SOME BRIDGES OF LOS ANGELES

 One of the features of walking in Los Angeles (and I know it’s not unique to LA but it seems both more pronounced and more appropriate here than anywhere else I’ve ever been) is that you’re seldom far from a freeway.  As a serious pedestrian you regularly have to walk over or under one.  Over is generally better, I think, because you can look down and watch the traffic flow, or more likely grind to a halt, “bummer to bummer,” as we like to say.

And as I observe my fellow bridge pedestrians (who admittedly are not huge a number most of the time) I find that they’re divided into two varieties: those who stop for at least a moment or two and look down, and those who stride swiftly across the bridge, keeping their eyes fixed straight ahead of them, as if pretending the freeway isn’t there.

Will it surprise you that I’m one of those who tends to linger, and yes it sometimes feels a bit contrarian to be up there staring down at traffic, but then I think that people are perfectly happy to stand on a bridge that crosses a river and watch the boats go by, so why aren’t they happy watching the cars and trucks?  One answer might be “pollution” and of course I have no rebuttal to that, but you know it’s not like I pull up a deck chair and sit there for hours, basking in the exhaust fumes, I just stop for a minute or two, enjoying the rush and the roar below me.

In fact there are quite a few places in LA where you can stand on a bridge and actually stare down at the river, although unfortunately the Los Angeles River tends to be a dry concrete channel for much of its length; great for car chases and such, but not exactly a roaring cataract.

Still. I do like looking at the river – and I especially like looking at the way the graffiti have been cleaned up – painted over with white oblongs, creating a bizarrely appealing minimalist art work.

And if you’re on a bridge in downtown Los Angeles, chances are you’ll also get a view of a railway line or two.  It’s like looking at God’s model railway.

Elsewhere you can look down and see all kinds of edgeland mess and complication, ruin, reclamation and repurposing, which of course I love.

I was doing this most recently because I wanted to take a look at the Sixth Street Bridge, which runs from downtown to Boyle Heights and is about to be demolished and replaced.  Nobody particularly wanted this to happen: the current bridge isn’t that old, built in 1932, but it’s suffering from “concrete cancer” and will be gradually taken down before it falls down, and a whizzy new bridge, described as a “ribbon of arches” will be put in its place. 

The new one will cost $440 million and according to Councilmember José Huizar, in whose district the project is happening, it won’t just be a way of getting from one place to another, but “a destination itself that people come to visit." 

To that end it will have ten-foot wide walkways and (wait for it) a viewing deck.  Just how many people will want to walk between Boyle Heights and downtown L.A. remains to be seen.  Completion is due in 2018.  How many will want to stand on the viewing platform and look down at the river and the railway line is even less knowable, but personally I think it’s very much to be encouraged.

WALKING SLIGHTLY

This thing popped up on my yahoo front page:

It was the headline “This Ford GT Has Fewer Than You Walk In A Day” that really caught my attention, obviously. And as you read the article you discover that the car has 2.7 miles on the clock, and is coming up for auction, expected to sell for about half a million dollars.

And I began wondering first of all who the “you” in that headline is referring to, and then I wondered just how many miles does the average person people walk in a day.  I accept that average is a fairly nebulous term here, but still …

My less than exhaustive research suggests that nobody really knows, although there have been plenty of studies that have come up with various contestable answers, many of them involving experiments that involve giving people pedometers. 

Now this strikes me as a, let’s say, flawed methodology.  If you give somebody a pedometer and tell them you’re going to measure how far they walk, you can be sure that people are obviously going to aim for the big numbers and walk a lot more than they usually do.  So … using the (I would say inflated) results, a 2010 study by David R Bassett of the University of Tennessee, concluded that the average American walks 5,117 steps a day.

Of course steps come in various sizes – if they averaged 3 feet each that would 5117 yards or 2.9 miles – thereby in fact proving that yahoo headline to be perfectly true.  However, I’m guessing that when you’re shuffling around the kitchen or the office these steps are considerably shorter.  Similar studies show that the Americans are way behind western Australia (9,695 steps), Switzerland (9,650 steps) and Japan (7,168 steps) per day.

