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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Getting There

Audrey’s Adventure: In The City of Stars and Angels

Despite all of the time I’ve spent around palm trees lately, there is still something so enthralling about their presence to me as hoards of their silhouettes line the final stretch of my foray into Los Angeles.

It’s probably because I’m a pasty white girl from the Pacific Northwest, but their structure and plumage totally fascinate me, as does their ability to occasionally produce coconuts. My grandmother’s fridge was dotted with palm tree-related magnets, among the company of seashells that lined her mantle and cactus on her windowsill. There’s something about such tiny artifacts, foreign to the pine-tree motif and harsh winters of the Northwest, that suggest warmth of a different nature than what we experience in Spokane. Wherein last year, I spent much of the summer wandering around with a black eye and deeply broken sense of being through dry heat in Browne’s Addition, 365 days later I’m getting lost in Los Angeles at night and prolonging calling an Uber while I sing to passersby on the street. Whatever fire that has such a tendency to burn me inside out this far in life seems more inclined to power my heart when met with humidity and strange plants, and it absolutely loves Los Angeles.

I’m really not kidding. L.A. was so far off my radar before I left home. The way it has always been represented to me seemed too vapid and, dare I say, uninteresting to be worth visiting. In movies, it looked like ugly suburbs and plastic surgery and crowded beaches. In music, it was shallow glamour and gang-laden mean streets. I don’t know why all of these bleak aspects formed a conglomerate in my head that had me so disinclined to see it for myself; I can only guess that it appeared as a place that the most inane aspects of humanity had eaten.

In reality, Los Angeles is the hardest place to leave on my trip so far.

I arrive here at four in the morning on a Friday, catching the day’s first Red Line Metro to Hollywood. In the dark of the early morning, I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, barely able to make out the names on the stars of fame under my feet. I stumble into a Starbucks that has just opened and, like a true American, down 30 ounces of cold brew coffee before walking to the hostel I won’t be able to check into for another five hours.

It’s the first time in a while, after spending so much time with my family, that I’ve been completely alone with a whole day to myself. I ask myself what I would like to do in Los Angeles. At first, I wonder if I should go to Compton, just to see the birthplace of West Coast hip-hop’s most badass talent since its inception in the 90’s. And then I remember how Compton is rapped about and decide that a solo white girl with blue hair is probably not going to be very welcome there. As it is, the hostel sits right off of Hollywood, in the thick of obnoxious tourist bus tours and costumed movie characters. When I’m exploring it for one of the first times, I walk past a Jack Sparrow that, for a moment, I think might be the real Johnny Depp, pranking the public. I look back and Jack Sparrow shoots me a creepy wink and a wave. I keep moving. It seems that whenever I step out on the street here, the current of liveliness that runs through the hills, the noisy streets, and all the way down to the ocean is lighting me up and propelling me in every direction. The entire town feels bathed in a warm California glow that sets me alight without sucking my oxygen, despite the very real presence of urban smog.

I was warned by a couple of people close to me that Los Angeles was a car city and that public transportation offerings would be slim. This is actually untrue. Yes, it loves its autos---with the exception of the wee hours of the morning, traffic is insane. Regardless, the city boasts an actually largely cohesive system of busses and subways, and though it requires patience, it is as efficient and stable as any system you might find in New Orleans or Seattle. When I decide to go to Venice Beach, it takes me an hour and a half; such long transit times are common due to the expanse of the city. I don’t mind killing the hours this way. I’m not in a hurry to do anything other than see. Often on my trip, most prominently when I’m riding trains between cities, I wish that time would move slower, the journeys would be longer; the peace of being able to just sit and observe new surroundings is that much of a gift.

Venice Beach is crowded, boho-gaudy, and wild; teems of folks in swimsuits and American Apparel walking the alleys between cluttered shops, the sand completely covered in the kind of people who might describe themselves as West Coast Beach Bums. (There is a difference between East Coast and West Coast beach people. The lifestyle of those in Florida, for instance, is more focused on relaxation and family, where the California folks are there to live out designer clothing ads.) Break dancers and magicians draw onlookers, as does an old man playing classical piano with a sign asking that you don’t photograph him without tipping. Some particularly inventive dudes sell “Hail Satan” signs for $5 each.

