The Making-Of a Caliboy in Brooklyn Post: "Searching for Birth 55"

From the very beginning of this blog, back in 2009, I had a few ideas of the types of posts I wanted to put here. Firstly, they weren't to be fiction. My fiction writing is my artistic goal, and I'm not going to post it for free. Little did I know that I would be creating a new type of literature, one of the pioneers of blog-posting as human-experience-chronicling, but here we are. So, as non-fiction, posts would seem to almost all fall under the realm of "Conversations with the Aether", and be split between a "Here're some deep thoughts about something maybe less deep" brand, and a "Here's an adventure I went on" brand.

Going to Governor's Island back while living in Brooklyn, or the Visceral Tuesday Walk in Austin are good examples of the latter "Adventure" posts. Those aren't exactly where I ended up with this Caliboy In Brooklyn blog, as going to Governor's Island was an activity that Corrie and I did as part of normal New York City activities, while the Tuesday Walk was originally for a novel for which I was piecing sound effects together (it's a long story). Those weren't one of the newer "Adventure" posts.

The ones I'm talking about are more of the Two Towns Over post, along with its two directly resultant offspring, What's the Catch? and Philosophical Basis for "Two Towns Over" Post.

This post here will give a glimpse of the madness that goes into hatching and executing one of these "Adventure" style blog posts.

1.

Everything starts with an idea. Using the "Two Towns Over" as an example, the idea there was that I'd had a bike for a while (two weeks) and hadn't gone on any "long" rides yet to report on any distinctly LA-based weirdness. There was a kernel of motivation.

So here, instead of "Two Towns Over", I'll be discussing my as-yet unpublished "Searching for Birth 55" as the post of reference.

Birth 55 is famous (that may be a bit much) in the downtown Long Beach area for having a fresh-fish market and restaurant scene. We had some friends who'd made a drive from their Long Beach apartment to the birth, and it had been featured in the newspaper as the possible victim of closure.

The location wasn't too far from where we live, according to Google Maps, but it was across the LA river, which meant it could supply fodder for maybe a good blog post. From this point I would locate it on the map, get the best directions available for biking purposes, because that's how I'm rolling these days, with broken femur healed and all, and then I'd set about picking a date.

In between hatching the idea and heading out, I usually try and get some research done on the place or thing I'm going to see, but sometimes that waits until after the trip is done and I'm compiling everything, and, sadly, sometimes it never gets done. I find having it done before is best; that way I'll know where to point my attention and camera at what I want readers to take from the narrative.

Around here weather issues are rarely a concern, even in February, and on the road, with my camera and occasionally a bottle of water, I would take an early establishing shot, trying to showcase the type of day for the ride adventure.

2.

Photographs make up a sizable element to a biking adventure post. I like to try and establish vistas that are only available at the places where my adventure has taken me. That sounds silly, but for me, having taken literally thousands of pictures of Long Beach's skyline in the two years we've lived here, each one of those shots is from a unique spot in the city, and many are largely unseen, tucked away in blog-post folder, only there for orientation of the location.

Once a trip is done and I've loaded the pictures onto the computer, I need a sheet of paper next to me to sort through the shots, their timing and placement scribbled as notes next to their numbers as descriptions:

That gets a little crazy, and my notebooks have pages and pages of barely legible scratches next to random number lists like this. I think this particular list is from my Essentially LA post on my Pop-Culture Wasteland blog.

On a quick tangent, other crazy things can be found while sifting through those lists in the notebooks:

That's an early sketch of how I was thinking of styling the cover to my book Robot Crickets. The second cricket was really just a screwed up drawing, it was always only supposed to be a single cricket.

3.

Once the location has been sought out on the web, the trip planned, then ridden, photographs taken and uploaded and sifted, I've usually been able to make some final judgments about the experience and feel ready to start typing.

Being back at the computer sometimes opens up a whole new avenue of thought that hadn't necessarily been part of the original plan. The "What's the Catch?" post mentioned above is a good example of that. That's a direct result of a few days having passed and sitting at the computer, doing some research.

Those are the main phases: (1) hatching the idea; (2) executing the trip; (3) compiling the ideas and raw data; and (4) writing the piece.

Inadvertently all of those aspects sometimes make it into the written post. For this post, I'll let you decide.

