The Valley remains a place to be passing through.

As I write this, I look upon a scene of snow-covered hedges through the window of the salle de sejour of my mother-in-law’s suburban house in Tours, a bustling city about as far from Paris as Bakersfield is from Los Angeles.

So I didn’t get around the Valley much this week.

I thought I would take advantage of that lack of immediate experience to justify a bit of review of the past, an exercise I usually find more useful, upon the passing of an old year, than the more common practice of making untenable plans for the new.

Personally, I made some rather substantial steps forward in 1985, considering my disdain for anything that brings changes of equivocal value into my life purely under the pretext of being new.

Most notably, I enrolled in my bank’s money-machine plan and got a telephone calling card, having finally decided at 39 that I am too old to go around without any cash and to charge my calls to my parents when I am away from home.

To be honest, I miss the idle conversations I used to have with the smiling tellers at Security Pacific National Bank in the Northridge Fashion Center. But there was no hope of saving that relationship. In 1985 my employer began depositing my paychecks automatically, ending my ritual biweekly contact with the people whose names I never knew.

As a newsman, I am used to writing about things I personally have no power to control. That doesn’t mean I have no feelings about how those things turn out.

Last year I wrote about a simple and evidently happy man named Jimmy Smith who won $2 million in the California lottery. I hope that money suits him, and I’d like to keep in touch to see how his year turns out.

Another story that caught my personal fancy was about an already moneyed group of Valley types who want 1986 to be the year they start a campaign to build the Valley’s own music center.

I hope they succeed. God knows the San Fernando Valley needs something to distinguish it besides the mountains that shape its geography.

I grew up not far from the Valley, in Highland Park, and I can remember precisely the day, when I was 18 years old, that I became aware by chance of the Valley’s existence as a place with its own identity.

I was riding my bicycle as I did every Sunday from my parents’ house to UCLA. I usually took Wilshire Boulevard, but this day I tried Hollywood Boulevard and, on the spur of the moment, decided to turn up Crescent Heights Drive. Once I started up the hill, I was drawn by curiosity to the top. I coasted down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, wondering what new world I had discovered.

I quickly reasoned that I couldn’t have lived 18 years in Los Angeles and entirely missed such a large piece of real estate. Putting the pieces together, I connected several other events that had been drifting in memory, out of geographical context. I remembered the trips with my parents to visit my mother’s relatives in Bakersfield. The trip always began on a Friday afternoon with a dreary, bumper-to-bumper trudge along San Fernando Road, as there was no Golden State Freeway then. I measured the end of my discomfort by the passing of the Mulholland splashway just before the mountains.

Later, in high school, I drove several times with my older brother to run the cross-country course at Pierce College. I always got drowsy on the Ventura Freeway. Winnetka Avenue seemed to be at the edge of the earth.

In my first year at UCLA I often drove through the wilderness of Sepulveda Pass and followed the Ventura Freeway until the sight of the Taylor Train yards told me I was back on my own turf.

So, until that day, the Valley meant little to me but a rather unpleasant passageway to someplace I considered more important.

Then my wife and I bought a house in North Hollywood in 1972. It was a solid house and inexpensive. But we never really felt at home there. We did not have enough money to make Ventura Boulevard a part of our lives. The rest of the Valley seemed short on character. And, near home, there was nothing worth walking to. We even had to drive to the drugstore.

So we moved closer to my roots; where you could walk to the drugstore and where the Taylor Train yards were still the dominant man-made feature of the landscape.

Ironically, I have covered the Valley much of my professional career. In the past 10 years I have written about much change and growth. But to me the Valley remains a place to be passing through. Its leaders, or so-called leaders, have done a lot of crowing about the respect it deserves but doesn’t get.

True, you can find almost anything you want to buy in the Valley. The Valley has its share of wealth and seems to be getting more.

But I’m personally more attracted to the large valley to the north, the San Joaquin Valley. There people have a mission and they know pretty well what it is. They’re producing the food eaten by us. If you pass through the San Joaquin Valley on your way to Sacramento or San Francisco, you can’t help feeling it. You are overcome by the smell of the earth and of the fruits ripening in crates. You are moved by the industry of a people who nurture the soil upon which they live. I am, anyway.

It’s time for our Valley to nurture the soil on which it lives. If it must do so with monuments to culture instead of potatoes, so be it. Let 1986 be the year it begins.