It wasn’t the same anymore because I knew chaos was just over the hill. . . . : On a Quiet Road

I was wandering along a quiet country lane called The Old Road on the kind of day that brings tears of ecstasy to the eyes of Eastern tourists. The temperature dozed in the mid-70s and the sky was a wash of pastel blue broken only by puffs of clouds that glowed silver in the sunlight.

Peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains, roughened with sage and scrub oak, dominated the skyline, embracing the Santa Clarita Valley in a sheltered tranquility that seemed remote and detached from mainstream L.A., the way a horse’s sudden hoofbeats seem alien in a gap of silence from the roaring highways that border the countryside.

I’m not sure exactly how I came to be on The Old Road, a winding, two-lane stretch that appears abruptly out of the junctured maze dividing the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways. It was probably considered a main route once but, like a man past his prime, was abandoned in favor of speed and efficiency.

I had been looking around the Sylmar-Pacoima area after a conversation earlier in the day with City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who is trying to slow apartment construction in the fastest-growing section of Los Angeles before population strangles us into immobility.

Bernardi is a crusty old guy who used to be a builder himself and isn’t making himself popular with members of his former trade by lobbying for a 6-month moratorium on apartment construction. But, unlike most of his colleagues, he never has been very concerned with popularity.

When I asked why he wanted the moratorium, his reply was not unlike that of someone stating the obvious.

“ Density ,” he said, not trying to mask his annoyance. “We keep building the way we are and population is going to outstrip every service we’ve got. We’ll lose the ability to even get around!”

He talked about the relationship between density and crime, and how he didn’t want his district to turn into one of those places in the San Fernando Valley that you couldn’t even drive through because of the heavy traffic created by population. He didn’t want an urban junkyard in the rural byways.

Bernardi’s moratorium has already cleared the Planning Committee and awaits action by the full council.

“This is just a beginning,” he said. “We’ll see what’s up ahead.”

That’s when I took to the road. I wanted to see the apartment-condo jungle myself and the terrain that Bernardi was trying to save. Then, after I saw it, I kept moving northward because I have a tendency on such missions to lose purpose and drift aimlessly, as though looking and listening will answer questions that can be answered no other way.

By that process, I was suddenly on The Old Road, trailing commerce behind me like dust from a wagon train, but so close to the freeway I could see traffic streaking by in an almost surreal contrast to the road I had taken. I slowed. Time and pace were different here.

The route is only about 4 miles long. I stopped once to talk to a family from Ohio who had pulled off the Golden State to picnic in an open space near a whitewashed wooden fence and again just to sit and wonder how long the empty hills and the tranquil road would last.

An answer came sooner than I expected.

The Old Road ended abruptly in a sharp right that crossed the freeway and became Calgrove Boulevard. It was more than the conclusion of a country lane. It was what slow growth advocates are concerned about: a trail of tranquility leading to calamity.

For there at the juncture was a Bob’s Big Boy, the garish complex of a Nissan dealer and bulldozers tearing into a hillside, obliterating the pastoral scene with the same force that a bomb shatters silence.

I had come upon an ocean of red-roofed tract homes that stretched from what once had been gentle foothills to the high slopes of the mountains, creating a horizon that encroached on the peaks and threatened the very sky itself.

The sage and the scrub oak had vanished under a structured tedium that we are only now beginning to resent. The rich brown earth had disappeared under blacktop roads that etched erratic patterns through a pastiche of tracts, paying scant homage to the vibrant scenery around them.

I stopped to watch the dozers slice all too familiar levels of flatland into what had been a gentle slope and later asked a woman at the Big Boy across the street what she thought about the waves of development that are gradually destroying our best open land.

She shrugged. “People got to live somewhere,” she said.

I drove back down The Old Road, but it wasn’t the same anymore because I knew chaos was just over the hill, where the bulldozers waited. I thought about Bernardi’s effort, however faint, and about what the woman said and the inevitable conflict the two attitudes present.

People got to live somewhere, I guess. But the day grows dark with disturbing portent when you stop to think about where.