Walmart Redux

Thursday, February 10, 2011

This afternoon I found a place to stay in the motor home in Azusa, at a small trailer park with a few spaces for RVs. It costs less than half as much as the nearest KOA, but then it's not exactly bucolic or charming. Just a place on the pavement with hookups for electricity, water, and sewer. It is ideally located for exploring the area, between the 10 and the 210, 23 miles from downtown L.A. and closer than that to many of the places I'll be visiting. As long as I make a point of staying off the freeways during rush hour everything should go smoothly.

Also this afternoon I visited the Upton Sinclair house in Monrovia. It turns out it's not a museum, just an attractive, privately-owned residence with plaques in front stating that it's a National Historical Landmark. Having listened to The Jungle on my walk I was interested in seeing where he had lived, although he didn't move there until years after The Jungle made him famous. He moved to Monrovia in the 1920s, and during the years he lived in the particular house I saw, 1944 to 1966, he was writing miscellaneous fiction for which he's barely remembered at all, including some of the fourteen books in his now-forgotten, but then best-selling Lanny Budd series. In fact, of his over 90 books only maybe The Jungle and Oil!, recently made into the movie There Will Be Blood, are still read much today. Some of his other works have intriguing titles, though, like The Wet Parade, The Enemy Had it Too, and Damaged Goods. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

I've spoken of Walmart so many times that I thought I'd do a little wrap up on it. As of the official end of the journey I had stayed overnight in Walmart parking lots for a total of 189 nights at 85 separate locations, in all thirteen of the states I've walked through from Michigan to California.

Over the year and a half since I stayed at that first one back in South Haven, Michigan, I have become quite fond of Walmart, and it has been good to me. I won't insult my readers by trying to extol the virtues of this cut-rate retailer. It's true that as an employer it offers low-paying deadend jobs for the most part. And it's true that it stoutly resists unionization of its employees. As a right-thinking (or rather left-thinking) person, I deplore these truths on general principles. But look, half of the jobs in this country are low paying and deadend, and a lot more than half are nonunion. So boo-hoo and Solidarity Forever. Those who seek social justice from a purveyor of low-cost, foreign made household goods might be barking up the wrong tree. On a broader front, unless and until full socialism along Marxist lines is realized in this country (which will definitely occur when monkeys fly out my butt), the basic wrinkles in the fabric of American economic life aren't going to be ironed out anyway.

Despite its drawbacks, Walmart does have this one bit of charm and generosity that virtually no other nationwide retailer has, namely its unspoken but open invitation to travelers to use its parking lots as refuges on the unarmed road of flight, as it were.

I do have a problem, not with Walmart itself but with those who report on it. Throughout the journey I've consulted sites on the internet that list Walmart locations. If you Google "Walmart in California," for instance, you'll get two or more of these sites. They are very helpful in pinpointing the exact locations of the stores. They also contain information about whether overnight parking is permitted, and here is where I take issue to some extent with their advice. Probably a third of the Walmarts where I have stayed have been listed as locations where "users say no overnight parking," based either on inquiries to the stores themselves or on the existence of local ordinances prohibiting RV camping in such places. I have read that the proper protocol for parking at any Walmart is to call ahead to the store and ask if it's okay to park there overnight. At first blush that would indeed seem like the sensible and polite thing to do. But I believe many RVers have been misled by posted signs or by the "users say" notations on the internet sites. For instance, in West Lafayette, Indiana, I woke up on my second morning at a Walmart right under a sign that said overnight parking was prohibited by local ordinance. In New Mexico one of the Walmarts I stayed at had a separate section unofficially reserved for motor homes in which over twenty of us were parked on the night I was there, clustered together like a wagon train or a reunion of old Canadian cheapskates. On each of the lightposts in that lot was a sign clearly stating that overnight parking was verboten.

My readers know that when I reached southern California I ran into a couple of Walmart glitches for the first time. In Redlands I was advised to park on the street next to the Walmart parking lot, but not in the lot itself, because of the cops. Then in Upland the parking lot security guard warned me that the police would ticket me and make me leave if I tried to stay all night. In both these cases the guards were sympathetic and assured me that Walmart didn't mind if I stayed. I believe them. I also believe that if I'd stayed put in all likelihood nothing would have happened.

With these two notable exceptions, throughout my journey I was never turned away from a Walmart parking lot or told to leave--by management, police, or private security guards. With that in mind, I would ask my readers to trust the advice I am about to give. Here it is: ALWAYS assume you can park overnight in a Walmart parking lot. Find an unobtrusive spot at a far corner of the lot that isn't in the way of automobile or truck traffic. If you value darkness and quiet during your sleep, try not to park under a light, and don't park near semis, which tend to idle their stinking engines all night long. DO NOT ask the management of Walmart if you can park there. They may be obliged to tell you no because of local ordinances or police guidelines. REST ASSURED that the overarching policy of the Walmart chain is what really matters, and their policy is to allow RVers to park overnight in peace and to leave them alone. NEVER underestimate the general indifference of the public, the management, or security personnel to your presence. If by chance you are told to leave a Walmart, do not let that experience put you off--it's an aberration. Try again at the next Walmart you come to. And there's usually another one just down the road.

I still don't know exactly what would motivate a town or county to pass an ordinance prohibiting overnight parking in large otherwise unused parking lots, but I have a couple of ideas. One is that such ordinances are aimed primarily at semi trucks, which are perceived as noisy and noisome, as indeed they can be. But Walmart parking lots are usually not right next to residential areas, so I can't see where even gatherings of trucks would bother anybody. These places almost always have enough room for double the number of vehicles that are in their lots at their busiest times, so I don't think it's a matter of freeing up space for shoppers. It may be that there's an atavistic anti-gypsy sentiment at play here, going back to our European roots--the fear of The Other I've spoken of so many times. To some prim and respectable city fathers and mothers the thought of hobos and wayfarers drifting through town and polluting their otherwise classy Walmarts and Targets and Home Depots with their caravans might be frightening. This despite the fact that many of the motor homes I've seen parked at Walmart cost as much as the nearest house.

My own purely unscientific conclusion is that many laws on the books, from those banning parking in certain places to those prohibiting the sale or use of various intoxicating substances, simply have no basis in rational thought or practical application.

Day 173: The Highway Walkingest Man

Hollywood to Pacific Palisades. 15.8 miles/3339.6 total Tuesday, February 7, 2011 The last day. Today I will begin my narrative before I begin walking. It is 7:21 a.m. and I am departing for the freeway in Duarte. I have to get on the 210, take it back east to the 605, and take that to the 10, which will carry me through fantastic L.A. and out the other side to Santa Monica, where I’ll get on the Pacific Coast Highway, California Route 1, and go north for a couple of miles to Will Rogers State Beach. In case anybody wonders, when driving a motor home pulling a dolly carrying a car, an important thing to remember is to make wide turns at intersections and in parking lots, and to be sure there’s plenty of room behind you when changing lanes. It takes some getting used to, but when you consider how many old farts are loose on the highways driving things much bigger than this, it’s not difficult. I’ve had no more problems at Walmart since Upland, but after tonight I’m going to begin looking for a more permanent mooring place for the motor home, perhaps until the end of February. My old friend I-10 will be my companion this morning. I’ve been traveling on or near it for much of the time since the middle of New Mexico, and before that it was with me through parts of Texas and Louisiana. First off, though, I’m on I-605, going south through Irwindale. I get a good look at all the gravel pits from up here, and can readily see how little else there is in the town. Of course they need places like Irwindale everywhere, to turn big rocks into little ones, for gravel and aggregate for concrete, as well as for trap rock, rip rap, and all the other gradations of stone. In fact, Irwindale stone is probably in most of the many miles of concrete roads in Los Angeles County, so the mark of this tiny place on the area is indelible. To put it mildly, I’m not the only person going into Los Angeles on I-10. Within a mile of getting on it I’m in wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper traffic across six lanes. It feels as though all the cars I’ve ever seen on this interstate for the past 2,000 miles have converged at this spot. After 20 minutes of slow and go, things pick up for a few minutes and I get up to 55 mph as I round a bend and enter L.A. I can see the cluster of tall buildings that is the skyline of the city. I suddenly see signs saying I’m on the 101, and I momentarily think I’ve taken a wrong turn, so I get off the freeway. This is a mistake, since I now see from the map that the 101 and the 10 merge and that I was okay all along. But it affords me the opportunity to take a slow trip around the center of the city. Finally, through the dumb luck I'm often blessed with to offset my bad judgment, I find my way back onto the 10, and now I’m west of downtown. Again the traffic is light, but soon it starts to get heavy and stop and go as I approach Santa Monica. At 9:07, one hour and 46 minutes after I left, I arrive on the PCH. But hell, traffic is part of the experience of living in this area, so why shouldn’t I have it, too? Now I have to drive from here back up to Hollywood to begin the walk.

