Fountain Blue

 

Give The Monkey A Dollar

 

Hidden Monkey

 

The Dog Sees All

 

Stillness

Deer photographed from my car (August, 2019)

Often in these last days of summer, the mist makes its way up the canyon from Santa Monica Bay and swirls around the Spanish Colonial architecture of the college where I work.  On these days of meetings, working with students, organizing lists and course syllabi, I try to get in at least two or three walks around campus to keep the blood flowing.

The thing about Los Angeles is that you are never more than an hour from every kind of geographic environment:  oceans, lakes, a river, flood plains; mountains, deserts, and several valleys.  On the steps of the chapel on campus, I can see mountains, the flats of Santa Monica, and the bay itself stretching out to Catalina Island on a clear morning.

Quite often, especially in the monastic summers when the campus is mostly in repose while summer session is being held downtown at our other campus, the lawns and walkways become the province of nature:  deer, coyotes, squirrels, sparrows, red-tailed hawks, owls and butterflies.  Occasionally, during the fall and spring semesters, we see wildlife in the quieter corners of the campus.  I have felt a particular kinship with the deer.  It is ironic that I used to accompany my father on his quest to shoot one every fall Saturday morning of my childhood.

A typical encounter goes like this:  I feel the fatigue of looking at paper after paper from my writing students.  Or, I have a challenging problem in research or writing that I must work out in my head.  I excuse myself from the office and go out and begin a trek around one of the walking paths that crisscross the campus.  A spot I like overlooks a deep canyon that flows south passed the Getty Center.  Red-tailed hawks ride thermals all the way up the canyon, searching for field mice and other small prey.  It is necessary to stand for a moment, close my eyes, and breathe deeply.  When I open them, I allow my vision and awareness to lock in on the canyon choked with eucalyptus, sage, yucca, and scrub oak.  Only then do I become aware of an otherness, a presence, and inevitably, the deer will materialize out of nowhere, grazing lightly while watching me.  I do not move, and they relax and go about their business.  I watch them, their movements, their patterns.  Usually, I see females and young ones; rarely do I catch a glimpse of the more cautious males, or bucks.  Sometimes, their antlers are in velvet, meaning they have not hardened yet and can be tender if the deer bumps into something or tries to fight another animal.

These deer seem to exist in a parallel universe to ours.  I have seen them gently grazing while students or cars pass within feet of them.  Only occasionally do they spook and lope away with a speed that is breath-taking.  Once I saw one sprint back and forth repeatedly across a rectangular patch of grass, relishing freedom like a condemned man.  I’ve seen them bedded down in the dense brush.  They do their thing and the human beings inhabiting their space do theirs.

I drink in the calm, measured life of grazing the hillside.  I feel the tension slip away as it does in deep meditation.  Feet away from each other, we human beings, facing tests and course work and rushing to class, exist parallel to the deer who take their time meandering across the canyon.  Two universes, two speeds, both unique.

So daily, I seek out this parallel dimension alongside the academic human reality.  I connect with nature—the deer—and allow my human cares to dissipate.  When I am driving onto or off of campus and I see a deer or two or three, I’ll stop and watch them.  Often, they have come right up to the car and walked so close I could have touched them.  I don’t.  I think that would disrupt the transparent membrane between our reality and theirs.  I just watch, and they watch me.

Once, while driving onto campus one early morning, I saw two coyotes in an open meadow, circling around, warily staring at me, baring teeth even though I did not even get out of my car.  This is strange behavior for coyotes except when they are cornered.  Normally, they run for cover and do not like to be out in the open.  If they are stalking something, they attack and carry the unfortunate prey away to the underbrush to strip flesh and gnaw on the bones.  But these two stared at me defiantly, and kept circling around.  I waited, holding my breath, and watched them from the safety of my car.  One, feeling I was not a threat, went down into the tall grass to pull and rip at something while the other kept watch.  The other came up out of the grass with a deer leg in his mouth and blood covering his snout.  This was desecration, a bloody testament to the horrors inherent in nature.  It is never all peace and tranquility.  This is life—predators and prey.  Even in the realm of the deer, every day is a struggle.  The rules of their universe parallel the rules of our own.

