Better Angels (14 page)

“I’m too old to be pulling an all-nighter like this,” Dr. Lydia Fabro muttered to herself as she watched the pre-dawn light creep over the buildings of Miracle Mile, onto Museum Row, across Hancock Park, into the sago palm and fern universe of the Page Museum’s atrium.

Couldn’t be helped, she supposed. Just as the (hopefully temporary) closure of the Page Museum and the shutting down of research at Rancho La Brea generally couldn’t be helped, either.

She had only been a post-doc at the Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries for a year and a half, but already her work was being foreshortened. She had testified passionately on behalf of Rancho La Brea’s scientific importance—before the Museum Board, the County Board of Supervisors, the City Council, the Park Service, corporations, anyone who would listen. In her testimony, however, she had been excessively careful not to spotlight the tar pits’ value to evolutionary biology. Mention of “extinct genomic diversity” would only have inflamed the inerrantists and churchstaters. Instead, she had steadily avoided the religio-political minefield of theory, emphasizing instead the potential medical value of the discoveries to be derived from the asphalt-preserved DNA found in the tar pits—a politically astute maneuver, she had thought.

In the end, however, no one had listened. The New Commonweal had gained majorities everywhere in the political world. The corporations willing to risk fundagelical boycotts in Stadium Revival America were few and far between. Funding shrank to a trickle.

The Museum’s last Director, Ellie Kornbluth, had appreciated Lydia’s politically shrewd efforts nonetheless. She had shown that appreciation by putting Lydia in charge of the shutdown. Running the “Skeleton Crew” disassembling the fossil exhibits, a bittersweet task: taking down the murals, taking apart the dioramas. Cataloging, boxing, transferring. Fencing off, sealing shut, and abandoning in place the pits and excavations and the museum itself.

Standing in the atrium garden, Lydia was glad that at least they’d been able to fight for enough funding to keep the irrigation system on, so that the garden wouldn’t die. The koi that had swum in the atrium’s artificial stream were gone now, though, as was the stream itself. With the funding stream dried up, the stream of water had dried up too. She tried not to think too much about that analogy

Leaving the atrium, Lydia walked through the building, thinking of Noah, alone, animals and family all long since disembarked and gone into the world, the shipwright making one last circuit of his handiwork before mothballing the ark where it had grounded on Ararat. A strangely Biblical resonance, Lydia thought, especially since it was the Bible bangers who were forcing the shutdown here.

This place too had been an ark, however. An ark of time rather than space. An ark preserving the bones of the extinct against total disappearance, rather than the flesh of the living against extinction by drowning. Reconstructed skeletons of the lost—which, the fundamentalists still claimed, were always and only creatures drowned in the Great Flood that Noah and company had survived.

An empty ark of time, now, Lydia realized as she walked through the empty halls. The “fish bowl” lab, where she and other researchers had labored with fine brushes and dental picks and ultrasonics to clean and categorize macro and micro fossils of myriad types, while museum-goers watched them through the tall glass—now all eerily tidy, as empty as if decades of work had never taken place there. Gone too was the artwork, the visioned and revisioned murals taken down from the walls, the dioramas removed from the display cases, the display cases themselves removed. No more of Hallett’s 1988 Treasures of the Tar Pits. Or of the Connollys’ Early Man in North America and Extinct Animals in Southern California. Or of the WPA mural of ancient La Brea painted in 1937 under the direction of Dr. James Z. Gilbert. Or of Knight’s mural-scene of the ancient Los Angeles basin’s flora and fauna, painted under the direction of fossil-hunter Chester Stock in 1925.

Most evident in their absence from the time-ark were the great skeletons of asphalt-permeated bones, the bone assemblages transmuted to a color Lydia had never quite been able to describe except as a mixture of bronze and mahogany. Gone were the Harlan’s Giant Ground Sloth, Antique Bison, American Mastodon, Western Camel, Shasta Ground Sloth, Imperial Mammoth, Merriam’s Giant Condor, Dire Wolf, American Lion, California Saber Tooth Cat, Western Horse, and Short-Faced Bear. A second extinction had come upon the place—a disappearance in death of species that had already long since disappeared from the world of life.

