Lit from Below

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Every day I wanted to go out and get some photos, it would start raining. All week it was a constant downpour, and lo and behold, Los Angeles has surpassed both Boston and New York on the amount of rainfall this season. That just isn't right. The night before I was driving home from Rancho Santa Margharita at about 2 in the morning. There were massive puddles and flooded lanes on the 5, 22, and 405 freeways. It had been raining so much that I could hardly see the painted lanes on the freeways. It was a perilous drive, one where I frequently found myself planing across water. Note, that when you're planing, your tires spin in place, but are suspended by a surface of water, so it really makes for some massive control issues. There was hardly a vehicle on the freeway, except the occassional big rig or other brave motorist. But all in all, barely a shred of life on the road. Yet despite this, every ten minutes I passed by another motorist on the side of the freeway. I wish I could say that most instances were because they stalled, but unfortunately for me, the majority of them had wrecked.

Though that was the day of greatest downpour, it was also the last punch before a 12 hour break from the chaos. An opening had swept across the South Bay, leaving the air cool and the whole city feeling clean. I had waited for several days to find an opportune moment for a photo shoot, and it had presented itself. Thus, I went up to one of my favorite locales. Palos Verdes is a higher scale community made up of ranches and horse paths. It's a place where you'll find the people who invested in tech stocks in the late nineties, and remembered marketting trends well enough to sell them off at the perfect opportunity. It's the land of trophy wives and retired CEO's. BMW's and Lexus. It is definitely a laid back community, but certainly not a very welcoming one. There is a law in place that states that all pedestrians must have at least twelve dollars in their pockets at all times. Why? That's how much it costs to take a Taxi from anywhere in Palos Verdes out. There is a cove there that is considered more dangerous than Baghdad, as the surfers are so territorial that they'll assault anybody who just so happens to be walking along the beach, or they'll vandalize cars with out of state license plates that park either in the lot or on the stretch of road leading to this surf spot. The surfers had even erected a large sign reading "Beach is for Palos Verdes residents only. Penal code A-325-489B". However, no such penal code exists. This cove is also so dangerous that the Palos Verdes police refuse to do anything about the situation.

Naturally, that was the place to avoid. I stayed closer to the city limits along the northern edge of the peninsula. To pass time, I hiked along the extremely rocky shoreline. I walked a mile down the shore, but it felt a lot longer due to the difficulty of the terrain. I found a very interesting rock formation, and it was there that I waited the half hour for sunset, skipping stones to pass time. I snapped a few photographs, then headed back before I lost all light and had to traverse the rocky beach in the dark. It was while heading back to my car that I saw the interesting phenomenon of thick clouds gathered over the city, and the city's lights illuminating them from underneath.

There was a phrase from my recently submitted short story:
But here he was after a five mile hike through the Oregon hills, a hike that began after a winding dirt road become too overgrown for his old Ford. He was so far from civilization that the blazing furnaces of Calypso’s Industrial Module were a mere flickering aura dimly illuminating the east horizon.

I thought of that exerpt while taking the last photos of the evening. I saw right before me the very image I was trying to portray in that story.