Country Road

I was walking down a side street here in North Hollywood, and marveling at the state of it around the hour of two in the morning. It so happens that while it intersects with numerous major arteries, there's a long stretch of it that is uninterrupted by any intersections or lights. As I plodded along to my home down the road a bit, I was reminded very much of some rural road down which one might find Tom Sawyer, Ichabod Crane or Scout and Jem walking. I had to use my imagination a bit given the high concentration of buildings, but the feel of the street in the middle of the night made it very easy to do.

I thought how badly the illusion would be degraded if I were to walk the same street during the day, with all the people who use it in a condition of wakefulness. It would be so hot, noisy and urban, instead of what it was so late at night. It was so still.  There was not a thing moving, and the distant sound of traffic on the freeway might have been a rushing river. Apart from that, there was no noise save for birds chirping. There was little light as well. The stars might well have provided some of the illumination I walked by. It truly felt as if I might have been not just in another, lightly populated place, but another time as I suggested above.

What might I have been doing at that hour? Perhaps headed for some night-time fishing, or staggering home from a village tavern. Maybe I could have been a constable silently on patrol, encountering nothing and risking dereliction of duty with a nap seated against a tree. All of this in the midst of the fourteenth largest urban area on the planet. It's a blessing that in cities like LA or my hometown of Phoenix that there are sanctuaries of tranquility like this in such abundance. Back home, one could almost believe they were out in the middle of the desert when it's merely a mountain preserve around which millions flow past on the freeway.

I wonder if others ever have the same thought- if they possess the runaway imagination that would let them believe for a moment that they are on Mark Twain's frontier or Washington Irving's New York. I like to think that it's so, and that others keep it to themselves out of fear of getting razzed or some notion that it's uninteresting. For my part, I feel secure in telling all of this little oasis which winks in and out of existence in the space of a few hours in the dead of night.