Letters to the Editor
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Los Angeles, sweet and sour
I've lived in LA for 15 years, and it's starting to grow on me. It's not a great place to be poor, but at least there's a limit to how cold you can get. I've been pretty darn cold in a sleeping bag on a cement floor in Koreatown in January, but it's got nothing on my unheated attic bedroom back home in Maine.
Now that I've advanced into a comfortable income bracket (not so easy back home), my only reservations about the city are the somewhat sketchy air quality (we give up the constant drizzle and mud for a faint sense that breathing might be hazardous to our health), a lingering guilt about consuming piped-in water in a desert (though LA was once quite swampy – we can blame some heedless drainage experts for that) and the brutal heat of the summers, to which I've never quite become accustomed. If you live in a shady place – and turn off all the pilot lights, switch the bulbs to compact fluorescents and sit indolently naked in front of a fan – most of the summer is endurable without air conditioning. But then, I never have to don a parka and mukluks to shovel out the driveway – that's definitely an argument for getting over the heat.
People say the traffic and housing prices are unbearable, and I'm sure it's true, if you insist on living in a McMansion you can't afford that's so far out in the suburbs that you spend over 4 hours of every day driving back and forth to work. That's a lousy way to live. Try to stop thinking about keeping up with the Joneses. I own a comfortable home on three acres of oceanfront which I bought for about $100,000 – in Maine. In Los Angeles, I rent half of a cozy 1920s duplex only 7 miles from where I work. It takes me about 25 minutes to get to work each day, and I never have to touch a freeway.
Now, I'm not a person who needs people much, but there are certainly a lot of flaky and shallow types – not to mention a slew of grifters – to be found in this town. On the other hand, if you settle in the right place – say, on the border of Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Hollywood – you'll find there are a lot of cool folks around who look out for each other and do interesting things with their lives. They might not fit in so well in small-town America, but they're good people nonetheless. They walk their dogs and raise their kids and don't judge their neighbors, unless their neighbors appear to be cooking up a batch of meth in the basement or shooting kiddie porn behind the tinfoil-covered windows of their living room.
Here in the epicenter of our city of 13 million people, I watch four baby skunks and their mother tussle in my garden at dusk. Possums climb the tree outside my living room and stare in at me in the evening hours. From time to time, a pack of giant racoons starts a gang war over the koi pond. The neighborhood mockingbirds have learned the car-alarm song, and the mourning doves that nest in the trees coo plaintively in the early morning hours. The ducks next door splash and squabble as the neighborhood cats look on, lying lazily on the sunny roof of the shed. Three different species of jewel-like hummingbirds visit my salvias every day, not to mention the butterflies and giant black bumblebees that mob my herbs, which bloom year round. Under my ancient and gnarled rosemary bush, uncountable lizards lurk, waiting for a quiet time to come out and sun themselves on the rocks. And if I take a walk up the hill in the evening, it's likely I'll see one of the coyotes that sings in response to the ambulance sirens that sweep through the canyon at night.
Also, if there's anything at all that you're interested in (that doesn't involve snow), there's sure to be some way to pursue it in this city. We have every kind of art, food, music – or any other cultural or multicultural experience you might seek – in abundance. Meeting people isn't a cakewalk, what with our car-based society, and at first you might feel a little awkward if you don't appear to have just stepped off the pages of Vogue – but that just means you're hanging out in the wrong circles. One of the greatest things about LA is that no matter how odd or awkward you might be, there's always someone weirder just around the corner.
Yes, I miss the pine-scented air and peace and quiet of Maine. But the pervasive poverty and terrible winters, not so much. Here, we can hike the trail that climbs above the Hollywood sign to reveal the city glimmering below under trailing veils of vapor, like an strange underwater kingdom. We have those delicious autumn evenings when mesquite smoke drifts over the city, and the scent of eucalyptus carried on the moist morning air, and the first spring day you see a street lined with jacarandas blooming like a purple fever-dream, and the glorious cleansing of the first winter downpour sweeping away the dry, gritty summer.
No city is perfect, but LA is a city in which you can be anything you want to be, no matter how outlandish. It is the American dream, both sweet and sour.