Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Tunnel Vision

The NoHo/Stud City of my youth was obviously imperfect, but in many ways we all managed to overlook some things so that we could envision others.  Here’s something precious I think I mostly overlooked at the time:

My walk to school was only about a third of a mile.  I’d start up my block of stucco bungalows and cross a quiet residential intersection, then head up another block of bungalows - outrageously, with no sidewalks for my delicate footgear… and then cross again, walk one short block west, and finally make a right turn into the stub.  The houses all along the way were single-story, sited on roomy lawns, with detached garages and semi-detached perspectives.  Porches were swept and unused; front laws, manicured and vacant.  The wide quiet street fronting up to wide quiet lawns leading to sterile little porches; it all made me feel rather disconnected.  I was okay with that, I knew I had things really good compared with the rest of the world. 

But those houses - it was as if they were watching me with rolled-back eyes or something.  There was nothing wrong with them.  To the contrary, they exhibited pride of ownership, were well-maintained - it was a classic neighborhood for any child.  I’d sometimes actually meet with actual neighbor kids from my own actual block to throw a frisbee or a baseball up and down the street.  My block felt like something I could belong to.  But along the way to school, those few interceding blocks felt like a journey into very different territory - someone else’s.  Maybe someone creepy. 

But then I’d hit the stub and what do you know: my old friend was always waiting for me to give me a fresh take on things. 

The 134 cut through my quadrant, which in L.A. is to say, a major freeway bisected my neighborhood.  We were a grid of ten narrow blocks across and four tall blocks up and down, penned in by four larger boulevards.  When they put in the big freeway, they just ran it through the middle of the uppermost row of blocks and installed double dead ends on every north-south street between Kling and Riverside Drive.  A tunnel ran beneath the freeway and my walk to Riverside Drive Elementary School led me under the wide swath of concrete that impassively, perpetually withstood untold tons of automotive inventory at speeds of dead zero to better than eighty.  Those massive trucks, those reckless coupes on steroids, gomers and dozers vying for ten traffic lanes plus four shoulders, and I was in the third grade and had to take the tunnel beneath it all to the other side every day.  The tunnel - my old friend. 

The tunnel punched through from the truncated stub of Mary Ellen Street, one of the middle north-south streets in the quadrant and a logical place to put the only tunnel under the freeway.  There were just two or three houses and then a short flat rise of twenty vertical feet or so behind sturdy hurricane fencing, very steep and covered with dense brush.  Right in the middle was a rough concrete aperture - the entrance to a crude plain tunnel.  About six feet wide and eight tall, its roughened walls of nubbly sprayed cement rose straight up to a flat roughened ceiling.  The floor, also concrete, was in poor repair, and water would gather on it in small stagnant puddles, having dripped down from occasional dark leaky patches overhead.  Lighting was provided by dim bulbs hanging down in little metal cages every ten feet or so, and the tunnel was easily 80 feet long.  A four-foot metal post blocked the center of each entrance - even bikes had to be walked into this cloistered space.

It was a pedestrian tunnel, but to me it certainly didn’t feel ordinary.

Some people vandalized the tunnel with graffiti and broken bottles and the occasional personal offloading - that was to be expected.  In many ways it was a profoundly creepy place, an after-school special’s stage set for Bad Events, where the bully or the mean storekeeper has you pinned down, but for me it really wasn’t so much like that.  The tunnel felt like an okay place.  The thick pocky walls felt intensely sheltering and protective; their unfinished breadth baffled all sound till even the massive freeway immediately overhead was inaudible save for at the very ends.  The air inside felt like cave air to me, somehow nourishing and ancient.  Upon walking into that tunnel, even the small landscape of the little cul de sac collapsed to an identity, the walls constricting it and the light growing smaller and dimmmer the further in I walked; from within, the world outside was pared down to almost nothing.  It was out there, behind you and before you, bright dots against the darkness of the tunnel walls, details indistinguishable. 

As I’d approach the other side of the tunnel, the world would slowly grow, incrementally, more and more of it becoming visible as I approached the debouchement, coming slowly back to recognizability.  And when I’d emerge outside again, blinking, a mini-block away from the crosswalk at Riverside Drive and my school on the other side, I would come back out into that same old sunbaked flatness of the Valley air ineffably refreshed, a little restored, and focused on my goal, my day, the task at hand.  I’d come out of that tunnel just a bit different than I’d been when I went in, even if only momentarily and illusorially.  I’d find myself to be a little more straightforward for the experience.  As the time I appreciated it.  I’m pretty sure I’d appreciate it now.