We got up fairly late this morning. Once again I went out for coffee. This time I went to a McDonalds just down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. The place ... is designed to look like a theatre with a big marquee on the front. Inside, though, it was nowhere near as pleasant than the one on Sunset. It was not kept very clean, and the only people inside looked as if they had begged their coffee money on the street. ... I just got the coffee quickly and left.
The big news in Los Angeles this morning was the death of a Hollywood legend. Carroll O'Conner passed away. While he had acted in nearly a hundred movies and TV series, O'Conner was certainly best known for playing Archie Bunker in the landmark comedy "All in the Family". This was big news in L.A.; even La Opinión made it a front-page story. The Los Angeles Times devoted an entire page to O'Conner's obituary, and the morning news had a special retrospective. In addition to summing up his acting career and stressing his passionate work against drug abuse following his son's suicide, the reporters noted one other important fact. Just before he died, O'Conner had just celebrated his golden wedding anniversary--something that doesn't happen very often in a city and industry where divorces are taken for granted.
Since we were in no particular hurry today, we decided to have breakfast right at the hotel. ... In addition to their normal menu, Theodore's Restaurant (also named after President Roosevelt) offers an unlimited breakfast buffet for $9.95. It's actually quite a good deal. They had ham, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, pancakes, biscuits, croissants, muffins, danish, bread, hot and cold cereal, hash browns with cheese sauce, yogurt, melon, berries, apples, oranges, orange juice, grapefruit juice, cranberry juice, grape juice, hot chocolate, tea, and coffee. I returned to the buffet three times, sampled a bit of almost all of those, and managed to thoroughly stuff myself. Margaret was somewhat more restrained.
This morning we took the subway down to Wilshire and Vermont, where the two branches of the red line split. Then we caught a new form of transport called "Metro Rapid", which is MTA route #720. Metro Rapid is a bus--sort of. The vehicles are low-floor buses that are designed to make it easy for handicapped people to enter. They have special bus stops that MTA calls "stations" and which are much more easily identifiable than a regular bus stop. (The problem with the rapid stations, though, is that they never have benches.) The "stations" are spaced about a mile apart, and Metro Rapid automatically stops at all of them, regardless of whether anyone is waiting or whether a passenger has signaled that they want to get off. The buses also have special electronic technology that will change upcoming traffic signals so that Metro Rapid almost always gets a green light. That's where the term "rapid" comes from. We realized too late that the run the rapid buses in groups of three, so there's often room in the last bus, even if the first one is full. They also run frequently--much more frequently than ordinary buses. So in many ways it's a bus that works like a train. In fact, it's a substitute for the subway that was supposed to run all the way down Wilshire Boulevard until they ran into those natural gas pockets that kept them from proceeding.
Those natural gas pockets are actually related to our first destination of the day, ... the famous LaBrea Tar Pits. I always was vaguely aware of the existence of the tar pits (I think mostly from allusions to them on The Flintstones), but I never really knew what they were. Today I found out.
The tar pits are ancient deposits of asphalt. (They make a big deal that it's asphalt rather than tar, as if anyone really cared about that distinction.) Those that are left look like little ponds. The asphalt forms a thick black film over surface water, and periodically the underground natural gas bubbles up, causing a the pits to burp. In prehistoric times many of these pits were overgrown with plant life. Animals would come to the areas and accidentally become trapped in the sticky mess. Much of the tar eventually dried into a coal-like substance (presumably similar to the hard asphalt on a highway), which contained the fossilized remains of millions of prehistoric animals. The discoveries started to be found around the turn of the last century in an area called Rancho LaBrea (luh-BRAY-uh), one of the original ranches given to the first settlers who came to Los Angeles from central Mexico.
The George C. Page Museum does a nice job telling the story of the tar pits. They have actual re-constructed skeletons of mastodons, saber tooth tigers, and prehistoric birds, as well as life-size dioramas showing what he area would have looked like millennia ago. You can even see actual paleontologists at work cleaning and classifying bones. We shared the museum with a lower elementary children on a field trip. Their teacher was trying to explain everything to the kids, but I'm not sure she really understood things all that well herself. Her explanations were about as superficial as the abbreviated description I have here.
They had a gift shop at the museum, but like most L.A. gift shops, there wasn't much of interest on sale. Margaret was particularly upset about it. She had hoped to pick up some serious scientific books about the tar pits, and they had nothing even remotely close to what she wanted.
* * * * *
Just down the street from the tar pits is the Peterson Automotive Museum. It's not exactly a surprise that Los Angeles should have a major museum about cars. It was a bit surprising to me, though, that the place was as large and as interesting as it was. The Peterson building is a four-story former department store that covers about half a city block. Its entrance is in the rear, convenient to the adjacent parking ramp. We walked around back, paid our admission, and went in.
