Divided #10 – Day 56
We are in Los Angeles! If you cross the country by car, reaching LA, reaching the Pacific coast is very special. You get a very different sense of the size of the United States. Going from New York to LA, normally takes 5 to 6 hours by plane. You board a plane at JFK, read a bit, eat something and watch a movie or two. And then you get out at LAX and you are in California. It took us 55 days and we drove 7828 miles to get here. But we got to see the country, got to understand this place a bit better. But it is not over yet. It’s only halftime even though it does feel a bit like we have completed something.
But before we reached the City of Angels we spent some spectacular views on the road. There was Grand Canyon, a place that never seizes to amaze you. The size of that canyon and its beauty are hard to describe. After shooting a portrait of a park ranger we took a day off, to explore the Grand Canyon more and to hike down a few miles.
While Grand Canyon amazes with its natural beauty, Las Vegas couldn’t be more of a contrast. There is nothing natural about that city at all. It’s all artificial and the city comes across like a woman who has put on way too much make up. It’s not our favorite place to be, but of course it was an important destination for our project. We stayed at Circus Circus, an old casino that is way past its heyday. We would have loved to shoot there since you can find a lot of interesting people in there that can’t really afford to come to Vegas but who want to fulfill their personal longing for this strange place in the desert of Nevada that is such a fixture in American pop culture. But of course we were not allowed to shoot on the premises of a casino. But we did get our Vegas portraits. And not only us left Vegas happily. There was an adventure dome at Circus Circus with lots of rides for kids, plus a water world outside. Elias took full advantage of all the attractions, and whenever we were not shooting he could be found taking a ride or being in the pool.
On I-15 it only takes 4 ½ hours to LA. But although it was tempting to drive straight to LA, we stayed true to our credo, not to take shortcuts and to stay mostly on highways. So we took the long route through the Mojave desert, and it turned out to be a very good decision. If it would have been for that, we would not have met Big Daddy in the tiny desert town of Amboy, probably California’s smallest town, with only 4 residents. Amboy is located on the old Route 66 in the scorching heat of the Mojave desert. Its population consists of a sheriff, a postmaster and Big Daddy and his son, who run Roy’s rest stop that has definitely seen better times. But when we saw Big Daddy, we knew we had a portrait, without knowing his story. And when he started to tell us his story, we couldn’t believe our ears. Big Daddy used to be the head of a big LA gang and a big time drug dealer. He was 57 years old and he had lived the life that we normally only know from movies. In a long interview he explained to us among other things how it felt to be shot and stabbed and what was worse (stabbed). And how he was hording a million Dollars in a hidden safe in the basement of his house. He said he had retired from the gang life and the drugs and that he was the only one of his generation who was not dead or in prison.
But this interview and portrait shoot was not only memorable because of Big Daddy. It certainly will also go down in the records of this project as the hottest we have worked on. When we were working that afternoon, the temperature reached 108 F (42 C). It was so hot, that our video camera kept overheating. We had to do the interview in 15 minutes segments. After about a quarter of an hour the camera would shut down and we had to put it in front of a fan for 5 minutes to cool it down. But nobody is in a hurry in this small desert outpost, and so Big Daddy wasn’t bothered that the interview took up most of his afternoon.
The following day we arrived in LA. But we were not greeted by the brilliant blue sky of Southern California, but by low hanging thick clouds and pretty cool temperatures. It was certainly not what we had expected. We have been many times before in LA, but never in June. So for the first time we encountered what locals call June Gloom, a weather phenomena similar to the low hanging fog we have in the lower parts of Switzerland during the winter months. It is triggered by the vast temperature difference between the hot inland and the cold water of the Pacific.
But not only June Gloom was a surprise to us, also to sheer number of homeless people in the streets of Venice. In no other place we have seen more people without a home than here. It is a reminder of the incredible disparity of the American society.
