PERSPECTIVE ON THE BULLDOZERS’ PROGRESS : A Rusty Pipe Rattles a Tune of Loss : A 60-mile commute--once a dash from city to country--blurs into mapped and plotted development.

By rough reckoning I have traveled 80,000 miles--three times around the Earth, almost halfway to the moon--only to find myself locked in place, watching time slip backward against the weight of memory.

It’s the nature of commuting, which is mileage without distance, motion without movement. So call this the confessions of a freeway rider: For six years I traveled back and forth, running against the grain of traffic between Hollywood and Westlake Village--60 miles, every day--out along the 101 and back.

Every day began like a four-lane prison break. By 7 a.m. the city lay wrapped in smog and I was hooked into traffic heaving over the Cahuenga Pass, then downhill past Universal City to link up with the train of cars shunting west across the long, flat shoulder of the San Fernando Valley. Here the freeway bored through satellite colonies of convenience stores, gas stations and shopping malls--a landscape featureless, franchised, endless. Then, quite suddenly, the road bent upward, rising out of the valley into rolling hills and open country. The ascent had the effect of a natural frontier, like arriving at the edge of an ocean or a great desert. Below, the city was a smudge in the rear-view mirror, while up ahead green foothills dotted with live oak stretched out under a clear cobalt sky.

I was living some essential Southern California experience; nomadic, traveling through a landscape of wrenching shifts. By day I worked in the quiet isolation of Westlake and, when evening came, a pass through the curtain of green hills returned me to the valley, through the Cahuenga Pass and down into the gritty streets of Hollywood again. It was such delicious tension and, suspended in the tug of opposites, I have never felt so cut adrift, or so at home.

Still, as time went by, I became aware that the landscape was changing, its features blurring. I can’t recall when I knew it precisely; the realization stole on me as the land itself was transformed--piece by piece, bit by bit. One morning, as I was passing through the mountains, a yellow pickup truck appeared in a vast field of green. That evening a construction shed had been set up. The next day the hillside was creased with the tracks of a half-dozen earth-moving machines.

It happened quickly. A team of graders peeled the grass away, flattened out a section; a concrete pad, spiked with reinforcing rods, was poured over the dusty lot. In less than a month a building had appeared--a stucco warehouse, low and long as a city block. A crane lowered the air conditioners into place; a truckload of trees was laid out in rows across the parking lot. By summer, the final ingredient--a crew of workers (who knows where they came from or who they were?)--had moved in.

I can’t say the change upset me. The warehouse, hunched beneath the looming mountains, had a certain solitary, intrepid charm. But soon another truck appeared, barely a quarter-mile down the road; then the graders, the cement mixers. Suddenly the space between the buildings, once a sweep of open country, took on the look of what it had become--another mapped and plotted tract of Southern California real estate.

Civilization is as cumulative as cancer; once the quality of the environment had changed, the rest was mere quantity. Billboards sprang up around the freeway; puffs of black smoke, exhaust from teams of Caterpillar tractors grunting at the hills, hung in the air. And the buildings went up--a motel, another warehouse, then another, an office complex, a shopping mall. At the mountain pass where the road had once broken free of the city, a sign three stories high now flashed above a new-car lot: “Great Deals!”

Construction sites leapfrogged all the way to Westlake, then farther west. A sense of sovereignty had shifted in the landscape; man was not some puny force, instead it was the mountains that now seemed delicate, vulnerable. And what I witnessed every day on the way to work held up a mirror to what was happening in my neighborhood at home.

The block where I lived was one of those odd oases that sometimes can be found in the center of a big American city. Just back from Hollywood Boulevard, the street held a dozen two-story houses, some dating from the turn of the century, under tall canopies of palm and citrus trees. The neighborhood had a feeling of sleepy, protected permanence--but it was not protected enough.

Near the end of the block, a house was torn down. Then another, and another. It was “community redevelopment” at work. The area had been rezoned for high-density housing in anticipation of a proposed stop on the Metro Rail subway coming in from downtown; no one could stand against the soaring land values. By the end of summer only a single home remained--a large blue two-story once owned by Mary Pickford--in a field of dusty lots.

The Pickford house came down in early autumn. A bulldozer cracked the foundation; the walls hung in the sunlight a moment--you could see inside: The rooms were hand-painted with Babylonian bathing scenes!--then crumpled. Behind a wire construction fence, the block lay empty and lifeless as the moon.

Through that year, then the next, I drove the freeway as the wilderness became a city and my neighborhood became a wilderness; everywhere was swirling dust. The reference points had come unstuck: In the mountains and on the boulevard, the buildings that went up looked just the same, stucco boxes painted in an irony of earth tones.

But out in the mountains, a sliver of green remained where two foothills folded into a narrow valley. It was still working ranchland, too steep for building. At the bottom of the valley, a section of corrugated metal pipe, perhaps 10 feet long, had been abandoned. The wind must have whipped through the valley, because the pipe was always on the move. One morning I would see it snagged on a tree root halfway up the hill; that evening it might be wedged against the bottom of a ravine.

Then one morning the pipe had disappeared. Two tracks led from a depression in the grass and vanished over the crest of the hill. I pulled over, paced up and down beside the guardrail, stunned. It must have made a strange sight; a guy with a stricken look, flapping in the wind blast of the trucks beside a busy highway, looking for something that wasn’t there.

It was only junk; I knew I had no claim on any part of it. But someone, a stranger with every right to do so, had picked a scrap of pipe from a country hillside and left me, rolling along in the slow lane, feeling shot through the heart.

I commuted only a few more months out along the 101. The business had been bought by a larger company and the Westlake office was closed down. When I take the highway these days, escaping the city on a long weekend, the old familiar freeway rhythms--the slap of the tires, hiss from the carburetor, the thrill of traveling without going anywhere--still draw me in.

Out in the foothills I look for the sliver of valley that remains, a flash of rust hidden in the grass, something wild and willful out along this shackled highway, something to hang onto as I am passing through.