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tile San Fernando Valley. Steadily it climbed to the hilltops, masticating sage, greasewood, oak, sycamore and manzanita with the same ease it bolted houses and pavements. Into Griffith Park it swaggered, mumbling the planetarium, Mount Hollywood and Fern Dell in successive mouthfuls and swarmed down to the concretelined bed of the Los Angeles River. Here ineffectual shallow pools had preserved illusion and given tourists something at which to laugh in the dry season; the weed licked them up like a thirsty cow at a wallow. Up and down and over the river it ran, each day with greater speed. It broke into the watermains, it tore down the poles bearing electric, telephone and telegraph wires, it forced its way between the threaded joints of gaspipes and turned their lethal vapor loose in the air until all services in the vicinity were hastily discontinued. Short weeks after I'd inoculated Mrs Dinkman's lawn, that part of Los Angeles known as Hollywood had disappeared from the map of civilization and had become one solid mass of green devilgrass. No one refused to move for this dispossessor as they had for the governor; thousands of homeless fled from it. Their going clogged the highways with automobiles and produced an artificial gasoline shortage reminiscent of wartime. In downtown Los Angeles freightcars stood unloaded on their sidings, their consignees out of business and the warehouses glutted. The strain on local transportation, already enfeebled by a publicservice system designed for a city one twentieth its size and a complete lack of those facilities mandatory in every other large center of population, increased by the necessary rerouting around the affected area, threatened disruption of the entire organism and the further disintegration of the city's already weakened coordination. The values of realestate dropped, houses were sold for a song, officebuildings for an aria, hotels for a chorus. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, secure in the knowledge its city suffered from nothing worse than fires, earthquakes, a miserable climate, and an invincible provincialism, invited displaced businessmen to resettle themselves in an area where improbable happenings were less likely; and the state of Oklahoma organized a border patrol to keep out Californians. I could not blame the realestate men for attempting to unload their holdings before they suffered the fate of one tall building at Hollywood and Highland.
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