As Lydia walked through the emptied museum, she felt it was still filled with ghosts: of the greats, like Page and Harlan and Stock and Merriam and Gilbert, and the millions of more ordinary folks who had visited the museum in its nearly four decades of operation since its opening in 1977. Leaving the building and locking it behind her, she felt a strange empathy with La Brea Woman, the only human fossil that had ever been unearthed there. Discovered one hundred and one years earlier, near the end of the main 1906-1915 excavation period, the skeleton had been that of a woman in her twenties, apparently ritually murdered then buried in the asphalt seeps, 9,000 years in the past.

Walking up the ramp of the main entrance, Lydia stepped off the ark at last. Or rather the raft, she thought, because that was, structurally, what the Page Museum in fact was: a thousand ton concrete raft afloat on a lake of asphalt matrix. Up at ground level, on the “main deck”, the old busker with his guitar was at his usual station. At his work early today beyond any reasonable hope of profit, the busker stood on the plaza between the museum and the viewing station which looked out over the asphalt quarry lake with its replica mammoths in the grip of tarry tragedy—and which, once, had drawn the best crowds. The busker had been at his station regaling the park passers-by with folk songs and his own compositions and parodies nearly every day for longer than anyone could remember, even though interest in Rancho La Brea—and the Museum’s hours of opening—had fallen steadily over the past half-dozen years.

“Captain Hancock had a ranch, ee-yi ee-yi oh,” the busker sang, to the tune of “Old MacDonald,” when he saw Lydia approaching, “and on that ranch he had some mammoths, ee-yi, ee-yi oh. With a chomp branch here and a chomp branch there, here a chomp, there a chomp, everywhere a chomp branch, Captain Hancock had some mammoths, ee-yi ee-yi-oh....”

Lydia smiled and tossed a couple bucks into the old busker’s money box.

“Thanks, Doc,” the old man said, tipping his hat, then launched into a verse about Hancock’s saber tooths. Lydia was taken aback: that “Thanks, Doc” was as much conversation as the old street musician had afforded her since she started work here. She would have liked to know more about him, but he seemed intent on his playing and singing. Those two words were probably all the sign she was going to get from him that both their jobs here had come to an end.

Sad, really, Lydia thought as she walked up onto the viewing station overlooking the Lake Pit. So much still to be learned from this place. Looking down at the replica mammoth tragedy, she thought again how inaccurate that crowd-pleasing scene was, when compared to their current understanding of what had actually happened here.

Ceaselessly bubbling with methane from the fissures in the earth deep below it, the lake itself was actually a result of asphalt quarrying done primarily during the nineteenth century. Most of the animals that had died and been preserved here had not died in deep tarry lakes. They had met their fates in shallow seeps and pondings of asphalt on hot summer days, the asphalt that entrapped them often camouflaged by dust and leaves.

In the fall and winter, when the rains came, streams and their sediments re-buried the seeps, which in turn trapped still more animals and plants in their sticky grasp with the return of the warm weather. So it had continued, summer entrapments and winter burials, season after season for forty thousand years—and would still have continued, trapping household pets and unfortunate homeless people, were it not for the fences put up around each new seep as it surfaced.

Lydia turned her back on the bubbling lake and walked back down to ground level from the viewing station. She headed northwest across the park, past the Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings, past the trees and urban green space, past the remains of many of the hundred and more rusty-girdered and board-walled pits that had been dug into the matrix during the great excavations of the first two decades of the twentieth century. She walked past Pit 91, reopened in 1969, with its Viewing Station for the tourists who wanted to see the paleontologists, biologists, and geologists going about their dirty sticky work. She strode past the big Observation Pit, then into the Northwest Corner, near Ogden and Sixth Street, where several large, cone-shaped asphalt pools, the so-called Sycamore Pits, had opened up soon after the Great Quake hit L.A.

This was where her field work had taken place, during that few months each summer when the ground water had dried up or could be pumped out of the pits economically enough so that excavations could continue. Summers that had once entrapped mammoths had, for the past century, snared only scientists. Yet there were countless discoveries still to be made in the post-Quake pits—proof of which was the fossil find she had made only two days previously, while shutting down Pit 129.

