I don’t remember the first one, but I remember the last one, it was about a week ago, Sunday, Cahuenga Peak, a very tiny mountain in Griffith Park that I can walk to from our house. I’ve been more of an alpinist at other times in my life; these days I just like to walk uphill with a backpack, maybe a flask for the top. But I still crave mountains, any height, I feel very at ease when I’m on them, and I get itchy if I go for too long without climbing one.
What makes mountains beautiful to me is really nothing aesthetic. They’re piles of brown rocks, basically. Especially above treeline, around 12,000 feet, it’s more Martian landscape, a null of life, when typically the valley below will be glittering with grocery stores open late and other things I like. But it’s what is done there that becomes pleasing, elegant, especially when it’s hard and simple and frustrating and bleary: the attainment that’s always available, that’s only meaningful for what you make of it, while you drag your dumb, frail body from spot to spot. You lug along some food and water. You second-guess your decisions, your desire. Still, you head up and up, over talus and scree, and in those moments you come to know exactly who you are and what you are – weak, whiny, determined, hungry – and you know, too, what’s not around the next boulder: no soft ice cream, no sandy beach.
In Solo Faces, by James Salter, my favorite novel about mountain climbing, most of the book is set in the French Alps, but a good deal is set in L.A. He writes:
Above Los Angeles the faint sound of traffic hung like haze. The air had a coolness, an early clarity. The wind was coming from the sea which as much as anything gives the city its aura.
Last Sunday, on Cahuenga, I reached the top and chatted with two people who were about to head down. They were a little stunned by the hike, they hadn’t expected much exertion, they said; they’d searched on the web for a simple walk. I offered them a spare bottle of water. We chatted about the view. They left and I sat down, closed my eyes, and took a five-minute nap. On the descent, I remembered how Cahuenga Peak once belonged to Howard Hughes. He’d acquired it for Ginger Rogers, his love, who didn’t exactly return his love, who feared his type of love meant that he planned to build a castle on top of the mountain and trap her there. I mean, sure, awful, and I guess that was Howard Hughes. Still, I don’t know how much I’d mind it.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Check it out!
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