10:16 a.m. I’m setting out from the parking lot of Trader Joe’s on Santa Monica Boulevard and Greenacre in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, heading through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, then through the high rent districts of Bel Air and environs, ending at the ocean in Pacific Palisades. This end of Hollywood is strictly business, where people live, walk their dogs, and drink coffee. I soon cross into West Hollywood, which is a separate municipality abutting Beverly Hills. Together these two cities are surrounded by Los Angeles. Just like Hamtramck and Highland Park are surrounded by Detroit, except, well, different. West Hollywood, a city of about 35,000, is predominantly gay, although so far I’ve seen nothing but old Russian immigrant husbands and wives—short people hobbling down the sidewalks speaking in tongues. There are numerous little grocery stores apparently run by Russians, too. At Sweetzer I pass the West Hollywood City Hall, a nondescript modern building about a block long. Santa Monica Boulevard, by the way, is historic Route 66, so I’ve found my way back to that. 

On down Santa Monica I go, past La Cienega, past coffee shops, past drug stores, past health and beauty stores, past places with male mannequins dressed only in thongs, past shirtless handsome boys, past people taking clean cars to get them washed, past busy Latin Americans tending to bushes and trees, past small men walking small dogs. At 2.9 miles on this warm morning I enter Beverly Hills. And yes, you can immediately tell the difference. Gone are the businesses that thickly line Santa Monica. Now there’s a broad shady linear park on one side of the street. Plenty of benches for the homeless to sleep on in relative coolness and comfort. The streets and avenues are filled with the kinds of houses you’d expect. Nobody has exaggerated the level of affluence in this town. Nevertheless there is a range of income here, from moderately wealthy at the low end to fabulously wealthy at the top. The internet says the average home price is $2.2 million. At the corner of Santa Monica and Rexford, sitting up there like a smooth white western Kremlin, is the Beverly Hills City Hall, together with the police department and library. The original part of this architectural gem was built in 1931 in what is called the Italian Renaissance style, with lots of frilly rococo concrete scroll work around the windows and doors against a white background. But I see elements of Art Deco and Spanish colonial, too. I go inside to visit, and although there’s a small rotunda on the second floor the building is best viewed from the outside, with its tower rising about eight floors above the first two.

South of where I’m walking is the central shopping district of Beverly Hills. If I look that way I can just see that bank where Mr. Drysdale works and where Jed Clampett has his millions. And isn't that Miss Hathaway? At Rodeo Drive I head south for a couple of blocks to look for a Diet Coke and some of those two-for-a-dollar bags of peanuts I’m so fond of. Some of you might have thought I was kidding about the peanuts and Coke on Rodeo Drive, but I did find a Rite Aid drug store a block off of Rodeo with both those items. Fortified with supplies for the next few miles I strike north on Wilshire, up and out of the city and back into Los Angeles. This isn't the mean streets where Rodney King was brutalized or even where the hopefully untalented come to have that fact made brutally clear to them; it's the Los Angeles of the well-established rich and famous. To my left loom several gigantic bank buildings and ahead is the Beverly Hilton Hotel, a remarkably ugly place, looking more like a hospital than a hotel. Unfortunate 50s or early 60s style. On the other side of the street is the continuation of the linear park and an Art Deco fountain with a yellowish gold cast, depicting a kneeling Tongva Indian.

At Beverly Glen I turn off Wilshire and strike north into the hills past more mansions. At Sunset Boulevard I turn left. I’ll be taking Sunset for most of the rest of the walk today. It runs up and down hills, curving around through lots more rich neighborhoods, going past the UCLA campus, winding its way to the sea. Bel Air, where I am at 6.5 miles, is a district of Los Angeles, as are Westwood and Brentwood and Holmby Hills, other neighborhoods up here past Beverly Hills. Up by the 405 intersection the Getty Center stands high up on a hill, another museum on my list. At Woodburn and Sunset, I think I’m now in Brentwood.

It’s time for a statistical wrap up for California. I came into this state on January 13 and walked 272.4 miles here over 14 days, averaging 19.5 miles per day. California is my 13th state. Though filled with an abundance of nearly everything, in some of the areas known to my readers California has been remarkably deficient. The road kill, even in the vast desert spaces, was paltry. I ended up recording only 5 dogs, 5 cats, 3 rabbits, 2 birds, one raccoon, and one bobcat. I received only one ride offer other than a few inquiries from policemen, and found only four measly pennies on the road. At the end of today I will have walked 3339.6 miles over 173 days, an average of 19.3 miles per day. I will have taken about 6,680,000 steps since I left my front door in Cedar Springs, Michigan. How many churches, liquor stores, barking dogs, refuseniks, and cemeteries I’ve seen God only knows. I left on September 8, 2009 and am finishing 17 months to the day later.

I am told, and have no reason not to believe it, that there are very few wealthy people in relation to the number of middle income and poor people in this country. Nevertheless I am impressed here in southern California by how damn many rich people there are. Who lives in all these houses? Where does the money come from? They can't all be movie stars or business magnates, or even lucky hillbillies who find bubblin' crude when they're shootin' at some food. At about 10 miles I pass Bundy Drive. This is the street on which Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death back in 1994. O.J. still hasn't found the guy who did it, but he's currently looking for him in a Nevada prison. 

My more delicate readers will wish to skip this paragraph. One of the things I’ve done several times each day of the walk is to urinate outdoors—in cornfields, behind buildings and trees and bushes, off a bridge over the Mississippi River once, and sometimes in the middle of the road. When going through settled areas I use facilities in gas stations and museums and train stations and other public places, like a non-rock star should, but for the most part when nature calls I make for the nearest sheltered spot outdoors. I laugh at the idea of 1.6 gallons per flush, or even of the so-called flushless urinal. Pissing outdoors means never having to flush, and never having to look down at a plastic thing that says "Don't do drugs." In that spirit I take what may be the last pee of the journey behind a large sycamore tree here in Brentwood. I whiz as the traffic whizzes by.

At Billie Bob’s suggestion I’ve given some consideration to what music I’ll listen to in the latter part of the day here. I’ve decided to dance with the girl that brung me, so to speak. I go with the song that inspired me in the first place, “Key to the Highway.” So I’ve loaded nine versions of it into the iPod—two by Big Bill Broonzy, the man who is credited with writing it along with Charlie Segar; two by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry along with Big Bill Broonzy; three by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry only; one by Brownie McGhee only; and one, the Excalibur of all renditions, by Eric Clapton from the Derek and the Dominoes album. There are many other recorded versions, but that's all I have available. They all start out this way, more or less:

         I got the key to the highway, billed out and bound to go.

         I got to leave here running because walking’s most too slow.

         I’m going back to the border, where I’m better known,

         You know you ain’t doing nothing but driving a good man away from home. 

After that, variations abound. Some talk about Texas, some about other specific parts of the country, some about certain highways. I play all nine, enjoying the differences and the similarities. For the music my favorite is Clapton’s version, but lyrically the best one is a recording of Brownie McGhee by himself, after his old partner Sonny had passed on, which contains this bit:

        From the Golden Gate of San Francisco to the rocky shores of Maine

        I’ve walked the highway so long till the highway is my middle name.

        I’ll eat my breakfast in your city, I may get my dinner in New Orleans,

        I’m the highway walkingest man the world have ever seen.

I’ve gone about 13 miles now, and I’m nearing the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles. Down one hill and up another and I’m in the last two miles. I come to a downtown and a bustling business district that comprise Pacific Palisades. I stop at a gas station for one last Diet Coke. I'd like to mention a few things that have stood me in good stead on this journey. One is my tiny white Olympus digital voice recorder, not much bigger than a cigarette lighter, which runs on one AAA battery. Another is my Canon PowerShot SD780 IS camera, another small device that has been with me the whole time. I've probably taken 6,000 pictures with it so far. Then there's my iPod Shuffle, filled with tunes and recorded books. Oh, and the St. Christopher refrigerator magnet I picked up in New Iberia, Louisiana. And I especially want to thank my family and friends and all the loyal blog followers who have encouraged me to keep going. Without the knowledge of your presence and support I most certainly would not have gotten this far. Most of all I want to thank the Academy.... 