Probably the best thing about the Peterson is the way they display their cars. Instead of just lining them up, they've built little sets to try to show the old cars in what you might call "their natural environment". For instance they have a model of a small-town Main Street from around 1930, with cars from that era lining the street. There's a billboard from the '50s with a police motorcycle hiding behind it. Most of the cars are in "cherry" condition, but they've also found creative ways to display some that are far less than perfect (like a model body shop). Almost every era of car is represented, ... and while most of them tend toward luxury cars, there's even some economy models. In addition to the car displays there are also exhibits on such topics as automotive safety and the history of freeways in Los Angeles.
The second floor houses rotating exhibits. While we were there the main exhibit was "Cars and Guitars of Rock and Roll". Part of the exhibit deals with car references in songs, like "Cadillac Ranch" by Bruce Springsteen or any of those dopey car songs of the '60s. Another part displays cars, trucks, motorcycles, and other vehicles owned by rock stars. Among the most interesting were Cher's rhinestone-studded Harley Davidson motorcycle and a Hummer owned by rap artist Snoop Doggy Dog. Scattered in with the cars are authentic guitars used by the stars on the songs referred to in the exhibits. It's like a combination of the Hard Rock Cafe and a valet parking lot. Dweezil Zappa was a major contributor to the exhibit, so his and his father's cars are prominently displayed. It's interesting that while Frank Zappa owns several cars (presumably at least one other than the four or five we saw displayed here), he let his license lapse and never renewed it. He often travels in his own car, but a chauffer always drives it.
The third floor of the museum is mostly designed for children, and the fourth floor is offices and maintenance shops. The most interesting thing upstairs was an actual California Highway Patrol motorcycle that you could pose on for pictures. It was kids that were supposed to pose there, but I managed to get Margaret to photograph me doing my best impersonation of CHIPS. That's probably the closest I'll ever get to actually riding a motorcycle. I've always thought it would be kind of cool to have one, but these days most of them cost more than my car--literally.
The Peterson had a fairly nice gift shop. I picked up a cute little 8-inch model car with a surfboard on top. When I originally picked it up, I thought the car was a VW beetle, but it's actually a Chrysler PT Cruiser. It's hard to think of confusing those vehicles, but there is a definite similarity in their shape, especially when size is not a cue. .....
Kitty-corner from the Peterson is a Los Angeles institution, the 99¢ Store. I had seen countless adds for them in the papers. They have a cute way of getting "99" into everything they do. One add had a list of 99 emergency supplies to have on hand for a rolling blackout (all of which were available for 99 cents each at the 99¢ Store). Another added up the numbers of all the players on the Lakers, who had just won the NBA Championship. The total, of course, was 99. There was also an ad featuring Wayne Gretzky, who wore hockey jersey #99. Their trucks carry warnings like a pizza delivery car--"Driver carries less than 99¢", and signs in their stores advise that satisfaction is "99% guaranteed". Bags from the 99¢ Store note that they have "over 99 locations", and I read that they celebrated the grand opening of their 99th store last November by giving each of their stores 99 of those mini-scooters that every kid had to have for Christmas to blow out for just 99¢ each (the actual value would be closer to $99). Given all that build-up, I had to check out the store.
Believe me, the 99¢ Store is not just another dollar store. It's a wonderful place, and I really wish we had them in Iowa. First of all, while most dollar stores just cram their merchandise on the shelves in no particular order, the 99¢ Store was neat as a pin and extremely well organized. It was an enormous store (I've been to Wal-Marts that were smaller), but you could easily see what merchandise was available and find what you wanted. Half the store is groceries, and the other half is dry goods. The dry goods selection is not all that different from what you'd find in most dollar stores, except that there was a surprising amount of clothing. The grocery section was amazingly large. Except for meat and produce, you could get pretty much any groceries you wanted here--even dairy and frozen foods. Nothing in the store costs over 99¢, and many items are 2 for 99¢, 3 for 99¢, or even as low as 12 for 99¢. I bought a 10-ounce box of chocolate milk (3 for 99¢), a bag of sugar-coated almonds (99¢), 250 grams (half a pound) of cheese food imported from Switzerland (2 for 99¢), a pound of kosher matzo (4 for 99¢), an 8-pack of individual packages of frosted raisins (2 for 99¢), and 4 "vasos" of individual pudding snacks designed for sale in Mexico and labeled only in Spanish ("Postre Pack--Budin de Vanilla ... No contiene conservadores ... No necesita refrigerarse"--99¢). It's interesting that the Mexican pudding was "hecho en USA" (made in USA-in Fullerton, California, to be exact). Its nutritional information was all in Spanish, though, and I don't think that's actually legal for sale in America. I wasn't complaining, though ... and it wasn't bad pudding for 99¢.
