It was part of our family lore. A lot of my I mean, my dad had these bones in a briefcase under his bed, but all of his cousins also have a collection. It just got passed down through the generations,
archaeologists and paleontologists assemble the story of our past with artifacts. Oh, it's the symbol a story with words. Both of these disciplines are about filling in the gaps. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today's guest is a poet who has been inspired by her family history with the Brea Tar Pits a unique site which is preserved the bones of ancient animals and is still providing scientists with material to examine a century after its discovery. How do these two worlds combine? Let's find out.
I am Kathy Gilberts professor of English and our writing program here at Portland Community College. So I'll do the one about actually being in the lab at the museum. Okay, view from the fishbowl lab at the Paige Museum. All day, the sun breaks through the museum windows, making silhouettes of the patrons who roam the exhibit on the other side of the glass. They are shadows beyond the glow of the lit magnifiers and microscopes until they approach wave pantomime questions and awe. But at dusk when the ceiling fluorescence take over. Light is trapped bouncing between the fishbowl glass and the museum displays. The orange lit wall of direwolf skulls is reflected in two. Now a hall of black teeth and eye sockets. The hanging skeleton of a bird in flight becomes a flock. The prowling saber toothed cat, a grave pride. Even the patrons in the lab volunteers are mirrored, passing through each other like phantoms. white lab coats reflect starkly as they slip through the ancient horse and into the ribs of the short faced bear. If I look closely, I can see the ghost of my father leading me my nine year old footsteps in his wake. As he points out photos of our ancestor on the wall in a blink. My great grandfather drifts from the photos right through the glass of the lab windows and rests the shadow of his hand on my shoulder, a whisper stuck to his smiling lips.
So Cathy told me a little bit about what inspired you to write the poem that we just heard.
The original inspiration came from a weird briefcase I found under my father's bed after he had died. And it was full of fossils, a saber tooth tiger tooth and some dire wolf teeth and mandible of a badger ancient badger and I couldn't figure out why my dad had never showed me these things. But I knew that we had some family history with the La Brea Tar Pits in California. So I started doing a little bit of research. And remember that I had been taken there when I was a child. So this poem stems from sort of the end of that research when I finally made a sabbatical proposal and went to California and worked in the Page Museum, which is the museum for the La Brea Tar Pits and I got to work on cleaning fossils and kind of getting a sense of what my great grandfather had done in the early 1900s.
How did you go about finding out where these bones came from?
Well, I'm like I said, I remembered that as a child, I had been taken to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum and we have this rich family history of scientist and very like everybody was professor. And most of them were scientist, I kind of went away from that as an English professor. But I love science. And I write about it right? I remember that. And I talked to my mom a little bit about it, because unfortunately, my dad had passed away so I couldn't ask him anything else about it. And I started to do my own research using our library databases. To learn more about what was currently sort of on the books or what had been said about my great grandfather in his time in California, before that museum had existed. And when the Brea Tar Pits were sort of first being discovered as a repository for bones from the Pleistocene era.
So the La Brea Tar Pits, they first started to examine those bones Well, around the 19 1900 or so
yeah, my great grandfather was doing some digging in 1906. But probably just a couple of years before that, it became known as a place where they had these bones before that they were kind of just harvesting tar tar was a product they would use on roofs and things like that. So they were kind of just tossing bones out thinking they were modern day cows or squirrels or birds that had fallen in and it took a few people my great grandfather included to kind of go wait a second, these look different and recognize them as you know, ancient bison and saber toothed cats and giant ground sloths and those sorts of things.
people maybe are familiar with the La Brea Tar Pits, maybe they've seen them in a movie because they're in LA basically the tar pits are in Los Angeles. Yes. So they've shown up in movies. Yes. The location has, but people might not understand the significance and the ongoing research that's being done there. So for those that don't haven't been there haven't really looked into it. Can you describe what this site is like what it is? Sure. And how it is producing these fossils that, yeah, interested, your great grandfather? And then eventually you?
