Me & Freeways….on Madeleine Brand’s Show, KPCC, 9 a.m., Thursday

I’m on the 9 a.m. Madeleine Brand Show on KPCC, 89.3 FM, today, Thursday, where I’ll be talking about…of all things….my love of freeways

(An unlikely topic, admittedly, but listen in and I’ll explain.)

Here’s the link to the podcast.

The reason for my appearance on the show has to do with the fact that an essay of mine about So Cal freeways is included in a wonderful new anthology called The Devil’s Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today , from Red Hen Press, edited by the fabulous Kate Gale and the also fabulous Veronique de Turenne. (The essay first appeared in an earlier guise in Los Angeles Magazine.)

I’ve pasted the essay below, if you want to take a look. But I recommend the book itself, as it’s loaded with California-drenched stories and essays by such writers as Carolyn See, T. Jefferson Parker, David Ulin, Janet Fitch, Lisa See, Dana Goodyear, Deanne Stillman, Susan Straight, Terry Wolverton, David Kipen and….well, a lot of good people.

And, speaking of my pal David Kipen, he’s also on the show with Madeleine Brand today talking about—ta-da!—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—our new favorite topic! (By the time the show goes to air, we’ll know who won the damned thing, and whether any of the odds-makers were anywhere near to right. UPDATE: The winner is Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who was nowhere near the top of the bookmakers’ lists.)

The show will also feature a discussion on the horror that is the 100-days-overdue California budget.

Brand’s show is just under a month old, and it is a very good addition to the KPCC line-up.

You’ll see if you tune in. In any case, let me know what you think.

In the meantime, here’s my freeway essay.

Freeways

by

Celeste Fremon

I lie to people about freeways. I’ll give you an example: Friday mornings at around 11 a.m., I leave my Topanga Canyon home and spend two hours driving three Southern California freeways in order to reach the campus of the University of California at Irvine where I teach a weekly writing workshop. Friday afternoons at around 6 p.m., I make the same drive in reverse, except that the afternoon journey is far longer due to the rush-hour traffic. When friends hear of my Topanga to Irvine peregrinations, they regard me with pity. “You poor thing!” they say. “You must hate that drive!”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” I reply. I never tell them that, instead of loathing my freeway Fridays, I look forward to the hours spent in the clutches of the 10, the 405, and the 55. I certainly do not admit the deeper truth: that I love our Southern California freeways, a confession I realize is unfashionable in the extreme.

I love our serpentine weaves of concrete for all manner of reasons, but mainly I like them because there’s nothing to do on a freeway but drive. In this multitasking world, any period of mono-focus is a blessed time. Freeway driving—even at 6 p.m. on a Friday—is a meditation. Released from the tyranny of productivity, the psyche has room to stretch. One can safely engage in imaginary conversations or follow ideas up irregular trails that may or may not break through into the light. Movement itself—even slow movement in gridlock—is conducive to dreaming.

Sometimes there is the odd mishap. I was once so engrossed in a thought that I twice overshot the same exit on the 101. Yet, I suspect, this quality of enforced sensory deprivation is why, despite twenty-five years of hectoring on the part of Caltrans, eighty-six percent of those California residents who travel the freeways to work every day refuse to carpool, a number that even rose slightly from the decade before. They don’t want to give up their one oasis of solitary downtime. When one desperately needs a break from the craziness, freeways are the ashram closest at hand.

If we tire of our aloneness, we can also commune. “Let me call you from the road,” I say to those friends with whom I long to have an unhurried phone chat, or one of those deeply intimate rambles about everything and nothing that my soul seems regularly to require. Yet, spiritual necessity or no, the category marked “soulful ramble” rarely makes it to a first-tier ranking on my already overcrowded To Do list until an hour stuck in traffic on the 405 affords permission.