We took Metro Rapid back down Wilshire Boulevard. The area right by the museums is called the "Miracle Mile", and we found out at the car museum that this was the first automobile-oriented shopping district in America. Everything along here is built right up to the street, with just a very narrow sidewalk. Many buildings have no street entrance at all, and for those that do it's the "back" entrance. The main entrance to those businesses that remain on the Miracle Mile is around back, adjacent to the parking ramps. Not a lot of businesses remain, though. The Miracle Mile took shoppers away from downtown seventy-five years ago, but since then business has moved on from here to suburban shopping centers and to all those minimalls all over town. The largest part of the Miracle Mile (two major department stores and all the space between them) is now occupied by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We didn't go there, but I understand it's supposed to be a first-rate museum. There's also a museum devoted to the holocaust and the offices of a number of charities. Besides the 99¢ Store, I saw a supermarket, two large drug stores, and a "muebleria" (a furniture store). I also saw a lot of empty commercial space.
East of the Miracle Mile, closer to downtown, is the area that the Chamber of Commerce calls "Mid-Wilshire" but that most locals call "Koreatown". Excepting the two Korean capitals, Seoul and Pyongyang, Los Angeles has the largest Korean population in the world--apparently around half a million, making them by far the largest Asian group here. Unlike a Chinatown, the buildings here in no way look Asian. The whole place is generic five- or six-floor office and apartment buildings. You know it's Koreatown by the Asian people on the street and the unfamiliar script on signs above the stores.
We got off the rapid and transferred to the subway at Wilshire and Western. We made a quick hop downtown to 7th Street--Metro Center and then walked southward on Flower Street. Mostly we walked past parking. There was ramp after ramp and lot after lot, an utter sea of parking. Most of the parking was remarkably inexpensive by big-city standards. If you're willing to walk about half a mile from the core of downtown, you can park your car for as little as $2.50 a day. You could also pay as much as $12 to park at the Macy Centre Mall, but you'd be an idiot if you did.
Our next destination was another of those offbeat museums, the Museum of Neon Art. Where else but Los Angeles (except maybe Vegas) would someone open a museum dedicated to nothing but neon. The initials of the museum spell MONA, and in front they have a neon rendition of the Mona Lisa. The museum is small (honestly too small), but rather interesting.
They start with a historic and scientific background. They explain how gas discharge tubes work, and they classify the noble gases by color. (The most common are neon = bright orange, argon = pale lavender, helium = peach, krypton = silvery white, xenon = blue.) There are several works a few old neon signs that have been repaired (and others that are in various states of disrepair), several modern art works in neon, and a whole gallery of still prints (mostly in black and white) and videos of neon. We went through the place quickly, but it wasn't a wasted trip.
This was another place with a disappointing gift shop. If they asked my advice, I'd suggest they sell letters of the alphabet in small pieces of bent neon, so that people could make a novelty lamp out of their names or initials. They have lots of books (the sort of scientific treatises Margaret was looking for at the tar pits, as well as arty coffee table books) and they have large and expensive works of art, but there's nothing there that's really a souvenir.
I was amused to pick up a copy of the museum's membership solicitation. Like most such things, they offer various levels of membership, depending on how much you want to contribute. Here they name their memberships after the noble gases--starting with $50 for "neon" and increasing in increments from there. Topping the list is a $1,000 plasma membership. Plasma is, of course, the fourth state of matter, and it's apparently what exists inside an electrified neon tube.
We were planning to go to one more museum today, the Wells-Fargo Museum, which details the company's history and the history of the west. It's supposed to occupy most of the lobby of their main downtown bank. There's a twin museum in San Francisco, but since we would be there mostly on a weekend, it seemed appropriate to go to the one in L.A. I had written down directions to the place, but I left them back at the hotel, so we just wandered ended up wandering around downtown looking for it. We found what looked like the main Wells-Fargo bank, but their lobby had nothing but tellers and loan officers--nothing you could even pretend was a museum.
Margaret wanted a rest at this point, so we stopped in at a Carl's Jr. restaurant. Carl's Jr. is a chain that exists only in the West. (In fact, the only other place I've ever seen one is in Colorado.) A few years ago they bought out the Hardees chain, and the two feature the same stupid smiling star logo. We bought desserts (refrigerated pie and cheesecake slices) and the most enormous drinks I've ever seen at Carl's Jr. and rested our feet a while. .....
We caught sight of another "Wells-Fargo" sign, so we walked toward it. We ended up walking up and up and up. This building (which may well have been the headquarters, but still didn't have a museum we could locate) was located at the top of Bunker Hill. I went to the top of Bunker Hill in Boston last summer; now I can say I've done it on both coasts.
