THE CANYONS : SHADOW LANDS

When you live in a canyon, you come face to face with the id, and the id’s wildness isn’t always pretty. Yes, you have your bougainvillea, your Lupinus hirsutissimus and great, wide, beautiful green and blue and gold spring days. But you also have bonfire summers, when you hear fires coming before you see them, and they sound like trains, top speed, coming straight at you. And in winter, or each night at dusk, or at dawn, you see the canyons as they look in these photographs. Life has a dark side, and, in Southern California, you find that dark side in the canyons.

“You won’t ever catch me living in a place like this,” one of our house guests--shack guests would have been the more accurate designation--told me the first time we cranked him up to the front door of our Topanga Canyon home on a splintery tramline that dated back to 1916. No road at all to that first old house in the canyon--just the tram and a switchback path so precarious that my best friend once disappeared into one of its sinkholes. It took maybe half an hour to get her out. That kind of stuff happens in canyons all the time; it hardly ever happens in Sherman Oaks.

People in Sherman Oaks might be glad of that, but the people who live in the canyons are unabashed by such things. Because that’s the division. Between law-fearing citizens and outlaws. Long ago, a friend dished to me about a movie star he knew who lived a double life. The star kept his wife, children, horses, cats and cinema-size screening room in a big spread in the Valley. “But,” my friend asked, “if you have a mistress in L.A., where do you keep her? You keep her in a canyon.”

From the beginning of California history, outlaws have hidden in the canyons. A hero of a hard-boiled novel took 33 bullets in downtown L.A. but drove miles into a canyon’s stark tranquillity to spill his blood onto steep banks of non-judgmental shale. Even now, when you call the cops, it takes them an hour and a half to get to your house. But that’s all right, because the robbers are just as lost as they are.

All our canyons are the veriest retreat from what we are pleased to call civilization. Where did Manson live before he found his ranch? In the canyon right where I live. If the freeways, the high schools, the banks, the very mall-ness of Los Angeles make you crazy, you can go live in a canyon: Laurel or Coldwater, Tuna or Nichols, Malibu or Trabuco, Encinal or Topanga.

The canyons that slice up Southern California have their differences. Rich rock ‘n’ rollers live in this one, survivalists in that one; Laurel has traffic problems, Tuna doesn’t. But basically all of them are alike. They are what this country was before the sprinkled lawn became a way of life. The elements that control canyon life are plants first, animals second, fire third and rain fourth. Humans come so far down on any canyon list it isn’t even funny. The Chumash Indians didn’t have development plans for any of this property. Their thoughts on this subject, if they had any, might have been: We are part of a perfectly humming cosmic system here, a system that’s neither good nor bad but simply is. We don’t need to mess with it.

You look at an oak tree in these canyons, and you don’t have to say, “Oh, how beautiful.” The truth is, some days it is, some days it isn’t. Some days the larvae from oak moths rain down on you like tree dandruff. Some days the trees look like they need washing. A plant like greasewood, which can explode if fire even gets near it, isn’t beautiful, except sometimes it is. Sumac: What a pain. But it smells like heaven. And ceanothus, California lilac--blindingly beautiful three weeks out of the year, thorny and sullen the other 49. This isn’t necessarily nature to write poems about.

Ryegrass is nasty in August, but mild and velvety in April and May--which is also the best time to start your weeding if you want to live through the steam-engine fires from August through December. But April and May are when the rattlesnakes wake up and come out in the sun and introduce their babies to the larger world. Firemen and welfare mothers without other male protectors conduct courtships around these exquisite reptiles.

“Where’s that snake you were calling about, ma’am?”

“Right there, by your foot.”

“Oh! My goodness!”

After the snake has escaped or been squashed, the fireman comes in for coffee, and love blooms.

Generally, though, humans make themselves scarce. That’s the whole point. There are signs: The basketball hoop tacked up precariously in the wilderness, the roads that go nowhere, the jerry-built houses that everybody knows are no more than kindling for the next conflagration. You can hear party sounds, wind chimes, survivalists shooting their guns, or, often, sounds of ecstasy from somewhere around. But off the main highway, humans are rarer than coyotes. Some of the houses look pretty sturdy, with concrete pilings and three-car garages. But once, after a bad rain, I saw a brand-new car washed up in a tree. We may live here in the present, but it could all go in a minute. The other afternoon, sun about to go down, we saw a coyote out on the point. Something nice to look at. Then another one. Another one. Four of them. Partly together, partly alone. Their time was different from ours. They lived in a different world; the one you see in these photographs. A place where a human would never be boss. It’s good to keep that in mind.