THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN

I should have brought my camera this evening. I was about to, but the thought of lugging it on a "brisk hike" for an hour kind of dissuaded me. Still, I should have brought it.

I've been going up to a particular trail in Griffith Park on an almost weekly basis now. (Griffith Park, one of the largest natural parks in a US city, starts just one street north of Franklin St., which is at the end of my block, so it's "in my backyard", so to speak.) The trail starts just behind Griffith Observatory on a hill overlooking this part of Hollywood and continues up into the hills as far as the famous Hollywood sign - just one of many paths in the park. I haven't made it as far as the sign yet, since I usually hike a half hour up and a half hour down - not enough time to get to the sign at the end of the trail.

In any case, this evening I parked my car on the road leading up to the Observatory, usually packed with cars of people checking out the view or taking the trail. But mine was almost the only car there. The reason was pretty obvious. It had been unusually hazy, smoggy, foggy - whatever - all day, and by evening, there was really nothing to see over the edge. Not even the immediate city below the Observatory. (Usually, you could see out to the Pacific shore at Santa Monica westward and all the way across town to the Palos Verdes peninsula southwestward, one of the best views in town.) I resigned myself to ignoring the lack of view for the hour and doing the Nike athletic thing: "Just do it."

As I climbed the dirt path higher and higher, I seemed to pass out of the fog and into some higher plane disconnected to the city below. At the end of my half hour "there" and before heading "back", I stopped at one of those million-dollar overlooks. In the distance, not too far at all now, was the hill with the Hollywood sign (and a broadcasting tower on top), like an island in the mist, perched between Hollywood to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north (another foggy sea this evening). In fact, LA had suddenly become very simplified, as though a flood had rolled in covering 99% of the city and only the tips of the Hollywood Hills had escaped the deluge, like some Mt. Ararat. There was my hill, with the overlook and the high trail leading in either direction from it; the hill with the Hollywood sign; and another tall point across a gulf of white, where distant lights twinkled in the growing dusk like a space port in Star Wars. The sun had already disappeared a good 20 minutes earlier, leaving the violent, twisted cloudy mass in the west glowing an angry orange. The palette of the world had suddenly become very simplified: orange, white, pink, dark blue, and the gray of the surviving land masses peeking out of the marine layer. And there, in the dark southern sky above the sea of white, imperious Venus shone, untwinkling -- almost at my eye level, it seemed -- a regal distance from (mere) earthly elements.