She had spotted part of a skull, sticking up out of the tarry matrix—human, but not quite. And part of a shoulder blade, a scapula, but strangely elongated and reinforced. Probably the most important discovery at the tar pits in more than one hundred years, it had been overlooked throughout the rest of the shutdown because of the last-minute nature of the find and the fact that the La Brea fossils were almost always found in a highly compacted jumble or conglomeration. No clean strata here; the tar moved, and the remains of victims were often trampled by others victims as those victims were themselves dying.

For reasons too that ran solidly contrary to all her scientific training, Lydia was telling no one about the discovery. She sensed almost instinctively that any media hype now about strange, not-quite-human remains being discovered at Rancho La Brea would only infuriate the increasingly powerful and anti-Darwinian churchstaters. Who knew what they might do if such news got them riled? Have La Brea declared a hazardous waste zone? Burned off, or pumped out for cheap fuel oil? Mine the asphalt again, as it had been mined in the nineteenth century, when the fossil bones were thought to be the remains of unfortunate cattle that had strayed into the pits—and the road commissioners in San Francisco had sent down letters of complaint about all the bones they were finding in the asphalt shipped north from La Brea?

No, Lydia thought. Best to let the paleontological work go quietly into dormancy, for now. She had personally sealed the top of Pit 129 along with the rest of the excavations. 129 would begin filling with ground water soon enough, a dank and dark cistern that would hopefully survive undisturbed through the dank, dark and disturbing times now come upon intellectual and scientific culture in the United States of America.

She walked back through the park, saying good-bye to the few members of the Skeleton Crew still on the job and bidding Security farewell. Leaving the park and crossing Wilshire Boulevard in the morning light, Lydia kept thinking she had forgotten to do something—rather like the feeling she sometimes got, usually just after she left home on vacation, that she had left a light burning or the oven switched on. Other than filing the closing reports with the proper authorities, however, there was nothing more for her to do. She had done everything that could be done.

Once in her car in the parking lot, she turned on the ignition, then sat for a moment in her car, crying and sobbing quietly over the low whir of the electric motor. Brushing away the tears and driving out of the lot, she realized that this wasn’t just about the shutdown of research at La Brea—devastating as that was—but also about the prospect of meeting her mother Marie at the pier in San Pedro, then together taking a ferry out to see her brother Todd, in drug rehab aboard the “ship of hope against dope,” the S.S.
Libre de Drogas
.

After her sleepless night, a very long day had just begun. The busker in the park, she thought, was somehow a sign for the transition from her museum world to Todd’s world as a musician. She did not like the thought, when it came to her, that the busker had been standing halfway between museum and mammoth family tragedy.

Driving toward San Pedro, Lydia thought about the arc of her brother’s career as a musician. He had started very early on piano and keyboards, showing such great facility with them that he was playing Rachmaninoff before he hit puberty. In his teens and twenties, however, he had moved steadily from Rachmaninoff to Rock Monomyth: The forming of his band, Himalayan Blue Poppies, and the surprising popular success of their first album, Yeti’s Berg Address. The touring. The initial heavy drug and booze experiences. The co-founding of Intravenous Entertainment and the Nu Akashic Records label with Poppies guitarist Johnny Vance. The Poppies break-up. The critical success but lukewarm sales of the three Fabro-Vance albums. The acrimonious split with Vance and the ensuing court battles. Todd’s slide into deep dependence on hard drugs and, most recently, his hitting bottom, doing jail time, and finally going into rehab aboard the ark o’ narcotico, the
Libre
.

Six months back, since they were both in the L.A. area and Todd wasn’t touring, Lydia had gone out to visit him and his entourage at his place in Montecito, above Santa Barbara. She had left the tar pits and the museum and driven out there, but the scene in Todd’s big party house had seemed another, more contemporary version of Rancho La Brea’s Quaternary entrapment scenarios. Her brother, increasingly mired in drug addiction, had seemed then like some once-fleet grazer—a part-striped Western Horse, perhaps—hobbled and brought low in an asphalt seep. Todd’s groupies had struck Lydia as being like carnivores—saber-toothed cats, dire wolves—ripping into the carcass, dragging away all they could from it.