The second day I’m here, I wake up at 5:30 a.m. due to roommates who have chosen to turn all of the lights on and talk loudly in an Asian language. It’s a stark contrast to hostel life in NOLA, where my Australian counterparts would sleep off nightmare hangovers well into the afternoon while I’d wake up at eight, sober yet hot humidity-weary. My dreams over the past two weeks have become so vivid, and this factor coupled with how long I’ve been on the road, have me waking up every morning with a sense of placement in each new city so strong I forget that I have a life anywhere else.

As I roll around in my sheets, trying to not turn this over in my head for fear of ruining it, I remember that Los Angeles has an outpost of the Erin McKenna’s Bakery I visited in New York. These bakeries--gluten-free, vegan, and often with sugar-free goods--simultaneously make me homesick for Boots back home, and encourage a healthy amount of occasional gluttony on my part. The L.A. bakery is parked on an adorable stretch in Beverly Hills. The girl at the counter and I chat about Kathryn Schulz’ recent New Yorker article about the earthquake that will seemingly obliterate the Pacific Northwest, and the magma caldera beneath Yellowstone that will destroy everything else. The juxtaposition of a lively conversation about impending doom in the midst of such sweetness seems to be reflective of the person I’m becoming these days.

And I’ll tell you--it’s a person I am glad to be. Throughout the history of my being, I’ve lived the very odd reality of being a sweet, intelligent girl deeply confused by the world we live in; the resulting incarnations of such being a shadow side that is still finding the right fit for the practice of being a whole person. By some cosmic function, it is this aspect of my personality that has taken precedence in my relationships with other humans. For years, I’ve heard other people tell stories about it to me--that it came off as mentally ill; that it came off as jaded and cynical; that it came off as anxious and self-destructive; that it just plain scared the crap out of them. My grasp on it has been overestimated to the point where I’ve lost things about myself and people I cared about to all of the noise this has created for me.

I am reassured by my counselor back home on the regular that this isn’t entirely my fault, and is in fact one of the problems that women have to live with in our modern society. The last year has been an exhausting process of trying to pick up the pieces and craft them into something that makes sense to me. And what makes sense to me at this point, twenty-one years in, is that I’m done caring. You can think of me as apocalyptic if you’re inclined; you can tell me I’m a mess, or that I’m nuts, and all of it will have a grain of truth to it. But these things do not own me, nor am I going to put them away for you. It’s just beginning to matter less and less, because what I see in the mirror is a ball of girl-powered, gently loving fury that is too wild to need a definition of a society that I wasn’t very sold on in the first place.

I walk all over L.A. with this in mind, listening to the band Saint Motel and dancing on the inside through highs, lows, and peace. Saturday night, I am in the very front to see T.V. On The Radio, moving in maniacal joy while singer Tunde Adebimpe unleashes the lightning on a 5,000-person audience and the man in a white suit plays a trumpet behind him. I get lost that night trying to find my way back, getting on and off busses at wrong stops and at one point, spending 40 minutes waiting for one that never even shows up. In the Uber I take back to the hostel, the driver talks to me about Los Angeles and I about my rail pass, and I tell him the same thing I tell a lot of people these days as I exit the car--“you should totally take a train trip.”

Having been at it for more than a month by now, I’m honestly extremely tired. After California, I am giving myself a while to chill out in the PNW--you know, before it’s completely obliterated by the Cascadia subduction zone. (If you’re actually concerned about this, read Jim Camden’s piece which clears some stuff up.) Next time you hear from me, I'll be writing from Ashland, OR; home to Shakespeare everything and some really sick mountains.

That said, Los Angeles is yet another place that has captured parts of me, almost as if in a bad romantic comedy where the wealthy playboy turns the tables and shows the Manic Pixie Dream Girl how to free herself. (Just for the record, this is the only time you will ever hear me use that character trope in my vocabulary unless in the form of a worldly complaint.) The city I thought to be so bleak is in fact bathed in color and sounds like a trumpet orchestra playing every genre of music known to man. It's somewhere I could even see myself living pretty happily. The good news is that for its brevity, life is indeed an ample amount of time to live so many of the dreams we create. All one has to do is stop fearing the fire.



As photo archivist, Audrey Connor is responsible for maintaining the digital and hard-copy photo archives including historical photos. She works with customers to provide photo sales, page reprint sales and photo copyright permission.