Making the Great Outdoors Your Private Space

In simpler times, Los Angeles gave you breathing room: the pause of a yard--endless mental comfort zones of space. And even if you didn’t have a green patch of your own--back or front--you could wander toward the end of your block where there was an empty lot or two, or cross a couple of neat yards to the new subdivision where the money ran out and the clean black asphalt suddenly--like an interrupted thought--turned to weeds and brambles. Los Angeles would always trade on the vision of itself as “a place of limitless space”--or so it seemed. It offered neither the smashed-together shotguns of Philly nor the shared stoops of New York, places where conversations--whispered or otherwise--could freely float out onto the sidewalk or through the kitchen window, and secrets spilled public.

We didn’t have to imagine our way into private worlds--we could easily wander away and into them. But as so many of L.A.’s once wild, wide-open spaces have become cluttered with mega outlet malls, redundant tract homes or cookie-cutter townhouse developments and the city’s core has steadily swollen, finding a solace spot-a private moment--becomes a much more of a creative act.

Angelenos, stacked together end to end, have found that their perceptions of private and public space (and public and private acts, for that matter) are experiencing an evolutionary shift. The numbers tell us that our gut is right--in 1980 we boasted 2,966,850 Angelenos, but neither fire, earthquake nor urban unrest could serve to diminish the region’s pull, and by 2000, 3,694,820 called L.A. home. As space has gotten squeezed, it’s also been reinterpreted. Almost imperceptibly, the illusion of space has become a working substitute for the real thing.

Griffith Park, with its cursive loops of bridle trails and bitter-scented switchbacks, has long been the “peoples’ retreat”--a vast spread of land open, rambling and sparsely embellished, like a summerhouse. After Wales-born Col. Griffith J. Griffith amassed a fortune in gold mine speculation in the late 1800s, he purchased more than 4,000 acres of land in what was then Rancho Los Feliz. As a gift to the region that had been so kind to him, he gave the city a little more than 3,000 acres, a wild space 28 times as large as Central Park. His only caveat: “It must be made a place of recreation and rest for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people.”

Intended from the very beginning to be a retreat--a “backyard for all of the diversity of L.A.”--it has always attracted friends and families for picnics and nature walks. And as the city has filled in, it’s become increasingly common to see “the plain people” bringing more private rituals into public space-because they think of it as theirs.

Moments of Peace for All Walks of Life

Mothers who find only this moment in the day to call themselves artists park their carriages and sink into the grass to sketch the whorls of bark and sprays of oleander. Men and women in business suits sip morning coffee and peruse the paper, their car roofs open to the sun. Volunteers tend hidden, terraced gardens with cassia plants and silk floss trees. Masseuses set up tables beneath low-slung branches to take advantage of contemplative views. Those with only a car and special parking space to call their address take in the priceless expanse of a singular 360-degree view as they perform their morning ablutions. Actors act and singers sing. And church is always in session--even if it consists of just a congregation of one.

Others carve out time and space for rituals much more elaborate, or more extreme. Barely dawn, on the flats just before the first dirt trail and the rise of hills along the park’s Burbank border, you might get a hit of something beside the usual perfume of a skunk or rattle of a snake that, in this city, separates the great outdoors from just a walk in the park.

At the first turn, it might be the wheeze and hum of bagpipes. Along the next switchback, the thudding heartbeat of the big Brazilian surdo drum. Climbing the first long incline, arias a cappella swell from the valley below.

Season to season, all manner of aspirants come to stake out spots like rented rooms--a picnic bench carved up with love poems; the cool lip of a cave; the first opening view on a rise of hill. And in those spaces, people sink into themselves, erect invisible walls--whether in a breakfast picnic or a predawn meditation, a series of slow-motion taekwondo patterns, or free-jazz rhythms beat out on a picnic table with old drumsticks worn to a shine.

Who needs a rumpus room when you have the great outdoors--overgrown and alive?

Somewhere within this rambling piece of land, you can most times find a place to call home, private, “yours”--even if it is some extrapolation of a time-share arrangement. Anyone with the barest knowledge of this park, thick with California oak, sage and manzanita, knows much about its fabled warren of cruising spots or fern-blanketed trysting places.

Wiccan rituals or other secret gatherings in the shadows that leave behind odd collections of ash and bone along the footpaths also get good play--from whispered apocryphal to reports on the evening news.

Park rangers often stumble on broad extrapolations of the term “wildlife,” suggests ranger Russell Brown, who has seen more than just the remnants of a brief afternoon encounter, he admits with a blush in his voice. “There is this attitude that people have about the park, that it is wilderness,” adds Carol Reynolds, who has, over the last 30 years, walked, run or ridden many of the hiking and horse trails that crisscross the park, almost daily. “They see plants and trees and they think no one could see....”

Her introduction to Griffith Park as a little girl was early morning trips with her grandmother. After the rains, they would set out to pick mushrooms, “Not the round ones,” she recalls, “But the pointy-headed ones that grow in bunches” that had sprouted overnight at the base of the trees in Fern Dell, near the park’s Western Avenue entrance.

She harvested regularly as if it were her backyard, or the one many miles away and years ago in Poland. So, Reynolds, who has familiar with the park and its multiple uses, most certainly may have been surprised but hardly shocked (she’s seen an awful lot over the years)--when she encountered the “famous naked jogger” along a trail that runs near Travel Town, his running shorts in hand. “When he saw us, he dropped them on the ground.”

Ritual, and the privacy of implicit in it, doesn’t necessarily mean hidden corners and dark shadows. Finding enough elbow room, a place to clear one’s head, just means staking claim to what is there--no matter how illusory.

But you have to wonder how many of these customs and habits began: What set of conversations first sent a man and his bagpipes out into a vast parking lot to drown out the birds’ first songs most Saturday mornings? Was it a wife who doesn’t make idle threats? A litigious neighbor at the end of his rope? Or was it simply the appeal of a “space” much more vast than any practice room or performance hall?

Or how about the two trail runners, one shirtless, the other fully suited, who often make their climb up the steep, cracked, antique road, long closed, winding up to the Hollywood sign. The one, with a heavy, family-sized leather Bible, calls out verses, staccato voiced; the other responds to the sky.

Worlds apart, bagpiper and bible runners share the same underlying impulse--to doggedly re-imagine boundaries. Like those before them, they see what’s left of the “great outdoors” as an interpretation. They’ve learned: Space may shrink, but imagination is thick, vast and wild.