Day: October 24, 2015

Santa Monica Canyon Backyard (1975)

Just a little documentation perhaps useful only to give some sense of the place.  The house, a rickety old affair that showed up in a history book (that I later discovered in a local used book store) as the oldest frame house in the Canyon, extended some three stories-worth down the side of a very steep cliff which had become overgrown with all manner of vines and bushes and small wildlife.  (And I recall a mutant orange-lemon tree that had incredibly bitter fruit.)  Sometimes when the haze would abate, you could get a peek of the ocean through the bushes.  One of the photos, taken from the inside through a living room window, shows the rooftop of a neighbor’s house as well as the more or less flat roof of our garage (about four levels down and accessible only from a lower street) where bike repair, furniture refinishing and sunbathing took place.  Plant growth was not just limited to the outside; we packed the interior with spider and other plants to keep the air as pure as possible, although Santa Monica air was among the cleanest of the L.A. area.

Another 1975 Multi-Day Bicycle Trip

These were probably taken somewhere between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria.  During the few months that my brother and niece shared my Santa Monica Canyon house, I perhaps attained my greatest level of physical fitness before or since with miles and miles of daily riding (though only a fraction of what Dennis undertook).   Dennis frequently stopped on these trips to repair his tires; he ran sew-ups while my bike was shod with lower-performing but more durable clinchers.