L.A. Lost and Found:
Around the San Gabriels

"Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town." – John Fante, from Ask the Dust











If you park yourself in Pasadena, you have to be ready to get to know the freeways. Curls of concrete overhead, underground, tunnels, two-lanes, expressways, and dead stops at finely blind curves. These are the real mountain of L.A., let's not kid around. Out to the west from here, finally, up over the Santa Monicas, you can descend onto the luxury of water, those long beaches right at Malibu, where everything comes together: the traffic, the bad cliffs, the water, and they all crash at once at highway 1 ... that too is California. East, we just rolled up to Eaton Canyon Falls, a fun walk right in Pasadena.

Here is where the heat collects, down in lowland wash and palm arroyos, a bit like walking through wooded desert, where plants and cactuses shaped like twelve foot pods of asparagus shoot up in such random slots along the old river that you'd swear they had to have been...planted there. Slow climb up, many walkers, most unprepared, over gravel and offshoot trails, looking up, always, to the top of the San Gabriels and fixing that iconic image that comes to mind of California: the rugged ridges and

dried out landscape, and those enormous terra cotta houses that seem to find footholds on every last available inch of earth. We rise to the level of a shorter ridge of a foothill located across the skeleton of a river and see sitting there like nothing out of the ordinary a glossy blue pool, much like a jewel, precariously set onto the edge of a short cliff that is crumbling. On one hand it makes you jealous as hell; to be able to walk out the back patio into seventy degrees, a hot and dry kind of dusty heat, and to hop into your jewel is second to none. What man woman or child hasn't thought of days flying past from the perch of the steps of such a pool, agave drink in palm, and asking for the rest of the world to take a hike? On the other hand, of course, the house could fold tomorrow and find itself sliding down the cliff as a rain no tighter than a drizzle dislodges layer by layer of the crust that house is sitting on.

Well, we move on up the narrowing canyon where indeed there is real water, not the kind imagined. A narrow but clean looking creek that is cool and beautiful and provides a hundred little crossings by stationed rocks and limbs for the hiker. To either side of us are remnants of old mining projects, no doubt this as good a place as any to rush for gold or any other material considered worthwhile in the old days. An old defunct bridge above us, steep cliffsides, greening some the deeper in, rise up and we feel like we're right inside one of those old western movies, waiting for danger at the next turn of the canyon, this little creek at our heels, providing some comfort that things are fine and peaceful. Boulders start to pile up tall as a man. The crossings more frequent until a bend leads to a hollow, dark and noisy, lots of kids sitting and passing drinks and cigarettes, Eaton Falls dropping down hard and straight but picturesque. Not a bug to be had. Little salamanders, the precise colors of the washed out beiges of the landscape, scoot silently up the bald face of rocks as if it were nothing at all. From inside here, all that is down there – those other mountains of freeways – fade and we know this is the pretty town.