Since last I blogged the world did not end as predicted. (Camping down thirty-love.) While I was on the road and sick in bed my younger son toured the U.S. and Canada with a rock band, my elder son returned from Michigan to Seattle to be a summer law clerk, Donald Trump was publically humiliated so many times that his hair went to live with Ivana, Sarah Palin moved to Arizona where hopefully she will campaign successfully for secession, several popular uprisings in the Mideast were brutally repressed by the usual subjects, Osama Bin Ladin was relocated from a tony suburb of Abottabad to a pestilent ghetto in Hades (where he is apartment-hunting for Ratko Mladic, who will join him soon), non-apocalyptic but nonetheless nasty weather patterns destroyed many flat parts of North America, my newly-planted vegetable garden entered that long nightmare of sodden stasis we Northwesterners know as “spring,” the Mariners improbably stumbled their way to a .500+ record and an Australian college student discovered the disposition of the mysterious “missing mass” of the universe, which I had assumed was in my basement under the corner table with the darkroom stuff.
Other things doubtless happened too while I was virtually away, but it's been a funny couple of months in my world. April, I dimly recall, was a travel whirl. I spent not one weekend in Seattle, though I did manage visits to Philadelphia, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Whidbey Island and someplace else I’m forgetting. May has been a month of illness—an allergy-inspired cold, bronchitis, antibiotics, insomnia, fever and a persistent cough that lingers still. I look forward to a healthier June.
Let’s talk about Los Angeles. Growing up in Ohio, which is or is not Appalachia, the Rust Belt or the Midwest depending on which direction you’re facing when you’re there, I imagined Los Angeles to be a synthetically decaying, exotically corrupt, coastally distant incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah—a place where people with impossibly white teeth lived frivolous, sinful lives under an interminable sun so painful to their drug-dilated irises that they were required to wear sunglasses even while indoors having sex in the dark. While I eventually discovered that my estimation was indeed quite accurate, I have learned since that there are bad things, too, about L.A. I passed through briefly in my mid-twenties, but all I remember about the city is leaving with the distinct impression that I hadn’t really seen it. Years later my elder son attended college at Loyola Marymount, just about the same time that I conceived the bone-headed notion of writing a novel set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s. So I spent a fair chunk of time there over a several year span, researching, exploring, eating and sitting in traffic, and I came to develop a genuine fondness for the place, not at all as an insider but rather as a semi-regular oddball tourist with a pocketful of quirky agendas. I haven’t visited Disneyland or Universal Studios, haven’t taken in a Lakers game or seen the Dodgers play, haven’t spied on the houses of movie stars or gorged on fried chicken at Knott’s Berry Farm. But they practically know me at the La Brea Tar Pits, I’ve fed pints of blood to the outsized mosquitos of the Ballona Wetlands and I’ve left more shoe leather on the sidewalks of the “historic downtown” area than most city residents I know. Oh, and I tend to frequent Venice Beach—a guilty pleasure over which I feel no guilt. While my great-grandchildren may experience the sci-fi (to me) thrills of commercial space travel, I expect to live out my life within the Earth’s thinning atmosphere. So I seldom pass up an opportunity to observe alien life forms. Certain of the Venice regulars defy taxonomy. I cannot resist them.
I visit the Rancho La Brea Pits in order to stand face-to-face with Time. I know, I know, a quick visit to the mirror ought to suffice, but I can hardly grant big “T” capitalization to the puny temporal passage that has turned my hair the color of Victorian davenport stuffing and added Venerable Pounds of Wisdom to my youthful stick-figure frame. My transformation reflects the passage not of Time, but of mere years. The tar pits are a much longer story: 30,000 years, more or less, those being Pleistocene years, which while no longer or shorter than stand-at-the-mirror years, collectively stood for the last of four of the great Ice Ages of that period. The tar—la brea—is just that; asphaltum, heavy oil that rose to the surface ten thousands of years ago and formed sticky pools that filled with leaves, dirt and puddles; inviting oases in the forests. In would walk critters (indeed they still do, where the pits are open)—birds, rodents, sloths, mastodons—that then would get stuck in the underlying goo. Some fought their way out. The less fortunate attracted predators—bears, lions, sabre-tooth cats and so on—and they too would become entrapped. For millennia their bones have filled the hardened asphaltum beneath the site, smack in the middle of L.A.’s Miracle Mile. Holes dug during early excavations in the first years of the last century have filled up with the oozy stuff, as well as bubbling methane and stinky dark water. The tar seeps out of the ground randomly, so landscapers at the George C. Page Museum place orange warning cones where it accumulates enough to ruin a pair of tourist’s shoes, or a field-trip preschooler’s face. They keep the grass mowed short.
