La Brea, Sycamores, Los Angeles

 

 La Brea

La Brea (1) is dedicated to my beautiful friends Storrie, just 1 year old, and Elena, now 3. Their footsteps as they frolic, teeter, charge, gallop and giggle into the future mark the trail towards the Seventh Generation. May they walk in beauty.

 

This song is also for the grizzly cub, the monarch caterpillar, the condor chick, the pocket mouse pup, and the sycamore seedling, all on the path to their own Seventh Generation. Live long and prosper.

 

About the song, the history, and the Sycamores. La Brea Tar Pits burbles and oozes in the heart of Los Angeles, a mysterious dark window into 50,000 years of history. Out of the tar, sheltered safe from decay for tens of thousands of years, emerge the bones of the great sabertoothed cats, dire wolves, mastodons and mammoths, the ancient horses and camels that inhabited the savannas, meadows, forests, and wetlands that were LA’s past. We can know in a visceral way that the earth once trembled under the hooves of vast herds of ancient giant bison, because our imaginations can ride their bones into the past.

 

The green grass of the Hancock Park, where La Brea is now lurks, is dotted with orange traffic cones strategically placed over new blurps of black tar, the cones a clever system to prevent people and their pups who enjoy the park from stepping into a gooey asphalt puddle that had just surfaced in an Earth-hiccup. The tar pits don’t hold still.

 

As scientists of La Brea reconstruct the magnificent ice-age animals from their bones, they also restore an image of their world: the smaller mammals, birds, fossilized plants, and even the insects that were trapped within the tar. A story of the intricacy of ecosystems of times past is revealed under this scrutiny, and a portrait of how life carries forward through time. The science allows us to witness the transformation in life when the Pleistocene, the last ice age, ended 11,700 years ago as the glaciers retreated to the north. This transformation took us, Homo sapiens, and all who travel this planet with us, into the warmth of the Holocene: our times. The end of the last Ice Age was time of dramatic transitions, and some of the fantastic beasts of the Pleistocene whose bones were buried in the tar went extinct. However, most the plants and animals from those times have survived.

 

Just over 10,000 years ago a woman lived and died in the place that is now Los Angeles. Her bones were discovered in the tar of La Brea in 1914 (2). The bones of a domestic dog had joined her in the shifting earth of this place much more recently, just 3,000 years ago (3), and the dog’s bones were found along with hers. We don’t know much about her, but we do know she was here, so that this place that I was born to, Los Angeles, was her place in her time. And La Brea has opened a door of knowledge into the world she walked in; we would recognize much of it. Like us, she was a woman of the Holocene, and embedded in the swirl of life that carried through successfully from the end of the last ice age to occupy the magnificent world that we inhabit, we know, and we delight in. As we look over our shoulder from our most fragile place in time, the Anthropocene (where humanity has become the dominant force acting on climate and the environment), we hope that rich web of life we evolved as part of will continue.

 

The La Brea Woman would have walked through The Long Ago shaded by sycamore and oak, and would have known the seasons marked by the poppies and lupine, by the sycamore’s alternating leaf and bare white branches. She would have witnessed the glow of grass seed on graceful stem in the long light of the afternoon. She and her people would have known, named, and understood many of the same native plants, birds, and mammals with which we share our home today, only her people would have the intimacy gained by living embedded in a wild world that we can only imagine from behind our walls and windows.

 

Condors and crows would have wind-danced and courted in her skies. Wolves and grizzly bears shared her homeland, and their presence and power would have stirred awe and respect, a quickening heart. Hummingbirds and butterflies would have fluttered on their wing beats of beauty. Coyotes with things-to-do and places-to-go would have trotted through her times, no doubt meeting her eyes if they encountered her, because that’s what coyotes do. Squirrels would have warned her with their chattering if something was amiss near her home, and would have enjoyed leftovers from her stone ground meal suppers.  She was close the Pacific. Perhaps sometimes she got to settle down with the gulls in warm summer sand to watch the trail of shimmering gold and red that is the sunset on the western sea, and to witness the deep blue twilight taking the horizon as the spinning Earth carried her into the starry night. 

 

The lyrics of La Brea were written while sitting with my back against a Western Sycamore, Platanus racemosa, whose ancestors surely would have shaded the La Brea woman and her family. This leafy graceful survivor shaded me as I sat near the tar pits and read about the layers of history that have unfolded in La Brea. The sycamore is at home here. Her graceful limbs are slow dancing with the sky, moving to the beat of the seasons in twists turns shaped to catch the light of sun. Her roots are intricate weavings, living paths through the life-laden darkness of the soil. She is a life-raft, a safe microcosm of the Wild that persists even in this most urban of settings. Native insects, native birds, native animals are all at home in her circle. Reina de Los Angeles.

