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.

L.A. Lost and Found:A Lay of the Land

"One night I was sitting on the bed of my hotel room in Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or got out..." John Fante, from Ask the Dust













A semi-first go around in Los Angeles is, I am gathering, a little different than expected, even for the expecting type. Years ago we had taken a road trip from the deep spring of the midwest down into Huntington Beach, down on the southern edges of things, and we conveniently avoided virtually all of the various highway mousetraps and merely landed on that beach, stayed in a hotel across the street, and watched from our room windows the ocean a block away and a van patrol the parking lot for unlocked bikes. Other than movies and the occasional glance of Jack Nicholson at front court seats for Lakers game, let's face, I would say, that was it. Now we are hunkered down good in

Pasadena, with the big bald green San Gabriels in the background, nice pockets of uplifting yellow and bread colored architecture all around us, and then the little pockets of cluttered misfit neighborhoods. As a new driver to the city all of this palette of palm trees, terra cotta, dry mountain,

and not so far off sea, is a little like random slideshow of color and confusion -- one moment you are driving alongside a Bentley, it seems, the next, a young girl in an old motorcycle is cruising up through the cracks of traffic spinning through red lights. Shops of barbed wire; shops of dog-petting cafes and jewelry that might set back a rich man for the next twenty years. L.A., I am seeing now, isn't trip necessarily of pure and immediate immersion, but one of necessary retrospection, where that

photo album inside the mind reveals itself slowly in the days when you return to the land-lock, and what seemed a mass confusion turns to a yearning again for those days of visual excitement and the reek of prospective danger down the next road to come. All in all, give me one of those fine stoccato pads that line the dusty ridges of the San Gabriels, with a turquoise pool and an arcade courtyard set up for dining nightly against the California sun shine...just don't make me drive the cross town to a Dodger game again for awhile, bumper to bumper, and let there be no doubt, the folks commandeering those BMW's tweaked, at the very minimal, by a series of six expressos throughout this particular day and a patience level that has to resemble the mind power of the hummingbird we saw nip at the foliage along Eaton Canyon Creek just hours before.

"Coldly the remote mountains are clean.
Dusk comes. The long river races by.
You undo the rope, are already gone.
I stand for a long time, looking."
      – Wang Wei, from "Seeing Zu Off at Qizhou








From this very spot on lake terrace
we had years ago looked over the same open water.
We had seen the water-skiers in a line of three
pull back onto their ropes in unison
calling out their commands in practice
for the summer's coming shows
over the gurgling roar of the boat.
The rooftop was precisely the same.
White modern lights and walking tiles.
A sky that resembled the clean color of the lake.
Today I feel older by twenty years
but it has only been five.
Time somedays has wings.
I stand here looking out and say a goodbye.
It flies off. I will barely remember.

What I'd Serve in Spain
A-Z

"One time it is a nibble of Wisconsin Cheddar as big as a pinhead. She likes it. Another time it is a microscopic smear of Camembert or Liederkranz. She pulls away, shocked by its fine odor of putrescence, too decadent for simplicity."  – MFK Fisher, from "J is for Juvenile dining"











A. All Saint's Day (Did de Todos los Santos)

From our veritably land-locked stout northern state of Wisconsin, what do we know of All Saint's Day in Spain? We have a hard enough time, it seems to me, spending enough time rallying around a table long enough to take our nibble at the Wisconsin Cheddar, as Fisher points to above. There aren't all that many references to Wisconsin in Fisher's great canon of food dashes and sometimes trenchant articles, but the reference here does point to a slight problem with older perceptions of Wisconsin food, for example, pre-foodie revolution: we've got dairy, we've got beef, and we've got corn and bratwurst. It is all very fine fare – who of us could see living without the luxury of a thousand award-winning cheddars? We are spoiled in not only choice, but presumably quality, in which all it takes is a brief picking session down any large grocery store to seek out the generic stuff, and we will be able to tell the difference between the five dollar and twelve dollar in a very quick nibble. I find it safe to say, as I read Fisher with one eye and of Spanish cuisine on the other, that to look be a Wisconsinite foodie is by definition to also "look out onto the rest of the world in wonder," in order to see both parallels and certainly differences. As we get closer to our own trip to Spain, this looking abroad while looking within, seems a good strategy to simultaneously fantasize and appreciate where necessary. I already look forward to the moment when we are standing inside a Spanish restaurant, nibbling on tapas, sipping a zuritos, watching the deep golden sun wash over the calloused frontages of buildings in along the Plaza Mayor, I will be asking myself a simple yet most complicated question: what from here would I serve in my transplanted Spanish eatery back home?

