Wide Enough: How Visiting LA Strengthened My Resolve to See the World with a Bigger Heart

from 09.18.22

I am hounded by a question that has driven history’s most unrestrained souls to shred the veil of the known world in a desperate reach for what lies beyond. A question that led to the discovery of the western hemisphere, the charting of earth’s remotest islands, the plunge into the depths of our galaxy. A question that was once reserved for those with pioneer spirits and yet, in today’s ever-connected global society, seems hardly novel: how can I live in this world and never see its wonders?

When I was a teenager, there was an idiom that middle and high school girls often misappropriated for team sweatshirts and early, uncurated photo dumps: “If you never go, you’ll never know.” This catchphrase was meant to inspire people to try new things, but it actually explains why humans have historically been content to live where they have always lived and perpetuate the rituals and routines they learned as children. If people don’t know what they’re missing, they generally won’t seek it out.

But because of social media, we do know what we’re missing. Or at least, we are given glimpses. And like me, so many people are no longer satisfied to live their entire lives and never experience the places that we see as we scroll ourselves to sleep.

For years, my hunger for travel has been steadily growing and my bucket list steadily expanding. Two years ago, on the verge of the pandemic, after a couple monotonous years as a young professional, this hunger intensified into a sharp and irrepressible urge to fling myself far from home, to see a place I had never seen, to answer the unrelenting question.

So I followed that old wisdom and went west with some of my best friends. We spent a couple unforgettable days in San Francisco and then traced the coastline down to Los Angeles. Even now that long weekend feels surreal, a sudden gush of opportunity amid the slow drip of ordinary days.

I had fantasized about California before — about the Pacific horizon that eventually becomes the Far East; about the giant trees that eventually become the sky; about the sunny, mid-century disposition of the Hollywood hills. But after our trip I pined for California. It had become real but no less magical.

Finally, in May of this year, I returned. My roommate Joseph and I traveled to LA to spend a long weekend with our friend Jon, who has been asking us to visit since he moved there in 2020. As we had only passed through In-N-Out Burger and LAX on our previous journey, this trip was an opportunity to be reunited with a dear friend and explore an iconic city for the first time.

Storied places like LA exist as much in our imaginations as they do in reality. And whether we’ve imagined them kindly or otherwise, our obligation as visitors is to arrive with an open mind. My incarnation of LA has always been a bit exaggerated and contradictory, so as I prepared for the trip, I worked on revising my expectations. I didn’t want to land in the city and realize I had romanticized it, as I’m prone to do. Nor did I want to get there and realize I’d succumbed to the easy cynicism people carelessly lob its way.

In the end, the fault of my imagination was not embellishing, but oversimplifying. LA proved far more complex and nuanced than I’d supposed, and had Jon not been there to show us the city, I don’t think I could have understood it at all.

The truth of LA lies somewhere between glamour and grittiness. Between the mythical, sun-soaked metropolis teeming with celebrities and the polluted urban sprawl plagued by horrific traffic and superficial industry wannabes. It is a real place full of real people, and like any place that people call home, it deserves to be considered beyond its caricature.

Reflecting on our time in LA has been like trying to solve an equation built of random, unrelated functions. We saw so much of the city in such a fast, haphazard manner, and because no part of LA can prepare you for the rest of it, I struggled to process it in the moment. I remember it not as a single place, but a cluster of places held together by a strange magnetism. The object of remembering our trip has been to produce the solution, to collate all the sites and all our adventures into a single, enduring impression of the city. But up until now, I have been stymied.

Though LA is famously sunny, our first two days in the city were gray and overcast. According to Jon, it was the rainy season, something the locals call “May gray” and “June gloom.”

“You can tell we’ve had a lot of rain recently because everything is a lot greener,” Jon noted as we maneuvered through traffic on our way to Hollywood.

