This afternoon I had a nice hike out at Towsley Canyon, which is in Santa Clarita off The Old Road. Because it was a day off for me, I was able to take my time and go two miles in, all the way down the trail to a section called The Narrows which squeezes you through a passage between two closely situated rock formations. A creek runs down the middle of it - usually dry - but today the water was still rushing even though the rains stopped several weeks ago. When you come out of The Narrows, you start up a ridge that leads toward the backside of Oat Mountain, the highest peak in the area at 3700 feet. From the San Fernando Valley side, it lines up with DeSoto Avenue, so if you were to cross over it (which would take you all day and be quite an endurance test) you would come out in Chatsworth. I walked a short distance up that part of the trail, to where I could see all the antennas and weather equipment sticking up from the top of the mountain, and then I headed back down, back through The Narrows, tracing my steps on the return trip back to the car. The hike was four miles in all, which can only be done on a day off. I took a few pics, one of a medium sized snake that I saw in the parking lot. Not sure if he was a Rattler - didn't get close enough to find out, haha. But I did zoom in for a photo, which I posted on FB. ////
It is windy outside as I write. Some of the gusts are sounding a little scary. :)
Tonight I watched a movie called "Flying Leathernecks" (1951), starring John Wayne and Robert Ryan as the Commander and Executive Officer, respectively, of a Marine Corps Air Squadron stationed on an island near Guadalcanal during WW2. Yeah, I know I watch a lot of WW2 movies, but you already knew that too. And you like 'em just as much as I do. Anyhow, with Wayne and Ryan you have a classic "battle of opposites". Wayne is the Hard Guy, Ryan the Humanitarian. Ryan lets his men relax and drink beer and even Sake when they are not flying dangerous combat missions. If a pilot is experiencing in-flight nerves he will send him back to base. He is intellectual and quotes Shakespeare and mathematical theories. Wayne doesn't go for any of that, not only because he is John F. Wayne (which of course is part of it) but also because he commanded at Midway and saw the war on a major scale. He knows there is only one way to get the job done, and it ain't by philosophizing over the matter.
Robert Ryan happens to think he's an a-hole, but Wayne is not without care for the men. He has Generals above him, who give him orders, and they are now signaling that they want Wayne to try a new method of air combat called "close ground support", where you have the pilots fly at treetop level right up to the front line of combat, where it is not easy to determine who is who. They are flying so fast and have only split seconds to strafe or drop bombs, and unless they are precise they might just as easily hit their own men instead of the Japanese enemy soldiers.
So Robert Ryan must please forgive John Wayne if he doesn't have time to pussyfoot around. :)
I jest, of course, and I have long been a fan of Robert Ryan, who, so far as I have seen, never turned in anything less than a compelling and nuanced performance in every movie he made. He specialized in playing tough guys, but he could also play sensitive types and straight arrows. He had the face and eyes of a thinking man, and though he wasn't a major star like Wayne, he still had the lead role in quite a few films and the second lead in dozens more. You probably already know his work, but on the off chance that you do not, check out some Robert Ryan movies to see what I mean. He was one of the best.
"Flying Leathernecks" was directed by Nicholas Ray, of all people, whose "They Live By Night" we recently reviewed. Ray was similar to Douglas Sirk in that he usually worked in melodrama, and so it is a little unusual to see him at the helm of a big budget World War 2 film, but he does a great job. This movie features a great many scenes of aerial combat that are skillfully executed by Ray, who intersperses sound stage angles of cockpit closeups with actual footage from Navy cameramen of the air battles in question. We see shot after shot of real life stock footage of Japanese Zeros being shot down, and conversely the Navy's Hellcat fighters being blasted out of the sky in return.
The squadron makes a final run against a Japanese armada that is armed to destroy all American troops in the area. This is the mechanization of war at it's most extreme, and here we see the fearsome use of early air-launched missiles and torpedoes, which I had not known were available at that time.
Not that I am a military historian, which I am not by a long shot, but I have had a fascination with the war, because my Dad steeped me in it when I was small, and because - to be honest - it was the worst thing that has ever happened on Planet Earth, at least as far as we know, and it took place only 80 years ago beginning this September. 80 years is not a long time to allow such a major human event - the major event - to really and truly sink in.
We know about Julius Caesar and Napoleon and the conquests of other historical figures. But it is only in recent times, in the past two hundred years, that warfare has become mechanised, that the science of manufacturing came into play at such an advanced level, that only 80 years after the Civil War, we were seeing multi-thousand ton steel and iron Aircraft Carriers that not only carried a fleet of aircraft but also housed large scale artillery cannons that could shoot multiple shells at once, and arc them twenty miles toward a target. These developments came across in a relatively short time and they were fearsome indeed. My fascination has to do with "how did human beings get to this point"?
I have long wondered what a human being is to begin with, and I say that not facetiously but just as an existential question. It is perhaps one we all ask at some point in our lives, from our own individual points of reference.
I ask, in the case of not just war, but fearsomely mechanised war, fought with enormous ships and guns, and supersonic airplanes, "what are human beings"?
I don't ask it philosophically, but literally. Just because it blows my mind. And to be honest, I think that the battles and the technology are carry overs from some ancient set of grievances that go further back than we currently know about. Further back than recorded history. I also think we can intuit this probability in our souls.
If you think about technology, it is nothing new. Every invention is only the "pulling out of thin air" of information that already existed. Electricity was always available. Chemistry was always available. The study of Mechanics was always available. Cave Men could have accessed the info to get them to the Moon, had their brains been ready, because the information was always there for the taking.
That's the thing with humans. The information has always been there for the taking. But at it's most advanced, it has always been used for destructive purposes.
I guess that's why I am not a person who wants a lot to do with technology.
And yet I am a fan of war movies, so go figure. /////
This is my last night off until the end of the month. Tomorrow I will write to you from Pearl's.
See you in the morning with much love in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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