Devil’s Gate

TEXT ANYA JOHNSON

VISUAL MILANA BURDETTE

They say it is a portal to hell which excites me¹      hell seeming preferable

at times to the desert 

Hell is in Pasadena²   a place I have little occasion to visit 

until now     My! How this terracotta suburb has magic

The barefaced Arroyo Secco            once spooked by laughter    

(river voice of Coyote, said the Tongva)³      dry now       

quiet besides the overpass uproar     the crush of Whiteclaw

underfoot

Graffiti sprawl colors the gorge        erudite rockface claiming

Tony was here         B Funx was here      The Devil is here⁴

facing benignly away from explorers           in comic profile       

Nose craggy, jaw conical, forehead primitive           unlike any demon

I have met in life

The gate gapes⁵    lattice catching at my backpack but

cool cool laced with echoes

Absolute darkness here, like a water slide⁶ I haunted as a child

(propelled by a current        tunnel black as space  

until daylight strobes in        as you hurtle the final curves                                               

and are jostled out                airborne into the waterpark)

The path climbs       hardly, perceptibly, up⁷         terminus shaded

The walls rough and damp to touch             feel space expand and push

Throbbing now        with silence and compacted earth     I am no longer

Conscious of walking⁸           just silence and earth, thrum of voices⁹

buoyed up, up         not to a menace        not to a moonchild¹⁰

not to anything nameable

ENDNOTES

I might begin by noting that I am not a skeptic. Skeptical of others’ assignations of the divine? Maybe, but my leaning is towards belief. As a student of the Occult, when I heard of a rumored gateway to the underworld in Los Angeles, I was happy to believe.

Devil’s Gate Dam lies under the Pasadena 210 Freeway, surrounded by scraggy brush and several tons of loamy sediment. Setting aside legend, there is not much to this landmark that requires a suspension of disbelief. Once a natural dam, the rocky terrain held back a lake fed by San Gabriel Mountain streams. When the granite eventually gave way, a narrow passage was created, the floodwaters cutting a peculiar design into the rockface. The dam’s name is derived from this formation, which speciously resembles the devil.

The Tongva, hunter-gatherers indigenous to Southern California, associated this site with another ill-favoured deity. The constant slap of water running through the rocks was judged the voice of Sky Coyote—“Tukupar Itar” in the Tongva language. Although the Tongva tribe has died out with the once powerful river, by some accounts, Sky Coyote’s laughter is still audible.

Here’s where my skepticism kicks in. We have all seen horned, cloven-footed cartoons of the devil—this caricature dates to the ninth century and is useful as shorthand, like a skirted stick figure meant to represent a female-identifying body—but who has the authority to illustrate a god? While I don’t particularly read the devil’s countenance in this image, there is indisputably a crude, anthropomorphic profile visible.

Although marked “No Trespassing,” the dam and surrounding scrabble is accessible by a variety of entrances. The infrastructure is massive and elegant. Beaux-Arts arches crown the sluice gates, their smooth siding reinforced by concrete buttresses. The namesake rock formation and gated tunnel are at a slight remove. It is hard to determine the purpose of the tunnel—it appears to have been constructed as a spillway for surplus water from the dam, but it ends in a solid wall. 

My reference to “Purple Haze,” a Slidewaters Water Park attraction in Lake Chelan, WA, is used purely for illustrative purposes. I am in no way in league with the Chelan County tourist board. 

In almost all classical interpretations of Hell, one travels downwards. Notably, the tunnel at Devil’s Gate inclines, giving me the impression of being drawn up into the lap of the divine.

The echo chamber effect of the tunnel plays tricks on your senses, making sound and forward motion almost indistinguishable from silence and stillness.

It is not hard to imagine a cacophony of sound inside the tunnel—the quality of the silence is textured and dynamic. In 2011, paranormal investigators recorded several EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) at this site, including children laughing and the name “Tommy” repeated in response to questions the investigators posed. If you give credence to this method of data collection, this is an unsettling capture. Tommy Bowman, and three other children aged six to thirteen, went missing in the vicinity of Devil’s Gate in the 1950s. Several of the disappearances were attributed to serial killer Mack Ray Edwards, who killed himself prior to his trial while incarcerated at San Quentin Prison. Besides his confession, no proof substantiated his claims and the children’s bodies have remained unfound.

A further layer of the Devil’s Gate mystery revolves around Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and Aleister Crowley. Reportedly, Parsons assembled a Crowley-inspired Thelemic cult around his Pasadena home in the 1940s. One of his dubious associates, future Scientology magnate L. Ron Hubbard, joined Parsons in a ritual at Devil’s Gate. Outlined by Crowley, the rite purposed to open a portal to Hell and raise an anti-Christ. This figure, or “moonchild,” would then overthrow the Judeo-Christian world order. Successful or not, the following disappearances of children in the area gave their venture some plausibility, or at the least, a sinister cast.