SCENIC WALKING

If you go to the website caughtbytheriver.net (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll find and extract/sampler/cut up from the opening of Walking in Ruins.  It starts like this:

Some Scenes From The Life Of A Ruin Walker

24 February 2014 // Books

By Geoff Nicholson

ONE:
  If, like me, you happen to have written a book titled The Lost Art of Walking, people tend to ask you, “What’s your favourite walk?” I always find this a really difficult question. I want to answer honestly, and I definitely don’t want to be evasive or pretentious, but the answer always escapes me.

More and more I find that if I’m in walking in an area of unspoiled natural beauty, or in a city of great vistas and magnificent architecture, I’ll be impressed, I’ll be appreciative, but the truth is, I’m often slightly bored in these places. Only a fool would bad-mouth the Champs-Élysées or the Lake District, but I just don’t get very excited about walking there. Whereas if I’m walking along a beach and discover some ruined bungalows, or if I’m at the edge of a city and find a wrecked and abandoned warehouse or barn, then I’m fascinated, I’m moved. And that’s why I’ve written a new book titled Walking in Ruins.

You can read the full piece (and much more besides) on the website here:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/02/some-scenes-from-the-life-of-a-ruin-walker/

WALKING WITH FLUTEBOYS

Pico Iyer says you should always take a book with you when you travel, but it should not be about the place you’re traveling to.  And so, I spent a week and a half walking (not hiking, I insist) around Death Valley and other parts of the Mojave desert, spending at least some of the evenings reading Iain Sinclair’s American Smoke.  It’s a book in which, in his oblique and free associative way, Sinclair investigates his own American literary influences and enthusiasms.  The fact that I share some of these – Burroughs, Kerouac, Ed Dorn - makes it a damn good read.

Consequently, by day I would be walking round, say, the Ubehebe Crater then at night I’d be reading about Sinclair walking around Gloucester, Massachusetts in the footsteps of Charles Olson.  Or I’d be walking on the Racetrack Playa then reading Sinclair’s account of walking the waterfront in Vancouver looking for the site of Malcolm Lowry’s shack, bulldozed in 1957.

One of the disappointing things, or at least one of the defining features, of Death Valley these days, is that you’re seldom entirely alone when walking there, certainly not when visiting one of the “main attractions.”

At the Ubehebe Crater, for example, a handful of people were visible walking down to the very bottom of the crater. The National Park Services website says “Walking to the bottom of the main crater is easy; however, the trip back up can be exhausting.”  That’s a bit of spectacular understatement.  It’s a steep 600 foot drop, and some of the people I watched making the return ascent were crawling on their hands and knees by the end. There are actually a couple of people in this photograph –  two minute dots on the diagonal light gray path rising on the left.  You can see them slightly better here.

 Being of sound mind I walked around the rim instead. The National Park Services website again: “Walking around the rim is moderately difficult due to the initial climb and loose footing.”  And the winds – don’t forget the lacerating winds.

And you might think that visiting the Racecourse Playa – 20 odd miles down a bone-shaking dirt road – would buy you a bit of solitude.  But the day I was there a camera club was in situ - much fancy equipment, many tripods, many people shooting the same landscapes from the same angle.  Those are their Jeeps on the right of the rock formation, but at least they're forming a Herzog-esque fata morgana.

 Of course you don’t have to engage with these other people, and only an idiot or  a snob would say that a little human presence ruins a walk, but if you actually want to be alone in Death Valley, the best plan is to visit some location that nobody else wants to go.   

I was much taken by these cyanide tanks at Journigan’s Mill – yes really, Death Valley was once a great source of cyanide – and although there was evidence that plenty of other people had been there before (beer bottles, the remains of fires, some wrecked cars) when I was there I had it to myself, and could walk in ruins in solitude.

