Circum-training the American West: part 2

 

Though I have always considered myself virtually a native Texan, with all my grandparents here, I was born in Los Angeles. After WWII, my parents and a group of their friends bought a chunk of property on Mount Washington north of downtown, and created their own subdivision.*  My architect parents built their tiny gem of a modern house on the steep hillside, with a splendid view south over the city, and east to the Southwest Museum of the American Indian on the next hill over.

4567 Starling Way on Mount Washington in Los Angeles, Mount Miller Architects – then and now

They lived there only five or six years before moving back to north Texas to be near my mother’s elderly parents. But the “little house on Starling Way” was a major part of the family stories as I grew up. Last year I did some research with Google Earth Street View and the Internet, and it’s still standing! So I had to visit. With the invaluable aid of a former middle school student of mine who lives in LA, I did so.**  The current owner was very gracious, and has fixed up the house beautifully.

Monday morning I entrained on the Coast Starlight at LA Union Station. We went right up the coast from Santa Barbara to Salinas, then angled inland to Oakland.

unexpected rocky canyons near Simi Valley

 

some places, the tracks seem almost IN the ocean

 

For many miles, there is a huge ranch along the coast, and then some military installations, so there is no road access to the coast. The beach itself is all public land. But to get to a lot of it, you either sail in, or hike a long way in the sand.

deserted beaches, though someone sometime planted palm trees

 

wonderful shapes of central coastal California hills

 

Scenery from a train is often frustrating to a photographer. Here are these wonderful scenes, and they keep going by with no chance to stop and compose. And probably just as you click an obliterating tree goes by in the foreground, or you find out later you have a tilted horizon. And you are stuck with window reflections. But then the next scene goes by, and you snap again.***

 

Vinyards, a good ways south of the Napa Valley

 

Lucy, alert, and then in a more normal pose for when her folks are gone to work

I stayed with my cousin and his wife in Oakland for four days. Mostly I rested, and did laundry, and made the acquaintance of their elderly dog, Lucy. And I just luxuriated in the view of their live oaks in the backyard ravine, with the branches at the level of the sunny deck. I descended the flight of steps from the deck, and considered going down the steep path to the bottom, but common sense prevailed.

Everything blooms all the time in Oakland too. Plus, you can have a “baby” redwood tree#  in your back yard, much taller than the house even though rooted 30 feet below in the ravine. And a tree full of ripe oranges in the front yard.

The gorgeous pink cups arising from the roses by the street are Calandrinia grandiflora, in the purslane family. I brought a cutting home, but it hasn’t done anything yet.

 

I did take BART into San Francisco one day and went to the shops at Japan Town, but found them sadly declined in interest since I was there twenty years ago.

a “shopper” rests on Geary Street in San Francisco. I felt about that tired.

 

Amtrak has no north/south routes between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Since I didn’t want to simply retrace my steps, and since my pass let me  choose any route as long as I got back in 15  days, I e-mailed another cousin in Chicago and asked if I could visit overnight, the northern Empire Builder route getting in at 3 pm and the Texas Eagle inconveniently departing an hour earlier. Kieren was enthusiastic, so I left Oakland Friday night heading north.

The big loop route I ended up taking (dotted in blue)

 

to be continued — going home the long way . . .

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* My father spent the last couple years of the war on the west coast, in Civilian Public Service camps in Santa Barbara, CA, and Waldport, OR. The neighborhood on Mt. Washington was mostly men from Waldport and their families.

** My former student is now 40 instead of 12, which is really scary

*** I really did edit stringently; I took about 900 photos!

# The feathery tall tree on the left behind the house is the redwood; the other is a Douglas fir