Delirium

There are 6,500 centerline miles of streets in Los Angeles and over 800 miles covered by alleyways. It is the largest and most traffic-congested street system in the United States.

Wait, it gets better.....

If it were people laid out end to end, considering an average height of 5'5"... that would be just about 7,300,000 people lying on pavement. According to the U.S. Census, the 2010 population of Los Angeles was 3,792,621. I guess we do need a population increase after all.

On the other hand, if we say that 5'5" is too low of a number, that it makes no sense to have that average (hey, people in my neighborhood are short, okay?) then let's look at a more common denominator. The human intestines are about 25' in length, give or take a couple of feet. And if we, launching into flighty metaphors, say "Hey, look here at transit maps: the streets of Los Angeles twist and turn about the buildings of the city as writhing conduits of our innards, digesting cars back and forth across the fiery stomach acids of the metropolitan area." Then we would only need to tenderly drape the viscera from 1,553,191 good Angelenos along the roads to cover over the pavement of the city.

Much better.....

That's gross. But, at least now I know why I feel like I am swaddled in concrete when I toddle around LA. I need a better way to interact with my city than pavement.

And that is partly why I found myself on the road at 2:00 on a Sunday morning heading for Colorado, my family, and my mountains. I rode high on concrete fever, packed up with a snow board, an orchid, and my rose plants determined to get to the border as fast as possible. Don't be fooled, this is not a story of monumentally life-changing events. It is just a series of small narrations of needing to breathe not-concrete; bloody, colorful battles of desert sunrises presaging the arrival of sunny, oven-heat out of the nose-grabbing cold of the night; long long hours driving with too much time to think; and diving into any wilderness, mental, and physical, that I can possibly find.