Surviving L.A.

Surviving L.A. (This article is related to Surviving a Big City). Though I didn't have any of the really serious problems mentioned in "Surviving a Big City" I was extremely nervous and stressed a lot of the time witnessing people getting "beat up" and knife fights when I was a teenager(I was 16 in 1964). Think from the movie "Grease" and "American Graffiti" through the Hippy Era. In 1963 I saw my first "Berkeley Girl". She wore blue jeans, a Pendleton wool shirt and had hairy armpits. This was quite a shock for me at the time.

In 1960, the first skateboards were beginning. Boys used to take and old pair of metal roller skates and separate the front and back halves and nail them onto a foot long or more 2 by 4 and skate to school this way. Next, guys were going to wood shop to make their boards look more like surf boards. That is actually how skateboards were born where I lived in Glendale in the Los Angeles Area. So skateboards came from just a bunch of boys experimenting and playing with an old pair of metal skates that you put on shoes and a piece of 2by4 wood so they could surf the sidewalks like hot doggers did in the ocean.

After I graduated High School I could much more easily avoid being drawn into fights or fatal situations so in this way I breathed a sigh of relief. At that point my biggest problem was traffic. I hated being stuck for hours on the freeways of Los Angeles to the point of screaming. Living there from age 8 to age 21 will do that to a person. So after I got my license I would find myself a little crazy on weekends. If I couldn't get 100 miles away or more from Los Angeles County on a weekend, say because of work or college sometimes I would just go a little crazy on the freeway or a mountain road and almost die a few times because "Traffic really makes me crazy".
One time my father and I dropped my mother off at L.A. International airport in about 1962. She had flown to Seattle to visit relatives and then driven to Kent with them and had been having a wonderful time with them for over 1 1/2 hours before we got home. Normally, our drive home should have been 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. However, on this day it was 3 hours and 45 minutes in 110 degrees fahrenheit. By the time I got home my father and I were close to sunstroke because we didn't have air conditioning in our car. (Less than 10% of the cars back then did.)

Flash forward 46 years to now. I was driving with my family at 70mph or more on a southern California freeway when I spied in my rearview mirror a group of vehicles and motorcycles bearing down on us at 140 mph. I was scared as I didn't want my family to die. As they wove past us at impossible speeds I almost wet my pants as I really didn't expect to see that without someone dying as the freeway was fully loaded. These crazy people (at least 10 vehicles, motorcycles and cars) were racing each other under normally fatal conditions. I later asked my cousin who I was going to visit and he said, "Oh yeah. That can happen anytime. Often there are fatalities when they race that way." I said, "Why can they stop this?" He said, "The police can't follow them in heavy traffic. Too many people would die. Also, helicopters aren't useful because if the racers see one they just scatter in all directions. So these crazy people just keep doing this. It's sort of like playing 'Russian roulette' with cars and motorcycles.

The way I dealt with my personal overpopulation craziness and aberrant states was to simply as an educated person to move away to someplace quiet and beautiful where there weren't a lot of people. The most remote I ever lived was 10 miles from the nearest small town without AC electricity. The quiet was absolutely wonderful(for a while) and then I realized after about 4 years that living this remote could get as crazy in its own way as living in the city. So I decided that I was more of a long term suburban man with a love of outdoor spaces. However, I also decided that I would only live in really beautiful places near mountains and or oceans and trees. I have kept my promise to myself for almost 40 years now since I was 21. And because of this Peace has come into my life from living in beautiful places with beautiful people. Life can be good if you choose it.