by Ian Harding
“Back in the waterfall!”
I dunked my head back into the pond, and Keegan circled around, trying to find the best angle for the shot. After a few more takes, I started hopping around the rocks, striking superhero poses for the camera and trying my best to balance on one leg.
“Try to look thoughtful. Like high school yearbook-y,” Keegan hollered over the sound of the falls.
I raised one leg and put it on a rock in front of me. I tilted my head a little and tried to look pensive. My back leg started to slip, and I looked down to catch myself. As I looked down, I noticed that I was not the only thing basking on the rocks that afternoon. I jumped backward and jogged over to Keegan.
“What’s up?” he said, putting down the phone.
“Want to see something cool?”
His face fell, and his voice grew small. “There’s a snake in those rocks, isn’t there?”
“Yes. Yes there is.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His fists were clenched, knuckles white. We stood in silence for a moment, listening to the soft patter of the falls behind us. The birds in the trees around us were quiet, seemingly awaiting our next move.
I looked back at the rocks to see if there was any movement. The snake seemed to be lying low.
“It’s not in the path,” I said. “We can easily go around—”
“Nah, let’s do this.”
Keegan swung a camera from around his back into his right hand. He looked like a gunslinger from the Old West. He approached the rocks with a steady pace, showing neither apprehension nor glee.
I tried to stop him. “Hey Keegan, I’m pretty sure this was like day one of Boy Scouts. You know, ‘Hi Ian, nice to meet you. You’ll be in Rabbit Troop. Don’t touch snakes!’”
He kept walking, completely resolved to the task. He placed his foot on top of the small boulder where mine had been moments before, and peered over, raising his camera to his eyes as though the lens were a shield.
He looked over the top of the stone and saw the snake.
At this point, several things might have happened. One option—a very viable one—was for Keegan to see the snake, let out a bloodcurdling scream, and run for the hills. Another option was for the snake to bite Keegan. Or perhaps he could have stomped on the snake in a fit of fear-fueled rage.
What I absolutely did not expect, though, was to see Keegan’s face go from slight fear to unguarded sadness. His brow furrowed, and he lowered his camera as he stepped over the rocks.
I walked up and looked over his shoulder as he knelt before the motionless reptile.
The snake was dead. When it was alive, it had been a California kingsnake, a beautifully patterned nonvenomous snake native to this part of the world. People keep them as pets, and they’re supposed to be quite affectionate.
There were several wounds around the kingsnake’s head and neck. It had been in a fight with something, maybe a rock squirrel, and it had lost.
Keegan couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Maybe it’s a good sign that this actually makes me really sad,” he said. “You know what I mean?”
I nodded. We stood there for a few moments, arrested by the sight of the gentle-looking snake. Keegan slowly rose and turned back to the falls, leaving the snake where it lay.
After a moment, he regained his composure. “How about you jump over the pond like you did when you saw that snake and I’ll try and take a video of it,” he said, smiling again.
I walked back to the tiny pool, rubbing my neck at the thought of my previous video attempts.
“Do you think I could look sexy jumping?”
Keegan put the camera down. “Ian, no one looks sexy jumping. Just do it.”
* * *
The route back to the parking lot was the same as the one we had taken to get to the falls. It took longer getting back, though. I stopped to examine every chirp and drum in the trees above—despite having forgot my binoculars. Keegan scaled the hillsides, cameras swinging from the straps across his shoulders, in search of the perfect nature shot. I felt like I was back in the woods behind my house in Virginia, playing with my friends and making up stories about the world around us.
Our conversation, like our journey back, wandered to and fro. We talked about relationships, about altruism, about what it really means to love somebody more than you loved yourself. We talked about butts, too. And how they’re awesome.
As my car came into view, Keegan turned to me.
“So we’re going to be done in October,” he said. “No more Pretty Little Liars.”
“Yup,” I said. “It’s almost over.”
I opened the back of my station wagon—a car Keegan at first ridiculed but now adores—and sat under the lift gate. I took off my damp boots, allowing my feet to dry in the mountain breeze. Keegan sat next to me.
“You know what I’m looking forward to?” he said.
“What?”
“Having someone come up to me and say, ‘Hey, weren’t you that guy from Pretty Little Liars?’”
“Why are you excited about that?” I asked.
“Because that will mean the show is done. I like the show, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want it to end, but it will be nice to finally get to look at it in hindsight, you know? Try and wrap my mind around the whole thing. You can’t do that when you’re in it.”
I hadn’t thought about it like that. Saying goodbye to PLL had never felt like an opportunity to me. For me, it had always felt like an ending—and as I often do with endings, I tried not to think about it too much.
But now, in a parking lot in the middle of the mountains, in wet socks and sweaty clothes, I actually began to think about this chapter of my life coming to an end.
It’s difficult to describe. It’s similar to the pain you experience when reading a book that has really moved you. You feel the pages thinning as you near the back cover. You love the book, so you want to keep reading, but you know that the more you read the closer you are to being finished, to not getting to read that book for the first time again. I began to choke up.
