The Wonder Trail Read online

  (There’s much more about female travel writers tucked in at the end of this book.)

  The world has changed so dramatically in the past ten to twenty years it’s difficult to contemplate. One result has been that firsthand reports, dispatches, and images from anywhere in the world are about a thousand times easier to get than they were when I was a boy poring over the murals of Bonampak and the Amazon in National Geographic.

  But I think I still have something to offer.

  It seems like there might be some ground for me to stake out in the realm of travel reporting. Somewhere between a hard-nosed reporter who’s camping out with the dwellers of the garbage dumps of Nicaragua, and Rick Steves, who tells PBS viewers where to find Stockholm’s best cinnamon buns.

  How I Came to Write This Book

  Leaving my house, heading south, and going all the way down the globe to the very bottom tip of the Western Hemisphere. That was an idea I’d had for a while. To be able to draw a line of travel down the side of Central and South America seemed like it would be satisfying.

  And then one day a sign appeared. A map on the wall of my local coffee shop. It was a big colored relief map like you’d hang on the wall of a sixth-grade classroom, showing Central and South America. Everywhere from Mexico down to the end, to Tierra del Fuego. Everything south of where I was.

  Just a bit of hipster style, really, nostalgic-retro interior decoration. The map was in bright 1970s colors, covering the concrete wall.

  But to me it was like a dare.

  Maybe I should go down there.

  First I said that to myself.

  Then I started saying it to other people: “I’m gonna leave my home and go south.”

  “South where?”

  “I dunno, everywhere south, until I get to the bottom. Across Mexico, Central America, and South America down to the Straits of Magellan.”

  If this was a bad idea, no one told me. I live in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, nobody ever tells you if your idea is bad.

  Los Angeles, I’m Yours

  Los Angeles is fantastic. In LA, dreams erupt out of the ground like water gushing from fountains, and it’s sunny every day. The beach is there, the mountains are there, but it doesn’t matter if you never go to either of them. Many people don’t. They prefer to mix it up and eat and drink and party at the exploding carnival camped out in the valley by the Pacific, the most wonderful carnival in the history of the world.

  Before I moved to Los Angeles, a friend told me, “In Los Angeles, a complete idiot becomes a millionaire every single day. Don’t come here if you’ll hate that. Come here if you’ll love that.”

  Well, it scared me a little, but I decided I’d love it, too. I came. He was right. It’s stupefying and wonderful.

  Carved into a monument in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, I mean as close as possible to the exact old civic heart of the city, presumably the most sensible and stodgiest place in the city, a short walk—walk!—from the courthouse and City Hall, is a true story, from journalist Carey McWilliams’s 1946 book Southern California Country. McWilliams says—again, his words describing this are carved in stone in the heart of Los Angeles—he got blackout drunk one night, woke up at the Biltmore Hotel where some friends had carried him, stepped outside to the park, and saw a blond woman hike her skirt up, get into the fountain, and start singing while “grimacing and leering old goats” cheered her on. “Here indeed was the place for me,” says McWilliams, “a ringside seat at the circus.”

  That’s what you get in LA, you get a ringside seat at the circus, and I love the circus.

  Don’t get me wrong, there are times when Los Angeles drives me crazy. That’s my fault. That’s because I came here from Massachusetts and sometimes my stubborn mind wearies itself out working away, working its feeble little gears of logic to try to figure out questions like What is happening? That is a terrible instinct, a curse, really. It’s never gotten me anywhere but frustrated. Los Angeles doesn’t make sense, it’s not supposed to. If it ever did, it gave up long ago. Sometimes somebody tries to make sense, to implement some plan. The result is always ridiculous, any work on it ends up abandoned, one more absurd and baffling ruin to point out and idly wonder about and tease until it’s another chunk of beloved eccentric ephemera on the landscape, something you smile at from the 101 as you whizz past.