At 14.8 miles I turn left off Sunset onto Temescal Canyon Road for the last mile of the walk. On the way down the hill I pass Pacific Palisades High School, home of the Dolphins. After a bend in the road the Pacific Ocean comes into view. I am reminded that back in Cairo, Illinois in the fall of 2009 I crossed the path of Lewis and Clark and their intrepid company. When they reached the Pacific in November 1805, Clark penned these words: “Ocean in view! O! The Joy!” About a quarter of a mile from the water I reach the motor home, parked here on Temescal Canyon Road. But that’s not my destination now. I go beyond it down to the Pacific Coast Highway, cross the road and enter Will Rogers State Beach.

I’ve got another fifty yards of sand to traverse now. The smell of salt fills my nose. Far down to my left I can just make out Santa Monica Pier with its ferris wheel in the afternoon mist. Suddenly I realize that this is it. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pantlegs, and step into the cold Pacific. Journey's end, at 4:22 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. So I let my feet dry and wipe off the sand and put my socks and shoes back on. After resting for a few minutes on a bench overlooking the water I cross PCH and trudge back up to the motor home. Put a fork in this sucker, it's done. As I walk these final steps I think of the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. Today didn’t end with a bang, but then again it didn’t end with a whimper. After all, it’s not the end of the world. Just the end of the journey.

Day 172: Los Angeles

Pasadena to Hollywood. 16 miles/3323.8 total

Monday, February 7, 2011

9:40 a.m. I’m leaving from Euclid and Bellevue in Pasadena, heading for Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a distance of 16 miles. I have chosen to divide the last two days into two relatively short walks, in part because the traffic is intense here and cuts into the time, and also because there’s so much to see in the city.

This is it; I’m getting right down to it. It took me the better part of the afternoon yesterday to drive out these walks, snaking through Los Angeles, and I’m glad I decided to do it in advance, because it would have consumed far too much time had I tried to do it in the morning before I started.

I’ve abandoned the walking vest in favor of a somewhat more urbane lightweight jacket, which still has its share of pockets. I’ll have no need to carry extra water or supplies—almost every street corner has something to offer.

It should get up into the mid-70s today under typically cloudless skies, a beautiful day for walking.

Once I get back on Colorado Boulevard I turn left, and within two blocks I’m past the downtown section, going uphill. I pass the Norton Simon Museum, which I've heard has a very fine collection. I will visit during the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned beyond the end of tomorrow, as I’ll be reporting on a few things here in southern California.

At about two miles into the walk I cross the Colorado Street Bridge, high over a gorge and a river. It was built during the first half of the last century when things were a little less purely utilitarian and automobile-centered than they are today, and features attractive light posts with globes and sidewalks on both sides complete with benches where you can sit and watch the cars go by. This attention to pedestrian detail is a vestige of a time when many more people walked around than they do today.

Over my right shoulder the mountains are dotted about halfway up with houses. For a mile or two I remain in Pasadena, but when I get to Figueroa Street I see a post office that says Los Angeles. So it’s official.

I’m in the area called Eagle Rock. Like many large municipalities Los Angeles is made up of lots of small communities that have been incorporated into the larger city. Eagle Rock is part of L.A., as are Hollywood and Bel Air, for example, through which I will be walking.

I pass the Oinkster Restaurant, advertising hamburgers, pastrami, and chicken, but where’s the oink? I go by the First Congregational Church, organized in 1887, now the Los Angeles Filipino American U.C.C. church.

I think my readers will understand that I can’t possibly describe in detail, or do justice to, a city like Los Angeles, nor do I wish to walk through the whole thing. I’ll be going through the nicer northern edges on my march to the sea. At any rate, my own description of the city wouldn’t add much to what’s already been said about it.

At 4.8 miles I turn left on Eagle Rock Road, heading more or less south. It’s a street of small older shops that exist to serve the local population. The dogwoods are blooming and it feels like spring here.

At 6.8 miles I strike over to Fletcher on Avenue 36, and at 7.6 miles I’m going up San Fernando in the direction of Los Feliz. I’ve temporarily left L.A. and entered Glendale, a city of about 210,000 which is filled with Armenians—social clubs, churches, stores, all with signs in English and a Semitic-looking script that I assume is Armenian. The name Ararat seems to show up frequently. Serious-looking old bald men and short women walk the streets.

At 8.7 miles I turn left onto Los Feliz and soon re-enter the City of Los Angeles. I'll mention here that L.A. is the second most populous city in the U.S. with over 4 million people. It was officially begun in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula--the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River. The river has been renamed the Los Angeles River and the name has been shortened considerably.

I put the iPod on and play “L.A. Woman” by the Doors. Soon I cross I-5 and begin to go by Griffith Park. At the front of the park there’s a statue, and I go over to investigate. It’s Griffith Jenkins Griffith, 1850-1919, after whom the park was named. Griffith was born in Wales and came to this country at the age of 15, eventually making his way to the west coast, first to San Francisco and later to L.A. He made a fortune as a mining expert. In 1896 he and his wife donated over 3,000 acres of their 4,000 acre estate here in Los Feliz to the city.

In 1903 Colonel Griffith, as he was known (although there’s no record of his ever having been in the military), shot his wife at the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica, as she knelt in front of him. She wasn’t killed, but lost an eye and was disfigured. At the trial it came out that Griffith was a heavy drinker and suffered from paranoid delusions. He was sentenced to two years in San Quentin and his wife divorced him. He got out of prison and lived for another 13 years. When he died he left 1.5 million dollars to the city for the construction of the Greek Theater and the Griffith Observatory here in the park. I suspect, but cannot prove, that his having the same first and last names led to his unbalanced behavior. Like Sirhan Sirhan, Humbert Humbert, or Louie Louie, this does not bode well. Something to consider when naming your child.

As I head up Los Feliz the apartments and houses get more luxurious, and many are large Spanish-style structures dating from the middle of the 20th century. It’s hilly and shady and well-settled and affluent. What magnificent houses they are here in the hills above Hollywood. Wrought iron gates and multiple luxury cars abound. Latin American gardeners, landscapers, and nannies wait on the white man.

I tumble downhill past another entrance to Griffith Park, and at 12.3 miles Los Feliz takes a sharp turn to the left and becomes Western Avenue. I’m heading south. At 12.6 miles I turn right onto Hollywood Boulevard. I pass a mural of a young Johnny Cash painted on the side of a building. With his slick fifties hair and weak pouting mouth Johnny looks like a gay hustler who would be right at home on the streets of Hollywood.

Every now and then at an intersection I catch a glimpse of the famous Hollywood sign up on the mountain to the north of the freeway. I arrive at the Museum of Death and go in. The guy inside says it takes about an hour to go through it, so I put it on my list for later. The Museum of Death is a collection dedicated to the horrors of death in all their forms—executioner’s and undertaker’s instruments, gory police photos, serial killer memorabilia, dead celebrity stuff.

On the iPod is playing a great Hollywood song, Warren Zevon’s “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.”

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup.
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lying,
All the salty Margaritas in Los Angeles
I’m gonna drink ‘em up.

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will,
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill.

Don’t the sun look angry through the trees.
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves.
Don’t you feel like desperadoes under the eaves,
Heaven help the one who leaves…..

Look away down Gower Avenue, look away….

At Gower I begin seeing the stars of the Hollywood walk of fame. Unlike in Palm Springs, I recognize most of these names. Pinky Lee, Vincent Price, Tallulah Bankhead, Bob Hope, Milton Berle.

As I’m standing at the corner of Hollywood and Vine about to take a picture of Kirk Douglas's star a guy comes up to me and starts talking. “That’s my buddy, Kirk Douglas, man, I was named after him.” I nod appreciatively and say "Really?" and he says, “You probably don’t believe me, but I was.” He pulls out a wallet and fishes out his New York driver’s license, which says his name is Kirk D. Ferguson. I say, “Cool,” but he’s not satisfied with himself yet. He probes around in the wallet again. “I have to find you something that has my middle name.” He pulls out his VA card, and sure enough his full name is Kirk Douglas Ferguson.

I ask him if I can take his picture with Kirk Douglas’s star and he obliges, but the shot doesn’t get the star, just him. Then he sidles up to me and starts to tell me that he got charged double by the bus company for his fare out here from New York, blah blah blah, and do I have any money I could spare. But in his wallet, with all that I.D., was a decent-sized wad of bills. Rookie mistake, I'm thinking. So I say to him, “Hey, I just walked across the country. I should be asking you for some money.” He chuckles nervously, recognizing that it’s a standoff. No donation from me to the Kirk Douglas Ferguson exchequer. I wave and smile and move on. In my photo you’ll notice that he’s looking off to his left, eyeing the next person down the line, trying to stay one move ahead.