We sat there for a moment. Sweating. Thinking.
Keegan turned to me. “We should do stuff like this more often. Especially when we’re unemployed in a few months.”
I closed the trunk and got into the car. Keegan climbed into the passenger seat.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to hike a whole lot more. It’s like meditating, but, you know, with more birds.”
“No. I mean we should do more social media posts for money. I want to stave off having to do porn for as long as possible.”
AND ALL THE BIRDS AT SEA
Late last June, I had the morning off from shooting, and I wanted to get out of the house.
I called up John and Walter the night before, hoping they were both free. Walter was wrapping up a writing project but said he could take the morning off. John huffed at me over the phone—he said he’d been planning to color-coordinate his massive book collection the following day.
“What did you want to do?” he hollered over the Chopin that was booming in the background.
“Let’s go down to the beach in San Pedro, find a local brewery…”
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Maybe we could even peruse a bookshop or two,” I said, trying to rouse the bibliophile in him.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll make an exception this time, as long as we stop at a bookstore.”
Before I got off the phone with him, he had one last question. I couldn’t hear him over the music he had playing, so he had to repeat it a few times.
“There aren’t going to be any birds on this trip, right?” he finally shouted into the phone.
“Nope, not at all. It’s a beach day,” I hollered back.
It wasn’t a beach day. There’d been reports of a brown booby down in San Pedro—I’d never seen one before, and I thought it would make a good half-day trip to try and find it.
Yes, that’s right, I was hopi
ng to get a good look at a brown booby.
Despite what you might be thinking, boobies aren’t named for their pendulous breasts. The word “booby” comes from the Spanish bobo, meaning clown or idiot.
Most birds, when humans get too close, fly away. Boobies are different. They’re curious, and they’re clumsy. Boobies will land on sailing ships and toddle around the decks like buffoons—they’ll even wander up to people to see what Homo sapiens are all about.
Because they land on ships, they’re particularly easy to catch and eat—so humans took the birds’ innate curiosity as an opportunity to brand them as stupid. It’s a little bit like what happened to the dodo: when animals aren’t overtly aggressive or fearful, humans assume they’re slow in the head.
I had to keep the purpose of the trip to myself when I picked up John. I swung by his house a little before six the next morning, and he came outside in a bathrobe. I thought he’d just woken up, but he tried to get into the car and insisted he was ready to go—I refused to unlock the car doors until he changed into regular clothes.
After he did so, we grabbed Walter, who was waiting outside his apartment with a thermos of coffee and extra paper cups for the road.
As we coasted down the highway to San Pedro, the three of us still slowly waking up, Walter piped up from the backseat:
“I wonder what our chances are of seeing the booby first thing in the morning.”
John’s whole body swiveled to face me.
“The booby?” he asked. “Like the blue-footed booby?”
“Oh, so you know what we’re talking about then,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. The last time I saw one was in the Galápagos.”
“Well, that’s pretty cool,” I said.
“A sea lion tried to mate with me.”
Hesitantly, I offered, “Well, technically, we’re trying to find the brown booby today—they’re closely related.”
John was not pleased.
“I thought you said there wouldn’t be any birds—”
“We’ll be on the beach, it’ll be beautiful and sunny, and we can jump in the water. After that we’ll go find a bookstore,” I said, not sure if any of the things I had just promised were true.
San Pedro is technically a part of the City of Los Angeles, but driving in, it felt like a different world—it was originally a small fishing village but is now a part of the Port of Los Angeles, the largest port in the United States. Massive cranes line the channel that juts inland just east of the city, and cargo ships stream in and out, loaded to the brim with shipping containers.
As we got closer to the coast, it began to get cloudy, then very cloudy, then completely overcast. It didn’t look like weather for sun-tanning, or even beach-going. That morning it’d been sunny back home in East LA, but now it was clouds as far as the eye could see. It was at least ten degrees cooler outside, too.
John told us he had spent some time in the town before when he was auditioning for the role of Creon in an immersive production of Oedipus Rex put on by a band of local fishermen. He said he knew a good spot for breakfast.
As we sat around eating bagels and sipping our second cups of coffee for the day, Walter pulled out his phone to see if there were any new rare bird alerts about the booby that morning. It was still early, and there weren’t any.
After breakfast, we headed to the coast—to an overlook people had seen the booby from before. Watching the frothing waves of the Pacific wash up against the rocky shore reminded me of New England.
The sky was the same distinctive gray you get on the East Coast. Like dull smoke, it blended seamlessly with the waves on the horizon—a wash of ashy steel as far as the eye could see.
The three of us walked along the overlook, gazing out at the water. There wasn’t much going on bird-wise. The only thing of interest was a group of sad-faced fishermen bobbing up and down on a ship called the Monte Carlo. Way off to our left was the port, where cranes were speedily transferring shipping containers off vessels.
There were a few seagulls. Terns. Pelicans flying low over the water. The usual.
“There’s a Jesus egret out there,” Walter said. He’d been scanning the water with his binoculars.
