The White Album by Joan Didion

the matter of surface streets . A “surface street” is anything around Los Angeles that is not a freeway (“going surface” from one part of town to another is generally regarded as idiosyncrat ic), and surface streets do not fall directly within the Caltrans domain, but now the engineer in charge of surface streets was accusing Caltrans of threatening and intimidating him . It appeared that Caltrans wanted him to create a “confused and congested situation” on his surface streets, so as to force drivers back to the freeway, where they would meet a still more confused and congested situation and decide to stay home, or take a bus . “We are beginning a process of deliberately making it harder for drivers to use freeways,” a Caltrans director had in fact said at a transit conference some months before . “We are prepared to endure considerable public outcry in order to pry John Q . Public out of his car . ... I would emphasize that this is a political decision, and one that can be reversed if the public gets sufficien tly enraged to throw us rascals out . ”
    Of course this political decision was in the name of the greater good, was in the interests of “environmental improvement” and “conservation of resources,” but even there the figures had about them a certain Caltrans opacity . The Santa Monica normally carried 240,000 cars and trucks every day . These 240,000 cars and trucks normally carried 260,000 people . What Caltrans described as its ultimate goal on the Santa Monica was to carry the same 260,000 people,”but in 7,800 fewer, or 232,200 vehicles . ” The figure “232,200” had a visionary precision to it that did not automatically create confidence, especially since the only effect so far had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the initiation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat . Citizen guerrillas splashed paint and scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes . Diamond Lane maintenance crews expressed fear of hurled objects . Down at 120 South Spring the architects of the Diamond Lane had taken to regarding “the media” as the architects of their embarrassment, and Caltrans statements in the press had been cryptic and contradictory, reminiscent only of old communiqués out of Vietnam .
    To understand what was going on it is perhaps necessary to have participated in the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has . Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it . Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going . Actual participants think only about where they are . Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway . The mind goes clean . The rhythm takes over . A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident . It takes only a few seconds to get off the Santa Monica Freeway at National-Overland, which is a difficult exit requiring the driver to cross two new lanes of traffic streamed in from the San Diego Freeway, but those few seconds always seem to me the longest part of the trip . The moment is dangerous . The exhilaration is in doing it . “As you acquire the special skills involved,” Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, “ the freeways become a special way of being alive ... the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical . ”
    Indeed some locals do,