Seeing Los Angeles from the air for the first time chips something off your soul. Below me is an endless sprawl of a city with no boundaries, swathed in its own filthy brown smog. It is a long way from my Banks Peninsula home and it is a view of the world to come that makes me uncomfortable in my comfortable airline seat.
It has been a long, dreary flight from the island of Rarotonga to Los Angeles. Even by today’s standards of modern air travel, the Pacific is a big ocean to cross. All night, I watched the sleeping forms of my fellow passengers lit occasionally by the flash of the navigation lights on the long, curving stretch of the wings. Despite the novelty of arriving at a destination that is new to me, the landscape below these wings has a jaded familiarity to it.
Now that we are circling over the city, only some passengers bother to look out the window. For most, the view is as abstract as the sea we have flown over: a background to the intimate detail of life that goes on in their immediate vicinity.
The few window-gazers look for some recognisable landmark but see only a thin, watery vision of Los Angeles through the smog. Any bit of the city that pokes through the haze looks like any other bit, all gridded buildings and snaking freeways full of cars. There appears no end to it.
We land New Zealand fashion, a soft touch followed by hard braking for a pilot used to lots of wind and a short taxi to an air bridge with no queue. Like the city, the airport goes for miles in either direction and the planes land and take off with the regularity of a conveyor belt delivering luggage.
We spend what seems a very long time taxiing to an air bridge, and when none is available, we are ushered off the plane and down some steps into a waiting articulated bus that will take us to the promised terminal. As we pick up a few other planeloads along the way, passengers make way for each other, avoiding eye contact and talking quietly.
By now, most of us are tired of travelling. We have had enough, and perhaps because of this we let our guard down a little. The man squeezed in next to me is lean and tanned. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and has the smell of someone who smokes cigars and drinks rum. He looks to me to be a product of California with a touch of Texas, which is confirmed as we strike up a conversation. He introduces himself as Hec as he casts an eye over my backpack and asks, “Where ya been, buddy?”
I reply with a mix of tight-lipped New Zealand drawl and plain dog tiredness, “Rarotonga”. It has been a long flight with little in the way of sleep; it is early morning in Los Angeles but feels like the middle of the night. I have forgotten I’m no longer in the Pacific, despite being only a few short kilometres from its shores. I want nothing more than to crawl into bed in a quiet room. My slurred pronunciation would have been careless were I not too tired to care.
“Goddamn, I love that place,” says Hec, slapping his thigh for effect. “When I was young, we used to go up there in my daddy’s Buick. You could get four of us kids across the back seat. She was one big-ass rig.”
For a moment, I think we’re going to have a great conversation about big American cars, and I begin mentally dusting off my story of owning a 72 Dodge Dart when I lived in Hawaii. I can almost hear the Dodge’s V8 purring along the Lahaina Highway when Hec boxes on in an unexpected direction.
“Yeah, we would go up there to get away from all the smoke and goddamn filth of this place.”
He gestures at the smog and the city beyond the airport.
“It was something about the desert sky at night. Me and my sisters would sit out on a blanket and watch satellites whizzing over. How they don’t all bang into one another up there I’ll never know.”
As Hec carries on his conversation, a small warning light in my sleep-deprived mind blinks on my dashboard. It’s something about “up there” and “desert” that does it. There is a landscape being lost in translation. Rarotonga has a mountainous central region but is not the kind of place you could drive a Buick; it is more mountain goat country. As for the desert bit, that doesn’t compute, either – Rarotonga is a lush tropical island in the trade-wind belt.
The warning lights become a slow-dawning realisation that Hec is talking about somewhere else. In my confusion, I had already indicated that I had been to the place of Hec’s memory by nodding and agreeing to statements like, “You been to Green Valley down the 19? Goddamn it, I love it down there. You can almost smell the tacos over the border.” Now I realise that it’s too late to correct him. My sleep-deprived mind has let me slip down a path and into a landscape I have never visited. It is all a fraud as large as the Sonoran Desert.
It is clear Hec’s good opinion of me is based on the fact we both love the same desert landscape. “Hell, any friend of the big sky is a friend of mine,” he says, as he slaps me on the back. It is definitely too late to correct him, as we are nearing the terminal and with it the chance to slip away in shame. At this point, I decide to run with it, despite the fact the only desert I have ever been to is Antarctica and that popular wisdom says honesty is the best policy.
“There’s something about all that space, isn’t there Hec?” I say, and with that Hec’s eyes gleam with pride.
“Hell yes, all that goddamn space. That’s the sort of place a man can breathe. You know, you look like the kind man who has known some space.”
“I certainly have, Hec, the same as you,” I say.
“Hell, yes,” he says in triumph.
“I love Arizona, goddamn it.”
Matt Vance is a Banks Peninsula writer. He has never visited Arizona.