This is what greener looks like? I wondered. I was already finding myself a little disappointed by how brown the landscape was. The hills surrounding the city were covered in scrub grass with only minimal vegetation. Trash littered barren medians and steep embankments on the sides of the roadways. Everywhere you looked was more concrete or asphalt or steel — the gnarly exoskeleton of the city’s monstrous infrastructure. I suppose perusing celebrity gardens in Architectural Digest had given me the impression that the city would be lush and green, but despite the palm trees, LA is no tropical paradise.

And yet, as I kept looking, bright flashes caught my eye. There were flowers bursting from the most inhospitable crevices and climbing the most austere surfaces. Bougainvillea scrambling up ugly walls and surging over chain-link fences. Jacaranda trees in full bloom staging their languid ballet between stickered streetlights and graffitied payphone boxes. And on top of these, flowers of every shape and color that I’ve never encountered. Surely even the Southeast with its magnolias, mimosas, and crape myrtles is not so vibrant. It’s a good thing Jon was driving, otherwise I would have been tempted to pull over and photograph each flower, especially in Malibu.

But the landscape was not the city’s only anomaly. The first place Jon took us was the Hope Center in East Hollywood, the soup kitchen and homeless refuge operated by his church. This place is certainly not a top tourist destination, but Jon is proud of the way his church serves his city, and this was perhaps the gentlest way he could acquaint us with one of LA’s harshest truths.

As we moved throughout the city over the next couple days, we were often confronted by homelessness. People did not approach us asking for charity, but everywhere there was evidence of need. Every time we waited at a traffic light beside a tent colony or passed by a person with their all their worldly possessions in a backpack, a sickness roused inside me, the same sickness I feel in my own city when I see a person standing on a median holding a cardboard sign or huddling against a wall outside the grocery store. I’d like to say this sickness is compassion, but often it’s just a nagging sense of obligation.

I was glad Jon showed us the Hope Center, but I could feel myself relax as we returned to the car and drove toward downtown Hollywood. I don’t know how to hold the need of the world and my own comfortable concerns at the same time, so I must banish one or the other from my mind. As we reached Hollywood Boulevard, I allowed myself to forget the problem of poverty, just like the priest and the Levite passing by on the opposite side of the road.

The juxtaposition was absurd. We had left a place devoted to the nameless and landed on a sidewalk (only a few blocks away) paved with the most recognizable names in the world. Before the trip, both Joseph and I had dismissed the boulevard as an expendable tourist trap, but as we walked the street and encountered the names of our favorite stars, we grew more and more enthusiastic. Joseph was practically giddy when he found the footprints of R2-D2 and C-3PO at the Chinese Theatre, and I was equally thrilled when I located the signature and handprints of Julie Andrews. Pretend as we might not to be swayed by celebrity, we all have our heroes.

Though most of the city defied comprehension, the irony of that neighborhood was immediately obvious. Enormous billboards advertising the latest in entertainment towered over the grungy streets and unattractive buildings — a shrine to fame and power in a place that has clearly been overlooked. A massive banner for the new Downton Abbey movie caught my attention. The Crawleys seemed particularly out of place in their finery, and their dignified expressions could easily have been mistaken for disdain. I know for certain that the dowager countess would never have stepped foot in Hollywood.

Do these people even care? I wondered. There were many on the streets who were clearly preoccupied with matters of survival, and I imagined that much of the population was already employed by the film and television industry. These billboards really belong in suburbs across America where people return from work catatonic and slump down on the couch to scroll Netflix.

Over the course of the weekend, we got to meet many of Jon’s friends, most of whom come from other places. I suppose this isn’t surprising — LA has the kind of magnetism that draws people from everywhere. But what is surprising is that this magnetism does not hold born-and-raised Angelenos. In fact, it seems to repel them.

On our first evening in the city, Jon took us along to a birthday party for one of his friends. After standing around awkwardly for a little while, I wound up talking to a girl named Abby who had grown up in LA. “We’re really rare,” she said. “Most people leave.”