I don’t know that Jack Kerouac ever went to Death Valley but when I got back I dug out some of my Kerouac books.  He was one of the first authors I ever discovered for myself.  I was pretty young at the time and there’s always a tendency to think you’ve “outgrown” early enthusiasms – but some you never quite do. 

It’s true I don’t have quite the passion for Kerouac’s writing that I once did, but any time I go back and read his work, I’m always reminded why it moved me so much.  Here’s a passage from The Dharma Bums, about walking, more or less. “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”

BRUTISH WALKING (NOT BRITISH)

I'm back from my travels and will soon be blogging again.  Meanwhile there's this:

GEOFF NICHOLSON HAS GONE FOR A SHORT WALK ...

I'll be back soon, don't fret.

SOME MORE HOLLYWOOD RUINS

When I was out and about walking, beating the bounds of Hollywood a couple of weeks back, I came across an interesting bit of ruin – an abandoned gas station on a strangely large plot of land, on Western Avenue, just south of Sunset Boulevard.  There were fences all around the lot, but in any case it was the end of the day, it was getting dark and there were no lights in the place.  But I was intrigued.  This is how it looked on Google earth.

 So a couple of days ago, I went back.  Still, thinking I might do my “every street in Hollywood” project, I didn’t go directly.  I walked down Wilton intending to turn left at Sunset but I dunno, I guess I was enjoying the walk and found myself a few blocks south of Sunset on Lexington (“drunk and dirty more dead than alive” as they say, though not about this Lexington) and I had to back track.  My eventual route looked like this:

Well, in daylight the place wasn’t much more visible than it had been in the dark.  The fences were at just the right height to prevent you looking in, and although there were gaps here and there I could only get a very restricted view. 

Yes, the place was definitely an abandoned gas station, but it must have been abandoned a very long time ago because there were palm trees growing up between the pumps. There was also a huge area of space behind the gas station, with sheds, bits of furniture, multiple garbage cans, and although it didn’t look exactly lived in, it didn’t look like it had been left completely to the elements.  Somebody at least went in there and swept up once in a while.

I still couldn’t see over the fence, of course, but this is why a camera isn’t such a bad thing for the urban explorer to have. By holding up my arms and pointing the camera over the fence I could manage to get some pictures.

They’re not exactly the most revealing pictures about who, why, when, or how, but then I did some zooming in, like Decker in that scene in Bladerunner that once seemed unimaginably futuristic, all that “Track 45 right.  Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute …” Wait a minute indeed.  Was that a person sitting in there?

 Well, the more I look the more I’m sure it wasn’t a real live person.  I think it was an inflatable or perhaps a solid rubber version of the Hulk.  Incredible.  Another ruin deity presiding over his domain. 

I did a circuit of the streets around the whole of the ruined lot and found myself around the back of some brand new building project that’s going up on Sunset Boulevard.  I think it’s going to be a new Target but I could be wrong. I rather liked what I saw.  It looked like some sort of medieval fortress, crenellations, bizarre fortifications.  I’m going to bet it doesn’t look nearly as good when it’s finished, but I’m sure it’ll look better in a couple of decades when it’s in ruins and being demolished.

On a final note, I know that Hollywood has some reputation as a sexy, if not a sexist, place.  I encountered two rather dubious examples of the male gaze on my walk.

First, above, another manikin, some company for the Hulk perhaps, offering to buy junk TVs.  You can see there’s been some serious amateur breast enhancement here, but I think I’d have to say I’ve seen worse boob jobs in this town.  The women on the left look disapproving, though whether of the manikin or of me taking the picture it’s hard to say.

And secondly there was the above example of street art – a “slap” – of Frida Kahlo, kind of nice in its way, but then somebody had drawn a mustache on her.  I still can’t decide whether this is needlessly and superfluously cruel – I mean nobody needs reminding that the lady’s top lip did sprout some serious growth - or whether it’s some cleverly subversive reference to Duchamp’s Mona Lisa.  I hope it’s the latter, but maybe it’s both.