The Freeway Experience

More Joan Didion. I was reading an essay she wrote back in the 70s about the Los Angeles freeway system (if you have read her novel Play It Like It Lays then you know that Didion kind of obsessed about those freeways) – and came across a paragraph that gave me one of those beautiful moments of recognition. I remember, during my last trip to LA, one particular drive on the freeways where I went into this zone where I felt like I was flying. I had started off my trip with that horrible debacle and had been a bit jittery after that. But then – during one nighttime drive …

I was about to elaborate on my experience but I realized that that was what I had pulled out the Didion for – she describes it so perfectly. She’s a native Californian – most of her books (or a great number of her books) were devoted to trying to understand/excavate/explain/ruminate upon her home state. Water obsessed her, and roads obsessed her. Her essay “Bureaucrats” is about the Los Angeles freeways, and the bureaucracy it takes to keep them going (or not, as the case turns out to be. Bureaucrats never make things better or simpler.)

But the part I wanted to excerpt is this:

To understand what was going on it is perhaps necessary to have participated in the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident. It only takes a few seconds to get off the Santa Monica Freeway at National-Overland, which is a difficult exit requiring the driver to cross two new lanes of traffic streamed in from the San Diego Freeway, but those few seconds always seem to me the longest part of the trip. The moment is dangerous. The exhilaration is in doing it. “As you acquire the special skills involved,” Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in hi 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, “the freeways become a special way of being alive … the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.”