Next morning, Cheryl and I took off up the San Diego Freeway, heading for the Grapevine. Near the top, we turned left off the eight lane, and wound around the still brown hills through Frasier Park to Mt. Pinos road. We climbed about a mile above the Tejon Pass. On the way up, the only people going slower than our VW van were a few cyclists, laboring up in their granny gears. Two young couples roared past us in an open air Jeep, complete with roll bar, winch, and wire cages for their headlights.
“Whoa, where are they going so fast?” Cheryl said.
“Looks like they’re going to try out their new four-wheel drive on the jeep road up top,” I said.
“Where?”
“You know – on top, there’s a track that goes about a mile or two into the woods. It’s mostly a hiking and horse trail from the parking lot up to the top. That’s where we’ll go first. I don’t know if you can get a Jeep up there or not.”
True to its name, the top third of the mountain is covered with ponderosa pines. On a hot day in LA, this desert island peak is one of the few refreshing places around. The blue sky and harsh radiant LA sun are filtered out by the ponderosa needles, shaking overhead from the widely spaced pines. We sputtered into a parking spot, and walked along the carpet of dead brown needles to the viewpoint. On top, nearly nine thousand feet up, we looked down the Ojai valley, east into Bakersfield and west to the Pacific.
“You think this is better than the beach?” I asked.
“I like the beach. I’m a southern California girl. I like the sun and the surf.”
“But this is southern California. That what makes it so great here. You can go up into the mountains, you can go skiing, you can go to the beach, you can go to the desert, and you can even go to Ojai.”
“I know, but I think of the mountains more like the Sierra, where you go away in the winter and go skiing. My dad’s partner has a cabin up in June Lake, and that’s where we’d go, or to Mammoth. In LA, the beach is it. The mountains really aren’t very good here.”
She was right, of course. I missed the Colorado and Idaho wilderness, where you’d walk up a stream-side trail through aspen into pines, dodge afternoon thunderstorms, and shiver at night inside a down bag. And once you got up top, you’d look around and see, not metropolis and ocean, but just more mountains, stretching off to the horizon. Some would even be craggy rock covered and snow capped. In LA, the mountains, though high and cool, are isolated and lonely. No one visits Mt. Pinos, not compared to the beach, where there’s always something happening. Maybe skateboarding was the way to open up the peaks, give a proper Angeleno action to the experience. Too much nature up here, anyway.
Mt. Pinos has a gentle slope. We strolled through the edge of the forest into the sunshine, where we sat down, and leaned against a fallen log. We dozed a bit, soaking up the radiance while we smelled the pine duff and resin. Rested, we went back to the parking area to pick up the skateboard. On the way, we passed the Jeep, resting upside down on its roll bar and rear seat. The young couples looked perplexed, as if they didn’t know quite what had happened. Neither their winch nor their attitude would help them now.
Assured that someone had called a tow truck for them, we moved on to our own form of risk-taking. I hopped up on the board, and, without a helmet, elbow or knee pads, shoved off.
I was scared. I was used to skiing, or, more precisely, falling while skiing. Then, I knew the snow, no matter how firm or icy, was still soft enough underneath to give a bit, and wouldn’t tear my skin off like asphalt would. On snow or ice, you slide, not bounce, and as long as you keep your hands and feet in the air, you’ll do just fine. Falling off a skateboard at 20 mph might be a different sort of thrill, not necessarily one I’d like to experience.
Nonetheless, I wanted to see what riding down hill on tiny wheels felt like.
Since I never could quite figure out how to turn up into the hill to stop properly, what it felt like was a series of very short rides punctuated by stepping off the board to the road as soon as I felt I was going as fast as I could run. Not much fun, but at least I could say I had done it.
……
Even if skateboarding didn’t catch on with anyone over the age of 15 that year, someone in LA got the bright idea to screw the urethane wheels onto the bottom of a pair of ice skate boots. On a flat surface, with a rubber stopper at the toe, they not only looked like ice skates, but worked like them too. With a five mile long bike path, paralleling an asphalt boardwalk, and a huge concrete basin around Muscle Beach, it was only a matter of time before the skates invaded Venice.
First, some enterprising middle easterner showed up one day with a bunch of skates he rented out the back of his van. Give him your driver’s license, he gave you a floppy pair of skates, with which you rolled around for an hour. Exhausted, with quadriceps cramping, you came back to the spot where the van had been, hoping it would still be there with your license. In about a month, this fly-by-night arrangement was trumped by a closet-sized storefront, a permanent rental shop. Soon, there was one on nearly every block.
Overnight, it seemed, Venice took on a new look. In the sixties, Venice north of the Boulevard had attracted misfit beachgoers – nudists and gays owned the sand, panhandlers and drunks ruled the boardwalk. By the early seventies, Marina Del Rey had started to creep in, with Manhattan Beach-like condos slowly working up from Ballona Creek to the Venice Boulevard lifeguard station. The new arrivals took on the coloration of the indigenous population. Scruffy beards, ragged shorts and sandals with greasy hair and sunburnt eyes marked one as a North Venice native, distinguished from the South Venice afflu-hip by the dirtiness of their clothes and their lack of late-model cars.
With roller skates, though, the two cultures splashed up against each other. The more exotic Venetians – blacks, lanky female weight lifters, and wayward surfers – seemed to hop into the skates first. They caught the local shopkeepers by surprise. On skates, you’re taller, swifter, and quite foreign to the ambulatory. Store owners didn’t quite know what to make of the swift moving giants who would roll in, finger the merchandise, and act like they didn’t know how odd they appeared. Out on the Boardwalk, skaters began to pick up moves from the ice, turning backwards, rolling on one skate hunched over with a leg and arm outstretched. The more self-confident souls brought boom boxes along, providing a constant sound track to their gyrations. Those who were really good would set the box down in the parking lot by the restrooms, and put on impromptu skating programs for the more timid beach walkers to gawk at.
Most danced to urban beat music, with as much movement above the waist as below. Lycra, a recently developed synthetic fabric, was the perfect leg attire. For torsos, tank-tops or leotards seemed to work best; tight-fitting and sweat repelling seemed the order of the day. Bold colors predominated – red and blue, with some bright yellow, all worked to complete the “here I am, you’ve got to look at me” statement.
Soon, they spilled over onto the bike path, where their presence had not been anticipated. Through Venice, the Santa Monica Bay bike path makes a series of sharp turns which, combined with the increased density of bikers, keeps speeds way down near 10 mph.
Skaters could accelerate faster and turn quicker than cyclists, and began to weave in and out among their two-wheeled neighbors. The beach patrol at first banned them from the bike path. But relegating skaters to the boardwalk was equally treacherous. The little old ladies going in and out the Jewish Center started fearing for their lives, or at least their hips. After the first actual collision, the bike path was opened up again to all self-propelled wheeled humans.
The victory was complete when Linda Ronstadt was featured on the cover of her album, geared up in skates and flowing scarf, rolling down the Venice Boardwalk at sunset.