Yeah. So if you're walking around downtown LA, it's pretty odd. Because right in the middle of all these buildings is this field with these legs and these still active tar pits. In fact, if you walk around those blocks, oftentimes there is tar bubbling up in the sidewalks or out of the rain gutters, it's still very active, it comes up. And there's actually some articles about people calling the museum and complaining about tar coming up in their basements and saying, You need to come get your tar. And they're like, it's not our tar. It's the earth, you know. So they're still quite active. And, yes, they've been shown in movies. It's one of the largest, I think it may be the largest list on this continent repository of fossils from the Pleistocene area. And I keep saying Pleistocene, this is not dinosaur bones, right. It's quite a bit more recent, actually than that. But we're talking about, oh, 14 to 25,000 years ago. And so that's going to be a lot of very large mammals. Lots of birds, very large birds, and insects and other kinds of things they pull out, they found one human have a poem about her, the libreria woman, they don't know why she was in there, but they're still pulling things out. Today. They're about 30 years backlog. So they have a lot more pulled out than they've identified. They're like 30 years behind and identifying all of the things that they are pulling out, and they keep pulling out more every day. And it's a it's a really important scientific, you know, repository right here on our continent. Your family
went on a trip there when you were young, yes, seven or eight? Yes. What do you remember from that trip?
Um, I remember getting a T shirts. Actually, one of the one of the most sort of cemented things in my memory of that trip is one of the first things you see when you walk into this museum, which is this sort of glass case with these weird metal pulleys that come out of it, and each of them is stuck in tar. And so you get to walk up and try to pull the metal rods out to see how tough it is to get out of the tar. It's incredibly sticky. In fact, it would only take one inch of tar for a full grown cow to be completely immobilized, not be able to get out. So I remember as a child pulling with all my might to try to get this metal pole out of this tar underneath this glass, and it was practically impossible. And it really made an impression on me.
Were you worried at all you get stuck in the tar,
I was a little old enough to know that that wasn't going to be a possibility. I was more interested in kind of seeing bones. And I think I remember my dad making a big deal of this guy's picture on the wall, who was my great grandfather. But at the time, I didn't do any behind the scenes stuff. I went back again in 2007, when I was in my early 20s, and visited but again, didn't do anything behind the scenes. But after a while I made contact with Museum and I went several times before I actually did my sabbatical proposal and took walks behind with collections and stuff.
So before you found this box of fossils, under your dad's bed, and before this interested you in taking an extended look at this family history. What did you know about your great grandfather? Did you know a lot about his research,
I wouldn't say a lot. It was part of our family lore, a lot of my I mean, my dad had these bones in a briefcase under his bed, but all of his cousins also have a collection. It just got passed down through the generations. My great grandfather was both a scientist and an ordained minister. And so he was always sort of an interesting character in my mind, this dichotomy of interest in the way he meld those two worlds together to work for him to believe in evolution. And yet he's still preached every Sunday. So he's just it was a very interesting person. I remember hearing about that. But I didn't know, necessarily the particulars. I did know that our family worked for a long time to try to get him more recognition. He was a very humble man. And so there wasn't, you know, the people that make the most noise, right history, right. And so there wasn't a whole lot about him as being one of the first excavate there. But he really was. And so we worked a lot with museums to kind of pull out like our own family historical documents. And we donated fossils and worked a lot with the museum over the years, I say we I was a child, but my aunts and uncles to try to get him more recognition. And it did, in fact, result in more family photos up on the wall and more about him in some of the books that the museum came out with. And my great grandfather was a really beautiful writer. He wrote these articles about his findings that were basically poetry. In fact, I've written some found poems where I pretty much just stole his stuff and rearranged it right, but give him credit. So I believe that probably he did the same thing and he loved literature. He loved words. I have no problem believing that my great grandfather probably also thought of it as a metaphor and that it could all fit together with the way of Lucien worked.
Can we hear one of those poems that you say it was the found?