There are so many people trying to get my money and so many stores selling cheesy merchandise that I realize I’ll have to come down here again to spread it around at more leisure. And just like the panhandlers and the souvenir shops, I notice that the stars on the sidewalk are repeating themselves. I think I’ve seen Vincent Price three times already.

I pass a Scientology museum or store of some kind, where a silver-haired guy wonders if I'd like to come in and take a personality test. In his short-sleeved white shirt and black tie he looks like a senior member of the Geek Squad. As Jack Nicholson said in As Good as it Gets, “Sell crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here.”

I’m on the other side of the street now to see if there are any different stars on the sidewalk. Of course there are tons of them. They never stop. To give you a general impression of the heart of Hollywood Boulevard, picture a succession of lingerie and sex toy shops and souvenir stores and lots of pictures of movie stars together with some gigantic neon signs. Sprinkle in fascinated tourists with cameras, bored foreign-born proprietors standing on the sidewalk, and trashy-looking locals of all genders.

I stop at the Chinese Theater to see the hand- and footprints in the cement and snap a few photos. A tour bus rolls up and a bunch of Chinese people get out and assemble on the sidewalk while their tour guide tells them, in Chinese, about the Chinese Theater. They nod seriously and take lots of pictures.

At La Brea I turn left and head down to Sunset, where I turn right and walk to Poinsettia. Here I cut south again, zigzagging my way along. The noise of the wide east-west streets disappears and I’m in a shady neighborhood of craftsman-style frame houses--I guess what you’d call Hollywood bungalows.

Well I just got into town about an hour ago,
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow,
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light,
Or just another lost angel….

Poinsettia comes to Santa Monica Boulevard and about a block west the motor home sits in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s supermarket.

Day 171: Go Granny Go

Glendora to Pasadena. 20 miles/3307.8 total

Saturday, February 5, 2011

9:26 a.m. I am heading out from the parking lot at the corner of Amelia and Foothill in beautiful Glendora, heading west in the direction of Pasadena, a distance of 20 miles.

High wispy clouds in the sky today, heading up to about 70.

The biggest challenge so far today, and the reason I’m getting off to a late start, was finding a parking place for the motor home in downtown Pasadena. Finally I asked a policeman and he suggested I go down to a residential section with no meters and try my luck there, which I duly did. Now I just hope I can remember where I left the damn thing. Dude, where’s my motor home?

The Route 66 signs still abound on various businesses. In fact, I think Foothill is called Route 66, officially, here in Glendora. But in general the U.S. highway shield with the 66 on it is more of a business logo than anything else.

Glendora appears to be well-balanced on either side of middle income, with lots of older housing stock dating from the 1960s, along with a sprinkling of newer stuff. Tall, muscular gray eucalyptus trees rise 50 or 60 feet out of the median. Trailer parks abound.

I stop to get a cappuccino in Glendora, about an hour into the walk. At 3.5 miles, crossing Barranca Avenue, I enter Azusa. There’s a college here, Azusa Pacific University. The foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains loom large in the northern distance.

At 4.6 miles I come to the Azusa Foothill Drive-In Theater, or its sign anyway. Now it looks as if the land belongs to Azusa Pacific University. The road takes a turn to the left and straightens out to run due west again.

The name Azusa has obscure origins, probably coming from an Indian word. Jack Benny used to have a joke that it stood for “Everything from A to Z in the U.S.A.” At Dalton Street I reach what I believe is the political center of the city, the very handsome City Hall and Civic Center and Senior Center, done in the Spanish colonial style, off white, with a tiled roof and a beautifully manicured front lawn. It looks like the home of a Latin American drug lord.

In its westernmost reaches Azusa flattens out into a series of warehouses and office parks. The next town I enter, at 6.6 miles, is Irwindale. This one I know nothing about. Azusa at least I’d heard of, from the jokes on the Jack Benny show and Bugs
Bunny cartoons.

An interesting thing about Irwindale, amid these communities of tens and even hundreds of thousands, is that it has a very low population—only 1,446 in 2000. The city consists almost entirely of rock quarries, which are its main source of income. I pass the Vulcan Materials plant immediately on entering the city. It's a city of gravel pits, but also based on some signs I see, of landfills. They made money digging the holes, now they're making money filling them up.

Off in the distance to the south is a Miller Beer brewery. Past one of the quarries I cross the San Gabriel River, fed by runoff from the mountains to the north. There’s also a recreational area here, with a bike path, probably reclaimed from some industrial use. This river is flowing better than any large river I’ve seen in the west since beginning the walk again in October.

Next I enter Duarte, which bills itself as The City of Health for some reason. It’s a city of about 22,000. Down the road from me is the Duarte Historical Museum. I’ll put that on my list of things to see after I’m done with the entire walk. That list is growing. Duarte has a lot of apartment complexes on both sides of the road, lots of big shade trees on the sidewalks. The San Gabriel Mountains sweep up majestically to the north. Old Route 66 road here is called Huntington Boulevard.

The banners that hang from the streetlights don’t merely heap adulation on members of the military, they name graduates of Duarte High School who are going on to college, as well, and put the colleges they’re going to on the banners. The banners are in pairs, and I look up to see side-by-side Jesuses, each going to different colleges.

It has developed into a warm day. At Huntington and Calle Andres I come to a statue of Andres Avelino Duarte, 1805-1863, on horseback. He joined the Mexican Army in 1821 and was eventually assigned to Mission San Gabriel, somewhere around here. When he retired the government gave him 7,000 acres. Following the Mexican War and the transfer of the area to the U.S., Duarte began selling off his land to the Anglos and it became parts of the present day cities of Duarte, Bradbury, Monrovia, Azusa, Arcadia, Irwindale, and Baldwin Park.

Not long after I cross Buena Vista Street, at 9.6 miles, I leave Duarte and enter Monrovia. Monrovia’s piece of Huntington is pretty busy. I pass a place called Genzyme Genetics, which looks like the place where Arnold Schwartzenegger and Danny DeVito became embryonic twins in that movie.

Monrovia’s charming downtown, which I have driven through, lies a few blocks to the north of Huntington. The town has a population of around 36,000. A guy named William N. Monroe bought some of Andres Duarte’s land, and eventually the town was named for him. At the time of incorporation, in 1887, it was established as a dry town by some prohibitionists. Upton Sinclair lived here at some point, and his house is now a landmark, which I plan to visit after the journey is over.

Monrovia honors both its high school graduates who go on to college, as Duarte does, and its young members of the military, though at least it doesn’t insult everyone’s intelligence by calling them heroes. I suppose it’s the little products of the propaganda machine, like the fawning banners, that help to maintain support for and fuel our country’s permanent volunteer imperialist army, fighting endless wars to maintain the Pax Americana, propped up heroically by stable dictatorships all over the world.

Now here’s an interesting tidbit. In 1937, Patrick McDonald opened a restaurant at the now-defunct Monrovia Airport called the “Aerodrome,” at the corner of Huntington and Mayflower. It featured ten cent hamburgers and all-you-can-drink orange juice for five cents. In 1940, Patrick and his two sons, Maurice and Richard, moved the entire building forty miles east to San Bernardino, where they renamed it McDonald’s. The rest is history. So Monrovia can lay claim, in a way, to being the birthplace, or perhaps the father, of McDonald’s restaurants.

Huntington in Monrovia is very busy. I cross under I-210, and at 12.2 miles I enter Arcadia, where things become noticeably quieter. Arcadia is an upscale-looking place, shady, reminding me a little of Birmingham, Michigan.

Arcadia in its modern incarnation was founded by a guy named Elias Jackson Baldwin, known as “Lucky,” who bought a good deal of land around here in 1875, exclaiming when he saw it, “By Gad! This is paradise!”

Like everywhere else in Los Angeles County, Arcadia was once, and for thousands of years, the home of the Tongva Indians, who apparently still exist here and there. When the Spanish came they established Catholicism at the San Gabriel Mission and put the Indians under their control. But the worm turned again, and the area passed into Anglo hands, where it essentially remains today, although there is a decent-sized Asian population here. Up until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1965, there was city ordinance in Arcadia mandating that all sales of property be to white Protestants. And perhaps not coincidentally, James Dobson founded his fascist front organization Focus on the Family here in 1977, although it later moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Rounding out this parade of ignominy, the Santa Anita racetrack was used as an internment center for Japanese Americans during World War II for about a year and a half, until the prisoners were shipped further into the interior.