***

Searching for Birth 55

In the recent past, we've made friends with a childless couple who live in Long Beach. They're sort of our Marc-and-Linda-West, except that we don't hang out nearly as often. They're our age and as intellectually curious as us and fun to talk with, and we've done a few adventures of our own together. One evening we had dinner plans, and it was at dinner that they mentioned having earlier that day gone to Birth 55 and gotten some fish for lunch.

Ooh, I said, isn't that the same Birth 55 that was in the paper that was in jeopardy of closing? Located on an older, run-down arm of the vastly more interesting that I imagined Long Beach Port properties, the area Birth 55 occupied was about to be either rezoned or razed, or both, and the restaurants and markets would need to be relocated. (I do believe they've been given a stay of execution.)

Our friends had said that it was nice and crowded and that their food was fresh and delicious. I wasn't quite sure if it was a market or a collection of restaurants, but it sounded like it was both. That was reasonable.

Later on, after catching a glimpse of its location on Google Maps, I figured it'd be no problem getting over there and checking it out. I would have to cross the bridge that gets bikes to the Terminal Island and Ports properties, which is a little south of the Birth 55 tendril. The bridge itself is the Queen Mary drive, and on a silly bright and blue February Day (February in LA County, baby!) I set about it:

Not the worst February, let me tell you...

The path, apparently Rt. 17, would take me over to the Queen Mary, which would be to the left once we get over the bridge. But where I wanted to get to was off to the right, and up further north, up along the LA River on that side of town.

The road up and beyond wasn't as easy to find initially, so I wound my way around the path, looking for a tunnel or bridge to get past the highway to the main street I needed to bike along. I hadn't yet learned that I wasn't in the right place, but it was interesting to get a shot of downtown Long Beach that was an angle I'd never seen:

So, it took me a while to get a grip on where I had to go, and back tracking led me to what was the correct road. Since everything is on a narrow blip of land between the QM landing and the vast port system, the only cars on the roads are, in fact, big rigs. Below, see them snake away onto one section of the Port:

And here, they're thinned out a little, but that was the traffic I was about to be dealing with:

I made it back to an intersection and waited my turn, walking my bike most of the time, as there weren't sidewalks or a whole lot of shoulder. The spot itself was down the street in the above picture, down to the right. I crossed the main roads of a hard to explain area, and then started riding up the street I was pretty sure was the one I wanted.

Sometimes "pretty sure" only gets you so far. There had been construction going on on the shoulder of the direction I was heading, so there was no space for my bike.

Now, I don't consider myself a hipster: I'm too old and fond of whiskey for that, but I do have a decent cruiser bike and I do prefer to ride in the street as opposed to the sidewalk, and I prefer to go with traffic, like the law says. Why I follow that set of laws I'll never know.

But on this particular road, with absolutely no shoulder, rather a chain-link fence on the white road line, and the traffic going by consisting of almost exclusively big-rigs going sixty miles an hour, I reconsidered my adherence to those laws.

At the first opportunity, I scurried across the street, but seeing as how there wasn't a paved shoulder, and there was a high curb and ditch down the side, I'd decided to walk my bike until it became safe to again mount and ride it. I'm mostly a fearless jerk-weed when it comes to bike rides, but the femur action from last summer made me decide early to cross the street, and if I think it's unsafe for riding, then there could easily be a fundamental flaw in my planning.

As I walked my bike through a sweeping curve of the road, I saw enough signs that discouraged my further advance; they were of the "No Bicycles" and "Authorized Personnel Only" variety, used on special bridges back over the LA River and for entrance onto various Port companies' properties. I was mostly sure this road went through, but on this ever warming afternoon, reason got the best of me, and I turned back.

Here's my unpaved shoulder I walked my bike along:

Visible in that picture is some Port property right on the right and the fence along the street on the other side. Surprisingly I got a shot without any cars or trucks visible on my road.

After stopping and catching a breather before I started hiking my bike up the stairs to get back to bridge to come back to my side of town, I snapped a picture of myself, laughing snarkily at the image of a barrel-chested pink-skinned dumbass, out where he shouldn't be with his bike, protected by a straw-hat:

Birth 55, as far as I can tell as of right now, is either very hard to get to by bicycle, or impossible to reach. The jury's still out, but this half-adventure, half-reconnaissance mission yielded the hard truths: better leave this trip to the car.

(That's also why the title of this post is "Searching for Birth 55"...)