The other day, I got on an airplane and, as usual, fell asleep before it took off. And, just as Gulliver did, I woke up in the land of make-believe. Los Angeles … where your first experience is trying to find the carousel that is supposed to have your baggage from your mythical flight. I was again introduced to the law of the airport: “It will take as long for your baggage to get from the airport to the carousel as it did for your body to arrive from your departure place.”
The trip from the curb to the car rental garage was in a bus big enough to hold the entire Super Bowl football team and driven by a lady who was about 4-foot-11 weighing 94 pounds and had just graduated from Race Car Driving School in Marin County. Fortunately, they had seat belts on the bus or we would have wound up in a heap, just like the baggage did.
The rental car pick up went without a hitch, except that the rental clerk had to have someone standing with him, translating everything into Spanish so he could enter it into the computer.
As I crept toward the on-ramp for the freeway to merge with the evening rush hour traffic, I realized that I’d not done this for a few years and the butterflies in my stomach were bigger than of a third-day skier when he discovers he has committed to make the second turn on a black diamond, mogul-filled run.
Once into the mainstream of the evening traffic, I watched as car after car changed lanes and slipped into the space between my car and the one in front of me. A rule of Los Angeles freeway driving is “if there is enough space between you and the car in front of you, another car will cut in and fill it up. Nature abhors a vacuum.”
By the time I got over Sepulveda Pass and got ready to handle the interchange to Santa Barbara, I was tailgating just like someone in the Winston Five Hundred and going as fast. I drove the 75 miles to Santa Barbara in a little less than an hour and never got into the fast lane.
The next morning you could see forever … California was like it was when I was a youngster, clear skies and the sun sparkling off the water. But, me being a youngster was 80+ years ago.
Walking to my meeting place that morning, I was almost knocked down by a couple on roller blades: both in a deep crouch and racing toward the acquisition of total body fitness. Dressed in matching purple and black spandex, silver roller blades and alternating green and red elbow pads (port and starboard, I wondered) and black brain buckets with a 6-foot ribbon flowing behind them allowing the second person to draft behind the first just as my car had been drafted the evening before while driving up the freeway behind big trucks. Except all that the second skater got to see was the fanny of the person in front of them while they were crouched down and working out.
After the meeting and on my return to LA, I avoided the freeway by driving down the coast, but though it was great to have the ocean on my right, the speed of the oncoming traffic was nearly that of the freeway, so I stayed way over to the right.
I was heading toward a time-management seminar. I showed up late. Some start.
Living like this is why I left the L.A. basin 25 years ago for the northwest eight months of the year and the mountains the other four. I’m too old to remodel.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