And as for the British, well again, the information is patchy but a 2011 article in the Daily Mail contained such gems as “Britons typically walk an average of two miles a day,” “one in six say they need to put their feet up when they return back at their desk or get home,” “the average Briton becomes exhausted after only walking up the stairs.”

Again the notion of an average Briton is pretty meaningles, but I find all this extremely plausible.  For what it’s worth, my own observations, unscientific  though they are, do suggest that the British probably do walk more than their American counterparts, even given huge variations in and between both groups.

Now, a lot of people assume that because I like walking I must hate cars.  This is not actually true, and is possibly a secret shame.  Of course I don’t have half a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket, but if I did who’s to say I wouldn’t blow it on a ridiculous supercar?   However, I’m pretty sure that in no circumstances would I buy a nine-year-old car with just 2.7 miles on the clock.  In order to stay healthy, cars need exercising just like people.

FLANEUSE O'CONNOR

I came across this quotation from honest Abraham Lincoln.

In fact you’ll find it spread all across the Internet like chicken pellets.  Sometimes it's "backwards" rather than "backward," sometimes it appears as "I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards."  Whichever way it is, I have yet to find the source where honest Abe said or wrote it, and in some cases he isn’t even attributed.

In any case it strikes me as a pretty dumb thing to say or write, and an even dumber thing to celebrate.  What the hell’s wrong with walking backwards?  I suspect people think it means “never retreat,” but that’s not much better - sometimes retreating is a very wise thing to do. 

And now wonderfully, amazingly, I have found that Mr. Lincoln didn’t always practice what he preached.  Here is a recollection of Lincoln at the 1856 Republican Convention, by William Pitt Kellogg, a lawyer from Illinois:

         “When he came forward to speak of course there was much excitement. … From time to time, as he reached some climax in his argument, he would advance to the front of the platform as he spoke, and with a peculiar gesture hurl the point, so to speak, at his audience, then as the audience rose to their feet to cheer, he would walk slowly backward, bowing …”

          It probably wasn’t a Michael Jackson style moon walk, but it was very definitely a bit of stage craft. He may be doing something similar here in Gettysburg.

In fact there are various sources that say walking backwards is terribly good for you – they’ve even got a name for it retro-walking, which sounds to me like you’d go out strolling in loon pants and tie dye tee shorts, but that’s just me.

According to Severine Koch, PhD, of the social and cultural psychology department at Radboud University, in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, writing in 2009 “backward locomotion appears to be a very powerful trigger to mobilize cognitive resource”.  And it’s easy enough to believe that walking backwards tones up a different set of muscles than walking forward and would probably be good for improving balance and coordination.  The problem is more where you could actually do this backwards walking – not in any place where there are a lot of people, obviously.  They’d think you were an idiot and they’d point and laugh at you, and then you’d walk into them.

Not that this has deterred Mani Manithan (above) who has been walking backwards since 1989 in order to end world violence.  He’s still at it 25 years later and has apparently now forgotten how to walk forwards. Of course he’s doing this in India, where they’re extremely tolerable of eccentric holy men. 

All of which brings us very, very indirectly to Flannery O’Connor.  When she was a child, in Savannah, Georgia, she trained a chicken to walk backwards.  It appeared on a Pathé news reel and now you can see it right there on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtnV-iD2QlI

Thank you Internet, maybe you’re not solely an instrument of the devil.

Flannery O’Connor is often, lazily, described, and occasionally patronized, as a writer of “Southern Gothic,” but it’s all too seldom mentioned just how damn hilarious she is.  In the book Conversations With Flannery O’Connor she says, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.”

O’Connor was afflicted with lupus which eventually killed her, but she didn’t blame lupus for all her problems didn’t.  In 1954 she wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick, “… it galls me to have supported the lupus for four years and then to be crippled with rheumatism (a vulgar disease at best) of the hip.  I am not able enough to walk straight but not crippled enough to walk with a cane so that I give the appearance of merely being a little drunk all the time.”  

In due course she used a cane and then crutches.  She also kept peacocks, though I don’t believe she taught them to walk backwards.

WALKING WITH WOLFE

Until a couple of days ago I had never read (call me a Philistine) a single word written by Thomas Wolfe, unless you include the titles of his books.  I mean everybody knows the phrases Look Homeward Angel, though that’s originally from Milton, and You Can’t Go Home Again. 

