A Place Between Mountains and Eras Holding Basins of Dreams
By Rebecca Gross
Photo by Madi Parsley
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.”
-The Lovesong of Alfred J. Pufrock, T.S. Eliot
In eighth grade, two years after my dad died suddenly at our house in the San Fernando Valley, I read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” for the first time. It is undoubtedly a cliché to declare that reading this canonical work would change the way I read literature forever (it did), or to claim that digesting this poem would disrupt my sense of self (it absolutely did). But perhaps I might redeem my unoriginal platitudes by explaining why, for a valley kid like me, reading “Prufrock” was particularly impactful.
This Eliot piece opened my heart to the pain and beauty inherent in being from a suburban wasteland: The San Fernando Valley. And now at age 25, when I look back at my emotional journey with the Valley’s very own “half-deserted streets” and “one-night cheap hotels,” it’s the art I consumed, produced, and experienced alongside other valley kids that allowed me to (surv)/(thr)ive.
There were moments in my teenhood when I wanted nothing more than to be free of the Valley. I felt stuck, trapped, caged in the south-western quadrant of the Valley defined by the borders of the 101, 405, and the mountains. I was dipped like a homemade candle in layers of Valley -- born and raised there, waxy debris taking the shape of whatever container I melted into, sweltering through 110 degree days.
Hot blacktops made my skin sticky, brightening the red birthmark on my forehead. My dad used to call the red blotch an “angel’s kiss” to make me feel less self-conscious. (who would tell me this after he died?) The fact this blemish was always more prominent on days when Valley heat reflected back onto my body from the black top gave me a particular distaste for Valley heat.
For those of us who were self-described freaks, the rigid grid of suburbia and its lingering aura on the people of the region could be harsh. But when I found my people and joined a curated collective of weirdos, the weekends in the Valley became a teenage dream. When I turned 16 and got my license, I packed five or six friends into my sedan and we sloshed through San Fernando Valley hills bordering the Santa Monica Mountains. Taking sharp rights and lefts like we were sailing on an ocean occupied by a volatile sea storm, we opened windows and flooded our smiling and singing mouths with summer valley air. We replaced the salty sea flavor with that of the arid desert.
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We go from one desert to the next: swap San Fernando Valley for Joshua Tree. As I tried to fall asleep, I could hear the sound of the ocean outside my window –– the crashing of waves on the beach, the subtle noise sand makes as it is rearranged to form a new shape in the same moment the water recedes. The sound of putting a shell to an ear, a nostalgic and childlike sound that feels vivid and comfortable, one untainted by the truth most adults already know: the ocean noise which lives in the shell is really only the sound of your own blood moving through your ears, magnified by the shell’s echoing acoustics. Swoosh; I listen, in my dream. I could hear the low moan of the whale’s hum, as if I were hundreds of feet deep in the sea. Perhaps, for that moment, I was.
Though, outside there was only miles and miles of desert –– the kind that’s less sweet and more dry. Openness that at once feels as though it will invite you to roam and then swallow your body in its entirety, like the sick stranger your parents had warned you to keep your eyes averted from and your lips closed to. The unique Joshua Tree, its symbol of diversity and strangeness, of flexibility and sharpness, of collision and rapid spreading, the desert exists as an oxymoronic arid plane, absolved of the fluidity with which the ocean seems to breathe; her breath is still, and when it moves, her diaphragm seems to quiver moving her breath in evil chuckles like Ursula from The Little Mermaid.
Earlier in the day, before willing my eyes shut, I had walked on the ocean floor; that is to say, I had begun viewing the desert as a land that was once sea, as space that had returned to a time before time (When you are a child, and you spend your summers swimming in swimming pools in the San Fernando Valley heat, there is this game you play. I was a child that spent my summers swimming in swimming pools in the San Fernando Valley heat, and as such, I played this game. I called it “moonwalker,” but, as I was an only child, I do not have any way to know what other, or most other, children might call it, or really if other children played this game. When I played, nevertheless, I would make my way from the shallow end to the deep end one step at a time. Each step, I was compelled by the rules of the game to make contact with the pool’s floor, and between each step –– forced by the same rules –– I had to reach the surface of the pool’s water for a quick breath, before plummeting like a pencil back underwater, feet first). I felt as if I were a weightless sealing, one without air pockets trapped inside my body summoning my person to the surface; I planted my feet evenly on the floor. Plants sprouting, sandy paths, rocks and cliffs –– the sea- turned landscape guided my movements, perhaps I would be careful to step lightly in one place and I would let my toes spread wide and mush into the earth elsewhere.
