Iron Side Up: The Way Home on a Santa Ana Day

I have several routes that I use to and from work depending on the traffic and mood of the day which for a motorcyclist can be affected by many things, including weather. The most direct route and the one I take most often uses the 210 freeway for about fifty percent of the ride, about seven miles or so. Between the Pasadena end of the freeway and my office in Alhambra there are any number of ways to get there and none of them really interesting except for when I take the long way through the residential area down Marengo or Los Robles Avenues as I’ve done over the past year while Fair Oaks has been under construction, clogged and bumpy. The way home can be a different story and often depends on how the day went at the office; office being a relative term since I sometimes spend the day at microwave radio sites in the hills and desert areas. I love getting out with the operations guys in the field to work through problems on projects and find our way to solutions that meet a variety of needs.

My favorite route home when I just want to putt along and alter my perspective before walking through the door is one hundred percent surface streets. From the office I head up Garfield to Mission Street. When you look at the Google map Garfield changes between an Avenue and Road and back a few times; nothing like an undecided roadway to add to the adventure. North of Huntington Drive Garfield enters a very nice residential area lined with tress, great homes, and churches. At Mission I hang a left and take it through “Old Town, South Pasadena” with Antique and Ice Cream Shops, eateries, and stores and crosses the Metro Rail tracks where I inevitably have to wait for a train or two. This little section is part of the Historic Route 66 and makes me wonder what it would be like to ride the whole route some day; long interesting, and, of course, historic.

Once I get to Orange Grove Avenue I go right and eventually cross the 110 Freeway and then I am again in a residential area with well kept apartment complexes and large homes with deep front yards. The Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association property is here just before getting to Del Mar; it is a huge parcel with a plantation style mansion used for the headquarters. I then cross Colorado Boulevard near the huge Elks building and where I can catch a glimpse of the Norton Simon Museum. Just after Thanksgiving grandstands begin popping up along here like lichen on granite; they will get them up just in time for the Rose Parade. Then it’s over the 134 Freeway to West Holly Street where I take a right.

I am now getting to my favorite part of the ride home; halfway there and beautiful. I go down Holly and across the arroyo and then veer right onto Linda Vista and that takes me along a tree lined street with set back houses, some with wrought iron fences festooned with trailing rose bushes. Linda Vista stays up above the Rose Bowl at the bottom of the arroyo which also includes Brookside Park, Rose Bowl Aquatics, and the two Brookside Golf Courses. The canopy of trees is complete along stretches and is cool in the sun-dappled shade and it nowhere near resembles the cubicle I left behind only fifteen minutes earlier. Toward the end of Linda Vista I enter a lazy inverted S-turn and come out of the canopy for a glimpse of the furthest two holes of the golf course to the right and the mountainside to left. I track alongside the 210 Freeway for bit and watch the traffic either zoom past or move like the muddy Mississippi more resembling a parking lot than a freeway. Linda Vista becomes Highland Drive and then I head right to Berkshire dropping down along side the Flint Canyon Tennis Club and along another tree lined track until I jog right down Chevy Chase Drive to Descanso Drive where I bank left. Going up Descanso takes me under the huge oaks, past The Descanso Gardens, one of my wife and my favorite places, and then on up to Foothill Boulevard until I hit Briggs to the terrace and into the garage.

On a mild Santa Ana day, not too long after I had moved up to my Victory Cross-Country in December of 2009, I had decided to take my Descanso route home and found myself behind a dark gray Toyota Corolla with three young ladies in it that I estimated were in their late teens or early twenties. We were a couple of hundred yards from where we would emerge from the canopy and enter the lazy ess turn along the hillside when out from the driver’s window came a cigarette butt; I could clearly see the arc as the ember traced its path in the early evening gloom of the canopy. The butt hit the pavement and exploded like a miniature sky rocket spreading glowing tobacco and paper over Linda Vista and swirling out like a Ground Bloom Flower at a family fireworks celebration. I was incensed, infuriated, and utterly incapable of expressing any of it. I got past my initial impulse to race up and scream in the window in futility and slowed to find the butt and run it over and then I pulled over to observe that the smaller embers had gone out. By then I would have to abandon all reason to express myself to the smoker and instead let it smolder while I relived my emotions from the recent Station Fire. What was she thinking? Obviously she wasn’t thinking, couldn’t have been thinking, to do something so stupid and careless. Careless is what it was; she did not care about her actions and what could have been the consequences. We were less than three months removed from the end of the big fire in October of 2009 that had started on August 26, 2009. It consumed over 160 thousand acres and became the largest fire in modern fire history of L.A. County; destroyed 89 homes and over 209 structures. During this fire we lost two firefighters, Arnaldo Quinones and Tedmund Hall, while they were fighting the fire at Camp 16. You can understand the strength of my emotions when I tell you that my family was twice evacuated over four days; once from our home and then from my in-laws, and that on the Monday of those evacuations I observed Goss Canyon at the end of our street in Briggs Terrace fully engulfed in flames over 60 feet high and felt that all would be lost for us. It was a miracle that no homes were lost in our neighborhood. Walking to the end of the street overlooking the canyon when we were allowed home you could see the place where the miracle workers took a stand. There was an arc of un-charred grass down the canyon slope and just the down-slope branches of the scrub oaks had been scorched and extinguished as they turned back the fire. These were the brethren of Arnaldo and Tedmund who saved our homes.

What is it about us that we treat the earth as our ash tray, our garbage can? Isn’t it enough that we are filling canyons with our refuse and struggling to find the next great place store the artifacts that may one day describe us to future archeologists? You can walk down nearly any street at a normal pace and rapidly lose count of the cigarette butts on the sidewalks and in the gutters. When I walk along the streets in Alhambra I can stop and begin counting gum stains on the sidewalk. If I take one step I lose sight of dozens of them only to have hundreds stretch out in front of me. I’ve ridden along, driven along and observed all sorts of trash coming from vehicles. You can understand the beer can thrown into the brush; who wants to get caught with an open container in the car these days? I’ve had a passenger in my own car throw out a banana peel because “it’s bio-degradable”. I lock the windows on him whenever he’s in my company truck.