The Plunge

“Here in Los Angeles the shape of the city is soft at the edges, piled layer on layer, cloud on cloud,” Charles Moore wrote in The City Observed, Los Angeles (1984). Gutierrez, from San Pedro, was a scientist professionally, but was perhaps better known as a climber of stairs.

I got up off my chair and looked out at the streets of West Hollywood splayed beneath me, radiating away from the canyons, whose crevices are always the color of dark iced tea. I stretched

‘My feelings about San Francisco rise and fall with my moods. Or is it that the town alters my moods, thus informing my opinions?

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking