RUSKIN ROCKS, AND SO DO I

Last year, at LAX airport coming back from a trip to the States, my luggage and I got pulled aside by security. I’m one of nature’s worriers but I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, and I knew that I had, a little reluctantly, left my legal recreational marijuana behind.

 

It turned out that the security woman had looked at the X-ray of my bag and seen something worrying in the side pocket. I unzipped the pocket and found that the thing worrying her was a rock that I’d picked up while walking in the Mojave desert.

 

Fortunately I did not end up being interrogated in a small room by uniformed men with small mustaches.  And when I showed the rock to the security woman who’d pulled me over, she seemed to find the situation, and me, rather quaint and charming, and she let me go on my way with my rock.  But I couldn’t help worrying that maybe a stricter woman or man might have taken it more seriously and accused me of trying to steal part of America, like it was the Elgin Marbles or something.

 

I think this is the rock in question but I’m not 100 per cent sure.  I really need a cataloguing system.

 

This year the inamorata and I were walking in the Saguaro National Park, in Arizona, on the Broadway Trailhead, a very dramatic-looking but incredibly safe- feeling bit of walking territory with people just going for an afternoon stroll or exercising their dogs, 

And we saw a man heading towards us who was jogging rather than walking and he had something in his hand and he slowed when he got near and he said, far more to the inamorata than to me,  ‘It’s turquoise and copper.  I collect pieces to give to people,’ and he handed her a very small rock he was carrying, perhaps just a pebble, that looked, and stills looks, like this

 

To my untutored eyes it didn’t look much like either turquoise or copper but it was a nice little gift.  We had no problems at all at airport security.

And the two weeks later in Sheffield, England we saw some of the Ruskin Collection, and it turns out, and I did sort of know this anyway, that John Ruskin was quite a collector of rocks, displayed in the museum like this:

They seem to have a very adequate cataloguing system

ROAMIN' WITH RUSKIN

 One of the things I did while in England was go to Sheffield and the Peak District to go walking over the Monsal Dale Viaduct, which is officially the Headstone Viaduct but I never heard anybody call it that.  I was with my oldest pal Steve, a Sheffield resident, and one of my regular, if increasingly less frequent, walking partners.  My living in Hollywood and Steve having a bad back are the two primary causes.

         The viaduct once formed part of the Derby to Manchester railway line, and is most famous for having been railed against by John Ruskin. He wrote, “That valley where you might expect to catch sight of Pan, Apollo and the muses, is now devastated.  Now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.”  Growing up in Sheffield, I never heard of John Ruskin, but I did know Monsal Dale as a place the family sometimes went on Sunday afternoons.  We never did much of anything there except walk about, which I suppose was the whole point.

         Ruskin might be somewhat cheered by the current state of things in Monsal Dale.  The railway has gone, and although the viaduct remains, no trains run across it.  It’s a reminder, a relic, and now it’s the preserve of pedestrians, cyclists, and the occasional horse rider.  Our plan was to join them.

         It was in fact rather harder than we imagined.  We started at the car park outside the Monsal Head Hotel, and we took what seemed the obvious path, that looked like it would lead us down to the viaduct, but before long it was clear we were heading in completely the wrong direction. The viaduct was behind us and to the right, and we were walking away from it, alongside an increasingly broad stretch of water with no crossing place.

         Reluctant to turn back, or admit our mistake, we kept going till we met another walker, a large, jolly young woman, and we asked her if we could get to the viaduct this way.  She assured us we could, so we pressed on.   After a while we wished we’d asked her exactly how we could get to the viaduct this way, since we could see it very definitely wasn’t getting any closer, and a little after that we began to wonder if perhaps the woman didn’t know what a viaduct was, especially when we came to a weir, which made the water get broader still, and cascade fiercely over its edge.  Maybe the woman had thought “viaduct” was another name for weir.

        

         Fortunately Steve knew his history and wasn’t afraid to repeat it.  He recalled the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Assaye, in the Second Maratha War, in central India, in 1803.  Wellington, he explained, who was still Arthur Wellesley at that time, was leading British and East India Company forces against two Maratha chiefs.  Unexpectedly, and after he’d split his forces, he spotted the Marathas across the other side of the Kaitna river, at the village of Assaye. 

 Outnumbered and outgunned, he nevertheless decided to attack.  There was a ford at that point in the river, and although it would have been possible to cross there, it would also have been suicidal.  The local guides assured him there was no other crossing, but Wellington wisely didn’t believe them.  He reasoned that there must be another crossing somewhere else, and sure enough one of his men scouted out another ford not so far away.  Wellington took his troops there, crossed, and launched an unexpected, thoroughly bloody, but successful attack on the Maratha.  We, Steve suggested, should do something similar.

