Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones who also shelter in place. Old friends pass away, people we loved and admired. Immobilized for the time being, we can revisit destinations, near and far. join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel, the hope that these diversions might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
The Pacific Coast and Santa Monica Mountains from the pier. Thursday October 9, 2014.
Apart from mostly balmy weather, the first thing a visitor will notice about Southern California is the region’s utter dependence on automobiles. The freeways make eastern superhighways look like logging-roads. On our way to Laguna from Joshua Tree we had stopped for lunch at Idylllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains. We were on our way to the opening of California Mexicana was an exhibition curated by Kathie for the Laguna Museum of Art as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA Los Angeles/Latin America.
Kathie was eager to get to the museum prior to closing-time. We also had dinner-plans with museum -director Malcolm Warner and his staff. It being Friday, traffic was bound to be heavy. Looking at the map we decided to head back to Riverside, coming down to Laguna through Anaheim and Irvine. We rolled the dice and came up snake-eyes. Traffic moved from a crawl to stop, crawl to stop for an hour or more before I decided to dead-reckon our way to Laguna on back roads around Santa Ana, down route 241 to 135. Arriving after four o’clock, we headed straight for the museum. Touring the exhibition, everything seemed to be in order. The Diego Rivera mural in San Francisco had been reproduced as a full-sized banner. One of the coups Kathie pulled off was getting the Crocker Museum in Sacramento to lend it monumental canvas by Charles Christian Nahl, of a colonial-era fandango. On a rearing horse in the composition is celebrated bandit Joaquin Murietta upon whom the fictional Zorro is based. The painting Kathie wanted was unbeknownst to her, installed at the Crocker in its original nineteenth-century setting. Temporary de-installation would be costly and potentially dangerous to the work. Fate intervened. A similar painting by Nahl was at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which was about to undergo renovations. If the Laguna Museum agreed look after the piece, it could be in the show.
La Plaza de Toros: Sunday Morning in Monterrey. Charles Christian Nahl. 1874. Santa Barbara Museum of Art. (Reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
Another notable canvas was a painting of Mission San Gabriel Arcangel by German artist Fredinand Deppe, from Laguna’s own collection.
When we visited the mission a few years prior, we were horrified by the state of displays in its little museum. The chausable of Fray Junipero Serra lay in a dusty vitrine. Paintings and artifacts all exhibited need of care and conservation. The poverty of best-practices was due to the fact that San Gabriel was a working mission, serving the surrounding community. Things have greatly improved, but visitors to San Gabriel should not expect an experience like going to San Juan Capistrano. The latter is highly organized, like a Catholic theme-park. Mission de San Gabriel Arcangel is the real deal. Mission Road was torn up by the construction of light rail service. Stepping inside the compound was like stepping back in time. People prayed in its modest courtyard, the centerpiece of which is the Ramona Vine—a more than two-hundred-year-old grapevine said to have been planted by the heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 best-selling novel of racial prejudice, love lost and redeemed. Many consider its gnarled trunk and spreading arms to be the mother-vine of the California wine-industry. Inside the mission church, an elderly woman lights votive candles. On its walls is a series of paintings of The Stations of The Cross, by an indigenous Gabrieleno. In one of these retablos, a half-naked Roman hastens Christ along the Via Dolorosa. Legend has it the soldier in the picture represents one of the soldiers stationed at the Presidio, who had raped the painter’s daughter. Her father took his revenge with a paint-brush, ridiculing his daughter’s abuser in the House of God.
Stations of the Cross. Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, Los Angeles.Photo by Richard McLaughlin, on the website www.somosprimos.com (Reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
Following the opening reception, we attended a dinner at the museum, we returned to the Inn at Laguna Beach. After coffee in our room the next morning, we wandered north in search of breakfast. A huge queue had assembled in from of Urth Café. We were told by one of those standing in line that the reason for the clusterf*ck was that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian had dined there recently. Pushing through the crowd we went next-door to Number Three Restaurant, a perfectly charming venue with alfresco garden seating. Returning to the hotel we checked out, retrieved our rented Honda Elantra (curiously with Maryland tags) and headed back toward Los Angeles on the North Coast Highway. Before dinner, we wandered up the strand to Santa Monica Pier.
It was a fitting coda to our California sojourn. In 2014 Kathie had attended a conference at the Getty Foundation along with other curators and museum directors preparing exhibitions for Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.Along the Pacific coast in southern California the final hour of light in the day is magical. Even in summer, the mercury drops a few degrees. Pilobolus co-founder Robbie Barnett had called the eastern equivalent the green hour. There was nothing verdant about the L.A. beaches. A blazing sun hovered over a clam sea and the Santa Monica mountains; everything awash in violet, turquoise and gold.
Looking North from Pacific Palisades, above Temescal Canyon Road.Monday, October 6, 2014.
From atop the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway, the view from a little park at the corner of Mount Holyoke Avenue and Via De Las Olas had become one of my favorite motifs in 1983. Revisiting the site in October of 2014 I was shocked to find that half the park had disappeared. Brush-fires and other conflagrations are common in the coastal mountains of southern California. Their foothills are little more than glorified sand-piles, held together by gravity, and the root-systems of indigenous and invasive flora. When plants and trees are consumed by fire, the exposed soil can become saturated by heavy rainfalls. Unable to bear its own weight, formations like coastal bluffs collapse in landslides. Vertiginous bluffs along the PCH are covered with scrubby vegetation. When this burns, landslides follow. Whole sections of the road can be closed for weeks at a time. An Angelino friend used to joke that if they turned off all the lawn-sprinklers, L.A. would just dry up and blow away. As I painted this view, a musclebound rapper and an insanely gorgeous African-American woman came jogging up. We chatted for a bit. They had just completed a ten-mile run in the hills. City of Angels. City of Superheroes.
In the summer of 1983 I did a teaching stint at UCLA. Taking up residence in Ocean Park, I house-sat a bungalow for a movie director who was shooting on location somewhere in the desert. Knowing very few people in Los Angeles, I had been given the names of some local residents by mutual friends. One of these was a woman who lived neat Third Street and Wiltshire in Santa Monica. Gloria Upson had grown up in the waspy country club set of Palos Verde, or P.V. to the anointed. The neighborhood had inspired the prime-time serial drama Knot’s Landing, which ran from 1979 to 1993. We never became romantically entangled. I was married. She had become discombobulated over a love-affair with a married man who refused to leave his wife. Perhaps once a week we would meet for coffee or dinner, when I would get an earful about the latest episode in her own private soap-opera. One Saturday evening I called to propose dinner at a sushi-bar along the strand in Venice Beach.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I spent the whole day at the beach. It was torture!”
I asked her why.
“My car is in the shop. It took forever to get a taxi.”
Again, I asked her why.
With a hint of indigence she replied.
“Well how else am I supposed to carry my blanket, chair, umbrella, music and cooler to the beach?”
I asked why since she lived so close to the beach, could she not have just left all that gear at home and walked.
Silence. Finally, in sotto voce, with utmost gravity she replied.
“Only Mexicans walk to the beach.”
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to editions@needlewatcher.com