I also love our freeways for their iconic quality. There is no architectural element with which Los Angeles County (or Orange County, for that matter) is more closely identified than our 527-plus miles of curves, loops, and straightaways. Manhattan has its skyline, D.C. its monuments, Venice its canals. We’ve got the four-level interchange. Stealing water from the Owens Valley made metropolitan life in Southern California possible, but the Transportation Engineering Board’s Parkway Plan of 1939 shaped it. Los Angeles built the first freeway in the nation, the six-point-five-mile Arroyo Seco Parkway (later renamed the Pasadena), which opened in 1940. But unlike the Parisians, who adore their Eiffel Tower, or San Franciscans, who view the Golden Gate with affection, most Angelenos seem to hate their freeways with an unbridled passion.

We didn’t always loathe our übernetwork of roadways. In the 1950s and ’60s, when most of the system was built, we considered it a modern marvel. This was in part because L.A. had freeways and other cities didn’t. If New Yorkers sniffed at our gauche transportation methods, we simply pointed out that one can’t even park in Manhattan, much less drive across town. The red ribbons draped across the county’s maps redefined what a metropolis could become. Centralization was no longer required. The future stretched unfettered in all directions every time we rolled down the windows, cranked up the radio, and zoomed without stopping from Hollywood to San Clemente.

Our early freeway boosterism was further abetted by various East Coast and European intellectuals who lauded our multi-miles of cement as the new populist cathedral. In 1960, Charles W. Moore, then dean of the Yale School of Architecture, went so far as to suggest that if one wanted to stage a revolutionary coup in Los Angeles, one would not bother to march on City Hall. “The heart of the city would have to be sought elsewhere,” wrote Moore. “The only hope would seem to be to take over the freeways.” British design historian Reyner Banham further sanctified our monolithic arteries in 1971 in his quirkily influential book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. The freeway speaks the “language of movement, not monument,” Banham trilled. He went on to pronounce that it gave our polymorphous California lifestyle what it sorely needed, “a comprehensive unity.”

By the mid ’70s, such cerebral rhapsodizing was giving way to environmental concerns: We were paving paradise at a rapid rate. Construction ground to a halt. It was still permissible to like freeways, but only if one did so ironically, in the manner of, say, Joan Didion, who wrote in Esquire in 1977 that the freeway driving experience was “the only secular communion Los Angeles has.”

As with a romantic marriage gone bad, much of our current ill will is born of fury at a pledge that has been rescinded. Reasonable or not, the promise of California had always been of limitless horizons. The weather was mild, the state was big, the social stratification of the East was viewed with vague amusement, and for four decades, the Southern California economy grew as if it were on steroids. Even after loving it became démodé, the freeway system remained a guilty pleasure, a satisfyingly gigantic metaphor that expressed what we secretly believed to be our geographic superiority.

Then, in the mid-1980s, when the last big population jump exceeded the most optimistic projections of the city’s post-World War II planners, freeway driving suddenly became far less, well, free. (In 2007, an average of 325,000 vehicles made their way down the busiest stretch of the 101 freeway on any given day, a number that is greater than the entire citizenry of post-Katrina New Orleans.) In other metropolitan areas, overcrowding might be viewed as an unpleasant but inevitable fact of life. In Los Angeles, it was seen as a personal impingement, an egregious and wrongful loss of autonomy and time. All at once, freeways were the enemy. They reduced us to rats in a maze, people said. They stole our souls, separated us from one another, hijacked precious hours of our outdoor lives. Angelenos learned they were spending more time stuck in vehicular gridlock than any other drivers in the nation. We began to worry that, by driving across town, we were engaging in some kind of collective psychosis that future historians would parse unpleasantly.

While I am not immune to traffic-caused vexation, the joy offered by the roads themselves never vanishes. I like the way the Santa Monica births itself into the sunlight a zillion times a day out of the McClure Tunnel from Pacific Coast High¬way, California’s mama road. I like the graffiti, painted by high-wire outlaws, that constantly surprises me from the overpasses. I am still dizzied by the grace of the arched connectors from the Santa Monica to the 405. I love each and every mural. I rejoice at the intense-eyed, bearded guy in Kent Twitchell’s mural, Harbor Freeway Overture, which looms over the 110 on the parking structure at Citicorp Plaza, and Frank Romero’s Going to the Olympics, a 103-foot valentine to L.A.’s car culture, which sprawled gloriously along the Hollywood at Alameda, until CalTrans recently and unwisely painted over it.

