Since the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, I, like many others, have gotten way more into cycling. I’m lucky to live in Los Angeles, where cycling is a hobby that can be practiced year round. The local geography provides fascinating scenery and challenging riding, from central Los Angeles the beaches, the deserts and the mountains are all within the ambitious cyclist’s reach.

I believe that we live on the body of a giant creature, a creature like ourselves, but also so much more than merely human. A creature so vast and incredible that it defies our embodied understanding. A creature whose priorities and sense of time are so far beyond our own as to be incomprehensible to us. I am not alone in feeling this way, similar beliefs echo across the people of many civilizations, current and past. The Ancient Greeks believed that all of the material in the world hatched from an egg containing love, and that the two halves of the egg became sky and earth, and through their mating (urged by love) they engendered the gods who went on to embody the physical world we find around us. My own belief in a giant ur-creature is confirmed when I sleep and my cat sleeps on top of my chest. When I move, changing my sleeping position, I disturb the entire landscape of the bed/duvet complex. His face tells me that the causes, rationale and need for the bed landscape to change appear to him only as abstract and arbitrary cruelty. One might cling to the old order, one might dig in one’s claws, but ultimately one’s own desires and needs are immaterial to the flow of events.

My belief in this larger creature is further strengthened when I cycle along the San Gabriel river from Seal Beach, where you start out riding on the blade of a multi-story high concrete knife. To one side: the river itself – a trickle of water in a concrete trough; on the other: a massive petrochemical processing center. The river path leads all the way into the San Gabriel mountains; past oil fields; through spaces urban, suburban and rural; through to wilderness areas, industrial wastelands and rehabilitated wet lands. Every class register of equestrian activity from waspy horse girls to Norteño cowboys appears along the way, plus gun ranges, several dams, drone racing courses, and innumerable and varied styles of homeless encampments. “There is so much on the body of this creature!” I think as I pedal along, heading towards the mountains.

At the foot of the mountains is the community of Irwindale, one of several small municipalities contained within Los Angeles County. Like several of the municipalities in the liminal zone between the city of L.A. and the Inland Empire, Irwindale was incorporated as a kind of tax and regulatory dodge to suit the needs of industry. Thus, the human population of Irwindale is tiny, under 2000 souls, but the real inhabitant of the town is the void. Irwindale is home to the Irwindale Pit, a mega complex of gravel mines that from 1900 onwards, has been exploited in order to meet consumer demand for America’s best product: Los Angeles.

It might seem like a misnomer to call it THE Irwindale pit since there are several pits where aggregate is mined. Their number changes as new pits are opened and others are filled in. I think the pit is like Marat’s bathtub, we remember it for the corpse inside. But before he got into it, and after his corpse was removed, Marat’s bath tub remained a bath tub. While it’s true that Irwindale’s miners are hard at work removing sections of the great bather’s flesh because they are anxious that we should shelter and travel on it, I prefer to think that we’re removing the body as an attempt to investigate and describe this ur-pit, to better know and understand the bath tub.

Irwindale comes by its blessed gravel naturally: the hills to the north are on a very specific incline and the waters of the San Gabriel river create what are considered the ideal geological conditions to produce good gravel and aggregate for building in cement. At the end of the 1800s Los Angeles was little more than a humble village with an outsized reputation for violence, but shady real estate deals, oil, war-time manufacturing and showbiz conspired to pump the city’s infrastructure up to massive proportions over the following century, and much was made from Irwindale’s magnificent gravel. All of the notable buildings in town, the city hall, the many jails, the gigantic port and most importantly the freeway system are made from the body of the Irwindale bather. Even the San Gabriel river that helped birth such magnificent gravel is now a prisoner of Irwindale’s deluxe concrete. After the river leaves the mountains it is first enclosed by the Santa Fe dam, inside which is also housed a (nearly) permanent Renaissance Faire (closed now for COVID 19). Thereafter, the river is funneled into a dismal concrete spillway made from the dismembered body of its own child until finally escaping into the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Irwindale itself has been so thoroughly excavated that the municipality is on average below sea-level.

Every so often, a section of The Pit is filled in. For example one excavation was filled with old tires and used to build the Irwindale Speedway, where the Ballardian carnage of the freeway system (that owes its existence to both Pit and tires) is reenacted in miniature at the regular demolition derbies held there. Irwindale also attempted to woo the former Los Angeles Raiders back from Oakland during the late 1980s. A further attempt to diversify the Irwindale economy came in the mid-oughts when the city council lured the Sriracha Hot Sauce company to build their new factory in town, only to have some of the few residents complain of the smell of garlic and chili. As a result the plant has never operated at full capacity, while the aroma of dust and other industrial pollutants from the established Pit circulate without interruption.

Mike Davis, the grey eminence of SoCal Marxist historians, writes that Los Angeles is a city not so much planned or designed as envisioned. And this in turn has tempted many to read the city as an accumulation of the calcified desires whose projections have come to make up the actual city. But, as an entirely crude indexical sign, the Irwindale Pit rejects this tendency. Like a thumb-print smeared in blood, a reed stuck in a clay tablet, the connection is too direct and too specific. It is what it is, and it doesn’t represent Los Angeles to anyone, because it IS the city in negative. For a city conjured according to the higher order signs, it makes sense that this crude index is hidden on the periphery.

Or perhaps it’s not that sinister, it’s just that the Index is always at the back of the book. There is no sulphurous breath emanating from these pits, they waft instead a hard grey dust lightly tinged with garlic, which I find caked to my legs after a long ride in the area, hardened in my sweat and sunscreen. Anyone who’s been to Los Angeles has taken a bit of Irwindale with them, a particle of freeway dust burrowed into the tissue of your lungs that you will carry with you until your death. There’s no need to go see it, you already saw The Pit when you saw the town.

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This work is part of Doubled and Divided, a micro-issue on space and the built environment, edited by Lakshmi Luthra and Florence Uniacke.