Yesterday seemed like a good day to drive up to Santa Clarita or thereabouts for photos, a destination I hardly visit though it’s only 30 minutes away.
There were dark clouds in the sky which excited me.
My friend and I got on the 405 north, driving next to the vehicles speeding by at 70, 80 and 90 miles per hour.
The freeways intersected, and we got onto the 5, and then exited Magic Mountain Parkway and turned north up The Old Road.
The names sounded magical and mythical and western, and you half expected to meet Wyatt Earp and drive into some town with wooden sidewalks, saloons and horses tied to posts, but all I saw were office buildings, shopping centers, and hills covered in mass housing with stage names; motels, hotels, and industrial parks with white siding on roads and no people. In fact, there were hardly any people anywhere, just cars, trucks, buildings and gray skies.
We drove on, looking for some abandoned bridge over the Santa Clara River, but we never found it.
We looked, in vain, for a vantage point, a scenic rest, a hiking trail. Were there no public lands set aside for hiking or walking or biking or strolling?
Out in the distance, across the Santa Clara River, at the end of the eight-lane wide Commerce Center Drive, crossing under Highway 126, we stopped at Henry Mayo Drive where a “No Trespassing’ sign affixed to a steel fence guarded the riverbed and unusable paved trail. Green hills, yellow flowers, mesas and a panorama of Western Sky, unlawful to enter. A homely trailer park behind by a tall vinyl fence shielded its inhabitants from having to look beyond their entrapped dwellings.
Was this that trailer park that regularly floods during heavy rains? I couldn’t recall.
Not far away was the Chiquita Canyon Landfill, another toxic site in the news, infamous for sickening its neighbors with poisonous fumes.
We had passed many churches along the way, but for such a spirit rich area, the environs seemed godless, a place where powerful ignoramuses in charge of money and land had defiled God’s natural beauty and turned everything into an enterprise of private capital, and failed to erect anything with a soul, an architecture or an emotion.
Still looking for a nice photo, we drove into the rear end of Magic Mountain, up an untraveled road that ended at the security entrance of the theme park. A stop sign was marooned in asphalt. More scary signs warned visitors they had to yield to authority and stay off forbidden land. I took some photos from the lot, beyond the property, where nature, somewhat defiled, still reigned, in a bed of trash and abandoned steel parts.
Here in Van Nuys 
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