The Other Side: A Trip To Toyota
Last week I took our Toyota to the new Toyota of Rancho Santa Margarita. We live by the lake in Mission Viejo, and the dealership is about three miles from home. The folks at Toyota RSM have been very courteous and reasonable. They don’t appear eager to find fifty-two problems each time you take your car in; indeed, they are quite un-car dealer-ish. I hope that it’s not just because Toyota RSM is new…maybe it is possible that modern car dealers, squeezed between low car prices and soaring maintenance costs, can make money the old-fashioned way! Toyota RSM offers a ride home, but I decided to walk home, something quite un-Mission Viejo-ish (or for that matter, un-South Orange County-ish). I walked up Empresa, and tried a short-cut, turning left on Aventura which dead-ends in a church by Trabuco Creek, then traversing no-man’s-land along the creek; I found a scenic pathway by an apartment complex, and then reached SMP (abbreviated á la PCH) and the bridge across Trabuco Creek. The ravine formed by the creek is wide and deep. It has green-brown pastures and (like recently discovered on Mars) evidence of water having once flowed. It is studded with stately California oaks and sycamores. Thanks to recent rain, the oaks looked sparkly and the sycamores dignified in their fall colors, the land below them carpeted with leaves; this year the sycamores look much healthier, not gnarled and twisty and burned; maybe they’re not so syc any more. Trabuco Creek is fenced off, I assume for good reason. I resisted the urge to walk down to the creek and across the imaginary stream, walking across on the bridge instead. The view from the bridge was a wonderful surprise; I’ve driven over it hundreds of times, taking my daughter to her dance classes, making honey-do pilgrimages to Lowe’s, or hauling bikes, roller-blades and kids to the RSM lake. While driving across it the bridge looked like a bridge, and the creek looked like a creek; in the ten seconds it takes to drive across the bridge, the best you can get is a fleeting glimpse of the canyon, even if you’re a passenger. But walking over the bridge, it was an adventure! Below the bridge was a vast, lovely wilderness, an urban extension of O’Neill Regional Park. Above it: the concrete jungle of modern civilization. I walked up the Trabuco Creek side of Alicia, less traveled because it backs up against the creek. There was an old sign on the fence that said, “Caution: Beware Mountain Lions.” Was the sign intended to warn mountain lions that I may be walking by? Or was it to warn humans like me? Which side of the fence was for the lions? Can a mountain lion read English? Should the sign be in Spanish?
There were other tidbits of interest against the fence or by it. Clinging to the sagebrush was a few pages of a student’s homework assignment. It was well-written and organized; perhaps a girl? Had she already turned it in, or did she lose it on the way to school? There were also a few items I recognized…beer bottles, cans of soda, and a few things that looked gross but which I could not identify. There were also Cacti, thistles, a couple of music sheets, dead bugs, pretty wildflowers. Virtually no cigarette butts! Congratulations, South OC smokers! Helping prevent urban wilderness fires! The wild soon gave way to the scenic architecture and trimmings of modern life. Here was FloJo Park, tastefully sculpted out of a narrow strip of unused land; the heavy new Edison power poles, ugly but necessary; our very own Lake Mission Viejo; street lights; traffic lights. One of the traffic light poles on Olympiad had only three nuts locking it down, with the fourth bolts sticking naked out of the concrete. Hmmm! What happened to nut number 4? Are terrorists surreptitiously removing restraining nuts from street lights, so that when the quake hits street the poles will fall and traffic will gridlock, paralyzing our lifestyles? Can South OC survive without street lights< |
