I hiked to California's living tribute to Alex Trebek, and it was surprisingly profound
When Alex Trebek died last November, he left a hole in pop culture that cannot be filled, as much as the prospective new “Jeopardy!” hosts might try. But there’s another place, just above West Hollywood, to experience a lesser-known part of Trebek’s legacy.
When I set out to find the Trebek Open Space, I thought I was doing it to write a story about a little-known piece of public land in L.A. that’s tied to a show I grew up loving. But when I sat down to write, something very different came out. I thought I was going to talk about taking a hike. What I’m really going to talk about is living with loss.
Maybe grief is on my mind these days because I’m the kind of person who’s good at holding it together while something terrible happens, and then falls apart the minute the crisis is over. So now that the state is opening up — now that I’ve been to a concert and stood in a room with hundreds of people who were vibrating with collective joy over the return to “real life” — I’m feeling totally spent. This is the moment I’m processing everything we’ve been through for the last year and a half, how hard it’s been, how scary, how stressful, how depleting.
It probably wasn’t the best time to visit a place that’s a living memorial to a person who’s inextricably tied to my best memories of people I loved deeply and lost.
