In a vast field, before the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was built nearby, between Wilshire boulevard and Fairfax, there were immense pits of oozing oscilating tar –alive – not ancient like the skeletons of the wooly mammoths and mastadons revealed as the tar lurched, bubbled and poured over them.
My father enjoyed cemeteries and maybe this was the ultimate cemetery –one whose interred you could see gyrating in their primeval death.
It was early morning, about 8:30 and chilly for LA. We bundled in jackets against the light fog. Or it was an afternoon so bright that the sky seemed like it might disappear into another stage set. We never went in the evening –but we could have –there were no fences, tickets or explainers. There were flimsy bollards around the perimeters. There were maybe three pits, each covered by a pavilion without walls, held up by posts. We usually stood at the edge of the biggest.
For how long would we stay there looking down?
I asked my dad some questions that he couldn’t answer.
We always wanted to go again, my siblings and I, we were never refused. I could tell that it was a rare place as exciting for us as for grownups. We detected this in the attention of our Dad’s body as he gazed into the tar. He went silent. We followed.
Mastodons were here, exactly where we stood, when it was savannah. Sabretooth tigers hunted here in Pleistocene forests. Now it was an immense scrubby field with a few drinking fountains: Hancock Park.
This swath of Wilshire, including the tar pits, is still called “The Miracle Mile.” Many movies have been shot here. I’ve seen none of them. One is called Volcano another Earthquake – but the tar pits are not a result of volcanic activity – they were formed seismically through multiple intervals of uplift and faulting that allowed crude petroleum to seep to the surface from underground deposits over the last 50,000 years. The shallow petroleum pools entrapped and preserved millions of fossils representing over 660 species of plants, organisms, vertebrates, and invertebrates.
In 1910, it was the Salt Creek oilfields, dotted with oil-well barracks. It was seven miles west of Los Angeles. Before that it was the La Brea Rancheria.
When the bones rose above the tar for a minute you could see whites of ribs, craniums, unidentifiable skeletal parts.
In Los Angeles way before Los Angeles was here. Way before we woke up that morning and got in the car. Before parents, but maybe not before the ocean and palm trees.
Did it ever stop roiling, blowing methane bubbles, lurching, turning up bones?
What is under the earth? The past? No, layers.
Archaeologists call it “a carnivore trap” since so many carnivores were killed when they chased prey who ran into it. They couldn’t escape the bubbling tar, which is asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil. Now migratory birds get stuck in it. Asphalt preserves bones, mummifies the ancient by throwing it into view —a clock that keeps and kills time.
What
made the tar constantly move?
I found the names of the layers at home in The World Book Encyclopedia for Children: “lithosphere, asthenosphere, mesospheric mantle, crust, outer core, inner core. The geologic component layers of earth are at increasing depths below the surface.”
Where were the subternauts I wondered? John Glen had recently landed on the moon. I wanted to be an astronaut who went in the other direction. I collected rocks, mostly quartz --and shells from the beach. A start to making contact with the first layer.
When I went down, my father would accompany me. I was sure.
Travelling through the lithosphere into the asthenosphere and beyond, I’d speak rock and see in the dark. Time would compress under the weight of the layers. When I surfaced, my mother would barely have realized I was gone, though I would have descended through eons of schist.
Persephone would lead me –she who is named for disaster “destroyer of light.” She who knew how to navigate a subterranean love. Are the outer and inner cores named after Kore aka Demeter, Persephone’s mother? –She who roamed the earth in anguish at the disappearance of her daughter abducted by Hades? —Demeter, goddess of agriculture who mourns in the fallow Fall and Winter when Persephone was required, wanted(?), to return to Hades –Demeter-Kore who became joyful and returned to tending the earth’s cultivation when she and Persephone were reunited in the Spring and Summer?
I was a girl who could also access the molten.
At night, I fell asleep with my eyes open. As long as they remained open the witch who stirred her cauldron of boiling, lurching brew, couldn’t enter my room. Open-eyed I saw the tar pits at night when no one was there --mirroring the vivid L.A. sky – white bones surfaced as underground stars. Coyotes howled for me to go out and join them. Mountain lions rambled at night in our canyon.
In the Fall the smell of fire was often in the air. On the way to school the car radio reported a new one, out of control, in our area. “Could it burn our house?” I asked my father. “No, never.” he replied. That afternoon my grandfather appeared in front of school to walk us to his nearby house. We’d been evacuated. From the safety of TV, we watched our street blaze, trying to detect our house through the flames on screen.
Could the tar pits burn? Had they already burned?
In despair and rage Demeter ravages the earth’s surface in the Fall, scorching acres, to reveal where the abductor has hidden her daughter. We call it “fire season” in California and other Mediterranean places.
It was the summer when I was ten years old. My Father no longer lived with us. My mother enrolled me in Mr. Quiggley’s summer program. He read the Iliad aloud while we seven kids, ages 8 –13, dissected pregnant sharks in a church basement. Or, he read us purportedly “Chumash” tales, then piled us into his station wagon for a visit to the past aka an “archaeological dig.” Delicately, as he’d demonstrated, we brushed encrusted earth from objects barely detectable to the untrained eye --obsidian arrowheads, mortars and pestles, among other “artifacts” plentiful in the ground of early 1960’s LA.
When I was twenty-two I sent bones I’d found in a field on the island of Paros back to myself in San Francisco. The postal clerk asked me to open the box for customs. The Greek women in the Post Office exclaimed in horror and reprimanded me for stealing bones. Maybe they thought the bones were human –though no human could have a femur that large or a skull of such narrow shape.
In what movie does a girl send bones to herself? What travel trash book shows that women know how to descend and return? I didn’t tell anyone that I loved the smell of gasoline and was excited to pull up to a pump anticipating the fumes that would enter the car.
How to make a movie of a girl’s profession as a subternaut, her training at the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits? Skillfully she descends riding gravity thermals, scanning the chthonic for those trapped in the roiling sludge. She gets lost with them, mostly men, in the inchoate. Then she guides them to the surface. Adept of extraction, under daylight she bestows gifts. Then many forget and believe they are the alchemists of insight. Believe they can make wheat grow and navigate netherworlds.
Lost again, they return for more from this child Inanna and her underground sanctuaries, miner who feels and speaks for those who can’t. While she, shining, able and glad to be of service, runs after her dad’s stray tennis balls –and begins to wonder whether she has the right job?
It would be an abstract film. Maybe by Stan Brakhage. It might never name its location. It would invoke the tar pits as texture and atmosphere. In it a young woman might eat six pomegranate seeds -- not knowing that to eat with one’s captor forces one into eternal captivity. It would be projected on the surface of the Tar Pits on a moonless night. It could be called “The Miracle Mile.”
Susan Gevirtz’s most recent books include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel
abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey
Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat),
and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson
(Peter Lang). “Sun Worship,” an excerpt from her manuscript Guide School, is a
recent chapbook from YoYo Labs. “Doctor Shaman,” another excerpt from Guide
School is a chapbook from above/ground Press, and “The Guides,” another
excerpt, is a forthcoming chapbook from Antiphony Press. She was associate
editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s
poetry and scholarship. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime
antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting
of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State
University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in many MFA in
poetry programs, the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California
College of the Arts. She is based in San Francisco.