Not too long ago, our campus security saw a mountain lion crossing near the guard shack at the entrance to campus.  This hunter, the most fearsome predator in this area of the Santa Monica Mountains, was out and about.  A week ago, a mountain lion managed to cross from our western side of Interstate 405 in Brentwood to the eastern side where Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are located.  This is an amazing feat that a human being probably could not duplicate as the 405 is one of the busiest freeways in California.

We exist side-by-side with nature.  In Los Angeles, this means dealing with an alternative universe of great beauty, tranquility, violence and danger.  In short, one not unlike our own.  It is what makes Los Angeles unique as a large metropolis with a population equal to some countries.  It is the intersection of several strands of existence, and if we live here long enough, it becomes part of who we are.  Humanity and nature, us and our animal counterparts, side by side, the twin souls of the city.

If I Take the Wings of Dawn

for Laura Michaelian (1922-2013)

Earlier this week, while stuck in gridlocked traffic on Sepulveda Boulevard through the pass here on the west side of Los Angeles, a young deer, a buck with forked horns, ambled out of the brush on the side of the road and walked up to the passenger window of my car.  He stared at me intently for several moments, maybe even a minute, and clearly in my head I heard his voice:  “What are you doing with your life?”

Before you accuse me of driving under the influence, or question how I knew it was the deer’s voice, let me just say in my defense that although I was listening on the radio to the predictions of400,000 Ebola cases by the end of January and the report of how tumbleweeds have taken over whole neighborhoods in my drought-plagued city, I was not hysterical or even close to falling over the edge into insanity.  The only thing I can say is that the deer gave voice to a question that has been running around in my dreams for months now:  “What are you doing with your life?”

My problem is, I keep waiting for something.  A sign, a hint, a door left opened.  Is that wrong?  I mean, there has to be more to existence here in my fiftieth year than sitting in two hours of traffic each day only to fall into bed every night wondering exactly what I accomplished that day, or worse, what will I accomplish tomorrow, or next month, or in the years ahead?  What does it really mean if you feel as if every part of your life is a wrong turn off the existential highway?  I think of the phrase, “in the weeds.”  Is it normal to feel, on every level, in every situation, that I am “in the weeds?”  It is not just that I am entangled in the details and complexities of my life; those details and complexities are things I never thought I’d be entangled in, much less have to take ownership for, but here we are.  I own the wrong life.  However, I can hear a literal Greek chorus of wise men from Plato to William Michaelian tell me that there is no “right” or “wrong” life.  There is just life.  Live it, and quit your belly-aching.  (Okay, that last line sounded more like my mother from Kentucky.)

We live in moments, crystal drops of time that fall and shatter and wash away to become fragments of memory.  From dust we were created and to dust we shall return.  It is so difficult, so heartbreakingly frustrating, so profoundly vast and empty, to contemplate the fact that the world will go on, quite efficiently, without us.

I remember a religious studies professor I had as an undergraduate, the same man who married my wife and me in his church 27 years ago.  He told us once that as he was driving home one evening, he came to a stop by the side of the road with the premonition that he would die soon, and almost everyone on earth would not care.  Outside of his family and a few friends, his death would escape notice.  No tributes. No public monuments.  No lasting work—a great novel or philosophical treatise—to leave behind.  Just a quiet slipping away into the dusk.  Very few of us are Shakespeare.  Our reputations will not transcend the end of our earthly bodies.  We die twice, once at our deaths, and then again when everyone alive who remembers us dies.  How do we live in such a world?  My teacher broke down and sobbed in his car, and this from a Congregationalist minister not given to highly emotional outbursts or bouts of narcissism.  His was a stoic, New England persona, and a deeply serious man trying to express something dark and disturbing:  the absence of being in the world.

Although mortal, I am trying with every fiber of my being not to be.  How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?  We live well, with good works and intentions.  We create art and beauty, we celebrate truth, we extend a hand, we listen, we meditate, we hold close those we love.  We get up each morning and wind the clock of existence, day after day, so that time does not run out on us.  But it will.  It always does.  Time flies, and then there is darkness.  But still, we try to hang on to the light.

The deer by the side of Sepulveda Boulevard looked deep into my eyes for what seemed like an eternity, a plasma pause in the universe of light.  Then he snorted and broke the spell.  He shook his head from side to side, turned, and ambled away.  I watched him pass the other cars behind me, stopping for a moment to look at each driver.  I guess he still had not found the answer he was looking for.