A few minutes later, someone introduced us to a guy named Charlton, who was also from LA. When he and Abby realized they were both “lifers,” there was a mini celebration as though they’d just been reunited with a long-lost relative. It was the same solidarity I feel when I meet a Pennsylvanian in South Carolina, but I would never have expected it to be so scarce in LA, a place with such an established identity. I guess unlike most places, the culture of LA has been constructed mostly by outsiders rather than locals.

Most people come to work in the film industry. Among Jon’s friends we met a 19-year-old from Kentucky who is an aspiring screenwriter working for the famed director Ridley Scott; a 25-year-old producer who keeps her Emmy on her bedside table; a couple DPs; a few young actors; and some models. But lest you think Jon is rolling high with the rich and famous, all these people are industry nobodies. They are the nameless dreamers from other places who have made their pilgrimage to this place of opportunity. They are the anonymous talents who work tirelessly to keep Hollywood alive, hoping one day it will acknowledge them in return. And there are so many of them.

Being surrounded by so much creative energy was both inspiring and disheartening. On the one hand, these felt like my kind of people — storytellers, artists, romantics. People who care about art and language and fashion. People buzzing with new ideas to incarnate. Their passion and tenacity made me want to persevere, to spill all the ideas in my head like Legos on the floor and begin building something, anything.

But how could I hope to be heard among so many voices? How could I hope to stand out among people who are so original, so talented, so hungry for an audience? And if I were somehow to rise above the cacophony, would it not be at the expense of someone else just like me?

During our tour of the Warner Bros. studio, Jon, Joseph, and I came upon a tower of rejected screenplays that was much taller than any of us. A plaque explained that of the thousands of unsolicited scripts studios receive every year, only a couple ever become a film or television series. How many devastated writers did that paper pillar represent, and how many others were there just like it? Brendon Urie’s anguished voice floated through my head: “Every face along the boulevard is a dreamer just like you / You looked at death in a tarot card and you saw what you had to do.” Perhaps LA is just a siren luring artists to their doom with the promise of being heard and understood. And yet I hold so much admiration for the many souls who remain undaunted. “Oh the power, the power, the power of LA.”

As cruel as LA can be, it is the perfect city for Jon. He has finally found a place with enough dynamism and opportunity to match his own remarkable energy and enthusiasm. His fast, jerky driving always seemed a bit out of place in rural South Carolina, but it makes him a badass on the roads of LA. And his unmatched skill at parallel parking means he can always find a free parking spot near any destination. His portfolio of personal odysseys can rival the tales of LA’s most interesting people, and his enviable ability to develop quick and meaningful friendships is gold-standard currency in a city that thrives on connections and craves authenticity. In a place known to break the most stalwart spirits, Jon has proven resilient enough to survive and audacious enough to care. Amid all the impressive things we saw in LA, I found myself once again very impressed by my friend, whom I’ve known for almost eight years.

I was also very impressed by the people Jon has chosen as his friends. I had assumed that most of Jon’s LA friends led chaotic, fast-paced lives and that conversational though we might be, I could never actually keep up with any of them. I was wrong again.

We had a casual pizza dinner with Timothy, one of Jon’s closest friends and his former boss — a man who is extraordinarily busy yet made time to meet us because it mattered to Jon. Timothy rode up on a beautiful chocolate Vespa wearing one of his own customized leather jackets, a 70s inspired shirt that matched his argyle socks, classic blue jeans with a generous cuff, black-and-white chucks, and subtle jewelry. One of the most stylish men I have ever met, yet casual and approachable in a way that made his fashion sensibility seem incredibly attainable. We ate at his studio where he works on his jackets, designs interior spaces, and hosts gatherings for Christian artists. He is quite possibly one of the most refreshing people I have ever met — kind, sincere, lighthearted. When he prayed for our meal, he addressed God with a familiarity that made me envious. And when he told Jon to stop making split-second decisions based on the flip of his lucky peso, he did so with the good-humored firmness you’d expect of an older brother. It is no surprise that Jon considers him a dear friend and confidant. As we left dinner, Joseph said, “What a thoroughly delightful human being.” “For real,” I agreed.

