Running in LA
After about eight or nine weeks in Los Angeles one will start to say things like, “Well this city certainly does have some of the best weather in the world!” That, coming after two months of straight complaints—about safety and freeway gridlock; about prices and people and pollution—feels more than a little bit forced, as if the endless sunny afternoons and quick, cool evenings are any kind of true solace. As if fine weather is the cure for a rising pathos. A Mediterranean climate may be a rare and pleasant thing but no one believes it to be a true consolation: everyone on the bus notes with sadness that yes, in LA it is always a beautiful day, but one that we cannot come to enjoy.
The most magnificent climate in the world can do little against those barriers that have been erected against nature, the buildings and concrete roads that wrap the landscape like tight buckles. No, to knock that all down would take truly frightful weather, not the seventy days of uninterrupted sunshine that somehow starts to count as a blessing--there’s little like the reassurance of late afternoon sunbeams flitting as they sink below the palmtreetops. And you can always wear a t-shirt and shorts. And you should never leave home without sunglasses.
And with so little rain, there is nothing to wash the streets clean on the final day of the month.
With this, the best of the world’s weather, jogging in Los Angeles is never so awful. If you can stomach the smog a short run here is actually an exercise in social education (though I suspect few citizens are in need of a refresher course on class stratification). Two blocks east is graffiti-covered Koreatown and a mass of multi-colored people walking toward the transit hub at Wilshire and Western. Two blocks west and the concrete cedes some of its grip to irrigated lawns, healthy palms and a variety of landscaped lawn décor. It is in this way that money clothes its home. And there is safety, too. Where streets to the east are raw and perilous, the western mansions on the border of Hancock Park stand like ornaments adorning an oasis.
Jogging, even slowly, it takes just minutes to transition from one world to the next. Of course, a runner is a visitor: tolerated for a time, she is permitted only a passing glimpse of what life is like there. For the runner there is no participation, just peeks into other’s windows. The view shifts from awe to envy to unbearable intolerance and then an empty nothingness. It’s nothing much to talk about, it simply is. And we let it be, the balconies and fences and fancy cars. We let it all sit and instead say to ourselves, “At least there is the weather! This city may be one thing, but the weather is divine.”
brett at 12:49 PM on July 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)