Lifestyle
I've done this L.A. walk 400 times. Here's how it saved me
“Hello, old friend.”
That’s the phrase that popped into my head at the start of my favorite walk recently. It was a warm October evening and the swaths of black mustard weed on the trail had completely dried up, leaving the towering stalks spindly and bare. Some were more than 8 feet high. They lined the path as it curved to the right, swaying and rustling in the breeze, like an overeager welcoming committee.
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It had been several months since I’d returned to this trail, which is highly unusual for me. This 5.4-mile trek in Griffith Park is a staple of my life in L.A. To date, I’ve traversed it about 400 times, at nearly every time of day, in every season, snaking my way up the hillside as it’s bathed in golden hour sunlight, ensconced in early morning fog and even lit up under a full moon. But recently I’d been traveling, and then healing a gym injury, and I hadn’t been able to make it for a while.
Returning to the trail, with its soothing chorus of crickets, velvety laurel sumac shrubs and feathery wild grasses, something inside me loosened.
If you had told my 20-something self that my happy place would come to be a quiet trail in the urban-adjacent wilderness, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m a city girl through and through. I grew up in Center City, Philadelphia, and spent my first few decades in Los Angeles covering arts and culture, food and nightlife — it was all gallery openings and red carpets, open bars and kitten heels throughout the early aughts. Now? My favorite fashion accessory is … a hiking headlamp. But we morph in unexpected ways, like the natural landscape around us, contracting and expanding, cracking in places, melting in others and ultimately sprouting with new life.
I found my walk during the early days of the pandemic — a friend introduced us during a socially distanced get-together. I’d been into hiking, generally, for a while but nothing extreme. During that period of isolation, however, when my workdays were shorter and my social life was on pause, I did the hike three, four times a week after work, and twice most weekends — almost every week from late 2020 through the end of 2021. That’s about 300 times right there. It was a way to burn off stress during that difficult period and, frankly, to fill the hours I’d otherwise be spending solo at home, on the heels of a breakup.
We morph in unexpected ways, like the natural landscape around us, contracting and expanding, cracking in places, melting in others and ultimately sprouting with new life.
Eventually, that difficult time passed, restrictions eased, dinner parties began populating my calendar, I started dating again. But even as my life bounced back, I’ve returned to this trail again and again.
I mostly do the hike alone — it’s become a sort of meditation practice, a way to return to my body and connect to the moment. I don’t listen to music or podcasts; I just zone out to the crunching of gravel beneath my feet. I completely unfurl, my senses becoming more acute with every quarter-mile. I play a little game isolating scents in patches of wind, flaring my nostrils and parting my lips slightly, as if wine tasting. I pass through fragrant California sagebrush and wild fennel in one spot, a blend of sweet pea, lilac and kicked-up dirt in another. I want to fall to the ground and eat the trail in those moments.
The trail’s narrow dirt corridors have held me through so many difficult times. Within their embrace, alone on the switchbacks overlooking the city, it was safe to let go. I walked through that pronounced heartbreak until the only thing left that hurt were my feet. I’ve walked through periods of professional self-doubt and the uncertainty of aging parents undergoing surgeries. I walked until my emotional field of vision was mercifully more narrow: One more step, one more breath, that’s all I had to worry about.
Shortly after both of my cats died unexpectedly, I could barely tolerate the stillness in my apartment. One afternoon the grief overwhelmed me. I raced out the door and sped to the trail — I couldn’t get there fast enough — and as soon as I set foot on the path, under a canopy of Coast Live Oaks, my chest opened up and my breathing steadied. It was like a lifesaving burst of oxygen.
But the hilltops and open canyons also have provided spaces to unleash unbridled joy from new romance, exciting career turns and those same family members’ health and recovery. I’ve talked to myself on the trail, laughed out loud and sung — poorly but proudly — into those magnificent voids. The shifts in my internal landscape, mirrored in the cyclical qualities of the natural world, bring solace. At least until I have to sit in L.A. traffic on the way home!
I’ve long been aware of the science around the benefits of walking in nature. It lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure and has been linked to a decreased risk of chronic disease, studies show; it can regulate sleep-wake cycles, improving the quality of our shut-eye; and, as our sensory and motor skills become activated in nature, it boosts our mood and decreases negative thought cycles.
But walking the same path, repeatedly, may punch up some of those benefits, says my friend Florence Williams, a science writer and author of “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.”
“If you’re walking the same terrain over and over again, you’re taking away some of the distractions of the novelty effect, yet there’s still enough [beauty] to be comforting,” she says. “Eventually you become more receptive to the subtle changes around you. Your problems may feel smaller. It gives you perspective that there is this magical world outside of yourself.”
There may be more exciting trails in L.A. with, say, the Hollywood sign or a waterfall at the end. But the magic of my walk — stretches of different trails, patchworked together, leading from Cadman Drive to Coolidge Trail to Hogback Trail to Dante’s View to Mount Hollywood — comes from my knowing it so intimately. To know that after heavy January rains, inevitably there will be a deep, V-shaped rut along the center of the trailhead, like a voracious alien mouth; or that in late May the mustard weed will be so wildly overgrown and bushy that it will completely swallow up the trailhead sign, post and all; or that for a brief window in late October-early November, two pink silk floss trees will bloom the color of bubble gum just below the Vista Del Valle lookout point.
I once met a red-tailed hawk while doing yoga atop a rocky peak during my walk. I was in full triangle pose with nothing but blue sky in all directions and the loud whooshing wind. My feathered friend appeared right in front of me, hovering at eye level, wings spread. It looked into my eyes, then soared off.
Once, coming down the hillside, I was stopped by a family of coyotes slinking across the trail. I waited with several other hikers before progressing, only to be stopped at the next switchback by an angry rattlesnake, mid-trail, tail in the air. Only weeks earlier I’d run into a tarantula on the trail’s edge clutching a still-living insect in its long furry arms — several hikers were hovering over it, snapping photos with paparazzi-like fervor.
In those moments I feel so far from home — my original home, on the East Coast in the inner city, where my closest natural respite was a patch of grass beside a fire hydrant. How did I end up here, in what often feels like the Wild West, traveling on this rustic dirt trail — and in a hiking vest?! The contrast between past and present feels so pronounced in those times. And yet, I feel more at home here, on this trail, than almost anywhere else.
The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
Recently, I found myself exploring the trail in a new way: in a hulking SUV. I’d called up Griffith Park ranger Sean Kleckner with the desire to see my trail through the eyes of an expert. “Those, over there, are actually castor bean stalks,” Kleckner said as we zoomed past. With every bit of trivia I learned, the walk I thought I knew well surprised me, like a longtime acquaintance shedding their persona, revealing unexpected sides of themselves.
The late celebrity mountain lion P-22 hung out on this trail at night, Kleckner said. He was captured on Ring doorbell video hunting for food in trash bins by the homes near the trailhead. I thought back nervously to the many night hikes I’d taken there. The walk was edgier than I’d thought.
Countless car commercials were filmed at the Vista Del Valle lookout point, a helicopter landing pad about midway through my walk with sweeping views of the city. It was glamorous too.
The slippery shale and decomposed granite at the steep top of Hogback Trail make it the site of more hiker rescues (often by helicopter) than almost any other spot in the park, Kleckner said. Apparently it also was dangerous.
I considered all of this as I rounded the first switchback recently for the umpteenth time. The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
And yet, this time the walk felt novel.
We were, it turns out, still getting to know one another.
“Hello, new friend,” I thought. “It’s nice to meet you.”
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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