GUEST EDITORIAL
The famed view from the Mt. Lukens fire road (Photo – Reg Green)
I took Laura, the new mistress I have just found, on a short but rigorous hike last Sunday.
By Reg Green
My wife, Maggie, wisely stayed at home. It was what the British rulers in India used to call “beastly hot” and is why in the 19th century at the beginning of every summer the governing class there packed everything they needed for running a country of 250 million as it was then — filing cabinets, all office supplies, all clothing, medical supplies, favorite food– everything – and took them to the little town of Simla, 7,500 feet up in the Himalayan foothills. (Imagine your anxiety, wondering if you’d left your croquet stick behind.)
“If it’s this hot in March what will it be like in August?” Laura asked. She has just come to live here from the UK because her husband has been transferred and like every one of us who arrived here as an adult is finding it difficult to accept the sheer diversity– you could say perversity — of the California experience. As always too the scenery is equally melodramatic, in this case the empty and some of the steepest mountains in North America cheek by jowl with the teeming millions on the enormous flatlands of the Los Angeles basin.
And today everything changed again. I shivered a little on my early morning hike in light rain and thick fog. Above is a photo I took of the famed view from the Mt. Lukens fire road from which you can usually see downtown and all the way to Catalina.
Oh, I should have explained: Maggie is the costumer for an opera company, Laura is a wardrobe mistress.
> Addendum
Yesterday Colorado Boulevard.net had a photo from me of a view from the Mt. Lukens fire road showing….nothing. I was making the point that the climate here is far removed from the ‘sunning-yourself-poolside-every-day’ type the rest of the world thinks of as California weather.
On Sunday it was ‘beastly hot” and humid, yesterday socked in with thick mist and today…well, look at the photo I’ve just taken from the same point: Downtown LA ahead, Catalina in the distance and the teeming millions going to work all over — except up here!
The view this morning from Mt. Lukens fire road (Photos – Reg Green)
Reg Green (Nicholas Green Foundation) is a journalist living in La Cañada.
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