Oh, yeah, sure, sure. I can read one of them the article that he wrote and this was published. I have information about that too, but it was published in like 1910, I think somewhere on there. But I include a quote at the beginning of the poem a little epigraph he writes, for Mother Earth keeps well her secrets, and leaves her children with many a problem yet to solve. I think that in itself kind of gives you a sense of his artistry with his writing. But here's the found poem is called fossil garden 1870 A found poem. The asphalt miners knew not what they dug. They wielded the pick and shovel, little dreaming what their boots stood upon. Could a good fairy have whispered in the ears of those untutored toilers that great wonders lay beneath their feet, how changed their labors would have been. But to these winners of daily bread, the great gas bubbles coming up from the porous bottom, continually breaking upon the surface like splashing fish meant nothing. To them, it told not a sweet story. To them, it gave no thoughts of ancient fauna worth far more than the wages of their toil. The rare treasure of extinct fossil forms, like weeds, merely troublesome, a hindrance to the progress of their work. They called bone from precious asphalt tossed heaps of that skeletal burden aside, these fossils, whose fate the scientists bewail, forgotten and left to the bleaching son, I changed very little of his wording, I simply picked and chose different phrases from the article that he wrote and put it together. It was a collaboration between my dad, great grandfather and I,
when you found the fossils initially, and you started to find writing like this, did that lead you then to what you did on sabbatical? A couple of years ago?
Yes, yes. Over time, I visited the museum many times trying to get a better sense of what it must have been like to work with those fossils, or even just to hold them in your hands. I also have other family, some second cousins who used to volunteer when they were young, like teenagers, anybody can volunteer any age, well, not any age, but like teenagers to older people to work at the museum in that capacity. And so I had talked to her, but I just got the sense that I wasn't really going to get any more inspiration or any more ideas for how to finish out my project without going myself and getting my hands dirty, so to speak.
We talked about your background, and it's different than your father grandfather's. What did you do? How did you get your hands dirty?
Well, first, I had to apply, you know, and tell them what I wanted to do. And they were happy to have me there. I think they're always happy to have somebody who's connected, you know, to the actual history of the place, comments, kind of good for their publicity, too. But what I did when I went there was it was very basic at first because I was new to it. And as students, I used to love science myself as a student, I was the kid who like in eighth grade would skip, I would get passed to skipped in class, so I could go organize the slides in the lab. I was that kid, right. So being in a lab was exciting to me, but had been years. But literally, when I sat down, the first thing I was taught was how to sort microfossils. And so most people when they think about cleaning fossils, and working in a lab like that, they think, Oh, she's gonna get to clean like Saber Tooth cat skulls and still get like the arm bone of some wolf or something, you know. But no, you start with the tiniest stuff that looks like sand except through a microscope. And so what I was doing, I would be given a pile of what looked like little tiny pieces of sand. And I was taught how to identify things and you take a little paintbrush, and you move them across the page and put them in different piles. And the piles are insect material, plant material, bone material, and then the discard pile, which is usually full of clay, tiny, tiny pieces of quartz and other gemstones that are so little, they're not worth anything, right. But that was my job for weeks was figuring out how to sort those things and put them in piles before I can move on to the next thing, which I think my first bigger piece was maybe a coyote tibia, so part of a leg bone of a coyote. And then I learned how to clean that with the solvents. And eventually I was getting my own project I had the cervical so the neck vertebra of an ancient bison, which really means something to me, because that was one of the first bones that my great grandfather found that he knew was not a modern day animal. So it seemed like this beautiful connection. Anyway, they gave it to me fresh out of the bag from the pits. So I got to start pulling all of the microfossils out and off of that. So the reason why we have microfossils is because the big bones get other smaller things stuck to them or inside of them. So the cervical vertebra has the holes for the spinal cord. And in all of those holes were lots of other material that I had to pull out and then eventually sort once I'd cleaned the big piece. So it was a step by step process. But eventually I got my own project that I got to work on. And that was that cervical neck vertebra.
Your great grandfather was doing this work in 1908. That site producing material that still needs to be gone through 100 years over 100 years later.
