My aunt from Pasadena called up this morning to ask if I had felt the earthquake last night. I was a bit disappointed not to have. Pasadena is much closer to the San Andreas fault.
Relatives are another benefit of living in my native land again. My sister was in town. She used to live in L.A. long ago, and enjoyed showing me her old haunts.
We drove high up on the Angeles Ridge Road, which leads toward the Wilson Observatory, and looked down on smoggy Los Angeles from a place where, if it had been good weather, we could have seen the ocean. (It wasn't just smog-- the smoke from an arson fire a few days ago still hung in the air, penned in by these mountains east of L.A.)
The road is often closed in the winter and we passed several crosses by the side of the highway where people must have gone off the edge. Even though the road rises close to downtown Pasadena, once we headed up the mountain we were completely alone. We got out of the car at all the lookouts, and you could hear silence all around, with the city a distant hum far below. It was easy to imagine that mountain lions were watching us.
This sign was meant to signify that when chains are required, they are really required. Someone had turned it around to make a statement of some kind.
