Leaving L.A.

As Travis and Susie pick up and move to Vancouver, Travis chronicles one final, quintessential Los Angeles moment. While downtown meeting with some clients, Travis stumbled across Fisherman's Outlet Market, where the seafood is fresh, the crowd wildly diverse and the food insanely cheap.

He writes: The counter is a madhouse. People are yelling their orders from tippy toe. Eight short Latinos jockey in white smocks for position in front of the patrons. Fish in boxes is being passed through the crowd like grunge rock performers diving into the mosh pit.

The people behind me speak French, maybe Moroccan. The people in front of me speak Japanese. The people in the front of the line just grunt.

The menu, a large board suspended over the cash register (of which there are but two) includes: Swordfish. Orange roughy. Giant scallops. Catfish (whole, deep fried). Ceviche. Lobster tail. Mahi mahi. Salmon. Halibut. Cod. Tuna. Tilapia. Shrimp. Crab. Three soups: bisque and two chowders.

The price was SO CHEAP. Salmon for $8? Mahi Mahi for $9? Lobster for -- I cannot repeat it here, there would be a riot.

Travis marvels at how, despite once working downtown and attending USC, he'd never heard of the joint until now. That's why he'll miss Los Angeles: You're never done exploring this city. Even if you've been here for 10 years, 20 years or your entire life, you haven't seen everything.

That, my friends, is what L.A. is all about. It is never, ever, knowable, to anyone, ever. It's bigger than anyone can even understand. It's national-debt big, distance-to-Alpha-Centauri big, spam-messages-sent-per-year big, human-genome big. You have to pretend that it's possible to understand it, or else you could never possibly live here, never leave your house, never buy new shoes, never find a hair dresser.

Let me try to give you a sense of scale. There are, in fact, 112 Payless shoe stores within 20 miles of my house in Pasadena...

Los Angeles County is 4,084 square miles, an area 888 square miles larger than the combined area of the states of Delaware (1,982) and Rhode Island (1,214). Of that, L.A. city is 465 square miles. In 1850, L.A. city was 1,600 people. On January 1, 2004, there were 10,103,000 residents in L.A county, and a bunch more too hung over to drive home.

L.A. doesn't have thousands of years of history, doesn't have labyrinthine streets or canals. (Except that it does -- La Brea Tar Pits and Hollywood Hills and Venice respectively -- just like it has everything else you could possibly imagine, just like it produces, packages and distributes all the imagination you can stand).

Los Angeles isn't deliberately mysterious like Paris or a collection of tiny burghs like London, or everything packed into one island, like New York. No, the place L.A. reminds me of the most is actually Mars.

I feel like for the past 14 years, I've been travelling this city like Spirit, the Mars Rover, poking my head into one crater or another, drilling into this oddly shaped rock, finding out little fascinating tidbits, enough to fully occupy me for years, while all around me, an entire planet sprawls and storms and thaws and generally manages to do just fine without me.

So, the next time someone asks me what I think of L.A., I'm going to say, "I don't know yet, I haven't really seen enough of it to judge."

Good luck in Vancouver, guys. And we'll be sure to hit the Fisherman's Outlet Market for ya.