 

Sycamores have roots twined deep in the history of in Los Angeles, and the story of one is particularly bittersweet (4-6) . A sycamore seed once found its place in the world on the western banks of the Los Angeles River, the first young leaves of the seedling reaching for the sky in the late 1400’s. This tree would have been untroubled by the ways of men, and of course blissfully unaware that Columbus was taking his first steps at his landfall in the Bahamas far to the east just as she was unfurling her first new leaves, her new roots were sampling the sweet water from the river. 

 

This particular tree eventually grew to be a rare giant, 60 feet tall, and 200 feet across. The tree once shaded the Tongva village of Yaanga. Its shelter provided a meeting place for people who would come from all across southern California for councils. The Tongva people used this sycamore’s great size as a landmark, and they described other places by their distance relative to this tree. They used the shade it offered to meet and talk in comfort and beauty. The inner bark of sycamores was used for food or medicinal tonic, their branches were used to build shelters, and their big leaves used to wrap bread for baking; this great sycamore might have helped the Tongva out in these ways. If they borrowed the tree's help in these ways, they didn’t harm it in doing so; they lived in this particular tree’s company for hundreds of years. The Tongva’s many neighbors also depended on this tree for food and shelter: red tail hawks, eagles, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, mice, squirrels, and beavers… the beautiful western tiger swallowtail butterflies used the sycamore leaf as food for their young. 

 

The Californios displaced the Tongva, driving them from their homes and taking their freedom, using them for forced labor. When the Californios colonized this place, they also chose to settle near this tree, and named the tree El Aliso. Near its shade in 1781 they founded the small village El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. The people of Los Angeles lived alongside El Aliso for nearly a century as the fledgling city grew. Kelly Wallace, a historian with the LA public library, writes⁶, “In the 1830s, Frenchman Jean-Louis Vignes bought the land surrounding the tree and opened the El Aliso winery with cuttings he imported from Bordeaux… Vignes was so fond of the tree that shaded his wine cellar, he became known as “Don Luis del Aliso” to neighbors and townsfolk.” Kelly also notes that in 1870 the Los Angeles Star described El Aliso this way, “For regularity and symmetry it has no equal in all the country around, and its graceful branches spreading across a diameter of nearly two hundred feet, afford a shade unlike any other in all Southern California…Four feet from the ground the trunk measures twenty feet in circumference, exclusive of the bark, which is two inches in thickness.” Finally, in 1875, the magnificent El Aliso was killed, giving way to LA’s growth; the tree was over-pruned, its great branches cut to expand a brewery, and Angelinos ran a busy street (a street they ironically called “Aliso” for the beloved tree) over its roots.

 

One can visit the memory of El Aliso in the place it is thought to have once stood, now a lonely little bit of concrete, a freeway sign, a chain link fence (6).  Better though to visit El Aliso’s grandchildren and great grandchildren that can be found in pockets of beauty in the city. A way for modern Angelinos to honor the memory of the abundance of life that once occupied the LA basin would be to choose to plant the native trees where and when they can (7,8), and to protect those native trees that remain (9): the Sycamore, the fragrant California Bay Laurel, the Coast Live Oak, and little Scrub Oak. Each of these trees supports a framework for native life, and fostering these trees allows the richness of diversity to reawaken and advance (10) even in the intensely urban backdrop of Los Angeles. Native trees can provide a living link that brings to us closer to our world, a healing of the separation we have forced between ourselves and Earth; they invite nature back home. 

 

I recently learned that descendants of the Tongva and other local native people in 2021 won a 30-year battle to keep a section of their ancestral home wild; sometimes grace prevails. They saved their sacred place of emergence, where their people first came into the world, called Povuu’nga. It borders the Cal State University campus in Long Beach (in all older reconning, Povuu’nga was a day’s walk south along the river from where El Aliso once stood (11)). Because of the voices of those who cared, Povuu’nga first narrowly missed becoming a strip mall in the 1990s, and then later a dumping ground in 2019; future plans for a parking lot were averted. The courts have ordered the place to be preserved, with governance by local native people in perpetuity. And the native people say “NO!” to Roundup, no to non-native plants, no to tree removal, to dumping, to asphalt. They say “Yes!” to restoration of the wild, and to reviving it as a place for ceremony, prayer, and contemplation. They will protect a place where the Earth reminds us that she is here, awake (12-14).