  No, Los Angeles operates on dream logic. People come out here because of dreams and then they work in the field of dreams at huge dream companies that try to make and bottle and sell dreams. Which is of course impossible. You can have no idea what dream people want, what dream they’re having, but somehow everything works out and everybody who does it in the right spirit, accepting that it’s all a dream, seems to me to get some version of what they were after.

  There are the movie and TV and music businesses, sure, but my opinion is that’s not even where the biggest dreamers are. Close to the core, those businesses get kind of conservative, actually, from what I’ve seen of the inside of them. But real estate? Technology? The energy business, design, fashion, art, communications? Those people have no limit. You can easily meet well-groomed people in very nice clothes who will tell you they intend to die in space or their children’s bodies will be kept in silicon isospheres while their consciousness experiences the singularity through neurotech. Then they might tell you they’ve been distilling their own mescal and offer you some.

  Everywhere, there are tacos and delicious cheeseburgers and cold-pressed juices and Salvadoran pupusas and Korean barbecues, and every week somebody tells you to drive out to some mysterious suburb like San Gabriel or Alhambra to get a soup just like they make it in the southern beach villages of Thailand, or a special tea dumpling you could only get in Sichuan. And the fruits and vegetables! In Los Angeles, it’s legal to pick any fruit that hangs over the sidewalk. No one minds because there’s so much of it! I used to walk up the street from my house and pluck grapefruits. There are palm trees and cactuses, and in the hills there are deer and coyotes.

  For some people this dream is too much, too intense. Scary, even. They try to warn everyone that dreams sometimes turn into nightmares. There are police helicopters overhead and there’s not enough water, the hills could slide into the ocean at any minute, and who knows what’s coming from south over the border?

  To these doom prophets most people shrug and say “Maybe!” Sure, maybe in your twenties you read the pessimistic LA urbanist Mike Davis or talk to people at parties about the Manson family and Blade Runner, but you can’t take it too seriously. Keep some of it on your shelf as a souvenir and then move on to Reyner Banham, who drove around in the 1970s filming himself marveling to his English countrymen at how fantastic everything was. Or pick up Joan Didion, who stared hard in the face at everything terrible about Los Angeles but then went off to vacation in Hawaii with the shitloads of money she made writing movies that never even happened.

  The English painter David Hockney came to Los Angeles in 1963 and he said, “Within a week of arriving there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I’d passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting, all within a week. And I thought, it’s just how I imagined it would be.” I quoted that one time to a woman I knew in New York, and she said to me, “Yes, everyone from Los Angeles is always bringing up that quote.”

  A few years later she moved to Los Angeles to work for a guy who’s trying to pioneer electric cars, travel through space, and build a hypertube to San Francisco.

  Don’t Wake Up LA!

  Don’t get me wrong: I kind of agree with the doomsayers. If anything, I think it’s worse than they do. From what my eyes have seen, the apocalypse is well under way and spilled long ago into Los Angeles County. The local news is nothing but fires and murders and gangs of barbarians and people driven mad with rage, and law enforcement overwhelmed or driven themselves to madne
ss. Drive out to Palmdale or Lancaster and see cities that were sold as bountiful beacons of promise now dusty half ruins overrun by wild dogs. Drive out to Mojave and you’re in full-on Mad Max country. Beyond that, the desert is mostly owned by the federal government, which long ago gave up stopping weirdos from ripping around on it on their ATVs, except on those stretches the military uses to do practice bomb runs and/or build mock Iraqi towns to invade.

  For a while I got interested in fly-fishing. It was fun, but the real lesson I took from it is how far from Los Angeles you have to go to be near even a minor stretch of running water, even a stream. We used to drive 266 miles to get to the nearest fishable river. Los Angeles, just the city, has 3.8 million people or so, and it has nowhere near enough water to drink, let alone to water everyone’s yards and grapefruit trees and fill everybody’s swimming pools. Los Angeles is a dry place, it’s a desert culture. That’s why the first thing that happens whenever you go to an important meeting is someone offers you a bottle of water. As with desert tribes, offering water is a sign of power. The last true tyrants of Los Angeles understood this, and that’s why all along the banks of that fishable river 266 miles away, you see signs that read PROPERTY OF LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER, because they bought/stole it a hundred years ago and drained whole lakes and valleys and pumped water over miles of hills and through mountains and sent it gushing down the great concrete aqueducts into Los Angeles.