Yeah, yeah. So some people think of tar pits sort of like quicksand. Like you stand in it and you sink immediately. In fact, somebody tried to have sort of a poem about this to somebody tried to commit suicide once and the last 20 or 30 years, by jumping into one, you just stick to the top like a fly to fly paper. So it's a very slow and painful death for animals, they would walk onto it not knowing it was there because you know, leaves, we get stuck to it. So let's say like an ancient bison, right, he was looking for food, he walks out onto it, and he gets stuck. And he either starves to death because it can't move, or another predator comes from Season open target goes to eat, it also gets stuck, then that animal dies from starvation. And so the decay and they kind of eventually just become part of this tar pit, they slowly sink. But those pits go very far down deep into the earth. And so all of these bones get jumbled up in this mess, it's almost a cone shape actually going down into the earth. But this piles and piles on top of each other breaking things down, the bones get shoved into other bones. And so over centuries and eons, lots and lots of stuff got stuck in there. So at first, I'm sure those top layers, so when they were just getting the tar out to us as a product, right, some of the top layers probably were just modern day animals. But below that is all of this ancient stuff. And not just the animal bones, but the like seed pods and plant material and insect bits that exist in there. Those are important too, they can tell the scientists a lot about what the environment would have would have been like at that time.
So when they give you these bones to clean, is that a process that is precise? Is it tedious? Is it like washing dishes? Is it like scraping paint? What is the process? Like do you have to be very patient?
Yes, you have to be very patient. So sort microfossils, then you get the big piece and you think yay. But you also still have to be patient. It's all it's all kind of tedious. But one of the other volunteers that I was working with, she was a retired physician. And wonderful Monday, Mary Ellen, I love to prospective she goes, it's so tedious. But then every now and then you tell yourself, I'm looking at something no one has ever seen before. And then it's suddenly magical, no matter how long it takes. But to actually clean those bigger fossils with the solvent. It depends on what stage you're at. So at first, you just dump a bunch on it, let it soak, you take these toothbrushes, you have to be very careful, because don't want to break things, right, you have to very, very carefully pull bits off of other bits and you don't want to break. They're not necessarily the sturdiest things. They're super, super old bones. And then eventually, when you get it all cleaned off with the toothbrush very carefully in the solvent that breaks things away, you have to polish it with more solvents, it will still leach tar out of it because it's soaked into the material of the bone. So you have to do some more soaking and polishing. And yeah, it's a very recursive process. But I found it all fascinating. It was long and hard work and tedious and took a long time. But again, if every now and then you remind yourself like nobody's seen this before, like no human eyes have looked at what I'm looking at. That's pretty amazing.
Is it something that's kind of meditative, that you can kind of zone out and think about something else? Go somewhere else while you're doing it? Yes,
yes. Once you get into the flow of it right? At first, you're so focused on doing it right and not messing something up that you're very, you're concentrating on every moment. But like all things once you get into it, you kind of can let your mind wander it is a bit meditative. And so for me, as a poet, and as somebody who was there to write about it and be inspired by it, I love to think about, you know, my family, the family history, or just kind of meditate on what I was doing at the time and how I felt and how my body felt so that I could write about it later. So usually, we you'd have three breaks a day, a mid morning, break, a lunch break, and then an afternoon break. And usually on my breaks, I was furiously scribbling notes about what I had experienced, or like drawing pictures of what I had just done, maybe tidbits of lines of poems that come to me. And so I'm jotting things down. I also snuck a lot of photos with my cell phone while I was doing work. I even took pictures through the microscope a few times, so I wouldn't forget. I tried to like log everything, so I could use it later.
It was very interesting. This whole project is tied in with your family and your family history. And I wonder has that made you all think about the artifacts that we leave behind? wittingly or unwittingly, that tell our history because you're learning about history through excavating these bones and peeling off layer after layer, literally, and then you're trying to figure out some things by doing that somewhat. Figuratively. So how's that made you think about how we think about family history?