Paleontologists have pulled more than a million bones out of the La Brea. That’s a lot of critters. The most common large mammal excavated has been the Dire Wolf. If there is a better name for the Creature with Teeth You Don’t Want to Meet at Midnight, I don’t want to hear it. As large as they are in our imaginations, informed or not by the eponymous poker player of the over-performed Grateful Dead song, they really weren’t a heck of a lot bigger than a modern gray wolf. Okay, a little bigger. But more than being large, they were dire. It’s a word we don’t use lightly, reserved generally for circumstances, warnings, poverty and straits, but nothing else that chews its food and bears its young alive. (Excepting Newt Gingrich. There’s a dire piece of effing work if ever there was one. But I digress.)
There are many thousands of Dire Wolf skeletons in the Rancho La Brea pits. In the Museum stands a long wall lined floor-to ceiling with glass cases in which are displayed a fraction of the Dire skulls dug out of the tar. Rows upon rows of dead wolves grinning (direly) at sticky-footed passersby, wondering perhaps in one collectively petrified woebegone wolf–brain what cruel whims of evolution allowed these noisy, clueless, overfed creatures to parade endlessly by while their best wolfish memories still stink like a fresh-laid driveway in a heat wave. Here on the wall, then, and in the nearby exhibits, is a rudimentary User’s Guide to Time: Millions of bones and fossils and jumbled bits of an ancient landscape somewhat cooler and leafier than the Los Angeles Valley today. Thousands of sabre-tooth cats, legions of hapless birds, armies of little twitchy whiskered things with different sorts of tails. Mastodons. Bison. Antelope. Camels. Horses. Deer. Three species of Ground Sloth. In a cubic meter of tar there might be hundreds or even thousands of bones, tumbled together like the paleontological puzzle they are, awaiting—well, nothing. They would have been frozen and forgotten below ground forever, were it not for their chance discovery and subsequent painstaking extraction, cleaning, identification and (sometimes) reassembly. The bones are a rich mahogany brown, tinted by millennia of oily submersion. The digging continues. When it is over, for whatever reason in whatever uncertain future faces the City of Angels, there will be millions more bones still left in the earth.
There’s a demographic oddity to the distribution of vertebrate species at La Brea: the remains of predators outnumber those of prey. The hard-working folks at the Page Museum speculate that this is due to the periodic congregation of carnivores responding en masse to the clamorous death struggles of each haplessly mired victim, especially the bigger creatures like bison and elk. (Think of the behavior of vultures, say, or hyenas. Or banks.) It’s estimated that the astonishing mass of fossilized fauna in the pits, Dire Wolves and all, would have required such a feeding frenzy only every ten or twenty years, in between which they continued to receive contributions of smaller birds, mice, bugs and slithery things, all tangled together like the random junk in an end table drawer. Such a frequency would comfortably account for the volume of large mammalian fossils left behind.
That’s all it took: One big party every decade or two, and now a wall of skulls to marvel at, with thousands more packed in straw somewhere in a sub-basement, as lost to memory as if they’d never come out of the ground.. That’s Time. Thirty thousand years is hardly a blink in the history of the planet, of course. A comprehensive understanding of the age of the Earth eludes me, stare as I might at mountain ranges, riverbeds and roadside stratigraphy. As much as I love all things geology I can’t quite get my brain around the movement of a glacier or the transformation of a rough rocky coast into a white sandy beach. But staring at the black La Brea pond just a few feet from Wilshire Boulevard, I begin in my own puny way to grasp what scientists mean when they talk about an Age, or even an Epoch. In my most receptive moments I can close my eyes and feel, just for an instant, a temperate breeze, and smell the rich hummus shadows under towering oaks and cedars. There is something thrashing in the woods nearby. The bewildered bellow of a startled ungulate. The sharp scent of warm-blooded fear. Bright eyes flashing in the bushes. Then the primal, bloodthirsty shriek of an elementary school teacher telling Jason to give Jessica her juice box. And presto, I’m back in the present, and it’s time for a drive out to Venice, and a plate of plantain fitters with a cold Heineken at the Mercedes Cuban Grill. It’s an excellent place to kill some time, though not, by any stretch, to kill any Time at all.
But I’m a long way now from Los Angeles. The sun beckons here on Whidbey Island. Maybe it’s really Spring now. Hell, it’s damned near June. I thnk I’ll shake off the time-zoned cobwebs of April and the misery blankets of May, and go outside and play. I'll watch where I step, though. If it feels the least bit sticky, I'm outta there.
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