I turn right to head north a few blocks to Colorado Boulevard, because I know that will be the main street of Pasadena and the continuation of old Route 66. At Santa Anita I turn left onto Colorado, passing the Mandarin Baptist Church. After going near the Santa Anita Park racetrack, I walk through a long residential corridor with no sidewalks, finally arriving at Rosemead Boulevard. I know I’m in Pasadena, though I’m not sure exactly when I got here.

Colorado Boulevard, lined with tall palm trees, is a very busy urban byway. This street, or a portion of it further to the west at least, is the route of the Tournament of Roses Parade. I’m wearing my Michigan hat, representing, mindful that the University of Michigan has played in more Rose Bowl games—20—than any other school except the Pac 10’s own USC, which has been there 33 times. Not that we’ve won a whole lot of them, but even our eight victories is the second most, after USC’s 24 wins. Here’s hoping we'll be back here soon.

I also can’t help thinking about the immortal Jan and Dean song “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,” also covered by the Beach Boys.

And everybody’s sayin' that there’s nobody meaner
Than the little old lady from Pasadena.
She drives real fast and she drives real hard,
She’s the terror of Colorado Boulevard.

My sense of anticipation is building, as I’m now in the last city before I enter Los Angeles. I pass probably the fiftieth person I've seen dressed as the Statue of Liberty, attempting to wave people in to get their income tax filings done.

On the west side of Sunnyslope, extremely large mature ficus trees begin to line the boulevard. Pasadena is a city of about 145,000, but gives the impression of being larger than that, and certainly is more mature and turned out than some of the more populous suburbs behind me to the east. It’s the home to several colleges and universities, including Cal Tech, and also has the Norton Simon Museum, which is on my list of things to see after the walk is finished. And of course there’s the Rose Bowl, which is the home field of the UCLA Bruins. Of the many famous people who are listed in Wikipedia as being from Pasadena very few were actually born here. Julia Child is one who was. Another, I’m sorry to say, is Sally Field.

At 17 miles I reach Altadena Street and gradually the ficus trees give way. I pass Pasadena City College, a modern-looking collection of white buildings, and across the street an old Baptist Church, in the classic Greek-influenced early 20th century style. In spite of the fact that California was visited by Europeans long before the English came to the east coast of the country, I think it’s fair to say that this area isn’t known for a long history of distinctive and enduring architecture. Late Victorian is considered really old around here. The reason for this is in part that the Spanish and Mexicans considered this to be a backwater at the northern reaches of their empire, and didn’t settle it with nearly the enthusiasm that they did the areas further south. They had governors and sent missionaries to tame the Indians, to be sure, but it wasn’t until the Anglos came that things really took off. Los Angeles, for instance, had 1,600 residents in 1850, 11,000 in 1880, and 102,000 in 1900.

At 18.9 miles I come to Lake Avenue. I’m now in the middle of downtown. Up at Los Robles I turn left and head down into the shady neighborhood where I know I’m parked somewhere. The last few days of walking, starting from Redlands, have been characterized by urban walking, mostly on sidewalks, interrupted frequently by large intersections where I sometimes have to wait for the lights to change. Those buttons you push to get the “walk” signal come in several different shapes and sizes. The one in the photo above is probably the most interesting I’ve seen so far.

At Green Street I cut down a block and start walking south on shady and ever-narrowing Euclid. In a few blocks I find the motor home, waiting patiently like a good motor home should, parked across the street from the Mayfield Junior School of the Holy Child Jesus, near Bellevue Street.

Day 170: Whoa

Fontana to Glendora. 19.7 miles/3287.8 total

Friday, February 3, 2011

8:40 a.m. I leave the WinCo supermarket parking lot on Foothill in Fontana, heading west for 19.7 miles to Glendora.

It’s another cloudless day, with faint brown haze in the western distance. The temperature is in the high 40s, expected to get into the mid-60s

Things are looking pretty chipper down here at the western end of Fontana, although the last vestiges of a once more modest past remain, like this little pink stucco ten-room motel now used as permanent housing.

At 1.4 miles I enter Rancho Cucamonga, a city whose name I have always enjoyed saying. It’s a big one, with about 177,000 people. Another very densely populated chunk of pure suburban living. I think the “Rancho” is a recent addition to the name, although there was no doubt a rancho before there was a town, but adding that may have been an attempt to make it sound a little less silly, and less like “Kowabunga.”

There’s no denying the homogeneity of these instant neighborhoods, even when the builders give a small nod in the direction of variety by making them slightly different colors and in several different basic styles. The need for housing and the tremendous popularity of these areas, accessible by freeway to Los Angeles but far enough out to have a little character of their own, just fuels the growth. And these new neighborhoods serve another important function: they give people in older, shadier areas something to look down their noses at--to say “Oh Gawd, I’m so glad I don’t live there.”

Although I know it exists, I really don’t understand, intellectually or emotionally, the pride or satisfaction of living in one city as opposed to another one. The quest for the perfect place to live is a middle class preoccupation that’s nevertheless real, even if it's a bit embarrassing to think about. I suppose it’s what brought most of our ancestors to this country in the first place, though their considerations were more than just whether the neighborhood was shady or not. And this search for the perfect home is why so many people live in California. This is the last stop, except for Hawaii, in the quest for a better place to live within the United States. Ironically, the fact that this quest is so universal has made this one of the most densely populated spots in the country.

I pass the Rancho Cucamonga Walmart, where I spent two nights. I was informed by the security guard on the second morning that I should only have stayed one night. Oh well. That was a first in my long journey, although in the previous Walmart, in Redlands, I was told that I could park overnight on the street next to the store parking lot, but not in the lot itself. And last night I experienced yet another and even more ignominious first. In Upland I was told by the security guard that I should not stay at the Walmart, or the police would give me a ticket. In both Upland and Redlands, the rent-a-guards were quick to point out that Walmart itself had absolutely no problem with my staying; it was the police and the city who objected. All this is a disturbing recent development that has me wondering, after all these months and all the friendly Walmarts I’ve stayed in, why greater Los Angeles has a bug up its ass about overnight parking at Walmart. I really can’t think how it would matter to the municipalities, especially if it doesn’t matter to the store itself.

I guess there are some people who find the idea that people in recreational vehicles might stop and park overnight to be unseemly. Maybe they think of us as Gypsies or something, out to steal money and babies from the locals. There is a bright side to all this, though. It’s obvious that any town where the police would come and give tickets to people like me for parking overnight in Walmart doesn’t have much crime, or the cops would be busy elsewhere. So good for Upland and Redlands.

Despite these glitches, I remain stalwart in my praise of Walmart for its generosity in this regard, though I'm beginning to have my doubts about these southern California communities.

So, what of Rancho Cucamonga, at least the part I’m going through? Strip malls, business parks, office parks, housing developments. That accounts for the bulk of the Rancho Cucamonga of today. Whenever I say “Cucamonga” I invariably think of a 45rpm record that came out in the late 50s, called “The Battle of Cucamonga.” It was a parody of another popular song of the time, “The Battle of New Orleans.” Its refrain went as follows:

We’re the boys of Camp Cucamonga
Our mothers sent us here for to study nature’s ways.
We learn to make sparks by rubbing sticks together,
But if we catch the girls then we’ll set the woods ablaze.

I come to a little display in front of a shopping center, called Vinter’s Walk. Several plaques tell of the history of wine grape growing in this area. In the 1860s there was a Cucamonga Rancho where grapes were grown, owned by a man named John Rains. He was murdered in 1862 and his widow was bought out by Isaias Hellman, a German. He in turn sold the lands to investors. People from Italy and France came to make wine. Irrigation from the San Bernardino Mountains was brought in, and more and more people began to set up wineries around here, along with citrus and nut farms. The name Cucamonga comes from the local Kucamongan Indians. Always the last thing left, after the Indians have vanished, is the name.

If Rancho Cucamonga has a seamy side it has the good sense to keep it well hidden from Foothill Boulevard. Years from now this area will be an example of early 21st century California strip mall architecture and people will object to buildings being torn down because they’re gems of the period. There will be architectural conservancies to see that they stay up. I’d love to be around in the year 2100, first because I’d simply love to hang around that long, and second because it would be interesting to see what lasts. Some of the commercial architecture of the 1990s and 2000s, Asian influenced with pagoda-curved roofs and wide overhangs, looks as if it might survive.