* * * * *
The last place I went downtown was Broadway, the main Hispanic shopping area in Los Angeles. ... The part of Broadway I went to (just east of Pershing Square) was very run-down and extremely crowded. It was unquestionably the seediest place I had seen in LA, the sort of place where I felt I had to keep my hand on my wallet all the time. I stood out like a big white giant among the Mexican throng, and I felt like I was part of a game of "Which of these things doesn't belong?" So I just looked around a bit, and very soon I was back in the subway.
Margaret went straight back to the motel, but I left her and went home separately--stopping to explore other neighborhoods along the way. I got off the train at the MacArthur Park station and went upstairs to see what all the fuss in that strange old song was about. I'm happy to report that MacArthur Park is not melting in the dark. There is a bakery across the street from the park, though, so I suppose you could leave a cake out in the rain if you wanted to. There are old men playing games by the trees (though not Chinese checkers), and I did see a woman in a yellow cotton dress, but there's no green icing flowing anywhere. (For those who are totally confused by now, those are all weird images from a very bizarre song; the '60s were a strange time.)
Some travel guides warn against going to MacArthur Park. They say it's an unsafe, scary place. Balderdash! It's a lovely park, full of children playing and elderly people going out for a stroll. The park is located in a poor Hispanic neighborhood, but then the bulk of Los Angeles is made up of poor Hispanic neighborhoods. If I'd avoided everywhere that was poor or Hispanic, all I'd have seen was Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach. I walked around MacArthur Park and its neighborhood for quite a while, and I found it far less threatening than Broadway. I might not want to be there late at night, but during the day it was very pleasant indeed.
Next I took the subway up two stops to Vermont and Santa Monica. ...Vermont Street is also almost completely Latino. I saw lots of Hispanic people out "de paseo", walking around or pushing baby strollers. Everyone was friendly. They all smiled and nodded, and I had a wonderful time just walking up the street.
Most of the signs here are either bilingual or in Spanish only. Last spring for the first time in years I taught a Spanish class at the local community college. Most of the examples I had were horribly out of date, so I was pleased to be able to snap pictures of many of the signs around this neighborhood.
Apparently many of the people here come from Central America, rather than Mexico. I passed a Guatemalan grocery and a Salvadoran restaurant. I have no idea whatsoever what the cuisines of either of those countries are, and on this short trip I didn't have time to find out.
I walked northward about a mile to around Sunset. The area by Sunset and Vermont is called "the Medical District", because three different hospitals (Kaiser-Permenente Medical Center, Hollywood Children's Hospital, and Centro Medico Familiar) are all grouped around the intersection. The last one, of course, is probably the choice of most of the people in the neighborhood; the name means "Family Medical Center" in Spanish.
There was an interesting sight at the Sunset and Vermont subway station. Parked above the station on Vermont Street were a fire truck, an ambulance, a police car, and a "rail response truck" from the L.A. Fire Department. I have no idea what may have gone on in the station, but all those emergency vehicles must have been there for some reason.
I stopped ... at another L.A. fast food icon: Fatburger. That name hardly seems fitting in the land where you can't be too rich or too thin, but they named it back in the '50s when "fat cat" and similar terms were in vogue. I ordered the "Baby Fat" (the smallest burger they sell), an order of chili cheese fries, and some fresh-squeezed lemonade. Let me tell you, Fatburger's food was excellent. The burger was about half meat and half vegetables. The oddest thing about it was that it had both dill pickle and sweet relish. That actually was not a bad combination, though, and it was really very good. The chili cheese fries were also outstanding. They consisted of delicious fries topped first with a big handful of shredded sharp cheddar cheese, then a ladle of spicy chili, and then another handful of cheese. Unfortunately, they don't give you a fork or a spoon or anything to eat it with, so you have to sort of scoop the chili up with the fries. It was very good, though. Moreover, the lemonade was out of this world--not too sweet, and very refreshing. It's a good thing I don't live here, or Fatburger would be fattening their pockets by making me very fat indeed.
What you're supposed to see in this neighborhood is the Hollyhock House, a home that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a prominent L.A. woman. You can barely see it from the street; it's hidden in trees behind the minimall where Fatburger is located. It's closed for renovation, which was fine with me. I've been to Frank Lloyd Wright homes elsewhere, and the all sort of look the same.
I saw a store here called "Happy Family Drugs". I'm not sure if the Asian owners intended it or not, but they basically named the pharmacy after the neighborhood. "Los Feliz" (which should be pronounced lose-fay-LEASE) is an unusual structure in Spanish that could only refer to a family whose surname was "Feliz" or "Happy". So the region was the ranch that belonged to the Happy family, and "Happy Family Drugs" would continue to honor them today.
