Done With Local Flora

Driving in Los Angeles.  I’m not used to five lanes of highway with everyone weaving in and around at eighty-five miles per hour.  I’m not used to getting in a car pool lane and wondering how I get out of it.  My exit is approaching.  There is a double line.  Off in the distance there are mountains.  The northern border of this tremendous valley.  Off in the distance is a modest skyline and then what must be the ocean. 

We are making our way up to Pitzer College.  Did I even know such places existed when I applied to schools?  Why was the west coast so categorically irrelevant to me at that time?  Is this Mount Baldy up ahead?  That’s a proper mountain.  It’s not a hill or a plateau or a series of cliff faces.  It's not an Adirondack mountain that has smoothed and subdued for eons.  That thing was forced up out of the earth much more recently then anything we have back along the Hudson. 

Pitzer enthrals me immediately.  All the landscaping is done with local flora.  They don’t regularly pour truckloads worth of water on a lawn of grass to keep it green so that it will look like schools back east.  Cactus, wood chips, and small trees that must have deep, long, tap roots fill out the spaces between buildings.  The tour guide is enamoured with her school.  She is convincing and the feeling is infectious.  I imagine visiting my daughter here.  I imagine her falling in love with this sharp, cutting sun. 

We saw two other schools.  It occurred to me that America is rather wealthy.  Modern airports or railways like China, may not be in our near future but there is a tremendous amount invested in these universities.  The facilities at LMU and USC all speak of generations of resources poured into these establishments.  This is not easy to suddenly imitate.  The campuses at even the greatest Chinese universities are still all rather threadbare. 

Now we are on the street, walking about in Little Ethiopia.  I didn’t know L.A. had such a place.  They do.  This is a vegetarian Ethiopian joint and though the food is a long time coming, it is delicious.  The advertisements on the street are in Amharic.  It’s easy pretend you’re not in L.A..   Up above there is another sign in what appears to be Hebrew.  My daughter and I must leave now, early, before an important guest has arrived.  But there is, of course, a long drive ahead of us tonight.  And we must be up early tomorrow to see more schools.

Monday 7/30/18