Canyons a World Away From Urban Life

A friend reminds me about the canyon roads. About the restorative powers of the canyon roads. When the freeways seem like gridlocked shrines to human folly and the surface streets shrill with endless, mindless commerce, when the beach seems too difficult to get to and the mountains too far away, the canyon roads beckon.

Twisting off the spine of Mulholland Drive, they run up and over the hills that separate the urban sprawls of city and valley, not streets but roads. Laurel Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Topanga Canyon--even the names make promises.

Laurel Canyon is the oldest and perhaps the most famous; Angelenos used it to get from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley even before there was a Hollywood. Most of Laurel Canyon is not a canyon at all--the road, which begins on West Sunset Boulevard, goes as far north as San Fernando. Approaching from the Valley side, the road ducks under the 134, crosses Ventura Boulevard, then winds along a few miles of oak-sheltered lawns and homes. The canyon really begins south of Mulholland Drive, where, for 15 minutes or so, depending on traffic, it slides through another world.

Lawns disappear and eucalyptuses, their slender trunks tilted in tattered skirts, stand in clusters like Degas dancers at the barre. Houses glimmer improbably from the shoulders and laps of the hills, and the land falls away into ravines lined with green, streaked with gold.

Passing the countrified Laurel Canyon store and dry cleaners it seems impossible that just a mile or so away, Sunset blinks and roars.

A few miles west, the journey on Coldwater Canyon moves in the opposite direction. From the south, as it rises out of Beverly Drive, past emerald lawns and million-dollar homes, it remains high-end residential until it hits Mulholland. On Coldwater, it is the ride north that ventures wild.

On an early spring day when the sky over the Valley is 17 shades of shifting gray, the road hurtles down past fir tree and magnolia, past shaggy humps of oleander, twisting just enough to make tires grown weary of straight roads yelp with pleasure.

The writhing figures of cypress trees flash by, and sudden scarlet salutes of bougainvillea. There are houses here and there, but that is not the point. The road is now a tunnel, through sky and earth, through time, heedless of any.

Then, just past the church of St. Michael and All Angels, Coldwater settles down, smoothes her hair, buttons her shirt and moves serenely toward suburbia.

On a map, Benedict Canyon is a serpentine bit of string between Mulholland and Sunset. It’s about a 10-minute drive along Mulholland from Coldwater to Benedict, just long enough to remind anyone weary of life in Los Angeles that there is no other road in the world like Mulholland Drive. There is a reason this road has become the standard backdrop of noir: Here is a place that isn’t really a place, a world between the worlds.

Benedict Canyon shies off Mulholland, suddenly, at an angle and weaves its way along the lip of land in a way that makes it almost impossible for a driver to appreciate the view. Scrub-filled ravines, clefts and crevices softened by weeds, fall away from the road; on opposite hills, houses of three stories and four stand like stacks of pale shiny boxes sent home from Saks or Neiman’s, strangely unconcerned by the wild green twined at their feet.

The sandy spice of eucalyptus is inescapable here; leaves and sloughed off bark litter the road. For all its twists and turns, it is a fast road. The only difficulty is the sudden entrance into the belly of Beverly Hills.

Like turning away from a late winter sunset to look back into the electric blaze of the office, it takes a while for the eyes to adjust.

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.