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Tar, baby
Feb. 25th, 2008 | 7:24 pm
I met a kindred spirit at the La Brea Tar Pits. She's another brown-skinned single gal who's an outsider in
these parts and a bit of an iconoclast. On her own except for a little dog, she's got me thinking about the
nature of love, and everyone's quest for a partner who will be next to us, every day, in the trenches.
Unfortunately I can't hang out with my new friend at my favorite coffee shop or at the dog park. We can't go
shopping or watch the Oscars together or take a spinning class or join a book club. We can't even split a
split at the wine bar down the street. Because she died. Nine thousand years ago.
She was twenty-two and was considered middle-aged for her time. Now the oldest known Angeleno, the
anthropologists call her La Brea Woman. I call her something prettier, my favorite name: Hope.
Hope is the only human ever found in the tar pits, out of hundreds of thousands of creatures. She was
solidly built and shorter than I am: 4'11". She had an ectopic tooth, although I'm not sure what that means.
The bones of her dog were laying next to her bones.
It doesn't take much tar to trap a person or a large animal. Covered by a thin layer of water or leaves, thirsty
beasts would wade in, get stuck, start bleating in dismay, and then gangs of local predators would rush
over to finish them off and then they'd all get stuck and die in the sun. In La Brea, carnivores and
scavengers outnumber the herbivores about four to one. The pits swallowed dire wolves by the dozen.
The most unexpected thing about the tar pits is that they are just right THERE. Drive along the Miracle Mile
of Wilshire past a Rite-Aid and an IHOP and you'll see what looks to be a park with a lake. They call it Lake
Pit. Watch the simmering pool of pitch for a moment and it will bubble, gurgle, and burp, making the air
smell like freshly laid asphalt and historical DNA.
To depict the tragedies of so many poor animals, the Lake Pit also features a diorama of a mastadon
vainly struggling to free herself from the muck, while her family looks on in futile horror, the mastadonito
worried and trumpeting for his mother. I admit that for a very brief moment, the first time I saw the
mammoth statues in the lake that I thought they were real and preserved that way.
I was there, walking around the Lake Pit with Little Dog and a young boy, watching the statues intently, was
asking his mother,
"But what are they DOING, Mommy?"
"They are playing," she answered.
As I continued to walk around the campus of the museums where the pits yawn open, something black
and sparkling in the grass, just off the parking lot, caught my eye. It was just a bubble of random tar
popping up out of the ground. Dome-shaped and the size of quarter, it seemed to be a big onyx jewel but
still shinier. Impulsively I reached down and touched it. My fingertip stuck to the glob and then, before I
knew what I was doing, in a rush of fear, my opposable thumb got involved and my thumb and forefinger
were stuck together. It took a few minutes of scraping my fingers raw on the sidewalk to get them apart.
Even now, days later, they are still black and tacky.
Hope didn't end up in the tar by accident. She was a stranger to the area: her features don't match the
indigenous people who lived there. She was, I assume, minding her own business, strolling down
Wilshire Boulevard, when someone knocked her skull in with her own grinding-stone conveniently found a
few inches from where her bones were found. They also killed her little dog, and then threw them both in
the tar. This makes her the first documented murder victim in Los Angeles.
But I prefer to think of Hope as having died a much more peaceful death. Perhaps she was walking her
dog in an unfamiliar area and suddenly they found themselves stuck. They were patient. She talked to her
dog softly and maybe told him a story or sang him a song. She was waiting for someone else to come and
help. And if, with all of their might, they couldn't free her, at least they'd be stuck, too. She was waiting for
someone to be stuck in the tar with.
Hope's story breaks my heart a little. We all deserve someone who'll be next to us every day in the
trenches. Not someone who's making you chase them and shooting back. Or chasing you and then
smashing your skull in with an ancient rock. Those every day tar pits are true love.
Sometimes I feel stuck in a place where I'm waiting for someone to come and stand with me. I'm stuck in
tar but I won't give up. Hope, stand with me.
