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ALDEA HILL, AS IT WAS AND MAY STILL BE KNOWN to the
little children of Encino Village, is where the street I grew up on rises
steeply to meet Burbank Boulevard, across which superannuated character
actor Edward Everett Horton (Top Hat, F Troop, Fractured
Fairy Tales) in the days of my youth kept his woody, ramshackle
estate. (F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for a while in a guesthouse, you
might like to know, but that was before even my time.) From the top of the
hill, you look back north across the level expanse of what was once the
RKO movie ranch — where Frank Capra constructed the main drag of Bedford
Falls just a decade before my parents’ house was built — past the Little
League fields, and the railroad track, and the wash where the river runs,
past fields and subdivisions to the mountains that make the far end of the
San Fernando Valley. That is as pretty a picture as I
know.
The essential purpose of this
blocklong incline — a matching of form to function from whose perfection a
philosopher might extrapolate the existence of God — was evident to anyone
old enough to ride a bike without training wheels. It was for coming down
fast. On a bicycle or skateboard or whatever other wheeled thing you were
brave enough to try. One time a kid in my class was hit by a car, I
remember or think I do, as he cruised into the intersection at the bottom
of the hill; he flew across the street and landed more or less safely in
some bushes. Maybe I am making that part up. But he lived to tell the
tale, and, I am (practically) sure, to coast and coast again.
CLIMB, COAST; struggle, release; work, reward — that is
the dialectic, the yin and the yang, the Laurel and Hardy of the hill. I
think of Sisyphus and his big rock — he might have had some fun watching
it crash back to the bottom, might have at least enjoyed the view, the
easy walk back down. It would take only the slightest conceptual shift to
see the whole business not as useless labor — all rock and no play — but
as an endless game.
It wasn’t until I
went away to live awhile in the state of Florida, where you can see a
hundred miles from the top of a stepladder, that I realized to what extent
I was a child of my landscape, how keen was my Valley. Confining in a
sense, but sheltering as well. A big rocky cradle made of hills and
mountains, ground muscling up at every point of the compass. Crossing the
thousand-mile pancakescape of the Great Plains, as I sometimes do, ringed
by pure unadulterated horizon, I inevitably wonder, Don’t people go
crazy here? I suppose the natives must develop their own kind of
workable life-aesthetic based on the preponderance of sky. But I’m sure we
could never completely understand each
other.
Though it is the grid that seems
in an iconic way to stand for the city, the sprawl of parallels and
perpendiculars that impresses itself upon the visiting mind, Los Angeles
is after all a hill town. What is the Hollywood sign, the truncated
remnant of a realtor’s Big Idea, without its hillside, its elevation? The
city’s one big park is a mountain, the grid itself nowhere more apparent
than from yon lofty heights. L.A. was established first among the
foothills; the flats were filled in later. The mountains and hills define
and divide the metropolis, creating neighborhoods and even cultures — the
hills cleave Town from Valley as the Hudson River does Manhattan from New
Jersey, and the similarities do not end there — and provide a backdrop, in
a literal, theatrical sense, to the soliloquies and asides of our daily
dramatics.
They are dramatic in
themselves. So often and so completely are they masked by bad air, the
hills and mountains near and far, that on a day after a rain or when the
winds are up, they seem to appear out of nowhere, gem-bright and imminent,
with the force of revelation. (Smog is an insult to, well, so very many
things, but perhaps its worst crime is against the hills.) You can see the
real shape of the city then. I have my pet views, of hills from hills:
looking north from Normandie, where it peaks between Beverly and Melrose;
dropping into Glendale over the Glendale Boulevard Bridge; getting that
airborne feeling on the Sunset Strip; and the vertiginous roller-coaster
crest of Silver Lake’s Baxter Hill (as it may not officially be known),
which is not a hill for going down fast — San Francisco knows no more
frightful grade — but a hill for going up and over, with the distinct
sensation of tipping into the lake.
GODS LIVE IN THE MOUNTAINS: Shiva, the bush that spoke to
Moses, the deities and departed of the San people of the western Kalahari,
who revere the four Tsodoli Hills, conceptualized as Male Hill, Female
Hill, Child Hill and Ex-Wife Hill. The hills are alive with . . .
something. With their hilly holiness, their holy hillness. In a local
sense, gods just means movie stars and other people with money,
though in real estate terms the principle is identical: The more elevated
the property, the nearer you are to heaven. (Consider Mt. Olympus, home to
Zeus and a housing development overlooking Laurel Canyon.) When fortune
smiled upon an Encino Village family, when their ship came in, they would
invariably sail it up to a new house in the hills. Where else? Onward is
upward. |