It’s not like me to go more than a couple days between posting anything, and my excuse is that it pretty much took me the weekend to recuperate from the all-nighter I pulled Friday shadowing the 340-ton rock between South Los Angeles and its destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the final night of the journey that began in Riverside County about a week and a half ago.
I left the house at 8:45 p.m. to bike downtown and meet up with my friend Joni, wherein we pedaled down to Figueroa Street south of Gage in time for the rock’s 10 p.m. departure aboard its elaborate 200-foot long, three-traffic-lane-wide transporter.
Here’s a clip of the monster vehicle juuuuuuust barely clearing a speed limit sign at the bend in Figueroa Street just south of Exposition Boulevard:
That above location will now forever hold a frustrating place in my head as it was where I suffered one of the most dumbfounding brainfarts of my life. In addition to the camera I used for the realtime footage, I was also timelapsing each pass-by with my GoPro cam on a small tripod. After the truck had passed, I packed up what I thought was both cameras into my pack and Joni and I headed up through the USC campus to get ahead of it to await its first left turn at Figueroa and Adams. Upon arrival I went to unpack the GoPro and it wasn’t there — meaning I’d somehow managed to leave it behind. I made the obligatory return to the scene of my idiocy but I knew the whole way back that the odds of the device sitting there untouched amidst all the foot traffic were slim, and sure enough when I arrived it was gone. Sigh. All I could do was hope whoever found it needed it more than I did and would take better care of it than I had, and I returned crestfallen to Fig and Adams where I spent pretty much the rest of the night (and weekend) flip-flopping between letting it go and kicking myself for committing such an incredible and inexplicable fail.
The good news is that the rock was making great time. We met up with my friend Elson at Adams and Normandie and after that the crew flawlessly executed the rig’s toughest turn of the night, a right onto Western from Adams. Not much later the rig completed the left from Western onto Wilshire at 1:30 a.m., and things suddenly looked like they might wrap up way ahead of schedule. But thanks to illegally parked cars along that homestretch as well as a traffic signal that needed to be moved out of the rock’s way (see photo below), it then took three hours to get from there to the front of LACMA, pulling to a stop at 4:30 a.m. for an extended stop/photo opp before a large crowd who cheered its arrival. Continuing west it made a right from Wilshire Boulevard onto Fairfax and then a right halfway up the block onto the museum’s grounds where it will be installed in the Levitated Mass exhibit slated to open in about six weeks. I said goodbye to Joni via text as she was somewhere else near a plug recharging her phone, and Elson and I headed back east through the quiet streets by the dawn’s early light.
Here’s a clip of the vehicle passing in front of the United Methodist Church on Wilshire Boulevard between Highland and La Brea:
About a block and a half after the church, an LADOT service crew jumped into action to elevate the traffic signal at Fremont Place so the rock could continue rolling:
Not taking anything away from the largest rock to be transported since ancient times, but honestly, the vehicle was more impressive than its precious cargo. And not taking away from the enjoyment of being witness to the final leg of its journey across town, but by the time I got home at about 7 a.m. all the coffee in the can wouldn’t have kept me awake, and I crashed until 11 a.m. and then again from 1 to about 4 p.m. on the backyard hammock. Sunday, I did manage to do some leaf sweeping in the front of the house and go get Susan and me some lunch, but that was about it for productivity.
Still, if I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn’t hesitate. And I wouldn’t lose any of my equipment.
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