I also like it that once you get up the on-ramp—any on-ramp—there are fewer decisions to make than down below. I like that people are more polite on the freeway. Yes, there are those drivers on the 101 and the 710 who are too self-absorbed or comatose to let you change lanes, but such incidents are minor when compared with the behavior one finds on Melrose or Victory or Sepulveda. On surface streets, drivers honk over every perceived slight (or no slight at all) with a wrath so murderous, a five-mile drive can leave you twitching for the rest of the day.

I believe that the freeway system is arguably the last best democratic public space in Los Angeles. The use of beaches, parks, and museums tends more and more to fracture along class lines. But on the freeway, unless you’re a car pool or a presidential motorcade, nobody gets special treatment. There is no preferred seating, no member¬ship to confer privileges. Short of helicopter service, the only way to get there from here in L.A. County is by taking the 101, the 10, the 5, the 405.

I find it cheering that, day after day, our liquid city is a paella of mothers hauling soccer teams, truckers hauling cantaloupes, pickup laborers hoping for work, attorneys of every possible ethnicity and gender listening to left-and right-leaning talk shows, twentysomethings bumping whatever music moves them, the lone woman (and the occasional man) sobbing over a love song, or maybe singing along—well or poorly. At rush hour, the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class and the primer-covered 1988 Crown Victoria travel at precisely the same speed.

I know it’s stylish to speak of freeways as instruments of cultural isolation. Certainly, if one drives from Sherman Oaks to Pomona, one can breeze right by the housing projects of East L.A., as one would flyover states, and never acknowledge their existence. Moreover, freeways were the tool with which the ’50s middle-class fantasy of suburbia was made manifest by land barons from the Westside, Palos Verdes, and the Valley out to build their fortunes. Without freeways, white flight would have proved inconvenient.

On the other hand, as a result of freeway construction, the area of land within a thirty-minute drive from L.A.’s civic center leapt from 261 square miles in 1953 to 705 square miles by 1962, a widening of purview that applied equally to anybody with a vehicle and some gas money. Because of freeways, I can make the trip from my house in Topanga to meet friends at our favorite restaurant on 1st Street, east of the river, without ever having to wet my feet, so to speak, in Brentwood, Encino, or Beverly Hills, and my Eastside friends can do the same in reverse.

One last thought: I like freeways because you can scream. If you scream on Wilshire or Burbank or Cesar Chavez Boulevard, bad things are likely to happen. If you scream in your house, the police will show up and require an explanation. On the freeway, no one cares. I first realized this one afternoon in August of 1989, when my then-husband and I decided that, for sure, we were getting a divorce. I suddenly realized this meant that my son, who was four years old at the time, would no longer be sleeping at my house every night, eating the meals I cooked, having me there to keep him safe—joint custody being the price tag of leaving my marriage. The anguish that accompanied this comprehension was so intense, I was sure it would smash me to rubble. So I did the only logical thing: I grabbed my keys and got myself and my Honda Accord onto the Ventura Freeway where, for about twelve miles straight, I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed.

In the years between then and now I have again let loose at various moments on various freeways. In August of 2002, I screamed in fury and grief on the 405 the day after I got the news that my son’s father, my ex, had finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. My boy was drowning in his own anguish at the loss, and I needed to protect him from mine, so I took it to the freeway. I screamed and cried again on the 5 one night in April of 2006 as I drove back from visiting my mother in La Mirada, who spent most of that spring losing dominion over nearly every volitional act except the ability to blink and to breathe.

There were other screaming incidents, each of which brought some measure of comfort. The fact of allowing myself to go temporarily off the rails in the company of strangers, all of us whizzing along side by side in our respective sheet-metal co¬coons—alone yet not alone—first wrung me out, then eventually brought me back to ground.

So, yes, I love Southern California’s freeways, our profane and sacred concrete pathways of separation and connection. And, upon reflection, I’m not one bit sorry about admitting it.

(NOTE: I snapped the above photo this past August through a very bug-spattered window as I was coming into town having just driven from West Glacier, MT to LA.)