Topanga Canyon, 18 April 2009

The canyon is hard to capture, partly because it changes as you climb the long winding road up from the lower canyon by the ocean to the village and the upper canyon, and partly because its slightly ramshackle, unstudied, unsophisticated and untidy charm is a challenge to aesthetic sensibilities if, like me, you prefer your romantic landscapes slightly more studied, sophisticated and tidy, in which case the odd bits of chicken wire, recycled tractor tires, plastic jugs and retaining walls of  cinder block tend to get in the way.  And yet Topanga absolutely is a romantic landscape, with its sometimes homely shingled cabins and clapboard cottages tucked into the hillsides and perched on ledges, the chicken wire, tires and cinder block notwithstanding, and charming in that funky, hippie, laid-back, tie-dyed egalitarian consciousness style that always, by the time I leave, has me humming a Woody Guthrie song. 

I went up Saturday to attend the Topanga Earth Day festivities with a dear friend and canyon resident who lives near the Theatrum Botanicum, a garden and Shakespeare Theater complex founded by the actor and social acitivist Will Geer, (1902-1978) possibly best known today for playing Grandpa Walton in the 70s.  Geer came to the canyon after being black-listed for refusing to tesitfy before the HUAC -- the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities.  Geer's lover Harry Hay, (the gay activist who went on to co-found the Mattachine Society in the early 50s and Radial Faeries in the late 70s) was a member of the American Communist Party and he and Geer had been involved in, among other activities, helping organize migrant farm workers. Source].  Much maligned and demonized now, of course, but in those days what being associated with the Communist Party meant for a lot of people was that you cared about the plight of the working man. 

Like Geer, other so-called un-Americans who were called to testify before the HUAC included the novelist Alvah Cecil Bessie (1904-1985), the actor Robert Montgomery (1904-1981), and of course the infamous Alger Hiss (1904-1996). Interestingly enough, we were just talking the other day about someone else of that era, someone who, unlike Geer, became an informant and named names to the committee and then went on to have a lucrative career as agent and producer and so-forth, and yet you don't hear any of that history anymore.  "She was very nice to me," one of my companions said of the individual who was reportedly the inspiration for the character who betrays her friends in The Way We Were.  "Her husband was nice to me," someone else remarked with a decided shift in emphasis. 

Of course any of us who have survived the last eight years knows how easy it is to rewrite history.  And to be fair, not everyone who was named and blacklisted had their lives and careers permanently ruined.  Some people left the country and worked abroad.  Some turned to other kinds of work.   Nothing lasts forever.  Not smear campaigns, not blacklists, certainly.

Down at the bottom of Topanga is where I found my beautiful (funky, plastic, laid-back) chandelier (see previous posts), and here I was again.  The beauty of the place, I decided, has to do with the transient quality of what the people who've come here have done to it.  As if by some kind of common agreement or understanding, the folks who put up the first shacks and cabins knew that you can't compete with the landscape, that it will outlast you and your flimsy history, it will shake and fling you off, or slide, or burn you and your plastic and your cinder blocks and your tires.  So the early settlers -- and the communists and the hippies who came along afterward -- seemed to understand that all we really do is rest gently for a short time on the surface of a place, we neither own it nor control it.  it was made for us, but on a temporary basis.  And maybe too, some of them also believed that we should try and be kind to one another while we are here, and look after those who aren't as strong as the rest of us.  And okay, maybe even forgive those who turn their friends in.  

            Nobody living can ever stop me,
            As I go walking that freedom highway;
            Nobody living can ever make me turn back
            This land was made for you and me. 

            [Source]