Beverly Hills Koi

Winter paid a visit to Los Angeles last weekend. My wife and daughter and I spent Saturday afternoon in the northeast San Fernando Valley and got caught by frigid air, heavy rain and intermittent hail. The sun finally broke through in late afternoon to reveal a dusting of snow on the mountains along the Valley’s northern rim.

Back in the L.A. basin Sunday morning, my wife left for work early, while my daughter and I slept in. We woke to great masses of clouds streaming overhead, but with fleeting moments of blue sky – there was a constant play of light and shadow outside the living room’s picture window all morning long. By mid-afternoon, blue sky finally seemed to be winning and my daughter and I had become stir-crazy. We soon pulled on our jackets to ward off the cold and hopped in the car Chuck Berry-style, with no particular place to go.

Joyriding these days is pretty constrained, compared to what it used to be. Gridlock and the high price of filling up a tank have seen to that. There was a time when I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at driving the length of Sunset all the way to the beach, then back home via the Santa Monica Freeway – all on a whim. Nowadays, just Beverly Hills can seem extravagantly far.

We headed north up Vine, then west along Sunset. A huge bank of clouds – gray on the flanks, white on the puffy peaks – crested the Hollywood Hills. Directly overhead, a giant patch of blue stretched from West L.A. to downtown. To the south, however, another cotton-ball mountain range streamed in from the sea to smother Culver City and the Baldwin Hills.

We wound our way through the billboard canyon along the Sunset Strip, then emerged into that Beverly Hills twilight zone where the flats meet the hills. When my daughter was a toddler, my wife and I would take her to lush Will Rogers Memorial Park, directly across Sunset from the Beverly Hills Hotel. The park’s main attraction then was a koi pond that surrounded an old, moss-covered fountain. In those days, our little girl found the glittering carp and their floating world endlessly fascinating.

We hadn’t been to the park and its pond for a long time and decided to stop. It’s a small space (just five acres), but beautifully laid out. Two parallel lines of towering Mexican fan palms run north-to-south and mark the center of the park. They flank the pond, the fountain and a long garden bed edged by sandy paths. The rest of the space is taken up by green lawns and by dense stands of trees and brush. Species include date palms, several kinds of ficus, sturdy oaks, Australian myrtles and a few ancient-looking cedars. Smaller plants – among them, ferns, birds of paradise and lilies -- form an underbrush (and provide excellent cover for leprechauns).

Part of the park’s charm comes from age. This is Beverly Hills’ oldest park, originally created in 1912 as part of the terraced gardens fronting the Beverly Hills Hotel (the famous pink-and-green façade remains visible across Sunset, through the trees). The garden was given to the newly-minted city in 1915. It was called Sunset Park until renamed for Will Rogers in 1952 (his name is also on a state park at the site of his former ranch in Pacific Palisades and a nearby stretch of beach north of Santa Monica).


I don’t know if the fountain and pond date from 1912, but both certainly look old enough. The Mission-style fountain is smooth, brown and covered with Spanish moss. Water flows gently down its sides. The pool is divided into three sections and terraced, creating two short waterfalls that cut across the width of the pond above and below the fountain.

My daughter and I sat at the edge of the pond to watch and listen. A small flotilla of koi moved in our direction, as if expecting to be fed. They were quickly followed by a mallard drake and hen that had evidently chosen this shallow Beverly Hills pond as a spring nesting site. Fish and fowl seemed to lose interest when no food was proffered. They quickly dispersed.

My daughter watched them go, smiling. She is now more than two-thirds of the way through fourth grade. She is near the top of her class in all the language arts. We have a bond when it comes to words and reading and books and she still enjoys having me read aloud to her while she looks over my shoulder -- it has become an almost nightly ritual. We are now on the second volume of the Julie of the Wolves trilogy by Jean Craighead George. A key feature of the series is a father-daughter relationship that is strong, but nevertheless has its tensions and challenges.

I know there will be tensions and challenges ahead for us. I spent some time recently with an old friend whose daughter made it through adolescence and is now 18 and in her first year of college. “Prepare yourself,” he told me with a wry smile. “The time is coming when the message you hear is ‘OK, drop me off at the mall, then get out of my life.’”

At the edge of the pond, I looked over at my daughter and smiled. She smiled back. She is still only nine. I think I have some time before the exile begins.