The garden was at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation plant and it smelled appropriately so. All strange odors aside, it was on beautiful grounds: sweeping hillsides, perfectly manicured trees, reproductions of prolific Japanese icons of beauty and of course, small bodies of water cradling shores designed as abstracted beaches made up of cobblestones on which loons and various waterbirds (apparently immune to the periodic wafting of dubious smells) frolicked and ate smelly fish, who seemed to be teeming in dense populations of their own.
Our day was ultimately pleasant: we walked around the entire grounds, reading blurbs about the various spots of note aloud. We learned how to make doves that flapped their wings when you pulled on their tails and promptly left to spend the rest of our day in the greater valley area.
As we drove toward a Barnes & Noble located inside of an old theater (Julia's favorite bookstore) I asked her where exactly we were. "The Valley" she responded dryly. I noticed a familiar freeway overpass and a "Chandler" street and realized we were in between studio city and North Hollywood; very close to my good friend's house that I frequented the entire summer. I had gotten to know that area, and while my friend said that his neighborhood can be "a little shady" I never felt in danger or for that matter, very far from home. I noticed, however-that at the mention of "the Valley" my idea about where I was changed slightly.
It is no mystery that the Valley has a reputation for being, well, not the hills. It's supposed to be a working class neighborhood with lower income residents than west L.A. and possesses a stigma for being marginally less civilized than Rodeo drive and related places of posh-and-polish. Being a Hawaii boy, I had only heard the stigmas and not actually been, nor met anyone from this infamous "valley" but without realizing it, I had spent a great deal of time in the valley with my friend this entire summer without any of the prejudices or stigmas associated with the valley. My realization worked the same way as a blind study where I had no previous exposure to the actual area, but only the predjudices. I was expecting a shoddy, downtrodden, squalid, borough with homeless people dragging their useless limbs amid mysterious puddles of oily liquid with a distant car alarm audible only over the crying babies in the sultry, onion smelling air.... But it wasn't like that at all! In fact I like what I came to know as the valley far more than west L.A. I found a freshwater aquarium store to satisfy my nerd-lust for planted tanks. I talked to the shop owner for a half an hour about Amano and their multitudinous and amazing selection of shrimp. The bookstore was particularly interesting too; I mean, it's in an old theater!
I got really exited about this discrepancy because of the David Sibley article "Mapping the Pure and the Defiled." All too often the valley is "otherized" and made out to be something dirty and defiled and that if you live there, you are different and somehow shadier than living in a "nice-well-to-do" area of L.A. In this way, it makes the west L.A./Rodeo drive area the "central" consumer area of L.A. You can conceptualize how the upper-class, wealthy consumer culture of Hollywood and west L.A. could be the side of the dichotomy who does the marginalizing, despite the fact that L.A. has no "center" proper. The Roman nobility, if you will of L.A. live near Rodeo drive and Bel-Air (I find it interesting too, how the the columns and white masonry of the shopping district seem particularly "classically Roman.")
