32. Myths of other gods

The first in an occasional series about places in L.A. This place is Laurel Canyon.Strings

Predictably, it involves sex. And betrayal, murder, and glory. It begins with a girl "? pretty, well-connected, high strung (today, perhaps only that she had gender issues). The story ends with a musician and a laurel tree. But the story doesn't end exactly or, rather, it has neither beginning nor end, only another rendition "? sometimes melancholy, bluesy; sometimes raucous and urgent; sometimes elegant, lingering "? making the story even more dreamlike, harder to place. The story comes from an album of changes, of variations on a theme of longing. Predictably, longing for undying beauty and youth.

The girl is Daphne, a nymph (already the same old story) uninterested in men (this is unexplained). Prince Leucippus falls in love her. She is young, desirable, and unobtainable; maybe it wasn't love but his urgency to possess. He cross-dresses in a virgin's shift and hair ribbon and lingers with Daphne and her girl friends "? Leucippus being as friendly with Daphne as he can in drag. Unbelievable, but still, the point is erotic complication not low comedy. They all go swimming one day; "she" being he can't strip; they want to know why; he backs off; they get the picture; he's exposed; they kill him.

They kill Leucippus. And then Apollo and Eros are arguing over archery (enlightenment versus desire; they are arguing over which is more potent). To prove his point, Eros pierces Apollo with a gold arrow of longing, Daphne with one of disdainful lead. (But why? She had made her choice of what to love long before Leucippus' murder.) Apollo pursues Daphne; he must, not even a god can solve the problem of desire. Daphne flees. She prays for escape, for something other than the bitter ordinariness of being just another nymph raped into the endless story of heroes. And in their headlong race, at the moment when swift Apollo's outstretched arm encircles Daphne's waist and Apollo's hand "? a musician's hand, a lyre player's slim fingers "? lifts to cup her breast, Daphne's pleas are answered. She metamorphoses into a laurel tree. Feet, waist, arms, hair; roots, trunk, limbs, leaves.

Agreeably denied (this is even more unbelievable), Apollo then plaits for himself a wreath of Daphne's evergreen boughs "? what winners will wear, what poets laureate symbolically hang from their symbolic lyres, the laurel leaves that crown heroes grinning back at the cheering crowd. And some winners know that the prize most desired has eluded them. Will always elude them.

Risks

Laurus nobilis. Daphne changed into a "noble laurel" in Ovid's version of the myth. The somewhat similar tree indigenous to California and the West Coast from Oregon to Mexico is Umbellularia californica, also called the California laurel. Like a lot of things in L.A., the California laurel poses for something else, for girlish Daphne, for the savory bay leaf in a bouillabaisse, for a commonplace tree from somewhere else. And it isn't. With larger leaves more bitter than the Mediterranean tree's, the California laurel doesn't make it on the brows of heroes. There's even some question if our tree is poisonous. The Department of Agriculture posts a health warning prominently in its profile of U californica. Other sources, mostly from the 19th century, make claims for medicinal properties. Tea from laurel berries will treat dysentery. A boiled poultice of laurel with olive oil will heal wounds. Crushed, the leaves cure headaches . . . or cause them. It's not clear. And the tree has another secret, darker than desire. The California laurel harbors the pathogen that causes Sudden Oak Death.

California's laurel "? heady with too much perfume, too many questions "? isn't what you want it to be, but it looks as if it could be, could be as familiar as the things you grew up with before you came here "? but it looks familiar only if you glance away quickly, if you look down from a freeway overpass, if you're driving after midnight on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, driving through the loops of the highway south of Mulholland, hoping that the city below will reveal itself to you, that Los Angeles will stop running away, stop turning into something else, into something impenetrable, something that may be lethal or not, mind altering or not, healing or not. It's never really clear.

Clefts

The Santa Monica Mountains begin (of course, mountains, like myths, don't begin; we're always in the middle) . . . the Santa Monica mountains rise (then) in a jumble of geologic blocks thrust up like stalled pistons in a titanic engine. First as islands edged by submarine trenches and then on shore as a fault-bounded granite wedge that arrows east, until the body of the wedge from Topanga to Cahuenga is folded into neat north-south rows of canyons, their ridges dissected by lesser arroyos like veins in a leaf, like the folds of a skirt falling from around a woman's waist.

