Airborne L.A.

If God himself one day came looking for a close-up view of Los Angeles, this is what he might find: He would gaze down and see that rich people in Brentwood and Bel-Air play a lot of tennis in their own backyards, on mock-green rectangles that litter the million-dollar landscape.

He might see that majestic, high-masted sailboat headed out to sea from the safe harbor of the Cabrillo Beach Yacht Club. Or, nearby, the Point Fermin lighthouse on its rocky promontory jutting out into the Pacific like some washed-up boxer’s chin.

He would take in the breathless and sometimes clumsy diversity that can be had across mammoth Los Angeles County in the span of an hour or more drive from the human seals on short boards paddling out from Malibu Lagoon State Beach, past the puffing smokestacks of the Carson refineries, to the white-fenced horse ranches of tiny Bradbury, saddled on the foothills of the San Gabriels.

Maybe you have seen it yourself on low-flying, southbound airline approaches into LAX--meandering descents that bend around Malibu Beach and across Stone Canyon Reservoir, over Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium and, later, Watts Towers and the Hollywood Park racetrack before the planes make their westward landing against the sea.

Being up here, some 1,000 feet above the place where you play out your life, can make you realize that just maybe you don’t know L.A. as well as you thought. It can lead you to admit that a city’s shortcuts and secret passageways--the very keys to its intricate beauty and baffling idiosyncrasies--can best be deciphered from here, from on high.

For some, that realization might have come watching television the other day during the rescue of the 11-year-old boy jammed in that foot-wide crack in a pile of desert boulders in the Antelope Valley. As the news helicopters pulled back and panned the surrounding area you could see subdivisions full of homes, with green lawns and backyard fences.

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At 4,070 square miles, Los Angeles County is a sprawling hunk of land and water that is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, five times the size of neighboring Orange County.

This is the West, a place where your backyard provides some spectacular scenery, from sagebrush-strewn hills to sandy beaches to spots where it can snow a foot in the depths of a gray December--from busy freeways to a landscape so rugged and forlorn you’d think that that tiny Mars lander was lurking somewhere about. Or those boulders.

For me, a recent two-hour helicopter ride across the Los Angeles Basin and its bordering terrain provided a glimpse into what makes this city such a unique and sometimes troubling environment in which to live. It showed the ironies of a place where backyard pools can lie behind homes not 100 yards from the Earth’s largest ocean.

As when Dorothy stepped from her crashed Kansas house in “The Wizard of Oz,” the scenery in our county can quickly turn from more mundane black and white to splendid Technicolor, from the lush green of golf courses and neighborhood parks to yellowy fields north of the western Santa Monica Mountains--”Big Valley” country--to the asphalt gray of the freeway arteries and inner-city streets.

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Evan Jensen has been flying these often-friendly skies for more than a decade. A pilot who whisks along at 120 mph across some dizzying changes in topography, he is always amazed by what he sees outside his helicopter window.

“In the span of 20 minutes you can go from the ocean shoreline to the tops of rugged mountains,” he says, “from the heart of downtown to the middle of nowhere.”

There’s the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, at boulder-strewn Stoney Point, where Topanga Canyon Boulevard meets the Simi Valley Freeway. Like a crouching sphinx, the boulders provide the wild terrain for rock climbers from around the world. The rocks are near romantic-looking train tunnels that punch through larger rock formations--and it’s all just a stone’s throw from scores of purple- and pink-roofed condos.

There is solitude here, as in the trailer homestead built by some loner on a cluster of rocks just south of the Santa Susana Pass, an isolated eagle’s nest of a place reached only by a switchbacking dirt road whose origin remains unknown, even from up here.

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There are tributes to man’s hubris, his stubborn instinct to build his homes in precarious places--on mountain slopes, along a rocky Malibu shoreline or smack in the reckless middle of a flood plain. Those stilted cliffhangers look shakier from up here, those beach homes like bowling pins waiting to be struck down by the next winter’s storm.

There’s the Malibu mansion resembling a 14th century castle, the Bel-Air home that was built atop a leveled-off mountain peak, with commanding views of the people below.

Sometimes, the mansions are hidden, clustered in places where you can’t see them from the road, like the throng of million-dollar homes near a place called Devil’s Canyon, just north of the Simi Valley Freeway, habitats that remain spirited away from the rest of us.

As we whirl south over the Mulholland Pass toward the ocean, the ubiquitous backyard tennis courts and pools of the wealthy give way to the often treeless grid of the L.A. Basin, the place where most of us average people live. From up here, the mid-city sprawl looks to be a stark place, with rough-hewn edges, like the police chalk line around a body at some murder scene.

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All around, cars stop and go at traffic lights, metal molecules going about their way. Shrouded in haze, the city center sits well to the east, like some lord holding sway over his subjects.

Along Sunset Boulevard, Motown diva Tina Turner stares down from a mural that covers the entire side of a building. Farther south, the La Brea Tar Pits lurk in the midst of all this humanity, like some black-hole, backwoods Louisiana swampland.

In Los Angeles, backyards back up to things that are beautiful and graceful and things that are downright monstrous-looking.

Wilmington-dwellers live in the white-smoked shadow of refinery tanks that appear as ominous as children’s tiddlywinks from above.

Houses in Compton recede as we fly over the wrecking yards and junk piles, the stuff of a city’s lower intestines.

Not far away, the Los Angeles River winds southward, past still other backyards, an industrially suspect green moss growing on its concrete banks.

Nearby, within view of houses all around, comes perhaps the strangest L.A. sight of them all, the things that remind you that you’re not living in Des Moines or Detroit: And they’re not the palm trees.

Rather, they are the towering container loaders that service the big ships that come to port in Long Beach and Los Angeles, these lumbering cranes resembling dinosaurs pausing at the water’s edge for a drink.

On a sunny weekday morning, as the helicopter whisks back toward its Van Nuys base, horseback riders gallop along the feet of the San Gabriels, a lone kayaker floats in the waters off Santa Monica, cars wind up Malibu Canyon Road away from the sea. Drink in hand, an anonymous mansion-builder stands on the porch of his sprawling home in the hills above Brentwood, perhaps feeling like king of all the subjects who live down below.

And they all call Los Angeles County home.