Revisiting an oldie from2009

I'm revisiting this post fom 2009, sixteen years ago.

Toxic Nostalgia, 2009

I had to take my wife's car in for repair today. Not an infrequent occurrence, unfortunately. It's a '94 Acura, and it's just getting old. And women are hard on cars. I had hoped a new battery would take care of the starting problem. It didn't. Cars have made me feel stupid since the early seventies. Actually, the early eighties. I was driving a '68 Ford Falcon in the early eighties. I understood that car, and I could fix it most of the time it broke. Not so with the newer machines. I don't even change the oil anymore. It's too tight of a squeeze to get under the car.

Fortunately we have an excellent car repair, Pole Position, not far from the house. So I left the Acura off, and walked the three miles or so home. I walked past Citrus Drive, where the old house used to be, and that got me musing again about the disastrous bicycle run down Sierra Vista. I continued down the boulevard, and try as I would I couldn't help but enumerate the changes I've seen here in the last forty five years.

This is never a good thing to do. Never.

Because it is next to impossible to look at things the way they are now without comparing them to how they were then. The Heights, rising above the town of La Habra, was once a dark, shady, sparsely populated, and mostly undeveloped portion of the Puente Hills. Small houses nestled in the middle of five and ten acre parcels, and if there was any landscaping other than the native sage and sumac, it was family owned avocado or citrus groves. The narrow twisty streets were roads to nowhere unless you knew exactly where the houses were.

The Heights incorporated into its own city some years back, and the lot restrictions shrunk from five acres to one, and now I believe it's smaller than that, but I'm not sure, and I don't care to look it up. What you see when you look up to the heights now are big ass mansions: narcotecture in its most ostentatious, and obtrusive manifestation. There seems to be a battle going on up there to see who can build the largest possible edifice most violently in conflict with the land that surrounds it. And there are hundreds of heavyweight contenders in the brawl, with dozens more being built every year.

Below the Heights, the small, and not particularly well-to-do town of La Habra had the distinction of being the place where three major Boulevards ended. One was the fabled Whittier Boulevard: immortalized in song, main drag of East Los Angeles, and famous cruising ground in several of the towns along it length. Another was Harbour Boulevard, the street along which Walt Disney decided to build an amusement park. The other was Beach Boulevard which was the road to Knott's Berry Farm, and (take a guess) The Beach. Once you crossed Imperial Highway the first five or six miles of Beach rolled through the Coyote hills and entered the well built up coastal plane in Buena Park, home of the aforementioned Knott's. But the better perspective was gained on the return trip from Huntington Beach. After you finally got out of the stop and go traffic, and drab flatland towns you had that last five or six miles of empty road to stomp on the gas before you got home. The Coyote Hills are now smothered under thousand of houses, and there are two or three stoplights per mile along that formerly empty stretch of Beach Boulevard. All three of these legendary California roads ran their busy courses, then settled down and rested quietly in La Habra. They're now choked with traffic, and travel along any of these thoroughfares is done in increments of two or three hundred yards on a good day. So it is throughout Southern California.

And my point would be?

Like I said, it's never a good idea to start cruising memory lane. Nine times out of ten you're really searching vainly for a glimpse of your own misspent youth. And it's the cheapest of shots to sit around bemoaning the present, while longing for the good old days. I can get all kinds of wistful remembering the lost beauty of La Habra Heights, but the truth of it is that that little chunk of the Southland is now, and was always expensive land accessible only to those who had the ambition and drive to earn the kind of money it took to live there. It was, and is private property. And people can do what they damn well please with what they own. No one hired me to be an aesthetic consultant for the development of that, or any other municipality. I never had what it takes to achieve the Heights. Still don't. Nor was it ever up to me to declare Southern California officially full, and begin turning people back at the state line. After all, we too came here for the same reason that drew everyone before us, and after us. So it's crowded. There's no law against leaving. The past is just that: passed. It isn't the days that were better then; it was the eyes that saw them. It's not the traffic on memory lane that gets you down, but the reflection you see in the storefront windows.

JWM