Today the Santa Anas are blowing — hot desert winds that make the air taste of sun-baked eucalyptus and oleander. Crickets and cicadas sing under a cerulean blue sky, while lizards sun themselves on the cracked stone paths that meander through straggling undergrowth. Los Angeles appears pristine from this vantage point high above the city. It is here that I come in the late afternoon to reflect and write, here in the rambling, unkempt grounds of Greystone Park. Just up the hill from my front gate, it has become my own private retreat. Constructed in the twenties, Greystone now lies in splendid disrepair, and the granite balustrades of the once-elegant mansion provide refuge for wood doves and squirrels. Below me the city spreads out — a vast crystalline mirage of tangled freeways, overpasses, and high-rises, yet on the horizon, beckoning like a vague promise, the sun’s rays glint off a luminous blue strip of Pacific Ocean.
Buried deep beneath us lie the faults — insidious fissures that at any moment could send our homes and offices tumbling down upon each other like poorly stacked games of Lego. Lives here teeter precariously on the whims of temperamental Mother Earth. With frequent tremors she undermines our sense of security, taunts our nerves, and dares us to gamble. A thousand faults have snaked their way under our city and lie in wait with infinite patience. This is the “Golden State,” blessed and cursed by geology — yet all of us here choose to remain and play the odds.
At the top of the gardens I recline in the refreshing shade of a giant eucalyptus while contemplating my love affair with this city of paradoxes: this fulcrum of opulence, creativity, reckless ambition, absurd fantasy, and violent crime.
A waft of parched pine and I am back in the redolent woody campsites of my childhood, or cushioned by a carpet of virgin forest in my beloved northern Ontario, where roots run deep and loons sing across translucent lakes. Myriad memories float like perfume on warm winds.
Retracing my steps down Greystone’s ragged hillside, I pass through the Peach House’s electronic gates of wrought iron and walk upstairs to my music room, where books, guitars, and easel await attention. Dervin, the housekeeper, brings me hot, honeyed tea from his native Sri Lanka, and no sooner have I kicked off my walking shoes and sunk into the couch’s pillowy softness than a ball of grey-and-white fur leaps into my lap and looks up at me with soulful eyes. Ours is a special language of blissful neck rubs and appreciative purring sounds. Thus preoccupied, we gaze toward the framed photos that comprise my self-styled “vanity wall” — Liona Boyd being greeted by President Ronald Reagan, hugged by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wedged in between the King and Queen of Spain while posing grimly like Grant Wood’s American Gothic, laughing over dinner with Prince Philip, hamming it up with Bob Hope, flirting with Julio Iglesias and Plácido Domingo, bowing on stage with Peter Ustinov, and grinning like a Cheshire cat beside Liberace.
Was it really me in all those glossy images of showbiz and celebrity? What further escapades lie in wait for me and my classical guitar, so exquis-witely delicate in sound but uncompromisingly demanding to play? Below the framed letters from the White House, telegrams from Buckingham Palace, and gold and platinum records are stacked three monolithic black guitar cases plastered with colourful, peeling stickers from around the globe: Bangkok Hilton; Istanbul Music Festival; Hotel Nacional de Cuba; Kathmandu Sheraton; Lisbon Ritz; Quebec City Summer Festival; NHK television, Tokyo; Rio de Janeiro Intercontinental; Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur; and Hotel Raphael, Paris. Every sticker has a story and triggers within me countless memories from a life of contrasts. Here is an old sticker from the Gordon Lightfoot tours; here a souvenir of my concerts in Nepal; there a tatty remnant from the Persona recording sessions in London….