The area near Vermont and Hollywood is one of the trendiest parts of L.A. This is the district called Los Feliz (loss-FEE-less, in one of the worst slaughterings of Spanish they have here). It's named after a major boulevard that runs just north of here, which in turn is named after another of the original old ranches. This is the heart of the "club" scene, and it's the place where all those Rocky Horror people from the Roosevelt would probably spend their free time.
Indeed at least half a dozen "Midnight Insanity" people who among the passengers in my subway car as I made my way back to the hotel. One more called attention to herself when I got to Hollywood and Highland station. A policeman was stopping people asking for proof of payment, and when she couldn't produce a ticket, the girl got the automatic $250 fine.
Back at the hotel I was amused to find that the maid had left the standard hotel coffee fixings on top of the minibar, even though we still didn't have a coffee maker in the room. She hadn't left coffee the previous days, and I'm betting that one of the parking valets noticed me bringing in coffee from McDonalds and Burger King and mentioned something to the maid.
I joined Margaret back at the hotel, and we went out for dinner. We walked down Hollywood Boulevard looking for a place to eat. While we walked we passed the headquarters of the Church of Scientology. They were offering free IQ tests to passersby--which I assume came with a pitch for the "church". I really don't know much about the Church of Scientology. It's always seemed vaguely cultish to me, and I didn't feel like hearing their come--on just to see where I ended up on yet another IQ test.
Eventually we settled on the the Pig and Whistle Restaurant. This was the Hollywood's first restaurant, and back in the golden days of Tinseltown it was one of the places the stars went to be seen. When Hollywood Boulevard became the red light district, the Pig and Whistle closed its doors. It re-opened just this year, and it's really quite a nice place. They serve an eclectic menu in a funky, old-fashioned setting. We ate on a little patio outside by the sidewalk. I had shepherd's pie, a fascinating concoction of ground meat stewed with vegetables and cheese, placed in an individual crock, topped with mashed potatoes and baked, then topped with more cheese and broiled. It was excellent. Margaret had an enormous pork rib platter that also looked delicious. (By the way, I don't know why they chose such a strange name, but their logo goes back to the '20s and features a hog playing the flute.)
Our dinner entertainment came from watching the valet parking attendants out front. One time a customer left his car. The valet waited for him to go inside the restaurant, and then he just backed it up one space in the on-street parking. It made me wonder what sort of a tip he'd be getting for such hard work. Another time the someone left a sports car. I think it must have had a stick shift, and the parking attendant wasn't used to that. He kept gunning and killing the engine before he finally roared down the street. I have no idea where that car ended up, but I kept picturing the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where they leave a Ferrari in a valet lot, and the attendants go out joy-riding all afternoon.
* * * * *
After dinner we made our way back to the hotel. Tonight was movie night, the private screening of Rocky Horror for the Midnight Insanity group, and all the kids were dressed in costume for the occasion. We made our way past the mob to our room and started packing our things to leave L.A.
I was up at 6:15 this morning. Since we still couldn't do anything with the coffee the maid had left, once again I went out for coffee. I went back to the nice McDonalds on Sunset, where I stood in line behind four different people who all ordered value meals in Spanish. ... When it was my turn the clerk asked in English what I would like, and I ordered (in English) two large coffees, plus an Egg McMuffin for myself. It's interesting that while virtually every store clerk and waiter in Los Angeles is Hispanic, they're almost all bilingual. They also instinctively speak the appropriate language to each customer.
After finishing our coffee we gathered our things and made our way to the desk to check out. The check-out procedure went very quickly, and about 7:45 we left the Roosevelt for good.
There was one more thing for us to see in Hollywood. Every three or four weeks they add a new star to the Walk of Fame, and this was one of those weeks. On Thursday, basketball star Magic Johnson got his star on the Walk of Fame. The Los Angeles Times noted that the symbol on Johnson's star was a movie camera, probably because his major business activity since retirement has been operating a multiplex of theaters in an inner city neighborhood. They and everyone else easily saw through that, though. They noted that basically Johnson is famous for being "a celebrity". There is no symbol for sports, so the Walk of Fame promoters basically came up with an excuse to add him to the sidewalk.
That same Times article said that Johnson's star was located at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, right in front of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Since it was so convenient, we figured we might as well see the star everybody was talking about. We searched the sidewalk, and eventually we found a spot of pink that was much newer and brighter than everything else in the area. Saying Johnson's star was "in front" of the Roosevelt was really stretching it. It was actually in front of a parking ramp down the street. Between the ramp and the hotel there's a gift shop and a coffee bar. Unless the entire block has the address "7000 Hollywood Boulevard", I'd guess (given the way addresses tend to work in L.A.) that Johnson's star is actually located somewhere around 7030. At anyway, we saw his star, so our journey to Tinseltown was complete.