         Like Wellington, he reasoned there must be a crossing somewhere nearby, and sure enough we eventually found a small footbridge.  Once across we could go back along the other side of the river and come to the viaduct. And we did.  After a longish walk, an encounter with a herd of ominously insolent cream-coloured cattle, and a scrabble up a steep bank, we got to the top, and set foot on the place where the rails had once been, where the trains once ferried fools from Buxton to Bakewell.  As we walked across, Steve told me this was the site of the worst and, he insisted, the only, dirty trick he ever played on his two sons. 

         Some years back, when the boys were aged six and eight, he’d brought them to walk across the viaduct, much as we were doing now.  The tracks were already gone, but at that time the mouth of the Headstone Tunnel, at the far end of the viaduct, was boarded up, with a couple of solid wooden doors.  It must have looked somewhat like the image above, though in fact that's the other end of the tunnel. Steve went ahead of his boys, walked up to the doors and peered through a crack into the darkness of the tunnel.  Then he suddenly feigned exaggerated panic, turned  to his kids and yelled something like, “Oh no, there’s a train coming. Run for it!” and began to run back across the viaduct the way they’d come.

         The kids panicked for real, were absolutely terrified, and ran desperately after their dad, until at some point Steve stopped running and turned, laughing just a little guiltily.  He hadn’t really meant to terrify his boys.  He’d thought they were old enough and smart enough to have noticed that since there were no tracks along the viaduct there would be no trains either, but they were young and naïve, and above all they’d made the mistake of trusting their father. 

         Steve decided to make this a teachable moment, and pointed out to his lads that even if there had been trains and tracks it would certainly have made no sense to try to outrun the train.  The sensible thing would have been to clamber up the embankment at one or other side of the tunnel mouth; although looking at it now he noted now that there wasn’t really much embankment in evidence.

         He said to me later, “I thought it was a useful lesson in observation and the ways of the world. And I also told them that that would be the last time I would ever play a trick on them.  Others might in the future but from that moment they could trust me implicitly.”  He says he has stuck to his bargain.  Next time he and his sons are out walking and he says they’re about to get run down by a train, they can absolutely believe him.

         These days the Headstone tunnel is open to walkers, though rather overburdened with health and safety notices, and in we went.  Below is Steve disappearing into the distance of the tunnel, creating an image suitable for the cover of his next, or in fact his first, doom drone album.

LINES WRITTEN A GREAT MANY MILES FROM TINTERN ABBEY

The idea behind walking through LA’s downtown adjacent to the SCI Arc building was to look at some interesting post-industrial desolation before it gets gentrified out of all existence.  And in fact it’s probably too late already.  The transformation process is well advanced: factories are being turned into luxury lofts, coffee roasters are springing up like mushrooms.  The area is actually referred to on certain street signs as the Art District, and I like art well enough, but designating an area of the city as “arty” seems somehow incredibly dodgy.

Sure, there’s some spectacularly good street art around, including the piece above, but there is something a little schooled about most of it, not that I necessarily yearn for ugly, unschooled street art.

Be that as it may, between the pockets of gentrification there’s still some pleasant grit and neglect to be found. And not least of the joys of walking around there, was that on most streets there were very few other walkers.  It was perfectly possible to imagine some of the empty streets as pockets of post-apocalyptic abandonment, which is always a pleasure.

The odd thing, or maybe it wasn’t odd at all, was that most of this abandonment looked pretty damn good.  It had a certain enduring noble, it was photogenic, it looked a lot like a movie set.  But then, gosh darn it, came the terrible realization that some of these places actually WERE movie sets.  Of course they hadn’t been built as such, but that’s what they had now become.  In fact the cooler, more elegantly rugged the structure, the more likely it was to have a sign on it saying “Film Site Rental,” with a number to call.

This cast a strange suspicion of inauthenticity over everything.  The railway crossing sign below might have been real - there were certainly active railway lines running through the streets at one time - but didn’t it look just a little too perfectly antique?  Couldn’t it have been manufactured by some Hollywood prop maker?

And below here, a railway siding running to a disused trackside building.  The building was very handsome, a fine, honest bit of workaday industrial architecture.

But wait a minute, one's appreciation might not have been spoiled but it was certainly changed by the presence of a sign that read “Set Dress Truck Only.”  There was no room for real trucks, only movie trucks. 

It wasn’t quite a simulacra, but it no longer seemed to be exactly a “real” example of post-industrial desolation either, which seemed a shame.  It wasn’t that the building was unpicturesque, or that it was too picturesque, but rather that it was too knowingly picturesque.

In Of the Turnerian Picturesque John Ruskin writes, “he (Turner) has admitted into his work the modern feeling of the picturesque, which, so far as it consists in a delight in ruin, is perhaps the most suspicious and questionable of all the characters distinctively belonging to our temper, and art.”  That's Turner's Tintern Abbey above, painted in 1794.

Of course Ruskin never visited Los Angeles, nor did he ever see a movie.  But he was a great fan of architecture and he wrote, “When we build, let us think that we build for ever.”  He was also a great walker who wrote, “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you,” which sounds very similar to what you hear said on certain movies sets as the sun goes down and they start "losing the light."  

That's Ruskin in the picture above, the man in the middle with the walking stick