  So: Yeah, I get it. My one point might be it’s too simple to say there’s a catastrophe coming. I’d say the catastrophe’s already happening. We’re in it, this is it, the whole thing’s a catastrophe. And you know what? People are still desperate to come here. Most of them who make it want to stay. It’s possible Los Angeles has its doom coming. But I doubt it’s anything we can predict or do anything to prevent. If the whole thing ends, it’ll be with a big sudden jolt—like waking up from a dream.

  Where I Was From

  Before LA, I lived in New York City. I moved there in 2003, probably in the last generation when kids just out of college could afford to live in Manhattan. On an island! In Manhattan, every single street is interesting. There are whole neighborhoods just for partying, blocks and blocks with a bar on every one. You could drink in the courtyard of one bar on Saturday afternoon and stumble up the steps and into the sunlight from another bar on Sunday morning and round the corner and there are your friends having brunch right there, and on the way home, there’s a store to sell you Advil and toilet paper and Gatorade and there’s Julianne Moore walking her dog.

  New York is wonderful, all praise to New York. But when I’ve gone back there it’s felt fun but a little off somehow, like it’s becoming a theme park of itself. Some people are enjoying the theme park but some people are grumbling because it isn’t the theme park they wanted or were sold or the ticket was too expensive. Or they’re just tired because they’re not part of the theme park of New York at all. New York’s just the place they live in, but the theme park’s taken over all the good stuff, so it’s just a long train ride to work every day.

  That’s what it seems to me, anyway. But if somebody asks me, “Which one do you like better, New York or LA?” I say, “They’re both great!” while also fretting because this conversation is off to a boring start.

  But where I’m really from is Massachusetts. Sometimes in a brief exchange I might shorthand and say I’m from Boston. That has the danger of giving the wrong idea, like I grew up with a bunch of Irish drunks and armed robbers who never pronounced the letter r, when really I grew up in a pretty nice suburb. There were plenty of Irish drunks, though.

  Boston is clannish, tribal, and boastful. It makes sense if you imagine it as being more an Irish town than an American city. If you follow the stories of Boston sports teams, you realize they’re written and told in the same dramatic, histrionic way the Irish tell their history, maudlin, weeping years of famine and then wild, outrageous victories behind stupendous white heroes. Even the greatest black athlete in Boston history was named Bill Russell. But what comes with that, too, is Irish Catholicism, a thick, long-brewing stew of guilt and self-pity and -aggrandizement and -aggrievement. Mix that in with the pockets of Italians and the French Canadians and the Jews and the immigrants and the black people and it does make everybody funny.

  There’s also the whole Puritan strain, which runs from the witch-hanging founders of Boston, the Pilgrim fathers who arrived and straight-up declared they were here to set up God’s shining city on a hill and then went to work translating the Bible into Algonquin. Their children and grandchildren turned this drive toward generating uptight and industrious families and building empires of mills and whale ships, leaving their names behind on the dorms at Harvard as their trust-funded descendants slipped into the decadences of the time, like schizophrenic poetry and art collecting.

  Combine these two traditions and what you get is an insane self-regard. I mean it’s really so delusional as to be endearing, the regard in which Boston people hold Boston. When I was young, it was once reported in The Boston Globe that Supreme Court Justice David Souter of New Hampshire, while walking in Boston’s Public Garden, remarked, “Who needs Paris when you have Boston?” and many Boston readers heartily agreed. People in Boston call it the hub of the universe and the Athens of America and they pretend they’re joking, but they’re not. If anything, they think that’s a bit too much of a compliment to Athens, which they hear has fallen into a scuzzy shambles lately, not that they’ve bothered to go. This insane Bostonian self-regard is also why people who went to Harvard get weird one way or another when it’s time to tell you they went there. It’s because they’re so certain of the godlike power Harvard’s name will mean to you that they get self-conscious. They think they’re being, like, humble or courteous, but thinking that just shows how insanely highly they regard Harvard. It’s a truly, psychopathically Puritan way of self-aggrandizing while also simultaneously self-congratulating for, of all things, modesty! Truly unbelievable. (I went to Harvard.)

