A stroll through nature’s city
I WALK EVERY DAY, RARELY FOR PLEASURE AND NEVER FOR EXERCISE AND without company or electronic media. I listen to what’s in the air, not broadcast over it. It’s not strenuous walking -- there are no switchbacks or streams to cross, just a simple sidewalk -- which makes the walking more like purposeful loafing at about three miles an hour. I walk because I cannot drive.
My walking is a means to an end. But between my front door and my destination is an outside that is so palpable, so urgent that I lose the purpose of my stroll. When I pass the smooth, pale green bole of a eucalyptus tree, stripped each winter of the last shreds of its bark, it’s impossible not to run my hand, if only for a moment, over its clean, hard swells and involutions. It’s all I can do not to lay my cheek against the slightly furred skin of the tree.
Just before dawn, I walk while the thumbnail curve of the waning moon rides brightly in and out of the arms of the sycamores, maples and liquidambars that line the blocks near my home. They had been planted (some of them 50 years ago) with bureaucratic efficiency precisely in front of each house in the narrow strip of parkway between the sidewalk and the curb, but nature took the plan and twisted it, and the trees there are no longer just categories of the planting scheme. Each is itself -- bent or straight, thick or slim -- and different in every season.
Morning after morning in spring, as I pass under the same low-hanging branch of an ugly Brazilian pepper tree, I cut the anchor lines of a persistent spider’s web. The shuddery unease of feeling the web drawn across my forehead means that a state of nature is present, and it goes on, spectacularly indifferent.
I have to feel the web or see the clearing evening sky, when it’s broken by clouds after a day of rain, to know something of a world that has nothing to do with me but is continually and subtly being made. When I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and pivot slowly to take in the whole sky above the rooflines, I also know that the wheeling contrast of the white clouds against the deepening blue-black sky is an artifact of the reflected glare of the basin’s tens of thousands of streetlights. And I find that beautiful too.
No less beautiful than the drawn-out two-note call, repeated from yard to yard, of mourning doves, and the way their startled flight from front lawns begins with a loud clap, like a folding chair being closed, and the piping whistle of air through their wings that diminishes as they recede.
They rise up into air that’s generally still, into light that in the afternoon is often suspended like a luminous substance, a light almost unequaled for its day-to-day consistency (which is one reason why film production clings to Southern California when everything about making a movie can be done more cheaply elsewhere).
You cannot fake the light of L.A., the way it will particularize every nondescript house and tawdry palm tree with a painterly line of shadow or illuminate with no shadows at all, a local atmospheric phenomenon called “airlight” that explains why nearby landmarks on many days seem to disappear into an even whiteness.
On those days, in fall especially, sunset begins as a lingering dove-gray twilight under the rattling leaves of the street trees. If a Santa Ana wind picks up, the rustling crescendos into a syncopated rumble, surging with each gust and smelling of dry adobe and night-blooming jasmine under stars twinkling uncharacteristically.
Later in the year, walking is a burden. There may be other sensations, but when the wind slants rain under the edge of the umbrella, I’m cold and wet. The cold is relative, of course, no less than 45 degrees here in winter, in the wide swale between the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers, but I still have to clench my fingers into fists and jam them into my coat pockets.
Then spring jolts the street into a weedy exuberance, a lushness that overcomes even the worst gardener until the breathless glare of summer.
It’s my everyday loss, walking done, when I get to work or home. I step into the world where everything is controlled, including me, and leave a parallel world in which wind or rain or the ratcheting call of a scrub jay isn’t.
That other world, given the way we build in Los Angeles, is generally about five inches away, just beyond the stucco and two-by-fours of our houses.
Some of us look for our place in the natural world. We travel great distances or take risks to get closer to it. Some of us seek to demonstrate how superior that world is and how far it is from home. I walk every day, and it’s in nature’s city.
D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.”