All Roads Lead to Trona

Like most amusement parks, Los Angeles is a lie. If you accept the lie - and understand the lie, then you can survive and maybe even flourish here. Los Angeles is a great place to live. It is also a great place to leave. And there is an art to both living and leaving, I reckon.

"A girl must live by the light in her soul/When her world is spinning out of control. " I heard some pop chanteuse sing that in Koreatown once, and those pithy lines underscore what action must happen when the nuttiness of this town - the hubris, the collective neurosis and self-importance of what is universally considered the most reviled city in the history of Western Civilization - infiltrates and clogs the bloodstream of the spirit like a pound of bacon.

The communal neurosis collects and gathers in our car culture, reaches critical mass in our commutes to work, and stains our appreciation for what is really an amazing contraption: Henry Ford's horseless carriage.

The promise of mass-produced automobiles was this: freedom. And in Los Angeles, that is just another fat-assed lie. Cars are amazing pieces of hardware: Some even have souls. But to groove with the metaphysics of the machine and to tap into and exploit that freedom, you really have to get in your grocery-getter and get out of town.

Aye, when you just can't take another fucking day stuck on parking lots known as the 405 or the 10 or the Harbor or the 101 ... when you can't process any more talk radio or anybody's else exhaust ... when you cannot sanction another Type-A movie-business shithead cutting you off when you are just trying to do your time and get out of everybody's way ... when you cannot stare slack-jawed at another rap artist in an Escalade broadcasting Jenna Jameson vids on the quartet of in-car plasma screens ... you have to bail. Jettison. Ripcord. Yes: The next time this town begins to consume you, get in your stainless steel carrot and say sayonara for a couple or three days. If you do not, you are just another psychic SigAlert on the side of the Santa Monica Freeway, more moribund roadkill on the Yellow Brick Road.

Leaving Los Angeles isn't optional. It is necessary.

***

I don't mean to go all Baudrillard on you, but even when you leave Los Angeles, you aren't really leaving Los Angeles. For at least four hours on the highway, you are merely swapping one fun house phantasm for another. Some electric folk-singer once sang, "I want to live in Los Angeles, not the one in Los Angeles" and he pretty much nailed it. The L.A.-not-in-L.A. is really the chunk of terra firma cum antimatter we are talking about exploring in a car ... .

So, now that we have our metaphysical coordinates sorted out: I am of the opinion that Los Angeles starts around the Ventura County line, goes as far east as Rhyolite and somehow wraps around 29 Palms like a flattened Yum Yum doughnut with the jelly sucked out. It goes as far southwest as San Juan Cappuccino (so, yes, Orange County is Los Angeles, and, yes, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are really the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles). But as a matter of practicality, this anti-travelogue will not deal with Orange County, and neither should you.

But contained in this smashed topological jelly doughnut are a generous mittenful of really cool and bizarre towns, mesas, summits, sundry geological freak shows, and dry lake beds: The truck stops of Buttonwillow. The Okie bars of Oildale. The time warp en totem of Porterville. The spiraling-like-Escher choo-choo trains of Tehachapi. The opulent, fecund river paths of Kennedy Meadows. The towering pinnacles of Trona, dropped like the mother of all dinosaur shit in the middle of a salt flat. The barren squalor of Ballarat. The petroglyphs of Barstow that seem to stare down time. The charred ruins of a flapper-era feminist utopia, in Llano. The one-armed short-order cook at Hidden Springs shoveling hash browns onto your plate. The moonie faux-Scientologist motel staffs of Stovepipe Wells. The 18-year-olds in fatigues at Mercury, Nevada, aiming their semiautomatic weapons at concerned citizens who just want to see the spot where their tax dollars were turned into craters from the deployment of atom bombs on an otherwise placid, pacific, and limpid desert floor.

Like I said, if you haven't experienced what the outbacks of greater Los Angeles have to offer - be it the forgotten chunks of L.A., Kern, Inyo, or San Bernardino counties - for Hubbard's sake, man, put down your screenplay and hit the highway.