It's huge. It makes me think a lot about what we leave behind my my project is so funny because while it makes me connected to my family in a way that I maybe wasn't before. It's also really a story of Just a lot of loss, right? Like, I don't have my great grandfather or my grandfather or my father, all these people that would connect me to this thing are gone. And I'm trying to fill the gap and create that connection again, in a way. And so what they've left behind these stories, and this legacy is kind of my way of making that connection happen again. So of course, it makes me think about, like, what we pass on to people and what we do leave behind, and what weird things we find in our loved ones, you know, collections of stuff that that means something or don't a lot of the poems that I have, especially the one about finding that briefcase, it was under piles of other just junk, you know, like, you know, empty prescription bottle bags, and like old tennis shoes with broken shoelaces, and we leave so much junk, you know, and in the middle of that junk are these kinds of beautiful treasures that connect us to our family and even the ancient world? It's sort of sort of beautiful. You mentioned
that they've found the skeleton of one human. Yes, in the carpets. Yeah, only one just one so far. Yeah. And you wrote a poem about that? Yes. Can you read that one?
I can I say it's a poem about that. And people are like, what it is, this is one of those poems that I use to talk to my creative writing students actually about the act of revision. Because it went through so many revisions, it was a completely different poem, before it became this one. And of course, now not going to be able to find it very quickly. This makes me think like, Oh, my God, there are so many of these. I have so many poems. What about their does look great woman. Yeah, as I as I was saying, it went through many, many revisions, I wanted so much to tell a story about her because there isn't one. They don't know why she was in the tar pits. There are theories about it. When they first found her, there was a dog, also in the pits nearby. And for a while, they wondered if they had been buried together in some sort of, you know, weird burial or baby one was trying to rescue the other or something. But it turned out that the dog was from a different time period after they'd done some dating. So that theory went out the window. They didn't know if she wandered in if she had if she was blinded by the sun or had a headache or, or what they had no idea because she really is the only human they found in there. Typically, you know, humans lived together and would be able to help each other out if somebody had wandered into one of these. So they had no idea. So my first versions of the poem, were trying to create different possibilities for why she would have been in the pits like maybe she was sacrificed. You know, maybe she was thrown in by a lover, she had made mad maybe she had committed suicide, or she had postpartum depression or like, who knew you know, and I, I was trying to create this poem that would fill in the story, but it was just too much. It was too explanatory, it was just too much so it condensed it down into something else in it. It's definitely a different idea, and is much less, maybe about the physicality of her and more about the idea of her but I will definitely read it to you. I did title it libreria woman, we tend to walk out into the abyss when there's nothing left to lose, not giving up. But an acceptance. Novels and movies teach us so the world is too hard. Love is lost. The air is thin, there are no more breaths to be taken. Pain is deep. There is no way out but forward into uncertain terrain. And so she walks slowly into the water. He pulls the helmet off and floats into space. She dives from the cliff he falls from the building's gray edge, she sinks, the undertow takes her by the hand the foot, he closes his eyes to forever sleep. She doesn't dodge the bullet. He doesn't take the antidote, there is no antidote. Perhaps on the edge of black sludge, the hydrogen sulfide gas and stench of rotting creatures and festing her very humanity, one foot already in a shining line of tar already up to her ankle. The LaBrea women made the only sensible choice, put one foot next to the other, and waited.
When you wrote that poem, or at least you started it, how much work had you done restoring these bones and recovering them?
I hadn't been there yet. When I wrote this, this project is a long, it's a long time coming. I started it in 2010. And I didn't do my sabbatical semester at the tar pits until 2015. And so much of the research I had done was, you know, I had visited there, I'd looked up things and done research through libraries and through their website. And so I had learned about libreria woman ahead of time, and I'd asked the scientists questions about her when I had visited. So this poem came long before I actually got my hands dirty, but I had learned enough about the smells that the tar pits make, and the idea that there would probably be a lot of animals that were already stuck and like rotting in the sun, you know, dying slow deaths. And so I had this man mental image of what the scene would have felt like and smelled like and sounded like and all those things. But yeah, I wrote that way before I actually worked there.
When he went back to revise it. He said it was revised many times, did your experience, change anything about how you approached it?
I think so I think a big part of of this project, for me, learning just to be a better poet, is had to learn to walk the line between scientific truth and presenting a real life story of what actually happens and what it really is like to be in those spaces and to clean these fossils, and like the actual facts and data, and like what a poet does, which is take creative license and make a story and make beautiful and make metaphor out of things. And so I had to learn when it was appropriate to step away a bit from the explanatory science part and like Wonder, and I kept having to do that when I was working there, too. All day, I would have my hands on these actual real things, these facts things, I couldn't ignore this evidence in my hands of science of evolution of all of that. And then at night, I would have to take a step back and kind of meditate on it like, what does it mean? How does this connect to feelings and love and loss and family and the universe? And so yeah, sure, it was a practice in that
when you were talking about the process of how the pits would turn up? Yeah, the bones and spit them back out? I would imagine that you'd never in that site, find a complete skeleton?