 

As it happens, Povuu’nga is a field that I grew up very near to in Long Beach. To me as a kid it was a stretch land of with wild grasses and few fine trees, including one very old tree that I loved to climb; an oak, if memory serves. Later, when I was in college I would go out of my way to walk under that tree. Long before I knew this place (and my favorite tree at its center) was important to the Tongva people, I was just glad for it, as it was literally the only wild bit of Earth of near us in our vast enveloping city. It was a place where the birds could nest, crickets sing, and a person could breathe. I learned only recently about the decades long struggle to keep this bit of Earth unfettered because my friend Sharon Cotrell (15) was one of many community activists who worked to save to save Povuu’nga. It is now safe in part because she added her strong voice to a powerful community chorus. 

 

When communities speak, hope begins. An opportunity ahead for the people of Los Angeles is with the Los Angeles River, as there is intention to restore sections of this broken lifeway in the LA River Master Plan (16). There will be a riverbank to plant. Sycamores? I hope local people will get involved to help shape this plan, and reawaken something beautiful in their midst.

 

This song, La Brea, is a prayer that the natural world that the La Brea Woman knew 10,000 years ago, the world we were also born to, will endure with its rich complexity and extraordinary beauty and be still recognizable 10,000 years from now. For this to happen, we will have to learn how to work and plan together. We must finally begin to follow the science that outlines possible strategies to take us back from the brink of the sorrow, suffering and mass extinction that is swiftly manifesting as human-charged climate change is beginning to transform our planet. We must open our hearts and minds to the writings, the poetry and prayers, that are calls to action. We have more than just our own Seventh Generation to consider just now, but the Seventh Generations of all whom we share the world with. We will need to figure out how to choose life.

This song was nominated in the Folk Music Category in the 2023 New Mexico Music Awards.

 

1.     Bette Korber, youtube, La Brea.

2.     John C. Merriam. Preliminary Report on the Discovery of Human Remains in an Asphalt Deposit at Rancho La Brea. Science 40:198-203 7 Aug 1914.

3.     Benjamin T. Fuller et al. Tar Trap: No Evidence of Domestic Dog Burial with “La Brea Woman”. PaleoAmerica 2:56-59, 2016.

4.     Nathan Masters. The Sycamores of Southern California: A Brief History. KCET  June 20, 2013.

5.     Nathan Masters. El Aliso: Ancient Sycamore Was Silent Witness to Four Centuries of L.A. History.  KCET June 27, 2012.

6.     Kelly Wallace, El Aliso, the Big Tree of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Public Library, History Department. LAPL blog. Friday, April 27, 2018.

7.     Native Trees for Urban Gardens in Southern California. Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants, 2014.

8.     Calscape, Restore Nature One Garden at a time: Western Sycamore.

9.     Glendale’s Indigenous Tree Program, California Sycamore.

10.  Lisa Novick. Just Because It'll Grow in Your Yard Doesn't Mean You Should Plant It. Huffpost, July 24, 2013, updated Dec. 6 2017.

11.  Sean Greene and Thomas Curwen. Mapping the Tongva villages of L.A.’s past. Los Angeles Times, 2019.

12.  Kelsey Brown. Perspectives on Puvungna. Dig Mag.  

13.  Tristan Maglunog. Puvungna. Youtube Video.

14.  Harry Saltzgaver. Cal State Long Beach, Native Americans reach agreement to perpetually protect Puvungna land. Long Beach Press Telegram, Grunion Gazette, July 16, 2021.

15.  Karen S. Harper. Sharon Ann Cotrell: Loud and Strong, First Women Dockworker on the West Coast. The Historical Society of Long Beach.

16.  LA River Master Plan.

 

Thoughts about the trees in veneraton: redwood, aspen, bristlecone

  

Veneration

Note added 9/4/2022: the ancient trees are in danger

When I wrote this song two years ago I was not too worried about these trees. I had naively thought they were doing fine, not yet touched by climate change, and having lived so long, through so much, that they could survive the problems we are creating. I knew redwood forests were being hit by fires, but I also knew they needed fire. But through this last year I've learned that these trees are in fact in trouble, and each needs our attention and preservation efforts to continue to thrive. So I added to each section about the trees some notes regarding their fragility.

   

Pando, 12/2021, Photo by theilr@flickr. No little ones to be seen...
 

