Not Arizona, Not Maine

I was driving up La Brea and stopped at a light. There was a Trader Joe's on my left and I stared at the weather vane. A bear was attacking a lion on the east/west axis. The wind shifted and the scene disappeared. The light changed. I continued north.

I'd heard about an old vaudevillian named Ben Blue who'd also had some success in the movies and later on in television. He was able to travel during the Depression, and made a trip to Norway in nineteen thirty-four. He was taken by the culture and history and in particular the sod houses. When he returned to California he decided to build himself one, in Encino. The roof is covered with seven inches of sod, and the exterior is clad in simple slate flags. The interior is almost completely constructed of pine and Blue had traditional Norwegian murals painted throughout. He lived there with his wife until he died in nineteen seventy-five.

I sat in traffic going up the hill in Laurel Canyon and peeked up at the houses ascending the steep grade on either side of me. There aren't many really impressive houses on such a busy street, you have to go looking for them in the winding cul-de-sacs. The facades are often deceiving in the hills, though: most are squat and narrow. It's only when you enter that the houses open and sprawl for seeming acres.

I was looking for an immediately impressive house. Driving along the wide avenues of the Valley I thought about a movie I'd seen about Los Angeles. One line had stayed with me. "Roland thinks L.A. is for the brain dead. He says if the sprinklers stopped you'd have a desert. But I think, I don't know. It's not what I expected. It's where they've taken the desert and turned it into their dreams. I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, lives, pleasures. And no one is looking for verification that what they're doing is okay."

I found the address in Encino and parked across the street. A tall hedge surrounds the property. I hesitated going in. I lit a cigarette and looked across the street. It only occurred to me after a moment that the grass hill I was staring at above the hedge line had an extraordinarily straight edge and a chimney coming out its middle. I moved over a few yards and was able to see a section of the house set back behind a circular drive. I walked halfway across the empty street and stopped again.

I realized that Steve Martin was right. This city is a place of secrets. Ben Blue was dead, but now mowing a sod roof was someone else's idyll, and without being invited I'd never want to see the Norwegian murals.

Mid-Wilshire - 2/17/07