One last time we made our way to the Hollywood and Highland subway station. Since it was a weekend we had to wait a bit longer than the standard 10 minutes for a train, but it still wasn't as long as waiting for a bus. The train length was shorter on Saturday, and pleasantly full but not crowded. .....
We got to Union Station well before our Amtrak train was scheduled to leave. That was good, because we were able to be near the front of the check-in line. We got our boarding passes, and went out to the train. The car attendant assigned seats to us, and I politely asked him if those seats were on the "coast side" of the train. He said that since we had come so early and since we had asked, he would change them so we had the best view during our trip.
That was good, because having a view was really the whole point of this part of the trip. There are several ways you can get from Los Angeles to the region around San Francisco Bay. By far the quickest is to go through the so-called Central Valley, through Bakersfield and Fresno. Amtrak runs that route about every two hours, and the trip from L.A. to Oakland takes about half a day. We had instead opted for a train called the Coast Starlight, which runs once a day from between Los Angeles and Seattle. The name really is kind of odd, because even if we had gone all the way to Washington State, we wouldn't have been anywhere near the coast at night. It does run right along the coast during the daytime, though, following every little inlet for well over 100 miles between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Because it winds so much, the trip takes much longer than the inland route. We were scheduled to leave Union Station at 10am, and our estimated time of arrival in Oakland would be around 9:30pm.
While we waited to leave Los Angeles we were "entertained" by bad country music that was piped in over the intercom system. We found out later that this was not intentional. What we were hearing was the complementary music that sleeper passengers can listen to on headphones if they wish. Somehow they had goofed their circuits and were pumping that music into our car. Sometimes the music was loud, and sometimes it just sounded like we were overhearing somebody else's headphones. Most of the way north, though, we were accompanied by that old-time Nashville sound. I can usually tune out sounds fairly easily, but Margaret quickly got very annoyed by it. We had to put up with it for over nine hours, though, before someone finally figured out how to turn it off.
We left Union Station promptly at 10am. It surprised me that we didn't stop to pick up freight like we had on most of the other Amtrak trains I had taken. Margaret and I were in the last coach, and this time it really was the very last car on the train. Instead of mail cars behind us, there was just open track. We crawled northward past Dodger Stadium, which was well hidden but recognizable from its lights ... and made our way north to the San Fernando Valley.
To our right we caught a glimpse of the enormous Forest Lawn Cemetery. This was particularly interesting to see, because we had talked about it with my Aunt Alaire before we left. Decades ago Alaire lived in southern California. She remembered Forest Lawn as one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen, and she strongly recommended that we visit it. ... Unfortunately, it would have taken the better part of a day to get to Forest Lawn by bus, see the place, and return. ......
It was interesting to at least glimpse Forest Lawn from a distance, though, and the cemetery managed to provide more diversion for us during the day. Alaire had lent us an old book she had about the history of the place, and both Margaret and I filled time on this train ride by reading through it. The founder's attitude was basically that cemeteries should be parks for the living, rather than "stone yards" for the dead. Grave stones are not allowed at Forest Lawn. Most of the deceased are remembered with simple bronze markers, but some families have memorialized their loved ones by donating ornate marble statuary or stained glass windows to the park. It's an interesting concept, and I'm sure it does make for a nice park-like atmosphere. The area is apparently used for a lot of other purposes besides funerals-like weddings, for instance-and I'm sure it would work well for that. Still, I really liked seeing the stones of my ancestors out in Massachusetts last year. I'm not sure a brass plaque on the ground would have quite the same meaning, even if it were in the middle of a lovely park.
* * * * *
To our left as we passed Forest Lawn were the studios in Burbank. We passed the back side of the Warner Brothers lot we had seen earlier in the week. Beyond that are the Disney studios and NBC studios. We also saw a sign on a building that said "Central Casting". They used to be in Hollywood, but appropriately enough moved to where the studios are.
We made a 20-minute stop in Glendale, a suburb just north of downtown L.A., finally leaving there 12 minutes late at 10:30. We crawled on through the Valley, passing Burbank Airport at 10:40.
Most of the San Fernando Valley is technically part of the city of Los Angeles, though some of the people here have taken out petitions to secede and form their own city. It's definitely one of the wealthier areas of L.A. The homes are still crammed into impossibly tiny lots, but they are much nicer homes than you see "south of the pass". The stores here are on larger lots, with much larger parking lots than elsewhere in Los Angeles. Like everywhere in the city, though, when we didn't see homes or stores, we saw a very bleak industrial landscape. I still can't get over how many factories there are in Los Angeles. I didn't know we made that much stuff in the entire country, let alone in one city. It's not the new glass office parks you see in Midwestern suburbs, but ratty old factories that are still churning out whatever it is that they make.
