Walking a city is always more raw, and authentic, and authentically raw, than driving through it.

Skimming through a city in a climate-controlled bubble with heated seats and cupholders and  favorite-song playlists programmed into the onboard computer, one is too insulated to engage with the city in any meaningful way.

To experience a city, walk it.  Suck in lungfulls of smoky-smoggy air.  Feel the texture of it under your feet and at the end of your fingertips.  Sweat.  Pulse with its music, and its sirens.  There will be some level of discomfort.  There will be some level of surprise.  Rather the point.

You might stumble across an art show, a street fair, a long-lost friend, a person in need, a new flavor, a new song, a roiling protest march.  Drink it, breathe it, pure and unfiltered.  This is your city.  These are its people.  You have never been closer to your city than here, at the center of its adrenalized heart.

Riding the train between Los Angeles and  Anaheim on New Year's Day 2014, I  reflected (as I often do along that corridor) at the surreal landscape of "the between".

L.A. and Anaheim are both, in large measure, playgrounds as well as communities, known for dining and shopping and entertainment.  But where do their materials and products come from?  And where do they go when spent?

Much of what we consume or produce flows in--and then flows out--by rail.  Many of the city's raw or finished materials arrive by, depart by, or are manufactured along the rail lines.  And it is along these channels  that the city's refuse is banished, its scraps, its offal, its depleted, unwanted, and unused.

The rail lines betwween Los Angeles and Anaheim are weirdly beautiful.  They are lined with rail yards and factories and power plants.  Oil derricks nod in hypnotic rhythms as they pump the dark gold many Angelenos have long forgotten, though it continues to flow deep underground.

Glittering rubbish heaps tower stories high, gleaming like treasure hoards.

There are flat yards of *things*, of *stuff*, dozens, sometimes hundreds of them.  Armies of yellow school buses, herds of city trash trucks huddled like an armada of giant green armadillos, batallions of pallets, of flatbeds, of truck cabs, of oil drums, all aligned and stacked in fantastic arrangements like the blocks of a giant child.

There are lonely expanses under overpasses where L.A.'s mobsters might--might--quietly dump bodies which are then quietly recovered by the city's law enforcement ...

The  Surfliner South promises sea views, and along its southern leg delivers them.  But between L.A. and Anaheim the only view is of "the between," that inland industrial corridor where seemingly everything is made and mobilized and then
destroyed.

In this sleek and airbrushed digital age, we forget to some degree the gritty and sooty forums in which things are wrought with sweat, with tremendous exertion.  Traveling through "the between," a land ornamented with graffiti by the alienated, and the glimmer of broken glass, we are reminded with the force of a gut punch how things, even peoples, are made and mobilized and then cast aside ...

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