***

To explore the freedom that actually exists when a motorist can actually stand on the gas and open up the thermodynamic process of a piston-driven engine, one must find the proper time and place. The two hours when rush hour stops in L.A. - between, say, 12:45 and 2:45 in the afternoon - is an okay time to blast outta town on the interstate. But if you leave at 12:46, you are fucked. You will sit in your car for hours, hating life and your decision to drive past the safe-as-milk confines of La Brea Avenue. At this point, you might as well curl up in your apartment and assume the fetal position with an industrial-sized bag of Cheetos for comfort and just TiVo Dr. Phil until traffic calms down. Your next window for an exodus out of Smogtown is 8 p.m. or so ... and that is arguably the best time to travel. You are not going to sit in traffic - you are going to make time. Ambient temperatures have cooled down, so your car is not going to have its tongue hanging out. (Cooler temps are easier on parts, which is ultimately easier on your wallet.)

Now. Depending on your destination - and the faux-Buddhist in me says you don't have to dial one in, really - there are a couple of Robert Frost-approved escape routes out of this godforsaken city. For example: Big Tujunga Canyon to Angeles Forest Highway to Pearblossom Highway is an outstanding path. Big T cuts through the Angeles Forest, and because of the federal tax dollars shoveled into the maintenance of this road, you can have a real cool time making miles out of Los Angeles. There are specific sections of this road that remind this writer of France, Germany, and Italy, and the aforementioned Uncle Sam bucks ensure the road is well-paved, with nary a bump nor ripple. The corners are as tight as Fatty Arbuckle and curvy as a trophy queen, and the scenery is luscious. With the proper vehicle, you can really hang it out there in the corners, while pretending you are Mario Andretti at Monza or Bernd Rosemeyer at Nürburgring. Traffic is minimal, and Johnny Law is elsewhere, probably monitoring how many Type-A dipshits drove their souped-up ninja cycles off of Angeles Crest Highway and into oblivion.

Yes, you can ignore my advice and skirt the mountain roads through the San Gabriels and just slug it out on the I-10 east or I-15 north with the rest of the maroons, but that is really contrary to the Tao of an impromptu road trip. Again, I recommend Big T to Angeles Forest to Pearblossom Highway. Failing that, try Angeles Crest Highway - also immaculately maintained but, again, much more law enforcement and many more banzai!-buzzing mosquitoes on motorcycles - through Wrightwood, which will drop you off just east of the Devil's Punchbowl and due south of the El Mirage dry lake bed.

Whatever sinuous mountain route you take out of town, jot down these highway numbers for use upon your descent into the floor of the Mojave Desert: 395, 178, 58, 150, 154, 190, 127. Mark these on your atlas with a yellow highlighter. You cannot go wrong on these glorious roads. They all are scenic, smooth as a baby's bottom, meticulously maintained, and existentially correct. Moreover, they guide the modern traveler to surreal points of interest that are the exploded id of David Lynch's wettest dreams. (Again: Oildale, Ballarat, Trona, etc., etc.) Many of these state-funded roads were constructed on the cheap by convict labor and underpaid and overworked Chinese immigrants in the 1920s and '30s. You are not going to let the fruits of their blood, toil, and sweat just lie there, are you?

Bottom line: Lunar landscapes beckon. You can be there in two to four hours. Why fuck around?

The Paradox of the Desert

~

To the observer barreling down a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere at what appears to be just a vacuum in space-time, nothing may seem to be happening. But things are happening on tertiary scales and timetables. First, things are happening at the near absolute-zero speed of an epoch. On a good desert highway, you can see the layers of ages carved into the side of a mountain that was dynamited apart for your benefit by some poor, exploited Chinamen. Which is to say, you can see the history of the planet: You are sticking your head inside the exploded view of Mother Earth's womb and counting the millions of years, from the modern back to at least the Paleozoic. The best view of this in Southern California is on Highway 190 between Panamint Springs and Stovepipe Wells, where the earth has unfolded itself like a taco turned inside out.

Secondly, things are happening at the speed at which your vehicle is traveling. Again, there is no better road than 190 to test the limits of your vehicle's suspension, handling, and horsepower. (To sharpen your reflexes - which need to be heightened for these speeds, I recommend opening the volume cursor on your CD player to maximum, while enjoying the tunesmithmanship of the Fall, Kraftwerk, Durutti Column, or Melt-Banana. Your mileage may vary ... .)

And finally, things are happening at Einstein's speed of light, as refracted photons bounce off of fossilized lava rock, splatter across your retinas, and burn a hole into your cranium and, by extension, your consciousness. At these speeds and with these landscapes, you are tapping into and embracing the past, the present, and the future. You are doing more than just guzzling gasoline gratuitously on a groovy stretch of two-lane blacktop. Much more. You are a participant. Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." You have transcended Wittgenstein's limits. You are action, time, and vision. You are your own religion. Only in Los Angeles.