Arroyo: A Novel

by Chip Jacobs

digress. Having been away so long, I’m proud

Shades popular with biplane pilots and Progressive Age motorists

are de rigueur again as “steampunk aesthetic.”

On the canyon floor below, he knew, were the flatlands and farmland of unincorporated Linda Vista, where the Sierra Madre mountain range tapered away into the Crescenta Valley. Here, the present-day—ice delivery, telephones lines, legal services, electricity—was subservient to the agrarian past of citrus belts and moldering, red-tile ranchos; farmers, working their plots in a checkerboard layout; harvested and exported lemons, blood oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit, tangerines, mandarin apricots, and twenty other cash crops. Question was: would these flames render them all scorched history?

Pasadena’s architectural prodigy, designed to deliver passage from one part of the valley to the other. Few traversed it much anymore; in a couple years, no doubt, it’d be scrap wood from the bygone horse-and-buggy era. Crossing the Arroyo by foot or hoof anymore was going the way of the porkpie hat.