Out of breath, my chest would heave and if I was lucky I would turn my mouth to face a slight breeze I might catch; like a filter-feeder, I opened my mouth and wished they were gills to re-oxygenate my blood, tasting a residue of saltiness leftover from what could have been, from the potential of what might have been, or might become.
I leaned into a space of transformation, of constant evolution. Water could have flooded the valleys and basins I stood in, but at that moment, there was none; only dry sand and her prickly plant offerings prevailed in front of me. I could not un-imagine her resilience, though; her ecosystem, already accustomed to such harsh climate systems, would adjust and thrive should a god-like excellence inundate her sandy bottom with dense fluid: a salty water or a jello-like goo. A historical entity trapped within this basin was whispering to me she had done so before.
I could hear this whispering so vividly; indeed, I felt it fiercely in my bones, as though those too were becoming part of the desertscape –– as though this wasn’t the first time the desert floor had entered and enjoyed a human body as a vehicle for her thoughts. I was overcome by an explosive conviction that the desert was becoming and that I was, too.
Feet still planted, I found them difficult to move, but I did not not care to; I felt at one with her, and she was mesmerizing, and I was mesmerized. The whisper continued: She was always becoming, I was told, she was always changing, existing, growing. And there was no anxiety, as there was among the human race, about this constant reformation; as much as this continuous reshaping was part of the desertscape, it was also part of the desert-identity, one in which to not re-configure was to not persist in existence. I won’t make any adjustments; I will just let it be. I won’t resist becoming, and so I will become. And like that, I did. It was as if all I had to do, all along, was eliminate any resistance; my own resistance was all that was in my way of growth. I was my own villain, as much as –– if not more than –– I was my own bolster.
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“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
-The Lovesong of Alfred J. Pufrock, T.S. Eliot
We go over the hill to go to LACMA: David Hockney’s largest painting on a single canvas has the four of us sitting on a bench staring. It’s called “Mulholland Drive, the Road to the Studio,” which describes exactly what we see. I’m less interested in the windy rendition of Mulholland and I’m more interested in Hockney’s depiction of the Valley. North of Mulholland, grids of the Valley seem to go on forever, every now and then transverse by a diagonal street. Painted in red and white and then white and orange, I am forced to reckon with the simultaneity of negative and populated space, with the artist’s expressed truth: The Valley is a filled-up non-space.
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The living ecosystems within the desert and the ocean depend on interconnectedness. Each system relies on the existence and willingness of other creatures within its biome for support; when one keels, another stretches its limb to sustain. They lean into and away from one another, remaining present –– but not on edge –– should something happen. There is no crisis training in the desert or the ocean; existing in the desert or the ocean is a constant state of crisis. The creatures of the desert- and oceanscapes grow tall within states of movement and instability; in their oxymoronic space and with an oxymoronic nature, they become flexible in states of precariousness –– how else could they be? They don’t only accept change, they burgeon among it; they drink it like a baby separated from its mother’s breast, sucking long and hard with strength and conviction –– there is no other way; there is only the will for life.
Human beings are not well-suited for this level of adaptability; we have become inflexible in our bodies and our ability as a race to metamorphose. We feel dissatisfied when the stream diverts, and we are deprived of the hydration we need to sustain our being, but we have lost the instinct to chase it (to pick up and re-place ourselves, our belongings, and for all intensive purposes, our lives). When the desert first dried up, and we maintained traces of our pliability, we lost our gills to make space for air within our lungs. But as the deserts begin to fill once more with rain and river and ocean, we climb the tallest mountain before we will our bodies to evolve to our surroundings; our rigidity has made us cowards, ones who run away and place bandaids sooner than we transform.
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So let us go then, you and I, into the dried-and-deprived, filled-up non-space we call home: a place between mountains and eras holding basins of dreams, wasted and nourished. Let us ask the self each of us hold in this suburban wasteland: Do we dare? Do we dare… disturb our little bubble of a universe?
