A Most Solitary Place

Truly, there’s no place in the West where you can learn to be alone better than in Los Angeles. You learn, for example, that unless you look like--and I mean really look like--Sharon Stone or Brad Pitt, no one you don’t know will look at you. (Why waste a good glance at a nobody when, sooner or later, a real somebody will happen by?) Even more formative is the sort of high-speed, lonely closeness you get used to if you spend any time on the freeways. (At 70 miles an hour, you don’t really want to get very close to any of your ballistic neighbors.) As well, in a place where absolutely anything goes, you learn to project a certain cool detachment, a sort of “thanks all the same but I’m going somewhere else” that appears as a slight tightness at the sides of the mouth.

Indeed, born and raised in the wide-open spaces of Los Angeles, I’d learned not just to accept but even, at times, to enjoy my aloneness. I was a city kid from a town of challenges

that stretched, horizontally, over an area half the size of Connecticut. So when I went one summer to work at a cattle ranch a little to the north of town, I thought the solitude would be the least of my concerns.

I was wrong.

I’d wanted to do something different, but I hadn’t expected the differences to be quite so complete. There were, of course, the obvious ones. I knew, for example, how to enter a freeway and cross four lanes of traffic in a single move . . . but I’d never ridden a horse in my life. I knew how to wake up at the last minute and make it to an early morning (9:30!!) class at UCLA in an acceptable state of semi-sentience . . . but I’d never had to get up to the sound of a predawn breakfast gong and be thoroughly ready for a day of labor by 7--at the latest. I knew how to make a 10-foot jump shot in the middle of a crowd . . . but I’d never dug a series of 3-foot postholes in the middle of nowhere. These, however, were mostly mechanical challenges and so, with a bit of practice and a few calluses, easy to get over.

What wasn’t so easy to get over--what became, in fact, an almost insurmountable challenge--was the terrifying, utterly inescapable solitude. Aloneness I knew. After all, I had done the freeways, had ignored the propositions, had been ignored by thousands of people every day. But solitude? That, I discovered, I really didn’t know.

It’s not that there weren’t other people out there. Four cowboys and a cook on 6,000 acres. Not exactly high density, but at least there were a few other folk you could run into once or twice a day, maybe. And there was the beauty of the Cojo Ranch itself. Fifteen miles of private beach wrap around the 90-degree angle of Point Conception, where the coast, which surprisingly turns west from Santa Barbara for about 40 miles, turns north once again. Here is where the relatively cool Japanese current slides southward, not to hit land again until somewhere past La Jolla. Here is where the Chumash Indians believed the souls of the dead finally and forever departed for Similaqsa, the invisible Island of the Dead. Here is where the worst peacetime naval disaster occurred when the commodore of the Pacific Fleet made an 11-mile mistake on the foggy night of Sept. 8, 1923. Thinking he’d rounded the point, he ordered his convoy of destroyers to turn abruptly east--smack into the shore at full speed. As neighboring rancher Jane Hollister-Wheelwright once told me, “It’s one of the roughest damn places in the world. Lots of wind. Always fog. And all those wrecks.”

But it was also a little farther from the dubious comfort of crowds than I’d ever cared to get. The Transverse Range--known locally as the Santa Ynez Mountains--runs along the shore from Ventura up until, at the western edge of the Cojo, it seems simply to give up and sink into the Pacific. That’s the north side of the ranch--a steep, impenetrable wall of chaparral and sandstone. To the west is the Pacific Ocean: next stop, Japan. To the south is the Pacific Ocean: next stop, the Antarctic. Only to the east can you glimpse a bit of the stuff of human comfort, the barbed wire fence that separates the essentially unoccupied Cojo from the barely occupied Hollister Ranch, and a smudge of smog above an otherwise invisible Santa Barbara.

After that first month, it was clear that I’d survive the obnoxious tests of manhood and truly earn the right to make $1.35 an hour plus room and board--in other words, a small cot and a lot of potatoes. But was putting up with that disconcerting solitude really worth it? With whom could I argue the relative merits of Kurt Vonnegut and Jane Austen? To whom could I show my calluses with pride? With whom could I commiserate about the relentless work, the lack of female company and the redneck notions of an ornery foreman? I was alone now in a foreign, hostile, seriously underpopulated world.

And yet, with the underpinnings of familiarity removed, I made a frightening discovery. I actually began to like being alone, really alone. I’d take long walks, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, along the miles of untraveled beaches or up one of the canyons and along the ridge. My companions were the scurrying shadows of a bobcat in the brush, the paw prints of a mountain lion, the bark of a coyote, the sharp screech of a red-tailed hawk. I was a guest--and not a wholly welcomed one, at that--and the experience was wonderfully sobering.

There is a reason why the prophets would go where only the gods they saw saw them. True, when these “prophets” came down from their mountains or back from their deserts, they were often a little out of touch, if not downright insane. Ah, but the things they’d seen, things only such immense time and space and quiet will allow the mind to imagine, things one can imagine only where one can be thoroughly unself-conscious and, hence, more conscious of other things.

Not until I’d lived with that solitary immensity for a couple of months could I begin to appreciate it. With no TV, no radio and no telephone but for the pay phone in the mess, I was myself a little “out of touch.” I got no news of far-away tragedies to which, because they had happened to humans, I was expected to respond--shocked, saddened or publicly outraged. I heard no music to which I could tap a foot or troll, emotionally, for meaningful lyrics. I watched no sports and heard no weather forecasts. In short, I got none of the yammering stuff the world’s come to depend on for excitement, news and reality.

A few days after I got back to Los Angeles at summer’s end, I noticed that some of my old habits had changed. For a few weeks, I drove a little slower. For a few weeks, I didn’t comb my hair. (Not only was I not going to look anything like Brad Pitt, I wasn’t going to look like anything anybody would ever want to see.) And the tightness at the sides of the mouth was replaced with a surly grin.

Time and the seductions of civilization eventually wore down the edges of my arrogance. Much too quickly, I went back to driving too fast. A little while later, I started combing my hair again, though I still didn’t look a thing like Brad Pitt. Eventually, even, the surly grin gave way to the tighter mouth--poised, as it had been before, to disagree.

Still, even now I have to watch it. If things get too quiet for too long, I can forget to care and be lost for hours and hours.