By Hector Tobar

Ode to Caltrans

In this dream I am standing over the Hollywood Freeway and the traffic runs backwards. The Suburbans race in the direction of their taillights, young men cling from the overpasses and swallow up the scribbles on the road signs into graffiti-erasing cans. The 6 p.m. bumper-to-bumper up over the Cahuenga Pass runs southward into downtown, where teams of skilled technicians slowly dismantle the Cathedral overlooking the freeway, covering the site with an asphalt parking lot. Eventually the traffic thins and the concrete roadway loses its tar-colored stains and returns to the pristine gray of its youth. The cars begin to shrink in size, as do their drivers, until man and woman and machine fit inside the lanes better. The Hollywood Freeway becomes the newer highway I remember from my youth, curves sculpted around hillside neighborhoods of bungalows and apartments on stilts, a roadway starting to show signs of its age but not yet bursting at the seams. The exit signs that have borne faithful witness to the coming and goings of my California life — to breakups and funeral processions, to marriage and birthday caravans — lose their sooty patina and glow in the understated Caltrans green in which they were minted. I look at the signs, the phallic arrows, the sans-serif font announcing destinations — Hollywood Blvd., Vermont Ave. — and feel the Switzerland-like orderliness and simplicity that inspired their design. I am eight years old again, staring out the window of my parents’ sky-blue 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, listening to the climbing sound of my father shifting gears, taking in the new-car smell, looking for the statue by the Silver Lake underpass, the one of the exterminator with the mallet preparing to smash a roach about as big as an eight-year-old boy.

•   •   •

When you live faraway from California, as I have for the past three years, you begin to appreciate the freeway for the essential idea behind its construction — that automobiles should inhabit their own universe, segregated from the slower forms of locomotion. In other countries I’ve visited, cars and pedestrians live incestuously. You can drive ninety kilometers per hour on what looks like a freeway around the edge of Montevideo, Uruguay, for example, and still have to dodge street vendors spiriting across your field of vision and horse-drawn carts merging from the on-ramp to the number-three lane. In Iraq, the super highways Saddam built are a kind of Middle Eastern tribute to Caltrans. The undulating zinc center dividers of the Baghdad freeways are the same as those running through Santa Monica and the functional, gravity-defying concrete overpasses are engineering cousins to those designed on drafting tables in Sacramento. Given the palm trees and Baghdad’s insistently dun landscape, you could easily believe you somehow had been transported to Barstow, except, of course, for the large number of Bradley Fighting Vehicles cruising in the fast lane, and the peculiar habits of the local drivers. Iraqis often will take a one-hundred-kilometer-per-hour southbound detour on the northbound lanes to avoid the craters cut into the roadway by American ordinance, plunging into the oncoming traffic as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do. In California we drive too fast, but at least there are enforceable rules; there is a logic and highway etiquette respected by eighty-five percent of the driving public and enforced by a relatively incorruptible Highway Patrol. If the Buenos Aires commuters who make a habit of straddling the dotted lines on the Highway of the Sun tried the same thing on the Santa Monica, they would either be pulled over for a roadside sobriety test or find themselves targets of road-rage justice. In Los Angeles, we don’t suffer traffic fools well, because we drive almost as much as we breathe; we understand that the hours we spend outside the shell of our vehicles are mere episodes between the daily freeway slog. The Law of Evolution has dictated our adaptation into homo californius mobilius, and clever tool-making — the hands-free cellular phone, the multi-CD player, and the radar detection device — has saved our breed from extinction.

•   •   •

When my first and second sons were born I did not take the freeway. I had become, by that time, too aware of the metal-crunching bedlam on the Pasadena Freeway, which was the main link between my home in Mount Washington and the hospital where my wife’s OB-GYN worked. Winter was an especially frightening time to be on the One-Ten, as the California neophytes call it: Once I witnessed a sports car flip in the air on the long curve where Arroyo Seco Boulevard ends and the freeway begins. The car twisted in the air like a gyroscope before landing right side up, its driver staring out at me, his eyes empty in shock. I mouthed the words “Are you okay?” as I drove past, but he didn’t answer. Another night, I inched to the end of a mile-long bumper-to-bumper back up only to see a man’s body hanging limply, and unmistakably dead, outside the driver-side window of an accordion-pressed pickup truck. Every morning brought a new rip to the chain-link fencing that separated the freeway from the streets beyond, where bits of glass and pieces of amber taillights garnished the asphalt and grass. People were simply driving too fast, in cars that were too big for the narrow lanes in the most ancient of our freeways. When my wife went into labor, I took the side streets.