* * * * *
Past Northridge things finally started looking more suburban than urban. The main boulevards we crossed were full of strip business with big signs and vast seas of parking that could as easily have been in Ankeny. The homes and factories were still quite old, though--dating at least back to the late '50s or early '60s--and all the residential lots were still extremely small. It surprised me that absolutely all the railroad crossings here were at grade, which was why we continued to crawl along. I hate to think how much traffic our train held up while we passed by.
For a place that had sprawled on forever to the east, Los Angeles ended very abruptly to the north. At the end of the San Fernando Valley is a wall of dry hills. At 10:55 we went through a tunnel in those hills, and suddenly the landscape was rural. There were a few elegant homes tucked into the hills and a couple of brand new housing tracts, but mostly we saw farms and ranches. Before long we came to the community of Simi Valley, which looked suburban to the right, but absolutely rural to the left. Beyond there it was farm country all the way to Ventura.
Most of the passengers on this train were not particularly memorable, but there was one family we couldn't help but notice. The mother in the family seemed rather normal, but the father and son were unique. I would bet the father was a professor at a university somewhere. He had shoulder-length hair in a light auburn color. Margaret thought it was naturally red, but it sure looked like a dye job to me. His hair was slightly curly, and he reminded me of pictures you see of Benjamin Franklin. He had a dignified air that definitely made me take notice of him. Then there was his teenaged son, who nobody could help but notice. It's been quite a few years since I've seen a punk haircut, but this kid had one. His head was shaved, except for about a one-inch strip running down the center from his forehead to the back of his neck. This he had grown quite long. He had moussed or sprayed it heavily so that the hair stood straight out, extending probably four inches out from his head. To top this off, he had dyed his hair fire engine red, so it almost looked like he was wearing a bright red halo--sideways. Except for his hair, you wouldn't notice him. He was a pleasant, well-behaved kid, but he would certainly stand out in a crowd. When the family left to go to the diner, I wondered aloud just how long it took the kid to get his hair to look like that each morning.
We passed Thousand Oaks around 11:25. Past there we went through more farm country. Many of the farms had greenhouses where they grew their crops indoors. I'd imagine that makes for a more effective use of water, but it has to be a high initial investment.
We were definitely out of Los Angeles, but it was still very populated as we headed northward. I eventually figured out that almost all of California is heavily populated. After all, more people live here than live in all of Canada. It's a big state, but when you've got 30+ million people, even cramming everybody on tiny lots takes up an awful lot of space.
West of Thousand Oaks we made a dead stop just past the 101 freeway. The conductor announced that we were entering Union Pacific territory, and we had to wait for clearance from UP to travel through their jurisdiction. You'd think that when the same train travel through here at the same time of day, 365 days a year, that clearance could be done automatically. Only after a long wait, though, did we start moving again.
Amtrak's biggest problem is that virtually all of its routes run on tracks that are owned by freight companies. ... Amtrak is at the mercy of the dispatchers of those railroads. While they pay cash incentives to the railroads if they let Amtrak trains move on time, almost all the railroads give their own freight trains priority over Amtrak. In most of the country it would be foolish and wasteful to have separate tracks just for passenger trains, but you would think they could come up with a better compromise (like building more frequent cross-over tracks), that would allow everybody to move more efficiently.
When you grow up in Iowa, you don't really think of California as farm country. The Golden State is #1 in crop production, though, and agriculture is by far the top sector in the state economy. All those vegetables we eat in winter have to come from somewhere, and this is where a large part of them come from. Most of the day we saw fields out the window of the train.
The only way California can be a leader in agriculture is through judicious use of irrigation. This could not have been more clear as we passed by on Amtrak. Most of the landscape here is brown. The native vegetation is just dry grass, and those fields that weren't currently in production were very dusty. Where things were irrigated, though, everything was lush and green. Irrigation is a touchy subject here. For all the efforts of people like William Mulholland to bring water to the cities, it's agriculture that is the top user of water in California. As the cities grow, there are more and more conflicts over who should have access to water.
The irrigation is most necessary in summer. They do get rain along the southern California coast, but that rain is very seasonal. In Los Angeles they average nearly 20 inches of rain a year, which is nearly as much as the Great Plains get. The problem is that virtually all that rain falls in winter. I've read that they can have torrential storms around Christmastime, when the concrete river channels are nearly filled with rushing water. Spring, summer, and fall, though, are typically very dry everywhere in California. The temperature allows for year-round farming, but the moisture doesn't. That's why they have to irrigate.
