We drove up Old Topanga Canyon Road, past my first house, past Erik’s old house, past the home of the Strychnine Sisters and on to Red Rock. We almost gave up, the single-lane road crowded in by parked cars and garbage cans, twisting and rutted, and so obviously leading nowhere.

Red Rock is beautiful, even with a giant home TV antenna almost at the top of Calabasas Peak. An alligator lizard lay twitching in the road, fatally injured. I have no memories of this part of Topanga, the home of infant me. My mother remembers it though, of once giving a ride to Charles Manson, and throwing him out of the the v-dub once he started rambling. His race riot fantasies are the wet dreams of today’s GOP. How sad to go from one crazy motherfucker to an entire political movement full of them.

I love the shade, but wish for wider roads. Topanga was a refuge for the beatniks and hippies. It’s a good thing they got rich, because there is no way they could afford to live here now. Rattlesnakes and earthquakes, hillsides and mudslides, brush fires sweeping through the canyons. This is my childhood.