I hadn’t been so cautious when I had turned thirty and decided I would ask my future wife to marry me, speeding along those same sinuous lanes toward the Bridewell Avenue exit in South Pasadena with a dozen red roses on the front seat of my pickup truck and thinking that “Bridewell” had to be a good omen. I was rushing toward my future along roads tended, since my birth, by Caltrans workers in day-glo orange vests who toiled day and night to keep my path free of obstacles, and to make the roadway as smooth as a carpet of black velvet. Every now and then I became aware of when and where one of these workers was killed; Caltrans placed signs with a picture of a white Caltrans helmet on the roadside, as a poignant and wordless memorial. But then there were too many signs and Caltrans took them down because a highway shouldn’t look like a cemetery. I was, then, just becoming aware of the cycles of life and death, and how the flow of traffic sometimes guides us against our will onto the cloverleaf exchanges between our earthly selves and the great highways of the beyond.

A few years earlier, I had driven down the Hollywood Freeway and the Santa Ana to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office to pick up the belongings of my stepfather. He committed suicide on the green lawns of Rose Hills, overlooking the 605 Freeway, which to me remains the “San Gabriel River Freeway,” though not even the mapmakers call it that anymore. My stepfather had shot himself during one of those windswept Thanksgiving weekends, when autumn leaves zip across the lanes of traffic, dancing over bumpers and windscreens, mixing with the plastic and aluminum detritus lifted from the shoulders. In the years since, I have noticed that the same hot winds blow every Thanksgiving weekend. I feel those winds and remember that drive to the Coroner’s Office, in my pickup with my mother at my side looking out across the lanes of traffic, wondering why the man she loved would betray her so.

My mother was my first regular passenger, back when she was a freshly-minted divorcee, and I was a sixteen-year-old apprentice commuter at the controls of her Pinto station wagon, sky-blue with a strip of faux-wood paneling along the side. We lived then in South Whittier, the midway point of the Santa Ana Freeway and an unfortunate place to begin a daily trek into downtown Los Angeles. Back then—before hundreds of Caltrans employees and contractors toiling countless graveyard shifts had widened it—the Santa Ana was barely a couple of lanes linking downtown to the Matterhorn at Disneyland and Sea World and San Diego beyond. My mother hated the drive north to her job as a keypunch operator and practically celebrated when I got a job in the same building in the summer of 1979 and asked “Can I drive?” This was the summer of my full induction into California adulthood, the lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the showdowns with the eyes of foes gazing back at you in rear-view mirrors. I learned to make those last-second, fifty-five-mile-per-hour mental calculations at the spot where one freeway divides into two — “Should I keep going on the Santa Ana, or try going around on the Long Beach instead?”

Long before I had ever put my hands on the wheel, I was learned in freeway cartography. I had a strange and very lonely childhood, part of which I filled by studying the maps of the Southern California highway grid, then still a work-in-progress, some just visions represented by dotted lines, like the one for the end of the Pomona, which did not yet reach its namesake. I had been out there several times with my father, following the detour signs to last exit, catching a glimpse of the bulldozers and dump trucks standing on a patch of brand-new roadway. The work crews were preparing to push the freeway past the last ring of suburbs and into the orange groves beyond. On my maps, I looked expectantly at the dotted line of the “Beverly Hills Freeway,” which would one day connect Rodeo Drive to East Hollywood, where I lived with my parents before they were divorced: the never-to-be-built Beverly Hills was going to be my personal road to the sea, taking me in twenty minutes from East Hollywood to the cliffs of Pacific Palisades.

