Nature’s place in L.A.’s urban jungle

“LOS Angeles basin and hill slopes / Checkered with streetways,” Gary Snyder wrote in his 1986 poem “Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin,” a pitch perfect evocation of the way that, in L.A., nature and humanity collide.

This is, to a very real extent, the defining story of the city, where we must constantly reassess the boundaries between the domestic and the wild. As William L. Fox notes in “Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles”: “We’ve come a long way since [Gene] Autry played a former forest ranger in the 1949 ‘Riders of the Whistling Pines,’ a movie in which he took potshots at a puma. Rangers today are more interested in tracking the movements of the cats in the Santa Monicas with GPS radio collars.... Tunnels allowing the mountain lions and other species, such as bobcats and gray foxes ... to bypass the freeway system are slowly gaining approval in the region.”

“Making Time” falls into the growing subcategory of urban nature writing, not unlike Anne Matthews’ “Wild Nights” or Jennifer Price’s “Flight Maps.” These are books that frame the city as another kind of landscape in which we interact with the elemental world. It’s a matter of necessity as well as common sense, especially in a city like this, where nature is right in front of us, whether we choose to notice it or not.

An essayist and poet who lives in Burbank, Fox is a big-time noticer; much of the material here has a reflective, serendipitous flow. For him, Los Angeles is unique because its history -- its geologic, lithic history -- remains so close to the surface of the ground. “Every city has a metaphorical geography that determines and reflects the nature of its growth,” he writes in “Tracking Tar,” the opening piece here. “In Los Angeles, petroleum is a widespread fact of nature underfoot, one of the primary reasons for the city to exist, and the fuel that both allowed and necessitated the creation of a grid large enough to cover the basin, therefore determining the warp and weft of its urban fabric.”

“Tracking Tar” is emblematic of Fox’s intentions on a variety of levels. Beginning with references to the 1997 film “Volcano” (where, yes, a volcano emerges from the La Brea Tar Pits and sends hot lava spewing down Wilshire Boulevard) and the 1985 methane explosion underneath Ross Dress for Less in the Fairfax district, the essay places us in human and geologic space.

These are two of my favorite bits of L.A. pop culture history -- the one a Hollywood guilty pleasure, illogical but fun to marvel at; the other the kind of weird catastrophe that seems the stuff of urban legend but isn’t, an example of nature as metaphor -- and Fox’s use of them establishes his authority, his understanding of the subterranean currents that make the city what it is.

He’s also sharp on the relationship of Los Angeles to the oil industry, not just as history but as a matter of daily life. Many urban wells, he notes, like the “rig on Pico and Genesee avenues, which is camouflaged as an office building,” have been disguised to blend into the surrounding landscape, while near the entrance to the Beverly Center sits “the only oil well I know of at a shopping mall.” This is L.A. from the inside.

Unfortunately, as “Making Time” progresses, Fox’s vision grows a bit diffuse. Partly, that has to do with the book’s structure, which is more than a little amorphous; subtitle aside, it is less a collection of essays than a series of linked installments in a loose investigation of time and place. This works well, as long as Fox stays grounded. “A Tour of the Antennae” uses a series of visits to local peaks, with their telecommunications routers, to get at our disconnection from nature. “During the 1992 riots,” Fox tells us, “when large portions of the city were blacked out, people reportedly called up police stations in a panic to ask what was wrong with the sky. It wasn’t the smoke and fire they were so worked up about -- it was the Milky Way. They’d never seen it before.”

Yet partway through “Making Time,” he inserts a brief interlude on process, updating the first three chapters and noting a long break he took in the middle of the project. It’s jarring and it interrupts the flow.

Then there’s the issue of time, which Fox means to weave into the very fiber of the book, although he never evokes it as clearly as he does the physical world. The last two pieces, “The Present Perfect Continuous” and “Model Behavior,” address the subject explicitly, taking on perception, special effects and the influence of the movies. Still, Fox’s argument -- that as creatures of modernity, we live in an eternal present tense, unmoored from history, from continuity, from any real sense of who or where we are -- remains not quite fully articulated, just the slightest bit out of reach.

That’s too bad, for at its best, “Making Time” is ambitious and thoughtful, an engaging mishmash of ideas, experience and theory, much like Los Angeles itself. The key, Fox wants us to remember, is that whether we are aware of it, we exist in, and are part of, the natural world.

“This,” he writes, “is the environment we are creating -- not a more natural infrastructure of forests and lakes and plains from which we derive food, planks for shelter, and fiber for clothing, but a less natural network of pipes and wires, tunnels and towers. This is a part of the world we also have to understand in order to retain a sense of time and our collective memory.... And maybe it’s not such a bad thing to track some tar into the house from the La Brea Tar Pits, after all.”

david.ulin@latimes.com

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David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.