 _____________________

 

This song is dedicated to George & Gladys Korber

      

My parents often took my sister and me to visit the great the forests of the American West.  We were raised in LA, but the coastal redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, the Sierra redwoods, Sequoiadendron giganteum, and the great aspen stands of the Rockies, Populus tremuloides, were all part of our summer-lives.  My father knew by name and habit every tree of the western forests.  My mother wasn’t fussed about names, trees just delighted her.  She affectionately called the ancient and dignified Pinus longaeva of the lonely White Mountains “Bristletoes”.  I suspect this might be their true and secret name; it suits them. The trees became extended family, the sweet scent of their woodlands a sanctuary. 

 

Thanks, Mom and Dad. 

 

#Pando. Latin for “I spread”. One tree, a clone with shared roots, became a forest. Pando is ancient: some estimate that he is 80,000 years old, some say 13,000; I think it must be hard to know precisely, he’s just … old. Pando’s seed found its home as the glaciers retreated, likely a place near a spring in soil left rich by fire, strong beginnings that enable a take-off. His first root sipped some water, his first leaf unfurled in the sun. He stretched out to cover mountains. He became the forest that he is now the essence of, in the mountains of Utah. His extended family forests much of the Rocky Mountains. He shimmers, he sings, and he is utterly beautiful. 

Pando is dying. He needs wolves. (Pando, One of the World's Largest Organisms, is Dying). It turns out that cattle and deer enjoy the tender young saplings too much. There are no apex predators left anywhere near Pando's woods, and the deer can jump the fences that have been put up to protect the forest. My family went to visit Pando last winter. It was incredibly peaceful in that forest, the trees rising from deep snow with their graceful limbs bare and shining white bark against blue sky. But the sad reality that I had read about was very evident: there are no saplings. 

You can hear Pando, this ancient giant being, sing his own song (leaf, bark, truck, roots into the ground) in these amazing recordings: 

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1175019538/listen-to-one-of-the-largest-trees-in-the-world

#Methusela. Methusela is the oldest of the Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains. She is, in fact, the oldest known living being (outside clonal life, like Pando). She is thought to have germinated in 2880 BC, and so is nearly 5,000 years old. Bristlecones live in wild high places, grow slow, and take the shape of the wind. They hold the history of the seasons, the history of rain, in their rings, so they are a living a record of the climate. Older trees that lived and died can be linked to the patterns in Methusela’s tree rings, and together they can take us back through 9,000 years of seasons. They are teachers. Their forests are places of peace.  

The Bristlecones of the White Mountains live so far from human comforts, in high mountains in a dry, austere landscape, with white alkaline soils, that I had hoped we could not harm them. But our broad impact on the climate is endangering them, as the bristlecones are becoming vulnerable to bark beetles, the same beetles that have been on climate change-charged spree of tree-killing in many western forests, as trees are left more vulnerable by prolonged drought and intense heat (Drought and bark beetles are killing the oldest trees on Earth. Can the trees be saved?). The same drought that makes the piñon and Ponderosa pine near my New Mexico home vulnerable to these beetles is weakening these ancient ones. Bark beetles bore through the bark into the inner bark, phloem; to protect themselves the trees fill these bore holes with sap and force the beetles out and heal. But to make enough sap, trees need water. 

#Sequoia. The coastal redwoods are the last of the genus Sequoia. They can live to be more than 2,000 years old, and are the tallest trees, growing up to 115.5 meters. In a grove, head back looking straight up, awe reawakens, a feeling too rare in our times. Sequoias thrive in the cloud-mist and fog and the cool coastal rains that are the life-giving sweet breath of the Pacific. Their forests are the gentlest places. Fern, bird song, water music, the perfume of bay laurel. Tiny white blossoms of wood strawberries, with promise of sweetness to come. Blue jay and butterfly, the wild iris and her bees. 

Finally, both the coastal redwoods and the giant sequoia have been subject to great fires exacerbated by drought and heat due to global warming coupled with past fire suppression leaving excess fuels in dense understory. These conditions allow fires to rage with greater intensity. An example is Big Basin Redwood Park. 97% of this park burned, but some the old growth trees have survived along with the spirit of those that tend the forest (Big Basin's Story) (After the Fire). Despite being both fire resistant and fire-dependent the magnificent Giant Sequoia are also becoming more susceptible to fire (Wildfires Kill Unprecedented Numbers of Large Sequoia Trees).

Veneration is the first song to be recorded of a trilogy of tree songs that I’ve written, and each one of the three songs are sung to old Irish melodies. This one, Veneration, is sung to Carolan’s Welcome, a tune by the great harpist Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738). Music and image credits are at the end of the video, thanks to all that helped me with this. 

This Song won the 2022 New Mexico Music Award for Best Song in the World Music Category.