Love Letter to Will Rogers, from Assam by Grace Singh Smith

Two days before I flew to my childhood home in rural Assam, India, an unaccountable itch made me put off some last-minute tasks and rush over to Will Rogers State Historic Park, in the Pacific Palisades. The vast lawn in front of Rogers’s ranch, the vociferous parrots in the Blue Gum trees Rogers had planted along the trail that eventually led to the aptly-named Inspiration Point, the mimosa tree (its yellow blooms the kind of beautiful called “surreal”) which greeted you on the near-final turn towards the summit—all of this had been, for years, my refuge.

About to turn forty, on New Year’s Day, I found increasing comfort in routine. I packed the usual: a pastry, fruit, a can of cold coffee. A quilt for napping. A chapter from my novel-in-progress. An audiobook: Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.”

When I arrived, two hours before closing time (sunset), a chill had crept in, but the sun still shone, unrestrained. There weren’t very many visitors (perfect). The polo field was empty, save for a dog—the ubiquitous Labradoodle (Los Angeles’s unofficial mascot?)—half-heartedly going through an obedience routine and a sprinkler twirling shimmery reverse isosceles triangles.

I made for the picnic tables in the valley, past the sign for Jigsaw Farms, where there were several unoccupied tables and BBQ grills. A family—possibly more than one family, as the group kept breaking up into smaller units—talked, played music, ate. I tried not to smell their food, so much more appetizing than mine. The men spoke what I thought might be Armenian, and kicked a soccer ball around. Two tween girls drifted downhill, that mixture of feigned confidence and vulnerability practically an aura enveloping their bodies; they began throwing a ball back and forth, which landed on my “desk”. I gathered up my things. The men said something to them, in that language-not-English, and this softened my ire because English is not my first language either. Though I mostly speak and write in English, I am told I dream out loud in my mother tongue, Manipuri; nothing makes me feel more at home in LA than the sound of unfamiliar syllables and words.

Torn between disparate desires—to finish editing that chapter, to squeeze in a nap, but also to take in that beloved view from Inspiration Point one last time in 2024—I, a sad minion to productivity, resorted to setting the timer on my Fitbit. 

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

I migrated towards Will’s house, just beyond the signs demarcating the permitted area for lawn sports, and laid myself horizontal. Some mothers instigated a game with their children, involving boundaries, with a kind of cheerful determination. I’d grown up reading my lessons out loud, and still found it necessary to experience dense text through sound. Hence the audiobook of “The Waves”, recently finished in print. I placed the iPhone next to my ear, volume turned down to what I considered a respectful level. The children’s occasional cries got in the way, but I was feeling generous, it being the end of the year and all that. Besides, the Blue Gum trees were stirring in a light wind, like cumin seeds sputtering in hot oil. The voice read: “ . . . we melt into each other with phrases.” Something inside me—my heartbeat, my life force—began to yield to everything that enveloped me, begged me to partake. I was happy to be alive.

Like most Angelenos with creative urges, I have a day job that is the oil to my inner/creative life’s vinegar. These little pockets of solitude were my mini-artist’s residencies, an immensely accessible Shangri-La I was compelled to share with scores of strangers. My eyes grew heavy; my mind slipped into a state of incandescence, which Woolf described as necessary to “the prodigious effort” of creation. 

Timer set—a half-hour reserved for the hike—I drifted off.

*

The first couple of days back in my native village, rest was impossible. In a nod to the newly pious India—i.e. Modi’s India—several new temples had sprouted. Two of these held 24/7 marathons of worship, so loud the PA systems often squealed under the pressure of the singers’ ecstasies. Sometimes they took breaks from singing and indulged in banal monologues, in the local Bengali dialect. The call to prayer from the mosque a mile or so down the road could barely be heard. Allah would need sharp ears in the new India. My evening at Will Rogers’s park was no more than a fragment remembered from some past life. 

On January 7—January 8 in Assam—the alerts on my iPhone unfurled one by one: “Historic strength” Santa Ana winds and desiccated chaparral had conspired with a random hiccup of a blaze to wipe out that beloved landscape. A month prior, the Franklin Fire had wiped out over 4,000 acres in Malibu, so the new fire—the Palisades Fire—appeared on my screen some 7,873 miles away like a familiar story with a new plot twist, but also as an outsize cosmic expression of incredulity and outrage. Inauguration Day, around the corner. The earth, all used up. As the fires raged in Los Angeles, NASA reported that 2024 was the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. There were days when my parents—hardy rural folk—couldn’t even step outside. Their paddy fields’ growing cycles, slashed, thanks to those murderous heat waves and rain that rarely kept its appointment.

The images on my feed were apocalyptic with a capital A. Words do not have the capacity to contain such devastation. I began monitoring the news around the clock. The evacuated areas in Santa Monica were 12 minutes away from my rent-controlled place, middle-class status suddenly a blessing. 

I was under a yellow nylon mosquito net when the news broke about Will Rogers State Historic Park. A hollowness opened up in the region of my chest, where twin regrets took up residence: I’d never entered Will’s ranch house, content to eavesdrop on the docents while I napped or wrote or “read” on the lawn; and on that final day in 2024, I hadn’t made it to the mimosa tree or Inspiration Point because I’d overslept. 

Dear Will, I wrote an imaginary love letter, Thank you for . . . what? All my feelings of gratitude and sorrow, were they not so cheap, like marigolds tossed into a river along with the ashes of a dead beloved? No, there would be no words for this love letter. Only the memory of the setting sun turning the canyon into a ghost of itself, the purifying whiff of sage, my involuntary smile upon turning past the Blue Gum trees and finding the trail newly widened, a trail I had all to myself. I’d allowed myself 10 minutes each way, and with my usual ineptitude for logistics, thought I might still make it to the top. Then: buzz, buzz, buzz. Time to head back down, before the lot closed.

Somewhere beyond the freshly-turned ochre soil, the mimosa tree and the benches from which the sprawl of this paradox-as-city became visible in all its haphazardness, awaited me. Next time, I thought. Next year.

I ran downhill—inhale, inhale, exhale—and cut across the lawn. Made it to my car, in the lot behind the kiosk, with no time to spare. 

All photos of Will Rogers State Historic Park & Inspiration Point Loop Trail courtesy of the author.

Grace Singh Smith’s writing has previously appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, The Texas Review, Santa Monica Review, and elsewhere. Her short stories have been cited as Notable in Best American Short Stories (2016) and named a Best of the Net Winner (2018). 

17 July 2025