In the eastern part of the wedge, just before the it narrows to a point and hooks slightly, the contours of the ridges soften, clefts splay more. "Subdued" is the word used in Bulletin 158 of the Department of Natural Resources of the California State Division of Mines. Subdued, but only partly. These mountains are moving north and west (as the Pacific and North American plates rub past each other), rotating clockwise (they did this before), and the mountains are still rising over the plain. Erosion plays counterpoint. Rains blowing up from the south cut long-legged canyons. Their debris slide onto the plain in winter, gagging canyon mouths. Water pools in basins or turns subterranean and reappears as springs. The solitude is troubled by earthquakes and wildfires.

The mountains were a whole world once. Its day lasted ten thousand years. And when the heat of early autumn burned the grasses of the plain blond and golden brown, in the canyons beneath the laurels, under great stands of ferns, there were dark places, cool and wet.

Changes

Dancing and singing, they said, the native gods of the Tongva created the mountains and the canyons, the deer and the geese, the acorns and the laurel berries (both ground into meal), the willows and the marsh reeds (bent into domed shelters, plaited into baskets). And the fire the Tongva deliberately set to cultivate the oak trees, to kill the seedlings of competing trees, to open the ground. The Tongva and fire completed the work of gods, because the gods had made the flue-like canyons and the chaparral to live by burning, had made a hot, dry wind to stoke the flames and the seed heads of the native flowers to burst only after flames touched them, sowing another season.

From time to time Tongva willow shelters were burned in the canyon and new ones made near a stream through the laurels. In their season, older boys became men hallucinating on a toxic jimsonweed decoction. Girls became women, dancing and singing in a circle. In good years, hunters pushed off in reed canoes to cross the marshy cienégas on the plain. In bad years, the dead were wrapped with what they had carried and were burned. Afterwards, the dead were said to become stars.

There must be more stories of the Tongva than these, but all we have are a few transcriptions. Fewer wax cylinder recordings of turn-of-the-century Tongva voices. An incomplete dictionary. Some grammar. A solitary, torn page. The Tongva shamans had no time to add honey bees to the vocabulary of their dreams or add mustard or wild oats, other involuntary conquistadores from Spain, or the smallpox and measles that accompanied the Spanish. The shamans had no time before they and their jimsonweed visions were swallowed in Fr. Junipero Serra's missions in the 1770s; before typhus and cholera, forced labor and liquor burned through the Tongva when the missions were secularized in the 1820s, before Americans in the 1850s rode north over the Santa Monica plain and saw cattle and horses on a thousand hills. And saw no one living there.

In spring in those years, the slender stalks of invasive mustard, vivid with yellow flowers stretching to the horizon, were chest high to a man on horseback.

Subdivisions

The story we tell ourselves about Los Angeles begins in the middle, with that man on horseback riding through a landscape assembled by forces he doesn't understand, shaped by men and women he believes are gone. In his solitude, he thinks that he sees nature naked. He thinks that it will yield to him when he puts his American hand to it. He thinks that no one has ever done this, that no one has thought to improve this place. And he thinks that he has escaped whatever it was he had been, that not a single story clings to him that he cannot revise here. And he thinks that he is new because of this. And his world is as golden as mustard flowers.

That man on horseback is replaced by another man in a buckboard on a rutted country road where Sunset Boulevard is, replaced by men on bicycles pushing up a gravel road, replaced by prosperous Midwest men in early model cars weaving up the county road (not yet Laurel Canyon Boulevard) to marvel at the view. And some of these prosperous men, filled with desire, thought that it would be a fine thing to subdivide the canyon into house lots and sell them as quickly and profitably as possible to the next wave of enchanted tourists coming up the road.