And actually that latter has always worried me.  Isn’t the “again” at best superfluous and at worst self-defeating?  I mean if you can’t go home, you can’t go home.  But if you can’t go home AGAIN that kind of implies that you’ve been home at least once before, in which case you CAN go home again, just not right now, or maybe not more than once.

In any case, my non-reading of Wolfe has, in the most minor way, now been corrected.  I have read his short story “Only The Dead Know Brooklyn” from 1935 or so and it’s wonderful.

It’s written in “Brooklynese” which isn’t quite as much of a strain as you think it’s going to be, but the great thing is it’s all about walking and mapping and urban exploration and (oh what the hell, I’m going to say it) psychogeography.  I had no idea.

The narrator writes like this:

So like I say, I’m waitin’ for my train t’ come when I sees dis big guy standin’ deh – dis is duh foist I eveh see of him. Well, he’s lookin’ wild, y’know, an’ I can see dat he’s had plenty, but still he’s holdin’ it; he talks good an’ is walkin’ straight enough. So den, dis big guy steps up to a little guy dat’s standin’ deh, an’ says, “How d’yuh get t’ Eighteent’ Avenoo an’ Sixty-sevent’ Street?” he says.

The “big guy” is going to Bensonhurst for no particular reason except that he likes the sound of the name, and we learn that he’s been all around Brooklyn in this haphazard way, walking, wandering, drinking in bars, and feeling he’ll never get lost because he has a map with him.  The narrator finds this completely incomprehensible.

“… I got a map dat tells me about all dese places. I take it wit me every time I come out heah,” he says.  


And Jesus! Wit dat, he pulls it out of his pocket, an’ so help me, but he’s got it - he’s tellin’ duh troot - a big map of duh whole goddam place with all duh different pahts mahked out. You know - Canarsie an’ East Noo Yawk an’ Flatbush, Bensonhoist, Sout’ Brooklyn, duh Heights, Bay Ridge, Greenpernt - duh whole goddam layout, he’s got it right deh on duh map.


“You been to any of dose places?” I says.


“Sure,” he says. “I been to most of ‘em. I was down in Red Hook just last night,” he says.


“Jesus! Red Hook!” I says. “Whatcha do down deh?”


“Oh,” he says, “nuttin’ much. I just walked aroun’. I went into a coupla places an’ had a drink,” he says, “but most of the time I just walked aroun’.”


“Just walked aroun’?” I says.
“Sure,” he says, “just lookin’ at t’ings, y’know.”


No, the narrator doesn’t know, and he finds the whole enterprise absurd as well as incomprehensible, and also in some obscure way threatening.  He considers himself a real Brooklynite and of course a real Brooklynite would never just wander around, and would certainly never use a map.  So maybe this means that a real Brooklynite never goes anywhere except the places he already knows.  And the narrator here consoles himself with the thought that it’s impossible to know the whole of Brooklyn anyway, so why bother to step outside your own orbit?  Needless to say, this doesn’t only apply to people from Brooklyn.

The story seems to have been at least partly autobiographical, and Wolfe probably saw himself as a version of the big guy wandering around Brooklyn.

In Thomas Wolfe: Memoir of a Friendship, Robert Raynold gives an account of walking with Wolfe.

“ …(Wolfe) had a good way of walking along the street. He swung his long legs easily and his arms no more than needful; he carried his shoulders well; his torso was erect and firm and his head straight with innate dignity … Wolfe walked along the street as if his business were right there; his business was to see, feel, hear, taste and touch and smell the life of the street: he was working as he walked. This gave his face an alert, lively expression, animal in its watchfulness, with his wary lower lip thrust out; then from time to time the gatherings of his senses coalesced in a spiritual perception, and the joy of spiritual apprehension lit up his face – ‘in apprehension how like a god.’

Which suggests that walking with Thomas Wolfe must have been quite a performance, unless (you think?) just possibly Robert Raynolds was laying it on a bit thick.

For what it’s worth, I lived in Brooklyn during my time in New York, though I’m sure I never became a Brooklynite.  And I certainly did plenty of walking, though I think my senses rarely coalesced in a spiritual perception.  However, while I was wandering around, I did take a few photographs that I’m still quite fond of.  This is one of them.