Turn left and pray
WHILE on a trip to California in the late 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover’s chauffeur-driven car was rear-ended while making a left turn. “The Director [Hoover] had been shaken up,” Joseph L. Schott writes in “No Left Turns,” his irreverent memoir of Hoover’s FBI. “He had been sitting on the left side behind the driver. Now he refused to sit on the left rear seat any more and had forbidden all left turns on auto trips.”
I have my own harrowing left-turn story. A few weeks after resettling in Los Angeles, I was heading west down Sunset Boulevard into the tangerine glare of the descending sun, and after waiting for an opening in traffic, I turned with the feeble acceleration of my “new” 1986 Toyota Tercel and crossed the oncoming lane.
A screech of brakes and a horrific grinding followed, auguring the car’s total destruction. After being struck on the right rear fender by a van going east on Sunset, my Toyota careened toward the sidewalk. In the elongated seconds that followed, I braked hard, the pedal plunged to the floor, and the car seemed to go faster and faster. It plowed into a steel post, which, thank God and the guy who put it there, stopped the car dead before it crashed into a dry cleaners.
Far from being traumatized, as J. Edgar was, I have since mastered the fine art of the L.A. left turn and, as we anticipate the return of fall traffic, now is a good time to extol its many virtues.
A remarkable feature of Los Angeles, the classic left turn is an unnerving idiosyncrasy of L.A. driving. Scores of vintage traffic lights, unequipped with green left-turn arrows, provide the perfect habitat. You would never see this perilous maneuver, for instance, in Irvine. (And by the way, the first city in the state to unveil an experimental traffic light designed to reduce wait times in left turn lanes was Fullerton, not the City of Angels.)
Let’s face it: Metro Los Angeles lags behind the suburbs, signal-wise, but how we deal with left turns constitutes a unique phenomenon.
The L.A. left turn is not for the wimpy. Now and then an alpha male will roar left at the first flash of green, before opposing cars have a chance to move forward an inch. However, common etiquette demands we wait for a reasonable break in the action. On traffic-choked thoroughfares, we must bide our time until the light turns yellow. The wait can be quite long, and it is a good time to balance a checkbook or catch up on Harry Potter.
Those types of activities are not recommended if you are the lead car, however -- yellow can come and pass you by. Then irate motorists may try to honk you to death.
When the light finally does turn yellow, two cars, always two, by some unwritten rule, complete the turn. On rare occasions, a fanatically impatient third car, no doubt someone late for Pilates class, will join in and, for all practical purposes, run a red light.
Since nitro met glycerin, there has seldom been in all of creation a more explosive mix than the L.A. left turn and that figure known euphemistically as “the pedestrian.” This yields heart-stopping moments, such as when you decide to race against 4,000 pounds of Humvee speeding your way. Just as you hang a left, a decrepit white-haired man emerges from nowhere in the middle of the crosswalk. Your right flank exposed to the speeding Humvee, you must make a life-or-death choice.
Braking is out of the question. Miraculously, you avoid a deadly collision as the elderly man, showing unexpected agility, grabs your side mirror and is airlifted to safety. Or, at the very least, manages to scuttle a yard or two out of the way.
The fact is, Angelenos accept risk and uncertainty every day of the week.
Our sunshine and snowless winters come at the cost of an uneasy truce with often hostile expressions of man and nature -- on top of mudslides, floods and brush fires, the Big One always lurks. We are resilient people, not only to survive amid these tensions but thrive here. Anyplace else, with its perfectly regulated, risk-free left turns, is Dullsville.
In the asphalt labyrinth called Los Angeles, the left turn is one of the last refuges for automotive freedom and the operation of honest judgment. Most remarkable of all, it demands a naive faith in the intelligence and driving skills of our fellow human beings.
Sure, the L.A. left turn still spooks the faint of heart. But we, the proud and bold of Los Angeles, live with it day in, day out. So put your cares away, close your eyes, light a cigarette if you like, and don’t put down that cellphone, whatever you do -- go ahead and make that wild left turn. J. Edgar Hoover be damned.
Grady Miller can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.
