Photo Essay: Trail Use Not Recommended

I first spotted the Owl Trail in La Cañada Flintridge last year, before I moved to LA, when I hiked the nearby Descanso Trail that loops around Descanso Gardens. I made a mental note to go back.

It took me long enough, but I made it there last Saturday after my little house-hunting excursion in the foothills.

But when I got there, I was greeted with a warning: Trail Use Not Recommended.



I wondered how back it could be. Could it be worse than Runyon Canyon, whose severe erosion is a danger to man and beast alike?



After all, the beginning of the trail looks woodsy enough...



Innocuous, in fact...



Until you hit the last .02 mile of the hike, which trail guides warn are steeply graded.



Facing the equivalent of a gravelly luge run, and considering tackling its vertical course upstream, I wondered for a moment if I should turn back.

But it was only two tenths of a mile...Two tenths is nothing, it's like four minutes of a normal walk.

Besides, what was on the other side?? (Recalling my fishing trip when I was told to throw the red-winged sea robin back in, and I pleaded, "But what does it taste like??")



Perhaps unfortunately for me, not only did the Owl Trail deposit me back at the Cherry Canyon Motorway where I'd completed my Descanso Trail hike (and where I was conveniently parked this time around), but it revealed a whole network of other trails, fire roads and motorways to be explored.



Perhaps for the next trip...perhaps next year.

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Could I Be Loved?

I wasn't loved as a newborn. I was regretted. A surprise. A mistake.

I knew this from very early on in life.

I cried.

And I was rued.

As a child, I always thought I could be loved by my parents if I

behaved
obeyed
succeeded
surpassed
and won

But I was not.

As an adult, I always thought I could be loved by lovers if I

cared
nutured
submitted
pleased
and pleasured

But I was not.

And now I wonder,

Could I be loved?

At all?

By anyone?

I've worked hard to love myself, to be happy with who I am, and to assert that confidently.

I am open
and willing
and ready
for love
but love does not come.

Do I choose the wrong people to love?

Do I reject the wrong people who might love me?

During my last conversation with my mother, four or five years ago, she said to me, "I know I'm unloveable." And silently, I agreed with her, though horrified at the thought.

In the years that have passed since, I have suspected, out of all of the horrible things I have inherited from my mother, that is the worst.

Related reading:
The One Who Loves Alone
The 35-Year-Old Spinster
The Other Side of the Bed

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Photo Essay: A Real Fixer-Upper

At under $600,000, the cost to buy a midcentury single family home, designed by a renowed architect, in the canyon foothills of the Angeles National Forest is less than that of a typical, modest Manhattan studio apartment a fraction of its size.

When I saw that there was an open house for The Scott House designed by Pierre Koenig this past weekend, I had to go. I'm not in the market to buy a place (and I'm not up for forking over a downpayment without robbing my 401K and pushing the debt envelope too far), but it sounded like a dream house, and surprisingly affordable (by New York standards anyway).

Upon arrival, I realized that this was not my dream.



I suppose some people dream of moving into a historic property (or at least an early-career example of architectural innovation) and fixing it up, but I need off-the-rack clothing that's ready to wear, and I need a place that's ready to move in. It's sad when you see a place that hasn't been taken care of just enough so that it's not a ruin, but with missing floorboards and burned-out fireplaces, it's not exactly liveable either.





The Scott House is billed as being "virtually unaltered," a euphemism for nothing having been fixed, or cleaned much.

Yet its steel and glass structure is still a thing of beauty...



...though it doesn't make much use of outdoor space, save for the ramshackle front yard littered with rusted junk and encased in a rusted chainlink fence.



Inside, each of the two bathrooms (unusual at the time for a house of this size) are a tight squeeze...

...and one is situated oddly right off the carpark, separated only by a flimsy plastic wall.





In fact, the entire interior could use a more open floor plan...

...the main hallway running long and narrow, and the lack of natural light throughout the house forcing a reliance on incandescent lighting fixtures.





So there was no love connection between me and this house. Maybe I identified with it too much. Maybe subconsciously I felt like I was some human equivalent of a house like that: a little bit old, a little bit neglected, a little bit damaged.

But I don't think it's a lost cause. Someone will fall in love with this house for what it is now, for what it once was, and for what it might someday be. It just needs someone with the passion, interest and devotion to pay enough attention to it.

Related reading:
California Dream Homes

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Photo Essay: Low Visibility Hiking at Bishop's Peak

I woke up Saturday morning in San Luis Obispo kind of dying for a hike. I'd abandoned my plans to hike Black Hill in Morro Bay State Park the previous afternoon because it was so dark, damp, and foggy at only 5 p.m. I'd tried to hike along the ocean with Jesse at Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur earlier the previous afternoon, but our group hit high tide and a flooded beach, and some of our hiking companions were not as willing to walk through the water as we were.

So although I'm normally inclined to try to sleep in, I set my alarm for 7 a.m., grabbed a quick breakfast of Portuguese French toast at the Madonna Inn's cafe, and drove to one of the Nine Sisters of San Luis Obispo: Bishop's Peak.

