A Rarity

Yesterday, I saw things that I almost never see in Los Angeles. No, not concrete freeways and not the BMW in this picture. I see both of those all the time.

Look past the car, past the concrete, above the overpass...what do you see there?

"Just some mountains," you say?

Well, let me tell you, I drive home on the northbound 110 Freeway every day and I rarely see those mountains. It was so clear in Los Angeles yesterday that it was an event worth talking about. Everyone I spoke to was exclaiming, "Wow, can you believe how clear it is?" Yeah, who knew those mountains were there. It was so pretty that I found myself thinking about what the original group of thirteen that founded Los Angeles over 300 years ago must have seen.

Yes, it was so clear that I could see downtown LA from Compton, eleven miles to the south. That NEVER happens. Usually, I can't see downtown until I'm two or three miles away. And then, for those of you who want it all, you want to ski in the morning and go to the beach in the afternoon...I could see snow capped mountains to the east. I could see the mountains in this photo from Watts. I took it while standing on the playground of a school. You all should have seen the kids pointing at the mountains and the snow. I overheard one kindergartener ask another, "Where did those mountains come from?" The other replied, "What's that on top of them?"

What do we usually see instead? Why, absolutely nothing but some pinkish-brown haze in the sky. I like to say that haze is just some fog that hasn't burned off yet. Except that I see that haze almost every single day, no matter what time of day it is. I guess I need to tack an "S" and an "M" onto the beginning of "fog" and get rid of that pesky "F". I think we all know what that spells, right?

If you follow the news at all, you know that Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth won a well-deserved Oscar this past Sunday. I saw it last May, almost a year ago, and wrote about it here. Everybody thinks it's a great film but we all still want the magic pill to make the smog go away.

I wonder if LA will every reclaim her true beauty. I wonder if twenty years from now, folks like me will still be snapping pictures of sights like this, sights they rarely see.