Heading east outside Los Angeles, the traveler crosses a stretch of soulless country that at one time must have been pristine dry scrub and wash, a low desert, now stripped of all its dignity. Where once salt pans, mineral washes, sediments, hardy mesquite, and cleverly adapted animal life coexisted in rough harmony, now used car lots, fast food establishments, nail and tattoo parlors, hastily erected tract housing, and highways all bake together in the shimmering sun, Los Angeles spread malevolently east, eating up and polluting whatever lies in its path. At the time, 1971, immigrants, mostly from Asia, but a fair number from Mexico and points South, claimed this territory as their little piece of the American Dream, temporary digs until they sold the restaurant or dry cleaner and were able to move closer to the coast.
I had hitchhiked to L.A. from New Mexico, where I had, unknowingly as yet, left an older woman carrying my child. From the vantage point of 53, I can see that, at 24, she wasn’t really very old, but, at 18, I was much younger and saw her as overwhelmingly more mature. As part of an Aquarian philosophy that could be characterized by the phrase, “If you treat the world gently, it won’t hurt you,” I was traveling barefoot. My heavily calloused feet would gently meet the hot pavement and stones of the world, and I fully expected to arrive in one piece out the other side of my epic journey back to Boston. For a…