At 8 miles I enter Upland, the town whose Walmart I was run out of last night. It’s a little more green and shady than Rancho Cucamonga was, but otherwise appears about the same. In the center of town, at Euclid Avenue, stands a statue put up by the D.A.R. to commemorate the pioneer women, part of a series of sculptures called Madonna of the Trail. Upland, a city of 70,000, was incorporated in 1906, after previously being called North Ontario. More citrus fruit and grape cultivation here, giving way to suburban development.

At 12.2 miles I leave Upland and enter Claremont, and more importantly, Los Angeles County. So this is it. The last county on the journey. I pause for a moment to reflect on all the counties I’ve been through since leaving Kent County in Michigan—dozens, if not hundreds. True, this is only my third one in California, but further east they came thick and fast. There was desolate Borden County, Texas, where the population was only a few hundred. The Spanish moss of the parishes of Louisiana. The Mississippi delta counties with their dark bottom lands. The sturdy corn-growing sameness of the counties of Indiana and Illinois. But it all comes down to this.

What greet me as I enter Claremont are the campuses of Pitzer College and Harvey Mudd College, right next to each other along the south side of Foothill. The road is lined with those huge trees with the sinuous gray-tan trunks, sometimes with shaggy reddish outer bark peeling off them. I stop to ask a learned-looking man on the street what these trees are, and he tells me they’re eucalyptus trees, brought in originally from Australia. Of course. I pick up a leaf and crush it. It’s sticky and smells like, well, you guessed it. So that tree mystery is solved.

Clarement is known as a college town, and its nickname is the City of Trees and PhDs. It has several institutions of higher education—Pitzer, Harvey Mudd, Pomona College, Scripps College, and Claremont McKenna College; and two graduate institutes. In addition there is the Claremont School of Theology, affiliated with the United Methodist Church. So that’s the big thing here in this city of 37,000.
And whether or not it's the power of suggestion, the way Foothill is dotted with apartment complexes and nice older houses reminds me of Ann Arbor.

As I pass Claremont School of Theology it occurs to me that there are few pursuits more pointless than the study of what’s going on in God’s head. Clearly an avocation for those who have far too much time on their hands.

At 14.2 miles I leave Claremont. I was only there for two miles and I realize I saw just the tip of the iceberg. Now I’m in Pomona, but only for a short time, too. Pomona is a large community, with about 170,000 people. It’s the site of the Los Angeles County Fair. It was named for Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit.

After only a mile in Pomona I cross into LaVerne, population 31,000. It was first settled by a Mexican landholder named Ygnacio Palomares in the 1830s, then after California became part of the U.S. the land was gradually dealt off to Anglos, becoming parts of this town and neighboring Pomona, Claremont, San Dimas, and Glendora.

After about three miles in LaVerne I pass into yet another town, San Dimas. I’m in the San Gabriel Valley. San Dimas became a major citrus growing and packing center, and the name “Sunkist” was begun here. The name San Dimas, which was adopted in the late 19th century, is Spanish for Saint Dismas, the repentant thief who was crucified with Jesus.

Perhaps no greater claim to fame exists for San Dimas than that it was the setting for the 1989 movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” starring Keanu Reeves as Ted and featuring George Carlin. Set in San Dimas and telling the story of two slackers from San Dimas High School who engage in time travel in order to complete a school history project, the movie occupies a place midway between “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Wayne’s World.” Whoa. And so San Dimas occupies a special place in my imagination.

The first thing to greet me in San Dimas is the smell of horse shit. I look across the street to see the Equestrian Center, surrounded by white railed horse fencing. Apparently this is a horsy town, featuring mounted rides up into the mountains. On the lampposts hang banners naming young citizens of the town who are in various branches of the military, calling them “San Dimas Heroes.” I look in vain for the names of Bill and Ted, and conclude that they were smart enough not to go into the service. But had they done so, I’m sure they would have wanted to be in the cavalry, what with all these horses. Also, the name of the heavy metal band that existed in their imaginations was the Wyld Stallyns, which consisted of the two of them and the instruments they couldn’t play yet.

I won’t go through the center of San Dimas, which lies to the south. Foothill is a little hillier here than in other towns. Up on the foothills themselves perch large houses, isolated in their splendor.

At 19.5 miles I reach Amelia Avenue, and the dividing line between San Dimas and Glendora. I walk across into the eighth municipality I’ve been in today. That could be a record for me.

The air conditioner of the motor home comes into view in front of an empty store just on the other side of Ameila, in a parking lot festooned with No Parking Under Penalty of Death signs, which is at least half full of vehicles.

Day 169: The Inland Empire

Redlands to Fontana. 19.2 miles/3268.1 total

Thursday, February 3, 2011

8:52 a.m. It’s a cloudless day with a smudge of smog far to the west over the big city as I head out from the Walmart parking lot in Redlands, down Redlands Boulevard a few miles to Waterman, then north into the center of San Bernardino and west again on old Route 66, ending today’s walk in Fontana. It’ll be 19.2 miles.

I had another unscheduled day off due to weather yesterday. It was high winds, up to 35 miles an hour. But they’ve died down and things are just breezy now. It’s about 50, with the temperature climbing to 60 by afternoon here in the Inland Empire. That designation, by the way, is an informal one given to the areas around Riverside and San Bernardino to distinguish them from the coastal parts of southern California. At one time this was a major agricultural center--citrus, vineyards, vegetables--but much less so now because it’s becoming so built up and suburban. The question is, suburban with respect to what? Are these suburbs of San Bernardino or Los Angeles? They're pretty far out from L.A., and some of them rival San Bernardino in population. I think the answer is they're just suburbs.

Very soon after I start down the road I leave Redlands and enter Loma Linda, a somewhat more countrified place than its neighbor. It was only incorporated in 1970, and has a population of about 22,000. Loma Linda University is a center for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Also, according to Wikipedia, Loma Linda was listed by National Geographic as one of the three places in the world with the highest longevity. Don’t know if there’s a connection between the sabbatarians and long life. They do encourage vegetarianism, for what that’s worth.

Citrus trees grow matter-of-factly in all of southern California, in groves or in lines or stands alongside the roads or in people's yards. It’s no problem to reach up and pluck an orange off a tree as one is walking by, and I do so this morning again, cutting it open with my trusty Winchester pocket knife, which has had many uses on this journey and has served me well. Of course the oranges belong to someone and I’m technically stealing this one. It’s the kind of thing that in another day and age a Jean Valjean would have gone to prison for, or that would precipitated the Peach Tree War between the Dutch and the Indians involving my less-than-illustrious ancestor Cornelis Van Tienhoven. But there really is so much fruit on the trees and lying on the ground going to waste that it's a shame not to take some.

At 3.2 miles I reach Waterman Avenue and turn north into San Bernardino. I pass the San Bernardino Golf Club and head up toward the center of town. At Fifth Street, at about 6 miles, I turn left. The first thing I go by is a large park. Here my slightly eccentric getup, with the walking vest, blends in well with the garb of the various shopping cart people and other marginal hangers on who carry things in all their pockets and also have improbably large garbage bags of stuff and shuffle around rooting for yet more stuff. They fill the park and the sidewalk alongside it, eyeing me appraisingly as I stroll by. Look at all those pockets, they're probably thinking.

San Bernardino is a city of about 210,000, and the seat of San Bernardino County. The city was officially founded in 1851 by Mormons, but they were recalled to Utah by Brigham Young in 1857. Meanwhile San Bernardino was incorporated and began to grow as a commercial hub--railroads, highways, the usual. There’s a lot going on here, and it would be difficult to give anything but a passing nod to most of it. I will say that it is the birthplace of Gene Hackman, and also where Richard and Maurice McDonald started McDonald’s in the 1940s, beginning the concept of the fast food restaurant. Of course it was Ray Kroc who opened a franchise in Illinois in 1955 and eventually bought out the brothers.

San Bernardino is also a city along historic Route 66, and the famous Bobby Troup song “Route 66” mentions this among the cities through which the highway winds. Troup wrote the song in 1946, two decades before he became a doctor at Rampart Hospital in the TV show Emergency!, in which his wife, torch singer Julie London, also starred as a nurse. “Rampart, this is Squad 51. We have a white male, about 61, with an apparent heart attack. Patient is diaphoretic, his pulse is 120 and his blood pressure is 90 over 50.” In response to which Bobby Troup would invariably say, “Squad 51, this is Rampart. Start an IV of D5W and transport immediately.”

