San Francisco to LA, Baja bound (journal)

San Francisco to LA, Baja bound 11/21/1985

The earth's skin stretches along the fault from San Francisco to Cabo San Lucas. We follow the San Andreas Fault across the brown reaches of wrinkled skin, from Point Reyes to LA. Stark silhouettes of hills, highlighted razorbacks, an early sun.

 White Sierra peaks compete with low valley clouds, for sky.

Fault lines below us, as if the land were formed by a giant finger, dipped in melted chocolate, then lifted up, leaving sharp ridges of serrated earth. In contrast to the checkerboard grid on Central Valley farms.

An occasional ridge of clouds like an errant river patterned after the ridges  it crosses, a bridge of clouds.

In the distance, Telescope Peak, the farthest ridge, the White Mountains, Death Valley and the white snow fields near Mount Whitney.

To the south called, where the Sierras ease westward to join the coastal mountains, isolated peaks float in a white sea, denser clouds shore up at the edges of the Tehachepis. A faint dusting of snow against the blueblack ridges.

From this height, most color is lost, drained of essence. Like a standing wave, a bank of clouds rolls back from the steep cliffs and mountains.

Clouds enhance their shapes. The snow gathers like herds of lost sheep on the north sides and at the crest.

We begin our descent into LA. Trees become individual fly specks, no longer the dense mats of vegetation of  of the north.

Wave after wave of hills and dark silhouettes like the tracings of red mind on a gray sea, sediment in  tortured swirls. One can almost feel the tortured land screaming with adolescent growing pains.
 

Hills give way to the eroded faces, mostly to the south, where the sun soothes it out like smoke. A winding arroyo filled with boulders, and Franciscan mud gullies washed out to the sea by infrequent rains. Smog mingles with errant clouds that cowl San Gregornio, San Joaquin, and Mount Baldy.

Way off, a distant white peak somewhere in Nevada. Mt. Charleston?

LA sticks its dirty head through the clouds, herringbone grids of parked cars mesh on the flat desert sink.

The Pacific takes salty bites out of the saline desert. We fly through the vapor strung between clouds like laundry.

Above the bright turquoise sea, and below the gray washed business of cities, threaded by the complicated snakes of freeways.

John says the LA smog is nothing. When you fly into Mexico City, it's like you're flying into a bowl of soup. I am not looking forward to that.

John memorizes poems for tonight's meeting. I interrupt him again for verification of San Gregornio, brilliant, white, like a crack crack between worlds.

In this muted light, the LA River grid is a flat glistening aqueduct of concrete running due west, wide in places for the seasonal flash floods, otherwise a narrow braided river channel for the steadier flow, two rivers in one. Grid of main street and the irregular patterns of freeways, more like the path of the river and the river itself.

For one short block, besides each green postage-stamp lawn, liquid amber pushes its blaze of leaves toward the concept of fall.

In this city of deserts, metallic tweed of cars interspliced with grade wisps of rude and introduces the complexities of commerce to a place where creosote bushes once kept a generous living distance between each other each other.

A ragged line of trees, mostly eucalyptus, modestly covers a low-lying ridge near the airport. It reminds me of the banks along the Russian River or perhaps the Sacramento River. On those hot days of pavement, a distant memory of water wavers a mirage of mirrored oases.

Along this stretch, the land still remembers the shape of the inland sea.

11/21/1985
enroute, in the air
added 2/17
Baja Journal from the air: Bahía Concepción  1987
Baja Journal from the air: Lagunas Hanson, Salada 1987Mexico City Journal 1987