On another evening Jon introduced us to SJ, Katie, and Peyton, three roommates who occasionally hosted Jon during his couch-surfing era and welcomed Joseph and I like we were old friends. We arrived at their apartment just as SJ was returning from the grocery store with food to make dinner. As we walked inside and surveyed the living area, Joseph and I simultaneously pointed to the pictures of the Rat Pack and Audrey Hepburn hanging on the walls. “Jon, don’t tell me your friends know about famous people,” SJ groaned. Jon had told us beforehand that people like to tease SJ for knowing nothing about pop culture. In fact, Katie and Peyton have made SJ TikTok famous for growing up Amish. Clearly, they were the ones who’d hung these photos — fitting as they are both actresses.

We followed SJ into the kitchen, where she began to unpack an assortment of groceries. Joseph and I offered to help prepare the meal. “What are you planning to cook?” Joseph asked. “I don’t know, whatever we can make with this stuff,” SJ responded blithely. It turned out to be stir fry.

While Joseph and I chopped vegetables and SJ cooked the chicken and rice, Jon regaled us all with stories from his recent trip to Peru (think a treacherous journey to Machu Picchu, a nighttime hike through the deadly Amazon rainforest, and swimming in a river with piranhas, all told in Jon’s animated style). Then we all crowded around the tiny dining table to enjoy the meal. SJ held out her arms to signal it was time to pray, and we all joined hands like my family used to do. I enjoyed listening to her pray just as I had enjoyed listening to Timothy, and as she finished, she gave my hand a firm squeeze — a familial gesture that seemed to nullify the fact that we’d met only an hour earlier.

I don’t remember everything we talked about over our meal, but I remember laughing a lot and thinking how much I was enjoying the company of these total strangers. Sadly, Jon, Joseph, and I had to eat quickly and leave in order to make it to Griffith Observatory by sunset.

Griffith Park was crowded because it was Sunday evening, and by the time we’d driven halfway to the observatory, we realized there would be no parking for us at the top of the hill. Jon, who has seen the observatory many times, told Joseph and I to get out and walk the rest of the way. He would turn around and wait for us at the park entrance.

Jon’s friend Sean was supposed to be meeting us at the observatory, and though he’d been one of the many people at lunch after church that morning, finding him in the large crowd was sure to be a where’s-Waldo situation. Not to mention that our only mutual connection wouldn’t be joining us.

Surprisingly, we found Sean right away, partly because he looks exactly like one of my old high school friends. He could have left once he found out Jon wasn’t coming — he lives right at the base of the park and hikes to the observatory multiple days a week. He certainly wouldn’t have been missing out on anything. But he graciously stayed and kept us company.

Sean moved to LA less than a year ago, but he said that he feels a kind of ownership over the park. Visiting as often as he does, and on weekdays when very few others are there, he must feel that it exists at least partly for him, the way I have often fancied certain quiet retreats exist only for me.

His claims to the park are certainly substantiated by his knowledge about it. He explained that much of the land had been donated to the city by the Griffith family. “It doesn’t seem right that one family ever owned all of this property,” I said somewhat indignantly, remembering how I felt upon learning that the Rockefellers had once owned much of Acadia National Park.

Sean patiently answered our questions about the observatory, about life in the city, about his job translating new compositions into sheet music to be recorded for films and television shows. Eventually I worked up the nerve to ask whether he could possibly be related to a kid I went to high school with on the East Coast. I suppose it wouldn’t have been too surprising since LA is mostly transplants and Sean himself is from Indiana. But as far as he knew, there was no connection.