It would seem to me that the ultimate solution to California's water problems would be through desalination, distilling the ocean water into fresh water. That's what the oil countries in the Middle Eastern desert do, and I can't see why it wouldn't work here. With a limitless supply of water in the Pacific Ocean, it seems silly to be transporting water from the Colorado River and the lakes of the Sierra Nevada. Presently desalination technology is very expensive, but I would think it would be one of those things where the price would come down as it was developed.
As we followed California highway 34 west toward Oxnard, we saw migrant workers out in the fields. California's main crops are salad vegetables, and apparently most of them are quite labor intensive. (If you think about the work that goes into a home vegetable garden and then expand that to an area the size of a farm, that makes some sense.) .....
We arrived at Oxnard at 11:44, precisely 3 minutes late. Oxnard is one of those places with a funny name I've always noticed on maps. From the train, at least, there's nothing spectacular about it. We saw a lot of new housing tracts that featured enormous houses (the kind of monstrosities you see in places like Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota or Schaumburg, Illinois), again on extremely miniscule lots. These homes, which I'm sure cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, had no more than 2 or 3 feet between them. In announcing our stop at Oxnard, the conductor said, "this will be a short, almost a non-existent stop." He lied. After we stopped we waited and waited. Eventually we heard a P.A. announcement from one of the car attendants requesting that any visitors on the train please get off. We finally left at 11:52.
It's apparently fairly common for visitors to come aboard to see their loved ones off. That seems quite odd to me. I can understand going out to the platform, but there's no reason at all anyone without a ticket needs to actually board the train. All it does is slow things down.
Next we passed through Ventura (the city that Minnesota's governor named himself after), and then an area of orchards just north of there. Then just after noon we had our first view of the ocean. We would continue to follow the coast for most of the afternoon.
This was a weekend, and the beaches were full of people escaping the cities. For miles north of Ventura the side of the road we were paralleling was crammed with RVs of people who apparently were camping right on the beach. Lots of people had surfboards out, and everybody was in beachwear-even though it was still cool and foggy outside.
We arrived in Santa Barbara at 12:40--five minutes early. This was the first in a series of "smoking stops". California, Oregon, and Washington all have stricter smoking restrictions than most of the rest of the country. Smoking is entirely banned on in-state trains in all of these health conscious states. They do allow limited smoking on trains like the Southwest Chief that go across the country into less restrictive states, but on the Coast Starlight no smoking is allowed. They get around this by scheduling longer than normal stops about every hour and a half. The smokers all run down to the platform and light up. I suppose it would keep second-hand smoke out of the train, but it also tends to slow down the schedule. I personally think the smoking lounge idea they have on most other long-distance trains is a better way of handling the issue, but then I've always had good friends who smoked, so it's never been something that offended me.
We left Santa Barbara around 12:55 but almost immediately stopped again. ... As is almost always the case with unscheduled stops, after a while we saw a freight train start to crawl by on the other track. The conductor eventually came on the intercom to explain the problem. While this section of the route is double-tracked, a second freight train was parked ahead of us on the track we were on. That train had been vandalized and couldn't move. We had to wait for this freight train to pass and then for them to flip a switch so we could go over to the other track so we could pass the vandalized train.
The place we were stuck was certainly less than inviting. While the Santa Barbara station is on a pleasant tree-lined downtown street, north of there the neighborhood rapidly deteriorates. We were parked next to graffiti-covered public housing projects, and it certainly wasn't hard for me to imagine that people in this neighborhood might have vandalized a train. We were stopped there for twenty minutes before we finally started moving again.
We decided that instead of having a formal lunch we would just do some snacking today. We had matzo with cheese from the stuff I had picked up at the 99¢ Store, as well as frosted raisins and pudding. I still had pretzels left from the bag I had gotten at 7/11 the first day in L.A., and Margaret had some of the fruit roll-up and "nazook" pastry she got at Mashi's ice cream parlor. Together it made for quite a feast.
Past Santa Barbara the railroad travels along an almost completely deserted stretch of the coast. No road goes anywhere near here (most of the area is an air force base), so the only way you can see it is by train. The railroad mostly follows high steep cliffs, with occasional trellises connecting one cliff with another. There's a huge drop-off from the cliffs down to the rocky beaches below. Here we could see some actual surf as the waves hit the cliffs and crashed back out to sea.
Around 2:30 we stopped again, this time at the other end of the Union Pacific jurisdiction. (I'm not sure who's rails we were following now.) When we made the stop the train was at a very precarious angle that made it seem as if we might fall off the cliff into the ocean. We started moving again around 2:45 and made our way north through Guadalupe and Pismo Beach, another place that was overrun with RVs. Just past Pismo Beach we turned inland, leaving the ocean behind for good. We past by a string of lettuce farms before reaching San Luis Obispo (the next smoking stop) at 3:44pm.
CONTINUED IN PART 7
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