April 16, 2023 (Updated September 8, 2023)
“And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”
—Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country for Old Men
When I got my first car I sought to assert my independence by mimicking what I had seen others do with their cars. I thought I ought to go on a nightdrive. And so after midnight on a Saturday night, I piloted my ‘16 Jetta south from Mar Vista to San Pedro, taking the 405 to the 110. The drive on these two latitudinal arteries of Los Angeles took roughly half an hour and had no real sights except for one. As I approached the South Bay and Long Beach, I saw the smokestacks of the Port of Los Angeles smoldering in the night. The hubris of humanity outlined against the black ocean beyond and the void of the starless sky. Exiting the freeway in San Pedro I thought about turning eastward and exploring the empty port area on Terminal Island. I had read it was a trippy place to drive around at night, with all the lights and cranes and yet no activity of any kind, as a totally industrial area. However, I realized any activity I saw would likely be of illicit nature, and this fear of the unknown turned me westward to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Another area of LA County renowned for being interesting to drive late around at night, Palos Verdes is a hilly peninsula, a geographical promontory that serves as the southern edge of the Santa Monica Bay. I drove the coast road with all its treacherous curves and landslide warning signs, cruising with the windows down, letting in the chill. I didn’t come across a single car until I hit the main road again at the other side of the peninsula.
It was then that I had an epiphany. For one fleeting moment, the illusory myth of the automobile, that vital component of the “American Dream”, made sense to me. The hyper-independence it allotted me in transitory spurts felt magical. Everything was tied together in my head, and I lapsed into grandiose yet humbling thoughts of our place as humans on this earth. Even if they came at the expense of more sensible methods of transportation, only cars allowed a single human being to explore in a matter that was so solitary and yet so utterly freeing. I compared it to a party, as both parties and cars are ultimately transient blazes of activity in cold dark nights, just as all civilization since prehistory has been a great flowering of humanity, glorious and despicable all at once to us at our scale but pathetic when set against the empty universe and the omnipotence of time’s passing.