And it is on Route 66 that I am walking at this very moment, as I pause to read a plaque in front of a black iron fence surrounding a mound of grass. It says that here once stood the Martin Adobe House. It was the home of the Moses Martin family, Mormons, and was built in something called the Mormon adobe style. Nothing remains but this plaque and I'd like to see an example of the style.

At Fifth and D Street I come to the main U.S. Post Office, a handsome white Spanish colonial building that looks as if it dates from the 1930s, when public architecture in this country was at its zenith.

At E Street I decide to go south toward the what looks like the center of town. At Fourth I come to Theater Square, between the Rosa Parks Memorial State Office Building and the California Theater. I go down another block to Court Street and arrive at another park. Several more interesting old buildings and a fountain.

I strike back west, cutting through the parking lot of the Carousel Mall. My little detour to downtown has gotten me into a bit of a bind. Instead of being able to go straight back up to Fifth, I have to stay on Third Street for a bit because a gigantic railroad freight yard, at least a mile long and half a mile wide, is between Third and Fifth and there’s no way to go through it here. This takes me past the San Bernardino Santa Fe Railroad Depot, still operating as a passenger station but undergoing extensive restoration. The station was built in 1909 in a Spanish mission style. I go in to use the rest room, which has a nice old fashioned panache to it, with lots of octagonal tile work. There’s a railroad museum here, too, but it’s only open on Saturdays.

At last I find a street that bridges the freight yard and I get back up to Fifth. Going out of town I pass one of those great wide concrete ditches you see in the movies where the boys race cars while the girls watch, in their poodle skirts and pony tails.

At Macy Street I notice the road is now called Foothill. Still historic Route 66, and those signs are beginning to pop up all over the place, on motels, old restaurants, and businesses. I come to the Wigwam Motel, which consists of a couple dozen free-standing tepee-shaped units about fifteen feet in diameter and about twenty feet high. The signs in front say “Welcome Route 66 Travelers” and "Get Your Kicks on Route 66."

Just past the Wigwam I leave San Bernardino and enter Rialto. Rialto is nothing to sneeze at, with over 93,000 people. It was incorporated in 1911, but has been around for about as long as San Bernardino, although it didn’t start shooting up in population until about thirty years ago. A city of warehouses and distributions centers, and increasingly, subdivisions.

For the most part Foothills has all the same things you’ll find anywhere else in America along those busy strips we all love to hate. So those of you from elsewhere might be asking yourselves what’s different about a street like this in southern California from one in, say, Michigan, aside from the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains to the north and the palm trees everywhere and the spiky junipers standing like green upside down icicles and the warm weather in early February. What about the businesses themselves? On the whole there isn’t much difference. They’ve got all the big box stores you can think of, all the chain retailers (except Meijer), all the fast food places. Okay, no Culver’s. But how are they different? Well for one thing, take the Mexican restaurants in your town and multiply them by ten, and multiply the Asian restaurants by about five. And add In-N-Out Burger, Baker’s Restaurants, Yum Yum Donuts, Stater Bros., smog check stations, increase the gas prices by about 15%, and you’ve got southern California.

At 14.4 miles, at Maple Avenue, I leave Rialto and enter Fontana. Fontana, founded in 1913, is another very large town that took off in population and went from 87,000 in 1990 to over 190,000 today. Before World War II it was an agricultural area with citrus and vineyards and chicken farms, but then during the war Henry J. Kaiser built the only steel mill west of the Mississippi just outside the city limits.

Fontana seems to have a marked tendency toward working-class housing, with lots of shabby and forlorn little one-story half-ranches and trailer parks and manufactured home villages a half mile back from Foothill in either direction. The stores along the boulevard are from the 1950s, and scattered far apart, and many of them are empty and dilapidated or boarded up. Empty bottles lie in vacant lots behind chain link fences that collect trash at the bottoms. Then in spots there are modern strip malls and Starbucks and Walgreens and neighborhoods of newer two-story houses.

Fontana seems to be struggling with itself to become more middle class, and it's gradually winning the battle. After a few miles Foothill divides into a boulevard with royal palms running down the middle. Then there’s a mile or so of empty land and more trailer parks in the distance behind it.

The cross streets are named for trees—Maple, Sycamore, Sierra, Juniper, Citrus, Redwood, and finally Cherry, at the corner of which is a McDonald’s Chevron combination, and just behind that, in the WinCo parking lot, the motor home.

And speaking of trees, the ones I couldn’t identify that I saw in Redlands, and have seen all along the road since then, may be California laurels.

Day 168: Newborn Cities

Beaumont to Redlands. 20.2 miles/3248.9 total

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

8:20 a.m. I set out from the Walmart in Beaumont on Second Street, heading for the Walmart in Redlands, just off Redlands Boulevard, 20.2 miles.

It’s a mostly clear day, with some very high cirrus clouds in the western distance. The temperature is about 50, and it feels like it might get up to 60 or so.

Rather than backtrack to the closest street and go under the freeway I have decided to go straight west, cross country, to get to the next street down, Pennsylvania Ave. I’m walking through a plowed field in the direction of the railroad tracks. The morning dew on the grass is soaking my feet, a sensation I haven’t felt since I was in the east.

A pair of Union Pacific freight trains, going in opposite directions, are just clearing the tracks as I reach Pennsylvania. I go up under the interstate to Sixth Street, which was called Ramsey yesterday.

As with Banning, I’m trying to get a feel for Beaumont this morning as I go down what I think is its main thoroughfare. I can say that the population is over 33,000, having tripled since 2000. Both Banning and Beaumont are in the San Gorgonio Pass, a break in the mountains between the coast and points east, and were settled for that reason as stopping off points. Beaumont’s original name, when the railroad came through, was Edgar Pass, and later it became San Gorgonio. In 1912 when it was incorporated it took its present fanciful name, which means “beautiful mountain” in French.

I confess that I do very little planning in connection with my walking. I can make this admission after over 3,200 miles, as if no one has noticed. I like to see things unfold in front of me as much as possible, and even though I could Google various routes and avoid surprises and study up on places beforehand, often I haven’t found out much about where I am. If I supply data about a place, chances are that I have discovered it in the process of transcribing the day’s recording. Of course I have my route planned out, but if that turns out not to have been a good choice, there’s not much I can do about it once I’ve begun. The main point is, and always has been, to go west.

I pass the Beaumont Civic Center, so I’m probably in the center of the city. It was originally a lower middle class town, at least this part of it. Trailer parks dot the way. Various of the scruffier types are up already and shuffling down the street or hanging out in front of liquor stores, smoking and joking and coughing.

At the corner of Sixth Street and Beaumont Avenue, in front of the Yum Yum Donut place, I catch sight of the Cross-Carrying Dude again. He has paused at the intersection. He’s a curious combination of the old and the new—an old fashioned ascetic hauling the cross of Christ, but with a little wheel on the bottom. And he’s talking on his cell phone. He’s about 65 or 70, with a beard and a cowboy hat. In fact, he reminds me a little of the Naked Book Guy, though the Naked Book Guy would never do anything as crass as walk the streets with a cross. In any event, it’s evident that he isn’t on a long-distance trek, but rather making a circuit of some kind. Yesterday he was heading east on Ramsey, and now he’s a few miles west of that spot, coming down from the north. A local loony.

Some of my readers are no doubt wishing that I would go over and chat him up. And this, I suppose, is one of the flaws in my modus operandi on this journey. I feel very little desire to do things like that. I’d rather live in my imaginary world regarding these people.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about how little I do to make this walk interesting in a peripatetic wandering journalist kind of way. I am content to let things unfold in front of me on the narrow path I travel, and if something happens to be there in front of me, I might check it out or Google it later. But really, whatever I do see mostly serves the purpose of putting the stuff that’s already floating around in my head into some context. A place could be one of the most wonderful communities in all of the Inland Empire, as they call this part of California, but if a sign doesn’t say that the fact will be lost on me.

One thing I should mention about Beaumont, gleaned not on the walk itself but later from the internet, is that it has been the shooting locale of some TV shows and movies. A few episodes of “My Name is Earl” were filmed on location here, as well as some of the opening scenes. The liquor store where he buys the winning lottery ticket, the car wash, and the scene where he gets hit by a car were all filmed back near Sixth Street and Pennsylvania. And here’s a tidbit that I defy anyone to top: professional wrestler Gorgeous George had a turkey ranch in Beaumont in the 50s and 60s.

