Crossing Hollywood Ferry
An ode to my home canyon, with Whitman in mind // In my headphones: Joni Mitchell—Ladies of the Canyon (1970)
This article was originally published in The Dartmouth, in its April 16, 2025 issue.
The road to my house from the airport is long and straight. The graveyard of oil wells gives me my first sign of relief. The ugliness of the city comforts me, and I slip into my familiar anger, the specific tone of which changes depending on what neighborhood I’m in. I wish I could be airdropped into my house this time, so I wouldn’t have to drive down this street. It is the causeway for goodbyes, for dropping friends off at the airport and hoping they’ll come visit again soon. Except this time, I am the visitor, and I am the only one to pick myself up from the airport.
I revisit the city like an old foe. Once I enter the vicinity of my neighborhood, all the angst of my teenage years spent roving the city on two axes settles around the dashboard. The past is an uneasy blur, either tainted with the watery bleed of the traffic signals or enriched by the glow of the four o’clock golden light.
The buildings that rent to the stores along the avenue are the same as I remember them, but the storefronts have changed. Actually, they are forever changing. A storefront’s dissimilitude from the echo of what once occupied the same cavernous lot quiets my rolling homecoming breath, turns it even, makes it slow.
The buildings on this street are, for the most part, young and squat, their squareness linking them door to door, block to block. They are mostly one story in my city, but sometimes two, and always a row of trees punctuates the length of them, giving shade to the pedestrian while making the commute more hazardous. Their roots break the concrete. But no one really arrives by foot in Los Angeles, and they’re not causing anyone any trouble except the old woman who carts her groceries from the market to her apartment. I’d say there are three or four pioneers like her on every block. Most people hate to grow old here, but it’s not a terrible place to be young.
There’s a red light at the corner by the Writers Guild of America, and I have a chance to look inside. I see nothing but corporate furniture until I squint at a framed photograph, which I can barely make out through the window. It is a picture of the Writers Guild of America, just as I see it from the car. My city has no equal for vanity.
A handful of blocks after the Writers Guild now exclusively serve young boys with money to spare. Though of course the flavor of hypebeast-dom has changed since my acquaintances frequented this place, the simple aim remains: rapid accumulation of ill-fitting branded t-shirts. What once marked the pubescent divide between little women, who did not frolic here, and little men, who continue to graze in the impure pastures of derivative streetwear crazes, still carries the same heaviness of accelerated play-pretend today as it did then.
Now I pass my bus stop at the intersection where once I hid from a crazy man in the pharmacy. Another time I waited for my mom to pick me up from the grocery store across the way with battered soccer knees. I used to peruse the aisles idly, picking up free samples of walnut cookies when I could. Finally the light turns green. My Uber driver and I start up the final stretch of paved-over civilization, compressed under years of health fads and hyper-sensory distress, before we reach my canyon. I have lived here my whole life. First in one house, until I reached eighteen months. Then in another, just three houses down the road, but always in the same canyon.
The beginning of the ascent is not so treacherous, but it is certainly narrow here, and at one point quite steep. I roll down the window to breathe in the night air, but the sounds greet me before the sweetness does: frogs croaking in the cement stream at the corner by the stop sign where I was told the police couldn’t wait to ticket me. I still believe their tale, even now. I smell the creek that runs adjacent to the road, and I do what I have always done: I stick my head out the window and my senses flash open, wide, wild with, if not delight, then a certain insatiable hunger to contain it all — the night jasmine, the bubbling stream, the chirping rhythms, the earthenware ecosystem, the cool shock of the shade in the moonlight — in one great big gulp. But I never can, for I never have, and instead I stare wide-eyed, nostrils flared, hair blown back, my mouth agape, trying to absorb the world through osmosis in a scream. The driver is only trying to keep the car on the road.
We slow to a stop before beginning the main hatchback climb uphill. We crawl slowly at first, as the road only has room for one, and we pull into someone’s driveway as we wait for incoming traffic to clear. Then we drive past the dilapidated house on the corner that used to house a cult before it moved to Hawaii. My canyon is shadowed here, shrouded by the tangled trees overhead and the ever present threat of a rockslide from the hill above, until we reach the open stretch and a new darkness emerges. The black chasm between my canyon and the neighboring one yawns open and expands, expands until I cannot see past the cliff beside me. I glimpse the ridge of the next canyon over and look back to see the lights of the city in the distance. The tears come in droplets — spherical and autonomous. They appear on my face like dew, and I wait for them to dry instead of wiping them away. It is nice to be in my canyon, not to be in the city anymore. It is nice to be in my canyon, and not in the one in the distance there, just over the ridge. It is nice to be in my canyon, and not on the canyon floor.
My Uber driver must have some place like this, I am sure, some place where the light hits just right, where he isn’t coming and going anymore. But for me it is here, and as I stick out my head, I see I cannot absorb it all, for it has already inundated me. I am the city, and the city is me!
You are so talented!!