“What? Where?” I asked. “What’s a Jesus egret?”
Walter pointed out toward what may have been the horizon—I couldn’t quite tell where the water ended and the sky began.
“That speck of white out there, way in the distance—check it out,” he said.
Sure enough, way, way out I could see an egret standing on a raft of kelp and seaweed. The bird took a cautious step forward—it was hunting for small fish or crustaceans.
“See, it’s walking on water,” Walter said.
Behind us, John groaned loudly.
I looked at the egret for another second or two, then turned back to the guys.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Seems pretty slow out there—definitely no boobies.”
John pointed a little up the coast at some spray-painted structures on the side of a cliff.
“Want to check over there?” he asked.
As we walked toward the spray-painted buildings, we passed an old woman on a park bench who was feeding stray cats like they were pigeons. Five cats gathered around her, meowing and vibrating with feral purrs.
As we passed her, I wondered, would that be me someday? Would I end up an old cat lady, too? It was a definite possibility. But she seemed happy enough—and so did the cats. Maybe being a cat lady would be fun.
We walked through the neighborhood and wandered behind the houses to see if there was an open gate somewhere. Nothing.
About a hundred yards away, a man was walking around inside the fenced-off enclosure. He climbed up onto what appeared to be a partially collapsed roof. I took out my binoculars to get a closer look.
The man bent down and adjusted the cuffs of his pants. Then, slowly, the man sat down to face the ocean and began to meditate. I could see his back rising and falling with deep, mindful breaths.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was John.
“Check it out,” he said, and he carefully pushed my binoculars down and to the right so that I was suddenly making eye contact with a mostly bald, mostly angry Chihuahua seated just next to the man on the roof—keeping guard while his master meditated. The Chihuahua glared unblinkingly at me from across the fence, daring me to even consider interrupting his master’s solo time.
We kept walking for a few minutes and eventually found a gap in the fence. Someone had pried off one of the iron bars and replaced it with a bit of iron-colored wood. We squeezed through the fence and stepped into what I would later learn was San Pedro’s Sunken City.
* * *
The Sunken City was a real estate development that started with a visionary’s dream in the early 1920s but ended with a landslide less than a decade later. The landslide was gradual, but devastating. In January of 1929, the pace picked up considerably. The ground underneath the entire development started shifting down toward the water at a rate of roughly eleven inches per day. Residents paid to have their houses moved farther inland, but a few of them weren’t moved in time. The houses began to slide off the muddy cliff and into the waves below.
Nine months later, the stock market crashed, plunging the country into the worst depression its ever faced. Any plans of salvaging the quickly vanishing development were abandoned, and the remaining structures were left to slide into the sea at their own pace.
Nowadays, high school kids and local gangs take over the Sunken City at night. But during the day it’s just a sad collection of collapsed rooftops and empty concrete structures with dirt paths winding between them.
* * *
We shuffled down a steep incline and into the center of the Sunken City. Walter and I headed to the cliff overlooking the ocean while John hung back to look at graffiti. We didn’t see many shorebirds, and definitely no boobies, but we did pass a group of seven or eight teenagers who looked like they were
straight out of the movie Warriors. I don’t know if they were actually a gang, but if they were, I have to say that they were remarkably cordial, and I’m impressed that they hold their gang meetings at 8:30 on Wednesday mornings. It’s not every gang you see that can really master the breakfast meeting.
We walked past the roof where the man had been meditating a few minutes before. He was gone, along with his guard Chihuahua.
Walter was scanning the horizon for shorebirds. John was trying to read a graffiti-ed love note on the underside of an old roof. I decided to go off on my own for a moment.
The man I’d seen meditating on the rooftop had looked so peaceful, so serene, that I wanted to take a crack at it myself. I climbed up on the same concrete rooftop he’d been on, crossed my legs and closed my eyes. I started to take slow deep breaths.
I listened to the waves, to the sound of John’s voice as he tried to decipher the spray paint on the walls, to the sounds of a well-organized gang meeting in the distance. I heard footsteps nearby, and I opened my eyes.
Walter stood below me on a precarious-looking slab that angled downward toward the sea. His binoculars hung from his shoulder, a sign that there was little to see.
We began to wonder if it was legal for us to be wandering around the Sunken City. Squeezing between the bars of a fence tends to fall under the header of “trespassing,” so we started walking back to where we’d snuck in. On our way, we found a different break in the fence that spit us out into a park. We walked along the perimeter, which had views to the ocean, and observed a couple of bored-looking seagulls and two more feral cats. A group of old people threw some bread their way as we walked by.
San Pedro needs to stop treating its cats like pigeons.
Finding nothing but cats and seagulls, we headed to the car.
“Sorry about the waste of a morning, guys,” I said, as I turned the key in the ignition.
“We could still go somewhere else,” Walter said. He didn’t seem ready to give up quite yet on the booby.
“What about the shipwreck?” John said from the backseat. He was looking at his phone.
“What shipwreck?” I asked.