that define a certain time or place, those aren't so universal. They are quicksilver and unimaginable until they happen, and when they do it's as if the world had been created for that moment, for you and no one else.
For me, it is the I-10 to I-405 southbound interchange, which I prefer to think of as the Santa Monica to San Diego ramp.
It is a marvel of concrete and engineering; a quarter mile strip of elevated road pitched at 40 degrees to the 405 freeway dozens of feet below. Taken at too slow a speed and the driver feels their left shoulder bracing against the window. Taken too fast and it feels as if centrifugal force will propel driver and vehicle into the Pacific several miles away. And while it's possible to look out the side window while taking the curve it's not advised. Not because of the danger of taking ones eyes off the road but because no one should turn their head to the left while driving and see the wall of cars below as if they were defying gravity and climbing up and down the walls. The image is too disorienting.
The ramp alone is not enough, not to seal itself within my memory jar. It takes a confluence of sky and the magical synchronicity of radio to make the ramp a seminal LA driving experience. It can be any song that strikes a particular chord with any driven, but it has to evoke that sense of hope and freedom that is ridiculously more meaningful that it's supposed to be in the teenage mind. And it can be any type of evocative meteorological phenomena that does for the eye what the music does for the ear. Combined, the physical sensation of the vehicle tugging and hurling its way through physics, while the eye and ear are occupied by their own singularly pleasing elements, becomes that moment that becomes nothing short of quintessential.
And for me, it's the guitar solo from Gerry Rafferty's “Baker Street” mixed with a late August sunset colored amber-orange by smog. On the I-10 to I-405 southbound interchange. With the window down. And me singing along with the guitar at the top of my lungs.
The thing about this is that it feels like some scene concocted for a movie. Better, because I actually lived it. And all these years later I can recognize how lame the moment really is, how void of depth the song is of from any real meaning in my life, how the smog colored sky should be something that horrifies more than golden glow of nostalgia it creates, and how insane it is to love a section of freeway.
But then how can we explain away the things we love, and remember as loving? And why should we? The places they are, and the places within us that they occupy, they are sacred for having given us something more than the sum of their parts. In a city like Los Angeles, where the old is torn down, paved over, and quickly forgotten, the true history of Los Angeles rests in museums of memories of its inhabitants. The cliché that Los Angeles isn't a place, it's a state of mind doesn't quite catch the truth. It is a fluctuating landscape occupied by the builders and repositories of its history, a collective of ephemeral moments, a hive mind of experience. Los Angeles is a theatrical performance where audience and cast are one in the same, where the architecture of the theatre is also the setting, in an open-ended run that invites criticism but defies any one description.
Los Angeles is a gut feeling.
-- David Elzey
Funny you mention the Drivers Licence element. I had been blogging for another site and very recently wrote this:
ReplyDelete"As any Angeleno knows, L.A. sprawls.
But it's sprawl with ellipses: Long stretches of concrete pause before the sentence of the city starts up again. That's why the rite of passage of drivers' license and then -- if you're lucky -- the first car, makes the city not just navagatable, but knowable.
My license came much later than most of my friend's little slip of freedom. So, I hitched rides -- first to movies, to book stores, to record shops, to tiny cafes. Later -- to the beach at night, to basement clubs -- wherever. At the end of the trip there would be the promise of a simple meal. That's where the story begins..."
and on a personal note re: the CDL, i failed my driver test the first time. i pulled a very pissed-off DMV employee at the end of the day who deliberately had me make an impossible three-lane change into left turn in less than a block's length at rush hour. i also had the three optionals and blew the three-point turn.
ReplyDeletebut when i tell people about my driver training they're stunned to hear that an angeleno, a teen, did all his hands-on in the rain. that vacation week in december of 1977 it rained he entire time, and i learned all of my defensive driving on the oil-soaked streets of a city surrounded by drivers who rarely dealt with the rain. LA gave me an extra gift in that light. i not only learned how to navigate the highways but how to drive in adverse weather. i've since driven in hailstorms in the dakotas that buried motorcyclists and too paint off winshields, driven through new england blizards with zero viability, driven through torrential rain in oklahoma that ripped the wiper blades off the windshield...
and i always have LA to thank for preparing me for whatever the road dishes out.