4 - Sunday, Febru. ry 23, 1992 - North Shore News

The nightmare that is California dreaming

OK, SO the family is arriv-
ing in Los Angeles for a
week-long visit.

We come in from the east,
gliding down from the Sierra
Nevadas across the suburbs that
go on, and on, and on, and on.
We are flying at some incredible
speed across more parking lots
and warehouses than you might

imagine existed in the whole world.

The kids are totally ga-ga.

Palm trees. Parking lots.
Freeways. More parking lots.
More freeways. It is taking longer
just to fly across the width of this
city than it does to cross some
countries.

And now behold the columns of
ant-like things called automobiles
moving at considerably less in-
credible speeds, hordes of them, a
zillion square miles of asphalt and
cement and tar and gravel and ar-
tificial lawn and factories and
manufacturing plants and golf
courses and even the occasional
swimming pool, with that
ceaselessly crawling army of ant-
things coming and going as far as
the eye can see through windows
on both sides of the plane.

It is good that the kids have
flown into L.A. on a clear day
while they are young, I muse. It
will be a memory to be cherished
long after the last airline has gone
into receivership or been grounded
for violating clean-air regulations.

Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

Excuse the mood, but it’s hard
not to get a feeling, coming into
L.A., that one is touching down
upon a saga of civilization in
deniise.

There was, after all, almost no
snow on the mountains, I could
not help but note. Without snow,
the decade-long drought is
worsening. California is well into
a major environmental crisis

With the population having just
topped 30 million, the state is still
in something of the position of a
Third World country: its popula-
tion surging, in this case mainly
because of the flood of Mexicans.

The day we arrived, the L.A.

ARDAGH HUNTER TURNER

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PUBLIC VIEWING
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The City of North Vancouver is honoured to invite the
public to view the work in progress of the sculptures which
will be placed in Rogers Plaza

“North Shore Rhapsody”

and

“Joe Bustemente Trumpet”

BY RICHARD WOJCIECHOWSKI

will be available for public viewing on
Tuesday, February 25th, 1992
between the hours of
5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

166 W. Esplanade

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Engineering Department

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141-West 14th Street

North Vancouver, British Columbia

V7M 1H9

Times carried a front-page piece
about throngs of Mexicans liter-

wally swarming the checkpoint

above Tijuana.

If Mexican authorities didn’t do
something about it, U.S. border
authorities were going to shut
down all but one lane of traffic
heading through customs.

This would choke the economy
of Tijuana, whose merchants and
police had to find some way to
stem the tide or else.

The problem, Mexican
authorities replied, was that their
Constitution allows anyone who
wants to leave the country to do
$0.

Hey, amigo, it’s an American
problem, not a Mexican problem.

Other people have begun to pull
out of the state. One by one,
some of the larger corporations
have been moving their plants and
staff elsewhere. The reasons given
are scheduling problems related to
the horrendous traffic.

Anybody who has to depend on
a car lo get around — and that
means everybody, mass transit be-
ing a nightmarish joke — is in-
evitably late for work, and who
can fault them? Everything bogs
down,

Indeed, for a week we travelled
about in a rented car, and sure
enough, had no fewer than half a
dozen major freeway experiences.

Out of the three appointments
we had to make, we missed two
outright and were late for the

third. Great, eh? How to make an
impression!

Naturally, everyone understood
that we were just Canadians in for
a few days and couldn’t be ex-
pected to second-guess the traffic
all that well, but in its own
peculiar way supposedly laid-back
California is as rigidly ritualistic
as Japan.

In Nippon, if you are a minute
early, it is as bad as being a
minute late. In California, being
late isn't necessarily wrong, but
using traffic as the excuse is. In
both cultures, you can lose a lot
of face fast.

I saw the first freeway experi-
ence coming as we tried to make it
from Santa Monica starting at
nearly two in the afternoon for
Palm Springs. Mid-week.
Couldn’t be a problem. Ho ho!

We managed to clear Anaheim
before 6 p.m., which wasn’t bad,
but then the orange municipal
truck appeared on the side of the
freeway with the letters spelled out
in lights: CONGESTION AHEAD
ACCIDENT.

We made it to Palm Springs by
10:30 p.m., and that wasn’t really
too bad either, we were told, even
though we had figured on making
it in three hours, innocent turista
souls that we were.

Then there was the afternoon |
dropped the family off at
Disneyland, promising to pick
them up at 6 p.m. after visiting
someone in Newport Beach.

Who’ S got si them? '

-- Who plays with thein?.
[ite with them?.

Who needs them? -”

5 Who

0

Are you:safe?

As fate would have it, a major
accident occurred, stranding me
on Highway 55 for several
unhappy hours.

Lo and behold if El Nino didn’t
pick 6 o’clock that very night to
dump a major rainstorm on un-
til-then drought-stricken Califor-
nia, meaning that the family
members waiting at the
Disneyland gate for Dad almost
drowned in the torrent while he
fumed on the freeway.

incidentally, L.A. almost comes
to a standstill when it rains.
They’re just not used to it. Sort of
like Vancouver when it snows.

At the end of the week of claw-
ing our way down one freeway
after another, we figured we’d
give ourselves plenty of time to
drop off the rental and get to the
airport. After all, we were hip to
the problems that can happen, eh?
No green little Canucks, us.

Not any more.

We still hit two traffic jams and
got lost trying to find the rental
drop-off depot. We barely made
it to the airport in time, after all.

We lifted into the air and look-
ed down at the columns of ant-
things crawling from horizon to
horizon. Still crawling. Bumper-
to-bumper. Miles of them in a
row. Crawling a foot at a time.

A shudder of relief hit me. We
had survived and escaped. The
kids would live to tell of it. For a
while there I had begun to lose
faith.

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