Comments
Feb. 25th, 2008 | 7:24 pm
I met a kindred spirit at the La Brea Tar Pits. She's another brown-skinned single gal who's an outsider in
these parts and a bit of an iconoclast. On her own except for a little dog, she's got me thinking about the
nature of love, and everyone's quest for a partner who will be next to us, every day, in the trenches.
Unfortunately I can't hang out with my new friend at my favorite coffee shop or at the dog park. We can't go
shopping or watch the Oscars together or take a spinning class or join a book club. We can't even split a
split at the wine bar down the street. Because she died. Nine thousand years ago.
She was twenty-two and was considered middle-aged for her time. Now the oldest known Angeleno, the
anthropologists call her La Brea Woman. I call her something prettier, my favorite name: Hope.
Hope is the only human ever found in the tar pits, out of hundreds of thousands of creatures. She was
solidly built and shorter than I am: 4'11". She had an ectopic tooth, although I'm not sure what that means.
The bones of her dog were laying next to her bones.
It doesn't take much tar to trap a person or a large animal. Covered by a thin layer of water or leaves, thirsty
beasts would wade in, get stuck, start bleating in dismay, and then gangs of local predators would rush
over to finish them off and then they'd all get stuck and die in the sun. In La Brea, carnivores and
scavengers outnumber the herbivores about four to one. The pits swallowed dire wolves by the dozen.
The most unexpected thing about the tar pits is that they are just right THERE. Drive along the Miracle Mile
of Wilshire past a Rite-Aid and an IHOP and you'll see what looks to be a park with a lake. They call it Lake
Pit. Watch the simmering pool of pitch for a moment and it will bubble, gurgle, and burp, making the air
smell like freshly laid asphalt and historical DNA.
To depict the tragedies of so many poor animals, the Lake Pit also features a diorama of a mastadon
vainly struggling to free herself from the muck, while her family looks on in futile horror, the mastadonito
worried and trumpeting for his mother. I admit that for a very brief moment, the first time I saw the
mammoth statues in the lake that I thought they were real and preserved that way.
I was there, walking around the Lake Pit with Little Dog and a young boy, watching the statues intently, was
asking his mother,
"But what are they DOING, Mommy?"
"They are playing," she answered.
As I continued to walk around the campus of the museums where the pits yawn open, something black
and sparkling in the grass, just off the parking lot, caught my eye. It was just a bubble of random tar
popping up out of the ground. Dome-shaped and the size of quarter, it seemed to be a big onyx jewel but
still shinier. Impulsively I reached down and touched it. My fingertip stuck to the glob and then, before I
knew what I was doing, in a rush of fear, my opposable thumb got involved and my thumb and forefinger
were stuck together. It took a few minutes of scraping my fingers raw on the sidewalk to get them apart.
Even now, days later, they are still black and tacky.
Hope didn't end up in the tar by accident. She was a stranger to the area: her features don't match the
indigenous people who lived there. She was, I assume, minding her own business, strolling down
Wilshire Boulevard, when someone knocked her skull in with her own grinding-stone conveniently found a
few inches from where her bones were found. They also killed her little dog, and then threw them both in
the tar. This makes her the first documented murder victim in Los Angeles.
But I prefer to think of Hope as having died a much more peaceful death. Perhaps she was walking her
dog in an unfamiliar area and suddenly they found themselves stuck. They were patient. She talked to her
dog softly and maybe told him a story or sang him a song. She was waiting for someone else to come and
help. And if, with all of their might, they couldn't free her, at least they'd be stuck, too. She was waiting for
someone to be stuck in the tar with.
Hope's story breaks my heart a little. We all deserve someone who'll be next to us every day in the
trenches. Not someone who's making you chase them and shooting back. Or chasing you and then
smashing your skull in with an ancient rock. Those every day tar pits are true love.
Sometimes I feel stuck in a place where I'm waiting for someone to come and stand with me. I'm stuck in
tar but I won't give up. Hope, stand with me.
Comments
