An Enlightening Mix of Misbegotten Pride and Simple Charm

You have two ways to take in the holiday light show in Griffith Park. You can walk, or you can drive.

“Shouldn’t we walk?” asked the lovely and talented Alison.

“It wouldn’t be right,” I said as we approached the start of the mile-long, billion-watt celebration of the season.

Everyone seemed to have made the same decision. I didn’t see many pedestrians at the 2002 DWP Light Festival. I guess that’s why traffic was backed up before we even hit the starting point, and they say it’s far worse on weekends.

This year’s show celebrates DWP’s 100th year in business and pays tribute to its “proud history ... and its pivotal role in establishing Los Angeles as the second largest city in the nation.”

The word “proud” is an interesting choice. The men who built Los Angeles had big dreams, but scarcely enough water to wet their Scotch. So they funneled it in from the north, undeterred by setbacks such as the 1928 dam collapse that killed 400 people. The DWP has kept the spigot wide open ever since.

“It got that water by pulling off a deal so dirty it still stains the city’s past,” a predecessor of mine, Robert A. Jones, wrote in 1990, detailing the litany of lawsuits as well as the environmental havoc wreaked on the Owens Valley and Mono Lake.

But I digress.

At the entrance, they hand you a guide to the 26-station festival of lights. You’ve got plenty of time to read it, too, because now you’re in a bottleneck. We read by the glow from the “Welcome Tunnel of Lights,” which delivered us to the “DWP At Your Service” station.

Before I go much further I should say that in a city of infamous glamour and pretense, not to mention special-effects wizardry, the festival of lights is no Spielberg production. Whoever was responsible for the Staples Center display -- it resembles Tupperware left on a burner -- should not be allowed to participate next year.

Then again, you don’t often hear of a water and power department putting on a holiday show. It looks like something a small Midwestern town would throw together, but as you make your way through L.A.’s version of the North Pole, you realize that’s part of its charm. I saw a pickup with kids in the back, bundled under blankets and beaming.

The problem is making your way.

The route through the festival has two lanes, and as it happened, I was stuck in the right-hand lane while all the displays were on the left.

“I can’t see the [blank] light display because of the [blanking] SUVs,” Alison squawked as we motored along in the low- lying Nissan Sentra, which is not the proper vehicle to take to the festival.

I saw a cutthroat driver manage to jockey into the good lane up ahead, cutting someone off as if this were the 405 at rush hour. I tried to make a switch myself, but got boxed out by some moron driving a Ford Extinction.

So much for the spirit of the season.

We’re bottled up in the last patch of open space in all of L.A., choked by clouds of exhaust, for the sake of seeing a show dedicated to the robber barons who created this traffic jam and all others.

A cynic might point out the DWP was accused of price gouging in the last energy crisis. They like to lecture us on conservation, too, and here they are with a billion-watt extravaganza that cost taxpayers $330,000. I don’t think that includes the nightly power bill, either.

Is there something wrong with this picture?

I’m almost tempted to go get my money back. But I’m trapped, for one thing, and for another, the show is free.

Then it hits me.

The genius of the light festival -- the thing that elevates it to art -- is not that it makes you forget the dark history of the DWP and how Los Angeles came to be, but that it finally makes you embrace it.

Here’s a drive-by public event that requires no human interaction, just a full tank of gas and a taste for both comfort and excess.

It’s perfect.

You’re almost tempted, especially after you hear Frank Sinatra sing “God Bless America” at the “Statue of Liberty” display, to go for a second spin and spur the economy by burning more fuel.

When the water from the north first flowed into L.A., William Mulholland was there to mark the moment with the famous commandment:

“There it is. Take it.”

With Mulholland as our Moses, how can we not indulge? It was his daughter who flipped the switch to open this year’s festival of lights, as well it should have been.

Pack up the kids, pick up the grandparents, and head for the beacon that lights the sky over the boundless metropolis.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.