Our apartment was a short walk from the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue, two blocks from the eight lanes of the Hollywood Freeway. A few times I pedaled my bicycle up to the zinc barrier at the end of our street, to stand over the ivy-covered precipice and look down at the river of moving metal below. The freeway was a canyon of sound, something between wind and rushing water, as if the lanes were rapids filled with canoes that occasionally blasted a horn or screeched brakes. The freeway sounded even more like water a few hundred feet back, when I stood at the window of my third-grade classroom at Grant Elementary. Our school was close enough to the freeway that our ecology-minded teacher made it the subject of a science test: She had us cover a piece of cardboard with Vaseline, which she then placed inside our classroom. She put a second one outside the window facing the freeway. Of course, the Vaseline board facing the freeway turned black a few days later, proof that the river of cars below our classroom was churning up a mist of carbon emissions, little particles that couldn’t be good for our eight-year-old lungs.

Perhaps that was the first time I thought of the freeway as a place of pollution and peril. Up to then, it was just the byway of our family wanderings, the Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard onramps the beginning of most of our visits to relatives and friends. To sit in my father’s Volkswagen with my nose pressed to the rear window, watching the traffic flow along with us at fifty miles per hour was as natural to me as walking along the fence posts of a country road would be to a boy from Nebraska. The landmarks of the two miles or so of freeway between my home and the Vermont Avenue exit to the south are engrained in the deepest, most nostalgic and pleasant recesses of my memory. I can close my eyes today and still see the oversized, hopeful sign declaring “McGovern for President” attached to a building on Vermont that rose like a bluff over the freeway; it would later become a night club famous for something called “female mud wrestling.” I can remember the smaller brick cube of the workshop of the Earl Schibe at the top of the Santa Monica Boulevard onramp. When I was a toddler in diapers, one of my father’s first jobs was at Earl Schibe, a car-painting outfit that could transform your cream-colored Thunderbird into a cherry-colored Thunderbird in the time it took the sky to evolve from morning blue to the desert-dust-and-ash smoothie of midday. My father’s task was to hop into the still-moist sedans and station wagons and roll them out of the shop, then down the Santa Monica Boulevard onramp to merge onto the Hollywood Freeway, trying to get the speed up to at least forty in the short drive to the next exit, so that the rush of wind would dry the paint. My father tells me his palms would begin to sweat every time he did this, because he was just a couple of years removed from Guatemala and didn’t have a driver’s license yet.

My mother and father were car-less for the first year or so after their arrival from Guatemala in 1962. They had no wheels, no independent way to get around, and in 1960s Los Angeles, as in early twenty-first century Los Angeles, this was an especially helpless and pitiful state. How would my pregnant mother make it to the hospital once she went into labor? For years, my mother told me she believed she had transmitted the transportation anxiety of the last days and hours of her pregnancy to me through the placenta, a story I heard often after I became a sad and chubby adolescent; it was, she believed, the root cause of my melancholy. My mother worried about taking the bus to the hospital — Would they even let a woman in labor on? Would she need exact change?— until a neighbor in her apartment building came to the rescue. Booker Wade drove my mother to Los Angeles County General Hospital from their apartment off Santa Monica Boulevard, down the Hollywood Freeway to the Santa Ana. I prepared to enter the world inside my mother’s womb as she rode in Booker’s convertible, the top down because he couldn’t get it to close. From the back seat, she looked up through the cold February air at the concrete underbelly of the great Four-Level Interchange, the first nexus of the regional freeway grid, a monument to modernity where buses and tanker trucks could float for a moment or two in the California sky. Here, the Pasadena, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways and a half dozen “transition roads” crisscrossed in an enormous cement starburst. Booker’s car rolled down to the lowest level of the interchange, the “transition” to the Santa Ana.

I wonder if, in that second or two, my mother didn’t forget her labor pains and look up and feel a sense of wonder: She had arrived in a country where traffic could fly. Maybe she passed that sense of awe to me, the boy bouncing inside her belly, doing turns inside the amniotic fluid, feeling his mother glide forward at fifty-five miles per hour, and then dip and slow to thirty-five, and finally climb up again, accelerating anew.