Jeff Koehler, in his colorful and familialy researched Spain: Recipes and Traditions from the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucia, makes some of those parallels of geography mentioned above without really knowing it. Spanish food, he regularly suggests, is a product of the modern interplay between rural agricultural traditions and a similarly great migration to the urban centers, so similar as that trend in the US, and no doubt virtually everywhere else in the world. Despite, he says, such a migration, there has been some strong cultural backlash and even though the farming population can now be counted in a single digit where once in the forty percentile, it is not desirable or possible to rid themselves with a food culture that takes its inspiration from small farms, the sea, and the verdant hills. All Saints Day takes place on the first of November. It celebrates Catholic traditions by visiting cemeteries "with chrysanthemums, scrubbing marble headstones, replanting flowers, and tidying up graves. But, like all traditions here, the day is also celebrated with specific foods."

Keohler goes on to show us importance of chestnuts to the tradition, and their attendant "street corner shacks, roasted over squat, charcoal-burning braziers. Scooped still warm into rolled paper cones, they are sold by the half dozen. The blackened shells are peeled away to reveal the soft, nutty-tasting flesh." Who cannot picture these likely family-driven corner shacks, stirring up small fires, the nutty smoke wafting up and around the small roof tops, reminding all of their childhoods? But my own favorite is the reference to the quince paste, quince a fruit that also begins to ripen at this time of year. Koehler's wife's grandmother had been preparing the "stunning combination paired with some wedges of aged Manchego cheese or smoky Basque Idiazabal cheese," for a long time. The ingredients list is a short one, but likely much like the favorite strawberry preserve of the midwest states, a potent sweet and sour, built in this case by nothing more than lemon, two pounds quince, and two cups of sugar. There is a picture of the quince paste laced over the Manchego cheese on the opposite page. If the reader didn't know better, they might claim this was a fine pic from a small cheesery, quartered slices of a good Wisconsin Gouda, strawberry preserve spooned down thick. It could be any day of the year.

A Thousand Letters to the Moon

"A poet stands between heaven and earth
and watches the dark mystery.
To nourish myself I read the classics.
I sigh as the four seasons spin by
and the swarm of living things kindles many thoughts."
–Lu Ji, from The Art of Writing








1.

On a lowly sunday morning the fog stills to a quiet over the slate bay. Maybe there is a pair of pelicans left that, without my looking, I know that they are quietly paddling across the surface using their great yellow nets of beaks for the panfish. I am no longer drawn to moon or its attendant darknesses. Mystery is not of the darkness as so many shriveled voices have suggested; once past, it is the brightness of stars, of the theories of the origins, its ever expansion in galactic speeds, those crystals, how they meet upon the particulate and tumble down to register all of the colors, that is mystery to me. Two face, of course, to the moon, then. Of youth, the dark blotches poets cry of. That is the story of our unconscious. What lies below the surface of things? The fish which surfaces its silver abdomen from the depths just found out as he squirms inside the pelicans gullet. Have you seen a fish slap across the surface, mid-day, electric, under sun's gleam, untethered, free, juxtaposed against the depths. No need for the moon bottom shores. I had paddled through the flooding marsh. Just outside the reach of the forest border the main channel was full and released, as though a giant rake from above had loosened its surface and left furrows of silver and steel glistening, wave upon wave, and there I could see a sort of dance, a swimming, from fish eyes, looking up, wild, underneath nothing.

Shi or Studies in Chinese
Poetry for Today

"Clear moon pours bright light at night
and crickets sing in the eastern wall.
The Big Dipper's jade handle points to midwinter,
all the star's incredibly clear."
  – from Nineteen Ancient Poems









At city edge ancient glacial drumlins.
Late spring ponds full as steel ladles.
Outside the forest grounds highways in all directions
drone on out of sight like hidden crickets.

Shi and I always walk away from the city
and into the pages of marshland where geese
fly in and out of the linen marsh reeds
steady as pen lines margin to margin.


We find two pecking away at the gravel trails for seeds.
One makes eye contact and stops, spreads its wings
as if in fine pageantry; her black neck bobs
as the silhouette of a slender wrist behind a silk screen.

"Unbearable to watch these endless silk threads rain through the sky...Leisurely flowers fall to the green mossy earth." – Wang Wei, "A Young Lady's Spring Thoughts"











At night along the garden paths the rain has retreated.
It is a small war won today by the elegant crabapple.
How long they all waited inside the pulsing buds.
The light in the sky drifts off and fades over the lake.
The strongest perfume in the room there is little doubt.
As we stoop to smell we wish the rain away for May.