January 30, 2019
Corona, California
Happy New Year to you, the few, the proud, the ones who are still following.
All right, let’s have a quick review. I started this thing more than nine years
ago, and called it Go West, Old Man. I
went west all right, then stayed there for seven years. Then I went east last June, back to
Michigan. Now Gretchen and I are back in
the west, staying at an RV park in Riverside County, at the foot of the
comparatively lush hills of the Cleveland National Forest.
But is the old man still walking? In a manner of speaking, yes. Not moving forward from one place to
another, exactly, but I have recently begun to walk in a somewhat dedicated way. There’s a thing on my iPhone that records the
steps taken while in possession of the phone.
Most of you are familiar with it I’m sure—it has a red heart on it and
keeps track of various bits of information about one's daily activities. The only activity I care about is
steps. Steps, people. For now, I’m trying to log 10,000 steps a
day. Like the original walk I took from
Michigan to California, this isn’t difficult, just time consuming and somewhat
tedious. It isn’t twenty miles a day, either, just a comparatively wimpy three-and-a half to four miles. I’ve been
dedicated to doing this since about last October, with mixed results, meaning
that I don’t always do it. In fact,
October was the only month in which I averaged more than 10,000 steps a day. But on the days when I don’t hit the mark,
I’m conscious of the fact that I haven’t.
And in keeping with the nature of resolutions generally, I’ve already allowed myself significant exceptions. One in particular is that on days when I do a full workout at the gym I don’t require myself to
walk all 10,000 steps. Often my
total on such days exceeds 5,000, but usually doesn’t reach the full
number. However, because I’ve worked
out, after all, and the point of walking all those steps is mostly to
get some exercise, I forgive myself the shortfall. Putting in a half hour on the elliptical
trainer machine (not counting the other stuff I do) doesn’t give me anywhere near the total
magic number of steps, but the steps I do take are qualitatively better, since I have jacked the incline and difficulty settings up to the max by the
time I’m about halfway through the thirty minutes, so I’m trudging uphill in a virtual way, sweating and huffing. You might be wondering why I don’t just get on a treadmill and walk the 10,000 steps that way. And well might you
ask that. My answer is that walking on a
treadmill is about as boring a way to walk as mankind has yet invented, not to mention rather hard on the legs and feet. I’ve done it a few times, but it just doesn’t
compare to walking on real flat ground past real trees and cars and
bushes and garbage. Walking on the elliptical
trainer, however, does become a bit more interesting the harder it gets, and
seems to be more fulfilling.
But even the accomplishment of 10,000 steps on real terra
firma can get tedious, especially by the third or fourth (not to mention the
tenth or twentieth) time one has taken a particular walk. In Pentwater, Michigan, where we live during
the spring, summer, and fall, I took to doing brisk evening walks through the
dark and empty streets of the village, often at ten o’clock or later, simply in
order to get the rest of the steps I needed for that day. (Walking from room to room all day with the phone in one's pocket accounts for a few thousand steps by itself.) I got to know the mean streets of Pentwater quite well, and knew pretty accurately how many
blocks I needed to go each way to get to my number.
With the iPod playing a mystery novel in my ears, I would walk from
street lamp to street lamp, from one 19th century timber baron's rehabilitated mansion to the next, often taking a quick look behind me for whatever
might be lurking—things that the protagonist of the book might be wondering
about, too. Listening to books worked, for the most
part, to relieve the tedium, and let me get some “reading” in at the same time.
Here in California I’ve walked the roads surrounding the RV
park where we’re staying, and have gone up into the modern subdivisions nearby,
but it hasn’t been as fulfilling, for some reason, as the walks around
Pentwater were. Over the holidays we had
occasion to be staying in Los Angeles for about ten days, and there I walked
the neighborhoods of the Mt. Washington and Highland Park areas of the
city, on what might be called the northeast side, near the Arroyo
Seco and the 110 freeway, for those of you who know the area. And what a dump that is. I mean, really ugly and litter-strewn and run
down. These descriptors could safely be
used to describe just about every part of Los Angeles, with a few minor
exceptions over on the west side.