I pass a Mexican restaurant that advertises the availability of menudo on Sundays. I will report that I partook of menudo for the first time this past Sunday, on the day it was rainy and windy and I didn’t walk. For those who aren’t familiar with it, menudo is a thick soup made from beef tripe, other lesser cuts of stewing beef, tomatoes, hominy, and several other ingredients. It was served to me with diced onions, cilantro, oregano, and dried red pepper on the side. Once you get past the rather intestinal smell of it, it’s not bad. The tripe has a nice chewiness and texture on the tongue. Menudo is one those dishes that evokes the shitty way people had to eat when they were peons, because frankly a bowl of beef fat and tripe isn’t really a delicacy. Like chitterlings, it is made from parts of the animal that are pretty unpalatable unless you're French or Asian. This is what people like about it, because it reminds them of their roots. I wouldn’t turn it down if it were offered to me, but I wouldn’t order it again.

Sixth Street has ended, and I cut up to Eighth Street. I’m now going through the western outskirts of Beaumont, where a great deal of recent development has occurred, transforming this city, at least partially, into an upscale suburb. It's hundreds of acres of planned developments containing handsome two-story houses, going on for a mile or two, barricaded from the interstate by brick walls on both sides of the street. Bushes with a profusion of red berries grow along the walls. Trees with reddish bark and willowy leaves grow between the bushes.

When people ask me what's the most interesting thing I’ve seen, I always have difficulty answering, because it’s all interesting in context. I really don’t think that way. I love museums, of course, and cemeteries, and parks, but they are really comfort food for the mind. What interests me most is seeing the way people live every day in these places—trying to put myself into the scene in its most mundane aspects. Urine and litter-soaked alleyways, a species of tree or bush that’s new to me, a new landscape or vista. Moreover, once I’ve transcribed the notes from one day and finished the blog, I tend to put it into the back of my mind. I can’t afford to bask in the bright light of yesterday’s walk, but must look forward to the one at hand. Every day has new promises, both of different things and of the sameness and fatigue of putting one foot in front of the other more than 40,000 times before it’s over. At some point I’ll go back and read the blog, and then maybe I’ll remember some of the details.

It’s been about 3 miles since I began today, and my feet have almost dried out. The morning chill is beginning to wear off. Suddenly this street comes to an end, too, and once again I’m going out into the fields, this time down a steep hill and back up. At 4.2 miles I get to Oak Valley Road, and take that over to the south side of the highway to find a paved access road.

I’ve always been fascinated by expressways and busy roads. It goes back to when my father used to take me across Dixie Highway to the post office in Drayton Plains. It was a busy four-lane road, and he’d always cross between intersections, walking briskly across the first two lanes then standing on the yellow line while traffic cleared in the other direction. None of that going to the light and waiting for the “walk” sign for him. And since I did it with him, I felt deliciously complicit in this recklessness of an otherwise cautious man. Heady stuff for a small boy.

In recent years I’ve taken to fantasizing about living in the broad wooded areas that sometimes appear in the middle of expressways. Some of them are so large that I’m sure you could burrow down and dig a great house there, unbeknownst to anyone. Who checks these pieces of land? In my mind I have dug large underground multi-roomed places complete with generators, and have lived absolutely undetected, all the while surrounded by traffic. Mutant raccoons and deer, cut off for generations from access to the outside world, are my faithful companions. And I get to trot across the freeway to and from my house. I wonder if anyone has ever done that. Sure, living under highway bridges in cities is almost a cliché, but has anyone ever lived in the middle of an expressway?

Down here along the access road things are pretty well staked out for development. Neighborhoods and golf courses in the making. Years from now these places will be shady and verdant, but for now they’re all rooftops. Knowing that this newness someday will be old, and that the old places will eventually be torn down to make way for new ones, I regard these suburban developments not with disdain, but rather with the curiosity and affection one might show to a newborn baby, realizing that in its infancy it’s not fully formed, but will someday probably become a serviceable adult. Knowing also that as with human beings, some neighborhoods grow up to be great, some merely respectable, and most lead lives of quiet mediocrity. Some, ill conceived and ill nurtured, grow up to be bad, and some are scarred or die through accident and circumstances utterly unforeseen at the time of their birth. Newborn cities and towns.

I come to Desert Lawn Funeral Home and Memorial Park. I venture into the front section and see some of the older graves, flat against the ground. I stop to contemplate and to honor some of the dead, most of whom are visited only seldom. Here's Howard Purnell, who lived from 1945 to 2009. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." There's nothing like the comfort of a self-fulfilling Beatitude in the hour of grief. Then I go on.

At 6.7 miles I come to Cherry Valley Road, and continue on this access road on the south side. A mile or so later I find that I’m on the edge of a broad meadow in which cattle graze. Beyond, in the haze, are a couple of snow-peaked mountains whose names I can’t find on the map, the area being designated simply as The Badlands. But they look pretty damn good to me, so green and pastoral. I could pinpoint this spot and tell people to come an see it, but very soon the scene will change, as it does here, where the road comes to an end once again.

I go over the freeway again to start walking on Calimesa Road, through the city of Calimesa. This is a small, recently incorporated town of about 7,500 people, out at the edge of Riverside County. And at 10 miles I enter San Bernardino County, having reached the end of Calimesa and the end of the county I’ve been in for the 175 miles since I entered California. This must be a record for me for total miles walked within a county. In fact, I walked less in several of the states I’ve been through than I have in Riverside County. So farewell, and hail to San Bernardino County, the largest county in the continental United States. But I’ll only be walking across a bit of its western edge, and will be out of it in a day or two.

I’m walking through another little space between towns. At about 11 miles the road takes a sharp turn away from the interstate, and I choose to remain close to the highway on Dunlap Road, through part of Yucaipa, whose name comes from “Yucaipat,” a word in the Serrano Indian language meaning green valley.

At 13.6 miles I cross over Yucaipa Boulevard, remaining on the north side of I-10. Soon I find myself in another sticky wicket, the road having ended. This time my options are limited. The chainlink fences on either side of the freeway are tall and unstable and not as easily climbed as the four-foot barbed wire ones were, and in the middle of the highway is only a narrow row of Jersey barriers with heavy traffic in both directions, a challenge even to that daring dodger, the Rev. W. J. Teeuwissen, Jr. So I strike out cross country toward some steep hills scarred with dusty trails.

I pause to catch my breath at the top of the first hill, then notice a road that it winds around to the right on the north side of the next one. After walking sideways down the hill, mountain goat style, I find the path that takes me through to the next paved road, about two miles hence. This circuit probably added at least a half mile to the walk.

Now I’m on Reservoir Road, within the City of Redlands, walking next to an orange grove. I reach up and pluck one off the tree and eat it. It's perfectly ripe and delicious. That, I imagine, is what Eve said.

At about 16 miles I come to an underpass and go to the south side of the interstate for the last time, to begin walking on Redlands Boulevard. I stop to pick up a penny, which brings my total in California up to three cents so far.

Redlands is a prosperous city of about 70,000, with the feel of a university town. It nickname is “The Jewel of the Inland Empire.” It is home to the University of Redlands, a school of about 4,500 students started in 1907 as a Baptist college. Redlands is nicely landscaped, and at one time was known for the visual charm of its downtown.

The first Europeans to settle in the area were Spanish missionaries, among them Father Francisco Dumetz, who in 1810 named the area the San Bernardino Valley. Franciscan priests established a mission, the San Bernardino Assistencia, and proceeded to do what they did best, which was to try to convince the local Indians to adopt a religion they had no use for. Later Mormons came to the area, but didn’t stay long.

This is a city of big fat churches and high end housing. I pass Redlands High School, home of the Terriers. The downtown, which I’m approaching, is a nice eclectic little collection of gas stations and independent burger joints. On the Chase bank there’s a sort of mosaic mural showing three Victorian-looking scenes, of women in bustles and funny hats and of a man picking oranges from a ladder. For the Anglos, the city was pretty much kick started by the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s. Later it was a stop on the interurban electric railway between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. People would come out here to vacation. Now they come to stay.

On the western end of town I come to some large trees planted next to the sidewalk, another species I can’t identify, for which I beg the assistance of my readers. They have oblong leaves resembling those of a live oak, and the leaves are on them now. The bark is reddish brown and shaggy, but peels off to reveal a smooth mottled tan underneath. They grow very large, some of the trunks being three feet in diameter.

Down at the corner of Redlands Boulevard and New Jersey Street is the U.S. Postal Service San Bernardino processing and distribution center, a gigantic facility. I take a right and the discreetly placed Walmart comes into view.