There were a few houses in Laurel Canyon then "? the "pretty little home" (said by the Los Angeles Examiner in 1909) of Kenneth Redpath, secretary of the Los Angeles Driving Club and the house, "elegant in the extreme" of Los Angeles County Supervisor S. Tuston Eldridge, a developer who thought it was a good idea to get elected to the county board and build more county roads like the one into Laurel Canyon and to his weekend retreat. Even in 1909, those who could afford the trouble and the expense were busy subdividing what they imagined was a better paradise, better than the one that Los Angeles down below had already failed to be.

Dreams

Beginning in 1913, Charles Spencer Mann subdivided most of the long cleft of Laurel Canyon as it steps up into the mountains. He acquired the land with an assortment of partners, backers, and moneymen "? some of them crooks "? and did the same prodigiously entrepreneurial old soft shoe that hundreds more salesmen did in the 20th century springtime of the city. By converting dirt into desire, by converting chaparral on an acre or two "? or even a fraction of an acre "? into a whole world, a dream world. Mann named part of it Wonderland Park.

Mann's Wonderland property was just a short drive west from Hollywoodland, and Hollywoodland's knolls and hillsides were doing well for developers. Important people were putting up Mediterranean villas; businesses were opening on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard. The city was rapidly moving west from downtown, led by trolley lines and new highways, and moving up, above the winter floods and the summer fog. Next in line for a boom was Mann's property, he thought, with ocean views from the ridges and mountain scenery along the slim ribbon of the canyon's stream. These were minutes from Sunset and the movie studios and above prosaic houses and streamline gas stations and garish Spanish-style grocery stores and all the ordinariness of the city under its extraordinary sun.

Above. Beyond. The city's canyons and hillsides have always been imagined (by their buyers and sellers) as a place apart "? not only for their beauty but also literally because they are nearer to reaching what L.A. promises but never delivers, no matter how high you get.

Mann and his partners subdivided the dream. They improved it. They widened it. They pulled hillsides down and laid out estate-size lots along the canyon road (setting up the excavated hillsides to fail in future winters, the ornamental eucalyptus trees to burn in future autumns). A few industrialists, some movie people, the well-to-do bought the big lots, the eloquent views, the need to be above. In the arroyos behind the estates, Mann and other partners subdivided the dream more cheaply, cutting out narrow lots and fronting them with lanes only a Model-T wide.

Mann's sales pitch for Wonderland lots in Laurel Canyon implied that cottages with a vaguely English look would fill them. But most of the original houses were simpler and owner-built, ostensibly for weekend use. A few were more than that; a few were much less "? knocked together cabins "? an idiosyncratic jumble of additions and quick compromises with the size of the lot and with the slant of the hillside, with finances, with the drift of time.

Almost as soon as Mann left (to develop higher ground at Crestline in the San Bernardino Mountains), Laurel Canyon stopped being a sales pitch and became an actual place (became, that is, a collection of its own eccentric stories). The canyon was more relaxed than Hollywood and much less pretentious than anywhere else. Perhaps it was just the odd size of the lots or because property owners would sell or rent to just about anyone, people in the business, people with complicated histories, or because of something else that the story is reluctant now to reveal, something about Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, about how a factory town segregated itself by class and craft, success and disappointment, ambition and resentment. Laurel Canyon had its own place in the sorting of Hollywood, between the desperate bungalows rented on the flats and the long, sweeping lawns of the mansions further west and higher up.

Myths of Laurel Canyon

Laurel Canyon is a map coordinate, a political subdivision, a myth. Predictably for Los Angeles, the myth involves real estate. And betrayal and sex. It's a myth of human perfection defined by putting yourself in a nearly perfect place "? a wonderland "? that slips out of your hand even as you reach for it. The myth has a history, its verifiable documents, but they, predictably for Los Angeles, matter somewhat less. In one version of the myth, the canyon is a disorienting landscape, reached by a journey into the mountains, enjoyed, railed against for its disappointments, and ultimately abandoned. But that's only one version, the darker version. There are others. Like the house Houdini lived in or Jim Morrison's. It's never really clear which myths will satisfy "? if only briefly "? your longing for the unobtainable. Just out of reach.

The image on this page of laurel blossoms was taken by Flickr user Brent Miller. It was used under a Creative Commons license.