405

In West LA somewhere close to Santa Monica in the shadow of the 405. The highway’s voice is a constant. Sometimes it shouts, sometimes it mumbles, but never is it silent. The highway tells stories of shared journeys and not a one is the same. You hear whispers of a little of the miseries or joys of the travellers. An urgent chorus, all those trucks, cars, buses, trailers and motorbikes. So many machines freighting their weighted loads, each telling a tale as they push on towards what happens next. The drivers and passengers take their stories nowhere, somewhere, elsewhere and we share with them in the endless rumble.

The 405 freeway winds parallel-ish with the California coast, delivering you to the places you probably want to go: UCLA, Santa Monica, large swathes of Los Angeles. And it bypasses all these places too, a six or eight laned serpent snaking its nonstop way through acres of houses and office blocks and hotels. Except it is rarely a nonstop passage because, despite all the lanes, this freeway is notoriously congested. That’s why all the buldings alongside it look a little tattered and tired. They are perennially scruffy under a permanent sluice of traffic fumes, dust and vibrations. The 405 freeway runs north and south to San Diego and San Fernando in the valley. It carves its way through the urban sprawl that is Santa Monica, Inglewood, Torrance, Laguna Beach and Irvine where the 405 joins up with the 5, the main west coast artery that goes bumpily all the way from Mexico to Canada.

But the longer you hear the 405, the more you are aware that its monologue is slowly fading into the background. And yet you are aware that each night and each morning its voice marks the end of the day and the end of the night. In between, travellers move along on it loaded with possessions and goods, lives old and new, debris and remnants, cargoes and baggage; work, obligations, pleasure. People drag their histories with them, they write new pages, find unexpected reasons to be there. All on the 405.

The people and their various vehicles pass police patrol cars, skulking in their laybys hoping and waiting for some excitement. The police cars glitter black and mean and motionless in the bright 405 sunshine; police black should be its own special colour. The officers of the law watch for transgressions across all those shifting lines of traffic. They see the cars sometimes hurried, sometimes lurking in a single lane, too bored to shift left or right. They see cars hovering like predators. They see cars moving over and across. They see sudden accelerations and halts. They see the unexpected, unsignalled shifts that make other drivers and passengers hunch down involuntarily as they pass. And yet they wait and watch and only move when they must.

All those people, the fat and the thin, the old, the young, the ordinary and extraordinary, eating and drinking as they fly along, listening to crafted playlists or random radio tracks or hearing satnav instructions on repeat. They’re making calls, the angry, the tender, the sad, the hopeless and the lost. The desperate. The thrilled and excited. And at the ends of their journeys, the people share their discovered new beginnings wanted or unwelcome, joyful or undesired and reluctant. For the lost and the missing and the bold, they share their 405 journeys, driving forwards to new destinations, somewhere on or near or far beyond Interstate 405. California dreaming.