A Trip to California (Part Seven)

This section will cover our stay in California. After three days in a van, a part of me expected a real revelation in that well-known state of the union. I knew Hollywood and Disneyland; Ronald Reagan was president and I knew it was his home state (at that age, he was my first real experience of an American president, so I was well-informed). I had heard of Los Angeles, San Francisco, the redwoods, UCLA, the 1960s counterculture, Laurel Canyon (through references to it in the same era’s music and art) and its idea of celebrity and glamour. Very little of what I knew became any sort of reality.


We travelled through the desert of Death Valley to more desert in southern California. Ontario was a dry and burned out and spare town in the middle of expanses of dust and dirt. I never forgot how the patches of dirt were strange next to all of those expensive homes. Front lawns were a true rarity (they seemed to belong to every fourth home). After our stay, we travelled through Los Angeles to reach the airport to take us home, the vision was just as bleak (more so with the poverty and the haze of bodies). This return trip passed us through East LA and I remember it as a film of sepia and human traffic on every available space on the sidewalks and roads.