Fact vs Fiction is a Sticky Subject

 

    “Wagon Wheel,” started blasting from the iPhone at 4:20 a.m., this morning, a time set to give us a chance to get dressed before the attendant comes around to convert the bunks back to seats and drop off our continental breakfast at 4:45 a.m. We’re due into LA’s Union Station at 8 a.m. but we’re making good time and are on track (pun intended) for a 7:30 a.m., arrival. She runs a tight ship and has 22 roomettes and seven bedrooms to attend to before then so someone needs to go first. 

     It is still dark out when we coast through San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga to the east of Los Angeles. From here it was a numbing repetition of single-story manufacturing buildings, rail yards and truck warehouses, and houses crowded together on postage-stamp lots.  

    Just before arriving we cross the pathetic Los Angeles River, which is little more than a 32-mile,concrete-lined ditch that serves as an open sewer. No TV or movie companies were filming chase scenes there today so the folks in the numerous homeless encampments have it all to themselves.

     Union Station itself is a marvelous structure, bigger than Boston’s South Station but far smaller than Chicago’s Union Station. Because it’s too early to check into the hotel (they said after 10) we grab a LA Times, and cups of coffee and chai and hang out in the spacious halls where this year’s Academy Awards were held.

LA Union Station

    Around 9:30 a.m., we head outside and hail an Uber using the recently-downloaded app on my phone. Long a tried and true taxi man, this is my first time Ubering. We used cabs at the start of the trip in Boston and the first one was dirty, the driver unmasked, the car bereft of functioning shock absorbers. Under the guise of avoiding traffic, he took the way long way around to the hotel, basically doubling the fare. I’m impressed with everything about the Uber process. We choose the size of the car (room for luggage etc.), can see the driver’s rating, and were sent his name, license plate number and got real time updates on his arrival time. All were in good working order and clean as a whistle. Sorry Yellow Cab. I’m not ever going back.

    Our hotel is on Vine Street, about six blocks south of the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard in a neighborhood that’s kind of a transition zone from that touristy area to a somewhat grittier reality. It’s about as LA as you can get.

    Our only shore excursion today is a visit to the La Brea Tar Pit Museum and Hancock Park grounds. As a kid I was always fascinated with the thought of mastodons, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths and especially saber-tooth tigers becoming mired in stinky black goo, sinking quickly with a defiant roar to an ignoble end. Much like my overwrought concern that quicksand and piranhas would be bigger problems in adulthood, I had visions of sprawling lakes of bubbling black asphalt ensnaring hapless victims with alarming regularity. At the museum, however, we learned that even though more than a million bones of creatures that lived 38,000 to 10,000 years ago have been recovered the actual pace of capture was still only something like one getting stuck every ten years or so.

    The biggest misconception of all is that rather than some bottomless pit of goo, the layer of asphalt, really just very thick oil, was only a few inches deep. The average pit was maybe 20 yards across. Dried vegetation often obscured the danger.

Saber-Tooth Tiger Skeleton.

    Once stuck, it was not unusual for victims to linger for weeks. The ratio of predator bones, including giant bears, early wolves, lions, vultures, and those saber-tooth tigers, to prey species bones, is nine to one. That makes sense as they would be attracted to anything that became trapped and seemed like easy pickings. The most common bones found belong to wolves. There are more than 3,000 skulls in the museum’s collection. Only the bones of a single human have been found.

Wall of wolf skulls.

    The Tar Pits’ diminutive geographical size belies their importance to science. Along with inspiring the imaginations of small boys they are a great source of information about the scores of mammal species that once inhabited pre-history Los Angeles. Hancock Park, which includes a fabulous museum and the actual tar pits, along with ongoing archeological projects, is only about a city block in size. Boiling burps of methane continue to billow from the bottom of a small pond in the park, disturbing the floating layers of asphalt sending the distinct aroma of a newly-paved road across the entire complex.

    All around the tar pits, high-rise buildings are going up, their tall slender shapes loom like sentinels posted to warn the unsuspecting of the ancient danger below. There’s even a network TV show this fall about a giant void opening beneath the area sending hapless visitors on a three-hour tour (aka Gilligan, the Skipper and Mary Ann), back 10,000 years in time. We didn’t see any steaming fissures or voids but there was a spot next to the parking lot that looked suspiciously like quicksand.

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A mammoth skeleton unearthed at La Brea Tar Pits.