Wildlife

Photo courtesy of SMPD

One afternoon, while driving in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, I rounded the corner of a twisting street to come face to face with a coyote.  I stared at him through the car window, and he stared back, frozen in intensity.  He was not afraid; he was gauging his chances of flight or fight.  Quite suddenly, he decided he’d flee today, and he loped down a nearby driveway and into the bushes leading to the home’s backyard.  I could only hope there were no kids playing somewhere close, or a small dog or cat out for an afternoon stroll.

On another late afternoon drive in the same area, I came upon several deer in the roadway.  They calmly looked at me in my car, completely unafraid.  I sat and watched them graze on either side of the roadway, until they disappeared down a hill.

Once, up late reading and writing on a summer night, I heard a commotion in my fenced-in and vine-covered backyard.  I came out with a flashlight and saw nothing amiss on the patio.  Upon shining the beam up into the trees, I saw a constellation of twinkling yellow lights.  They were not stars but eyes.  I counted at least a dozen tree rats using the branches as a rodent expressway to the fruit trees in the yards up and down the block.  One of them eventually found my car engine and made a nest in a wheel well to catch some residual warmth.  I have also seen possums back there, including one juvenile who had obviously fallen from the trees.  The mother sat on a thick limb directly over the patio, waiting for me to disappear so she could mount a rescue.

Driving home late at night in my neighborhood, I have slammed on the brakes for a family of raccoons living in a storm drain.  A few weeks later, walking after dark, I passed the spot and heard wicked growling and thrashing in the bushes.  The mother raccoon was not happy that I had invaded her space.

Black bear tranquilized in Glendale
(Raul Roa/Glendale News Press) 

I tell these stories not because they are unique, but because in Los Angeles, they are commonplace, everyday occurrences.  And if you talk to people long enough, you will hear far more frightening encounters with wildlife than my rather pedantic tales.  I know people who have watched their small dogs torn to pieces by coyotes.  Blackbears make regular appearances in urban neighborhoods to swim in pools and eat from garbage cans.  Joggers and hikers have been attacked by mountain lions in the hills around the city.  And that brings me to the 75-100 poundmountain lion who decided to take an early morning stroll in downtown Santa Monica just a few blocks from the beach.  The animal paid for his indiscretion with his life.

According to an article in the Santa Monica Patch, this two-year old mountain lion would have died anyway, even if he was successfully tranquilized and transported back into the mountains.  Reporter Jenna Chandler quotes Jeff Sikich of the National Parks Service who told her that “Nearly every one of the handful of mountain lions of the same age tracked by the park service since 2002 in the Santa Monica Mountains has died while trying to establish his own home range.”

The cat was simply doing what comes naturally:  at a certain age, the male lions must find their own space.  The area above Santa Monica is saturated with the big cats right now, so it is difficult for a youngster to find his own territory.  If he had been able to find a suitable spot, with so many mountain lions prowling around, this often leads to a lack of genetic diversity and inbreeding.  Mountain lions usually turn back when encountering people or freeways, but often they are hit by cars and killed, or come in contact with a hiker with deadly results.

Sikich believes this mountain lion bedded down off of Second Street because he was lost.  He would have had to cross major streets and intersections, and walk by people both sleeping and awake to get to the center of town.  The Third Street Promenade, a major tourist and shopping center, was a block away.  When authorities tried to dart the cat and the sedative didn’t work, they felt the public was in enough danger to shoot and kill the animal.  Still, as many comments indicate on the Patch article, we will never know what might have occurred had the cat been saved and transported elsewhere.

May be we need to re-evaluate our compact with nature.  Here in Los Angeles, we live in such proximity to hills and mountains.  Urban growth mixes uneasily with the natural world that once occupied the space, and neither humans or animals are safe.  No one likes to see their beloved pets torn apart, and from the response this week, no Angelinos are comfortable with law enforcement gunning down lions and bears in their neighborhoods.

Police officers must have non-lethal weaponry on hand in their vehicles to use against animals.  As long as we continue to build into each other’s habitats here in Los Angeles, we will face this problem, and therefore, both animals and humans will be in jeopardy.  The only solution is to be better prepared for the next encounter.