It was foggy enough down below, at the bottom, as it had been the day before and pretty much my entire trip up and down the coast.

But the peak itself was completely obscured by clouds. I couldn't even see the top. If I was going to hike, I was going to have to hike into the clouds.







Quite frankly, I was a bit worried about getting lost in the woods, disoriented by the swirling mist.







I also worried about hypothermia, though I'd dressed in layers. I knew that I'd break a sweat with a 1200 foot elevation change, and it was already so damp out...and cold.





Not only could I not see where I was headed...



But I also had no clue where I'd been with no view of the landscape down below.





In the thickest part of the cloud line, I passed an older couple of hikers on their way down. "Not much of a view today, huh?" I commiserated.

"Oh, there will be at the top," the woman assured me.

I looked up there and saw pure white. Really?



And then I began to break through...



...Until I actually saw beams of sunlight, and blue sky ahead, through the thick atmosphere.





I looked out and saw a snowy sea, vast mountain peaks peeking out over the top of it like islands spotted in the distance.



By the time I began my descent, the morning's mist - more than the kind of marine layer we get in the beachside communities in LA - had burned off enough to reveal the land below.



I did not get lost. I did not catch cold, slip and fall, or shiver to my death. I was not abducted by a forest-dwelling kidnapper.

I did, however, get to see what it was like below, amidst, and above the clouds, seeing the same rocks before and after the sunshine hit.

Before:


After:


Related reading:
Under the Milky Way Tonight, and Every Night
Above the Clouds



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Under the Milky Way Tonight, and Every Night

"Look at this!" Jesse exclaimed, gesturing towards the starry sky. "I mean, LOOK at this!"

We'd gone outside to look at the stars, sitting on a bench on the deck of a house on a ridge in Big Sur, on California's Central Coast. The drive up had been long, dark, hilly, bumpy, and, above all else, foggy. We couldn't see a thing on our way up, but now on the ridge, it felt like we could see everything.

"Just think: this sky is always up there. It's always above us, but so few of us ever get to see it," I said. Even the times I'd been stargazing in a Dark Sky Community like Borrego Springs, I hadn't seen this abundance of stars, planets, and other reflective celestial debris.

It was comforting to think of the relative permanence of this sky. Sure, individual stars burn out, and Planet Earth's space missions have dumped a bunch of extra crap up there that's now dangerously polluting outer space, but that sky that was above us in Big Sur isn't not above us in Los Angeles, or even New York. We just can't see it.

That fact was, in a way, even more evident the next morning, when I returned to the deck to face the cloud line that separated us and our sunny day from the damp gloom that was surely dogging the low-lying communities below.



At that point, the clouds were at eye level. I needed to get higher.

I'd left my sneakers in my own car down on Highway 1, having hitched a ride up the ridge with Jesse, and I knew I couldn't hike to the top of the ridge in my flip flops, so I slid a pair of water shoes (brought for anticipated beach-walking) over my socked feet and headed up the road.

It got sunnier and markedly hotter as I reached the top of the ridge, past the tree line, where the landscape transformed from forest to ranchland.





It looked as though I was standing atop of some kind of island in the sky. I looked out where the Pacific Ocean should be, and all I could see was a blanket of uninterrupted white. Soft, but solid, and immoveable.



I relished the heat and the sun, which I hadn't felt much of since heading west and north from Paso Robles on my way up to Big Sur. And I reminded myself, although I knew I would soon return to the cold and damp of the ocean shore, "It's always sunny...up here."

You just can't always see it.

Later that morning, I reunited with Jesse at the house and returned to the bench on the deck, where instead of gazing upwards, we looked straight ahead at the fog rolling in right towards us. The cloud-like matter was both advancing and receding, somehow simultaneously, and we watched it move, somewhat in disbelief. How rare is it that you get to monitor the movement of that which oppresses you? Track its course? See both above and below it?

How much more enlightened would we - could we - be if we were able to do that all the time? Even down below?

Related Reading:
Above the Clouds

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Photo Essay: Bubble Gum Alley

One of the more unusual forms of folk art is bubble gum art.

One might even argue that it's not folk art at all, but just plain vandalism.



But when you walk down Bubble Gum Alley in San Luis Obispo, CA, you get the same sense that you do walking through Nitt Witt Ridge or Watts Towers: that it will never be finished, no matter how much material is added on.



The only difference is that in the case of bubble gum art, usually there is no single artist. Rather, the end result - or, the work-in-progress - is formed from the contributions of dozens, hundreds, thousands of artists, or, that is, bubble gum chewers.



New globs sit on top of dirty old globs, flattened out over time.



Blown bubbles frozen in time are affixed onto an underlayer of other already-been-chewed gum.



And sometimes the gum is used to affix other things to the wall, like business cards, wrappers...





...cigarettes...







...and other ephemera...





...including the occasional love note.



In Bubble Gum Alley, every visitor is a potential artist, if they have the right building material. It is collage art at its grossest and most personal, fruity-scented, untouchable.

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