  New England is brutally cold and harsh, the soil is rocky and stingy. In the summer the air can get heavy and thick and humid for weeks at a time, only releasing now and again in a violent thunderstorm. There’s every sign that God is showing no favors to this place, which of course is just how the Catholics and the Puritans like it. They convince themselves this is all edifying, that God, like a tough coach, is giving them just as much as they can handle because He wants to make them stronger. He loves them so much He gives them lots to complain about. When there’s a perfect day, in October or May, it’s true there’s nothing like New England, it’s so beautiful. But that’s a bit like eating a pound of cold broccoli every night and then rewarding yourself with a single bite of a chocolate macaroon from the world’s best bakery. It doesn’t make a ton of sense.

  * * *

  This is all to explain why when I got to California it kind of blew my head off.

  Here was a place where every day was gorgeous. When it rained, every rare once in a while, even that was thrilling fun. Everybody freaked out and water gushed down the canyons. The next day it was green everywhere and the air was so clear you could see Catalina Island from the hills.

  But it wasn’t just the climate. The whole way of seeing the world was upside down. In New England, nobody has a positive attitude. Why would you? It’ll be winter again soon, and that’s gonna be a friggin’ nightmare (pronounced “nightmayh”) so suck it up and get on with it. You’re lucky to be walkin’ around.

  But in California? Dude! If you’re not crushing it? Your problem must be you’re not projecting enough positive vibes! Or else your vision isn’t epic enough. Every day, somebody will tell you about a juice cleanse or cultish exercise and how amazing it’s making them feel. Every single conversation has at least some element of delusion. You might spend a very happy morning talking to five or six people about a project everyone knows is never going to happen. But everybody has a good time
, so who cares? You get a bottle of water when you arrive and parking validation when you leave.

  People in Boston are more buttoned up than people in Los Angeles, that’s for sure. I mean literally: They button up more of their buttons. That probably started just because it’s colder in Boston, but something like that can grow into a whole philosophy, whole ideas of restraint and propriety and decency. There are lots of ideas like that in Boston.

  There are none of those ideas in Los Angeles. To suggest them is to be kind of rude, actually. Suggesting, for instance, that filming yourself having sex is a less “respectable” job than, say, being a public school principal is a mark of deep confusion, if not very wrong, malevolent, “judgy” thinking. That can go too far, of course, it can get a little crazy, and for someone from New England, it can be disorienting. But the value at the root of it is tolerance, acceptance, openness to possibility, the belief that there’s a whole wide range of realities, maybe not just yours. In a way it’s a kind of moral humility. At its best, that openness is what makes Los Angeles so great.

  Sometimes, people from elsewhere in the world tell me that they’ve heard the people in LA are “fake.” That’s totally true. People are working to put across some invented image all the time. Literally, a lot of them are acting. You don’t just stop doing that after work. People are auditioning for you all the time. For what part, you often have no idea. They may not know. You do get the feeling, all the time, that you’re a bit player in somebody else’s whacked-out reality show.

  But mostly, I think the fakeness is a kind of politeness. Courtesy. There are lots of people in LA who are working very hard on wild, creative endeavors. Lots of wild, creative endeavors turn out to be disasters. Many more, probably most, turn out to be just . . . nothing, mixed-bag experiments presented to a public that shrugs, says “Okay,” and moves on. One in ten thousand will be a stupendous, world-changing success. But do not trust anyone who tells you they know which one it will be. No one knows. If you’re right more often than you’re wrong you’re a genius. If you’re right once you might be a genius. You can be wrong ten times and then really right once and retire in comfort to Ojai.