Geography: Part 1-Arroyo Blanco

The first part of the book is titled “Arroyo Blanco.” Below you will find all of the L.A. geography found in Part 1.

Pg. 1 “Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Piñon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates”
Pg. 1 “staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio’s in the shank of the evening”
Pg. 6 “the canyon fell off to the rusty sandstone bed of Topanga Creek, hundreds of feet below.”
Pg. 10 “But what was he doing on Topanga Canyon Boulevard at one-thirty in the afternoon, out there in the middle of nowhere?”
Pg. 11 “Making the trees and bushes and the natural habitat of Topanga State Park into his own private domicile…”

pg. 11 "“There wasn’t a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains that didn’t have its crushed beer cans”

Pg. 12 “He’d been in Los Angeles nearly two years now…mopping up the floors at McDonald’s, inverting trash cans in the alley out back of Emilio’s.”
Pg. 18 “catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized.”
Pg. 18 “she’d walked down along the Coast Highway”

Pg. 26 “there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets to downtown L.A. or even Van Nuys.”

Pg. 26 “hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men”
Pg. 28 “This isn’t Bakersfield, this is L.A.”
Pg. 30 “you were perfectly welcome to move into the San Fernando Valley or to Santa Monica or anywhere else you chose.”

Pg. 31 “propelled her Lexus over the crest of the canyon and into Woodland Hills”

Pg. 32 “He called it ‘Pilgrim at Topanga Creek.’”
Pg. 32 “He tried to confine himself to the flora and fauna of Topanga Canyon.”

Pg. 35 “with cold feet on that Calabasas property…I’m scheduled for an open house on the Via Escobar place at one.”

Pg. 39 “they’d abandoned the flatlands of the Valley and the hills of the Westside”
Pg. 39 “was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard”
Pg. 43 “If he’d wanted a gated community we would have moved to Hidden Hills or Westlake”

Pg. 43 “He made his living in Hollywood.”

Pg. 43 “theaters from San Pedro to Bangor”
Pg. 44 “L.A. stinks”
Pg. 58 “like seeing that gabacho with the long hair in Venice”

Pg. 60 “He’d been caught three times before—once in L.A., once in Arizona, and then with America just over the Tijuana fence”

Pg. 63 “The air off the Pacific crept up the hills”
Pg. 63 “To the north and east lay the San Fernando Valley…and to the south lay the rest of Los Angeles”
Pg. 63 “He passed the Dagolian place…and turned up Piñon Drive”
Pg. 63 “His house sat at the end of Piñon”

Pg. 64 “a jet climbing out of LAX cut a tear in the sky.”

Pg. 64 “suddenly turned into the street from Robles Drive”
Pg. 64 “faded to a pair of taillights swinging back onto Robles”

Pg. 69 “before they moved to San Bernardino”

Pg. 72 “a two-point-seven-mil estate in Cold Canyon”
Pg. 72 “she’d catered herself on a new listing in West Hills”
Pg. 74 “with an unobstructed view of the Pacific on one side…of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other”
Pg. 76 “Pilgrim at Topanga Creek”

Pg. 76 “I am climbing into the fastness of the Santa Monica Mountains”

Pg. 77 “drops me off at the Trippet Ranch trailhead”
Pg. 77 “broadcast handfuls of seed along the Camino Real to mark the trail”
Pg. 77 “at the prescribed campground (Musch Ranch)…solitary place off the Santa Ynez Canyon”
Pg. 99 “to keep the riffraff out of the Elysian Groves of Arroyo Blanco Estates”
Pg. 100 “creeping down Piñon Drive”

Pg. 106 “He lived in Bel Air for the past twenty years”

Pg. 106 “The referral had come to her from an associate at the Beverly Hills office”

Pg. 107 “right on the edge of Malibu and only, what, twenty minutes from Santa Monica?”

Pg. 107 “you get this feeling of the city closing in on you, even in Bel Air.”
Pg. 109 “fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte”

Pg. 109 “or even the parking lot at the Woodland Hills McDonald’s”

Pg. 111 “in a gas station on the Coast Highway”
Pg. 113 “veins of the poisoned condor spread out like a collapsed parasol in the Sespe hills”

Pg. 114 “Delaney had heard robberies on the Backbone Trail”

Pg. 114 “bent over the plates in Clarke’s An Introduction to Southern California Birds”
Pg. 114 “she’d been over most of the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mexican border to San Francisco”
Pg. 115 “she went for a short hike up one of the feeder streams of the Big Tujunga Creek, in the San Gabriels”

Pg. 115 “waitressing for the lunch crowd at a grill in Pasadena”

Pg. 118 “No Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.”