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COLUMN BY WARREN MILLER |
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InfoFor great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren's wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, warrenmiller.org Previous columnsOPEN HOUSE Column by Warren Miller of Deer Harbor A Different Kind of Golf Score Freedom Was A Two-Wheeled Bicycle Lurching Again...With Morphine! Are You Knitting My Nose Together? | |
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Southern California
posted 07/24/2010 At about midnight, I rode in a van from the LAX airport to the hotel, with a driver who spoke no English, only Spanish. Because of my late-night arrival at the hotel, they had to get someone from a back office to translate what I was saying in English into Spanish so that I could register. The next day I started off on my week-long journey, logging almost four hundred miles on car-choked freeways. I enjoyed meals in 19 of 21 different restaurants in my one week adventure. One meal was particularly enjoyable because I had lunch with some old surfing friends, one of which I had not ridden a wave with since 1943. The lunch with my surfing friends brought back a lot of good memories from the forties and the fifties. Memories of big waves, freezing cold winter days without wet suits and big fires on the beach to warm up by. Sometimes I have some trouble with the finances of some friends in my generation. Take, for example, three of them that made a lot of money in their professions. They meet every Tuesday for lunch in a local restaurant because on Tuesdays they get two hamburgers for the price of one. Two of my friends are 92 years old and we all have the same stuff burnt into our brains: the same depression frugality that is there forever. I usually don't think the frugality is bad, but this time I got stuck for the luncheon check for seven people, and I noticed that the restaurant didn't give us the two hamburgers for the price of one. After some spirited conversation with my friends, I said to one of the guys, "You can't take it with you," meaning his money. He replied, "I can't go anywhere without it." His caretaker who was pushing his wheel chair said, "I have written instructions to get the remains of his fortune converted into hundred dollar bills, cook them for his last supper and then get him cremated." Knowing my old friend, he will probably do just that. I took another day out of my whirlwind Southern California trip to ride the train to San Diego to see my grandson. It was the first time I had been on a train in America since I rode one from Boston to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1953. That train was three hours late on a two hour trip, but some of the audience hung around to see my ski movie anyway. The train ride to San Diego was smooth, clean, and comfortable and I would suggest that if you ever go to LA, you spend a day on the train just for the enjoyment of it and an opportunity to see the back yards of Southern California. It starts out with miles and miles of graffiti covered walls. Then a prelude to just what might be coming in America's financial future- dozens and dozens of boarded up factories. Their parking lots are overgrown with weeds because they are no longer able to sell whatever they used to be making. Then on through Orange County, which has changed from acres and acres of farming into tens of thousands of houses and hundreds of mini-malls. I used to drive through Orange County on a two lane highway, south to surf at San Onofre as early as 1940. Interesting how the entire world has changed in the last seventy years. When I was born in 1924, Los Angeles had just grown to one million inhabitants. Today, the Los Angeles basin is home to over 15,000,000 people. And that is a lot of people when most of them get on the freeway at the same time, twice a day. The population explosion is not out of the ordinary because people go where the job opportunities, weather, and recreational pursuits are readily available. As I rode south on the train to San Diego, it seemed as though all of those 15,000,000 people were either driving down the freeway alongside of the train, or had parked at a beach to enjoy the sun and surf of Southern California. I came home from my one week in the sun thoroughly exhausted and slept long and hard for the next two days. I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer travel like I used to, when I showed my ski movie in Detroit and then caught the midnight plane to Los Angeles, took a taxi home and was in my office early the next morning to catch up on business. I always made sure I was in my office by six in the morning back in those days. I sure am glad those days are gone and that all I have to do when I go somewhere is get there one day early so I can take my afternoon nap after my flight and be ready to spend some quality time with the people I will be visiting. For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren's wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, warrenmiller.org |
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