Sean proved most longsuffering in following Joseph and I around as we photographed the observatory from every angle, angles he had seen a hundred times over. When the sun finally set, he led us down the dirt trail to his apartment, where we met Jon. “There have been mountain lion sightings in the park,” he said anecdotally as we traipsed down the dark path illuminated only by our phones.

As we neared the end of the trail, I asked him if he ever composed any of his own music. (I’d learned earlier that he studied music composition in school and that he plays several instruments.) He said he has done a couple freelance projects but doesn’t have much time or will to compose anything after staring at sheet music all day. As an aspiring writer who spends all day reviewing other people’s words, I sympathized. And yet his response hadn’t been begrudging. In fact, he’d said earlier (in earnest), “It’s so cool to work on music written by composers I’ve admired for so long and to know that I’m just a small part of the process.” I wonder how many people in LA, or anywhere for that matter, possess this kind of humility and contentment.

Our time in LA passed quickly, but it didn’t feel rushed. We saw a large swath of the city and met many people, but we also made time for slow meals and a long, lazy Saturday in Malibu. We were tourists, but also just visitors getting to share Jon’s life for a few days. In this way, it was a very human interaction with the city. Rather than leaving with pictures of all the landmarks, I left with a small sense of what it might be like to actually live there. As we taxied away from the airport, I was confident we’d made the best use of our time.

Joseph and I have taken several trips together, and at the end of each journey, we like to exchange our highlights and initial impressions. As is often the case, most of our favorite moments were the same (mostly spending time with Jon and meeting his friends). But my thoughts about the place itself were scrambled and incoherent.

Naturally, friends wanted to hear about our trip, and as I cobbled together brief synopses, one idea continued to stick out: it was different than I thought it would be. I had expected LA to be loud and flamboyant, but it had the subtler energy of people preoccupied — artists obsessed with their crafts, tourists enamored by the sites, impatient drivers intent on their destinations. I had expected it to be a paradise — vegetation green and fragrant, buildings golden in the sunlight, glistening ocean waves visible from anywhere. In reality, it was not quite Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. Ironically, I had also expected it to be dirty, brutalist, and degraded — Camelot fallen into disrepair. But only a cynic could see it that way. In short, I had anticipated a spectacle. But LA is real; it is human.

I should have understood this without needing to visit, and yet, we so often forget the humanity of people in other places. During lunch a few days after our trip, someone across the table made an incredibly callous joke suggesting that America would be better if California would fall into the sea. I could feel my indignation simmering as I tried to protest. How can we be so unfeeling?

Perhaps it is simply fear. Fear of people who are different from us and might outnumber us. Fear of people who are like us and might outperform us. Fear of not having enough space or enough time or enough control.

A couple weeks after returning from LA, I went to see Hamilton with my other roommate, Josh. The show is full of agonizing moments, but one that lingers with me from that performance comes right before the finale. After killing Alexander Hamilton in their duel, Aaron Burr sings remorsefully, “I should’ve known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” In that moment, Burr realizes he will live the rest of his life with regret because his fight with Hamilton was based on the faulty assumption that they could not both succeed.

This is the refrain I’ve been repeating since LA, the truth I’m reminded of as I flip through Instagram at night and see the endeavors of artists, adventurers, humanitarians: the world is wide enough. It is so wide. There are so many places to see and so many cultures to experience, and contrary to what F. Scott Fitzgerald says, we will never reach the end of things “commensurate to [our] capacity for wonder.”

LA is a testament that our wide world is full of contradiction and complexity. My opportunities will often exist alongside someone else’s need — I must open my heart to embrace the one without guilt and acknowledge the other without reservation. The city is also evidence that there are many more voices to be heard, voices we need to fill up this great amphitheater called earth. We fear that making room for more voices will cause our own to be indistinct. But if some voices are willing to be less obvious, then all can be important — the way all the flowers in Malibu bloom side-by-side without diminishing each other’s beauty.

The world is wide enough, wider than we can comprehend. It is only our fear that would make it small. We are not suffocated by the size of the world, but by the size of our hearts.