Let me give you a little taste of my Los Angeles walking: Walking down the narrow streets at the foot of Mt. Washington toward Museum Drive as it slides into Marmion Way, one is struck by the narrow houses plastered haphazardly onto the hillsides. It's evocative of another world, and not the first or second worlds, either. Superficially it has the feel of a hillside village in southern France or Italy, only without the architectural integrity and respect for history of those places. There's no attempt to harmonize the styles of the buildings with their natural surroundings. The garishly colored eclectically designed houses haven't so much been built as they have been slapped up onto the sheer terraced inclines, with the hope that they'll stick. The streets in the neighborhoods are impossibly narrow and steep and could only exist in a climate that never sees freezing temperatures, and very little inclement weather of any kind. Like all parts of the city, it's better seen at night when the chaos and ignorance of the city planning is obscured by darkness and only glittering street lights show. It's the money view that movie makers use, usually from some vantage point high up in the Hollywood hills, on some place like Mulholland Drive, where the panorama of the city below resembles a vast and excessively busy airport landing strip. But down below, what comes to mind is what generally strikes one when driving through almost all of Los Angeles, namely that there is no integrity in this metropolis--no attempt to create something unified. To be sure, there are many ugly cities in the United States. But probably no large city has been built with such deliberate disregard for, and indeed violence to, the natural beauty that existed here before humans came in large numbers.
Down on Figueroa Avenue, one crosses the Arroyo Seco, a concrete flood control ditch running from Pasadena in the north to somewhere down in the old center of the city. Arroyo Seco is a charming Spanish name for what would, in English, probably be called Dry Gulch. Along the Arroyo Seco, skirted by a freeway on one side and train tracks on the other, are the tents and makeshift huts of the homeless, an interesting lot whose presence pervades the city and indeed the whole of Los Angeles County. They number in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands. Each newly-elected mayor promises to do something about the homeless problem, and each one fails spectacularly, although countless millions of dollars get appropriated and thrown at the situation in one way or another. A fairly large percentage of the money goes into the pockets of the people who do the "visioning" and the "planning." What filters down into the wretched depths of the problem itself is usually good money poured after bad, money spent with the best of intentions but that ignores the most important causes of the homelessness problem, in my opinion. The easy answer to the whole idea of homelessness is to think that the building of housing is the ticket. Just make cheap affordable places for people to live and they'll go live there and all will be well, the thinking goes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And not because that isn't a logically appropriate response to the idea. However, it simply overlooks the root causes of homelessness. Sure, a lack of affordable housing is part of the problem, but only a small one, and one whose amelioration would help only a tiny fraction of the homeless. We're not talking about refugees here, as in some other countries, simply waiting for their chance to enter our national mainstream. No, our homeless are home-grown, so to speak, folks who have fallen off the grid, and the majority of them are either mentally ill or drug- and alcohol-addicted, or a combination thereof. What the homeless of Los Angeles need (and I'm sure the same goes just about everywhere in the country) is long term mental health care and alcohol and drug treatment, things we have abandoned as a society because we think they're too expensive, and because older models (scary 19th century era mental hospitals) were too abusive to those they were meant to serve. We think that long-term confinement of such people is inhumane. Okay, agreed. But build them apartment buildings to live in and you simply create unsupervised nuthouses, crack houses, and flop houses. Build outdoor toilets to relieve public defecation and all you get is filthy and dangerous confined areas where rape and mayhem occur. Because the homeless tend to carry everything they own with them, and as a result tend to hoard and then discard, up and down Figueroa are piles of abandoned litter, clothing, and the remnants of salvaged food from dumpsters. The city apparently has higher budgetary priorities than to spend much time or money on picking up things from the street, and so it just accumulates in niches and ditches, like the homeless people themselves.
So that's a sample of my evening walks in Los Angeles, a city I would be happy never to have to set foot in again, not because of the homeless, but because it's a place that has been running from reality, or creating its own alternatives to reality, for the past one hundred years. It's one thing to walk through such a place, on the way to somewhere else, or in furtherance of a goal. It's something else altogether to swirl around in it day after day. But hey, the weather's nice.
All this is in furtherance of the 10,000 step goal. I think I got this idea from David Sedaris, who started walking around his home in the English countryside picking up litter. And Mr. Sedaris greatly exceeds the 10,000 step mark most of the time. How he finds time to write as much as he does, not to mention touring several hundred days a year, I don't know, but I tip my hat to him. I have no desire to pick up litter, which in any event would be a fool's errand on the mean streets of southern California. But emulating David Sedaris, even in a small way, is a worthy goal.
