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.