Oh, no, no, no, that's all scattered around, we have to put it back together. Right. And
it's pretty rare for archaeologists to find a complete skeleton. Anyway. So there's always, you know, a process of filling in the gaps. Yeah, yeah. And so I guess the real thing to consider when you're using this process is you're both starting from one piece of something.
Yeah, definitely. And then trying to fill in those gaps, for sure. Create a whole story.
So Kathy, you're part of an exhibit at the Joe McCauley gallery at Heartland Community College, which includes Yeah,
actually, I didn't choose my poems, my colleague, Jennifer, who's awesome. She had the idea that, Oh, you know, Kathy has this project, she's got these really old family photos, wouldn't it be amazing to also have this visual of this photo and this poem side by side, and how they speak to each other. And she's been working with me on my manuscript, she's read it all the way through and make suggestions about the order of poems and all of that. And so she actually said, it needs to be these two. And they both have a photo accompanying it. One of the fun things about having a family who loves to dig stuff up and not throw anything away is that we have all these amazing old photos and documentation of, of that time, in the early 1900s, with the tar pit. So one of the poems is related directly to work from the tar pits from that time period, it's called class of girls reconstruct giant ground sloth. It is a poem that is inspired by an actual newspaper article with that exact same title. My great grandfather was a science teacher in high school, he taught all different kinds of science, of course, he taught a little bit of paleontology, but he also would teach nursing students. And so what he would do with the tarpit stuff is he would often bring some classes out to the digging, usually boys, that was the time period, right. And then other students would be doing cleaning as part of what they were learning about. And so these girls, this class of girls, quote, unquote, they were probably nursing students. And what he would do is he would teach them anatomy by having them reconstruct the skeletons. And so there was a, I forget what they're called, but it's a sketch, you know, that they put in with the newspaper of an image of these girls putting together this giant ground sloth. Well, that sketches based on this photo that I have of a bunch of girls putting together a giant ground sloth, and I created a poem about that kind of imagining what must have been going on in their minds. So that's one of the poems in the photos. The other is more related to just my family history. Would you read one of those two homes now? Sure. Do you have a preference?
Probably the sloth one I guess?
Okay, sure. I can read that one. I've like zoomed by it several times now. Oh, here it is. Right here. Okay. Class of girls reconstruct giant sloth. We'd rather be digging hands black from the pits. Nevermind the heat or the mess. Give us discovery. Each protuberance only the tip of a skeletal iceberg. Another tooth or rib bone, a skull, or a monsters heavy pelvis. Reconstruction is nothing compared to the divinity of the find. Give us black tar and trapped bone. Give us revelation, sweat and hope. We wish to know this thing. Pet it's for put our faces to his nose to nose. Imagine the unique Brown of its coat. The yellow of its claws and teeth. how long its tongue. How wide its gate. Oh to sit on the branch this creature stands under. See it take a leaf. Watch its mouth as it chews Oh, to see this mandible and action to feel like God looking down on creation, oh power, we are asked to pull this creature from the heap and put him together, our own rooms still quiet, our hands lightly wrapped around each fossil old and brown. They warm beneath the palm. This remnant of life once given, then slowly taken away. It is exhumed, wiped clean, and we place legs and proper sockets, vertebrae aligned just so as if being hauled again is better than the piecemeal comfort of Mother Earth's Blackbelly. We are made of the same stuff, the structure is smaller, but just as doomed to lose its fleshy casing. Someday, when we wrap a bandage around the leg of the patient, and hear his tale of wounds, of blood and bone of bullets and bombs, will know his insights. And his end.
When did you find the photo or for see they
found the photo and the newspaper article about those girls probably early in my research process, because after I found that briefcase of bones, there was another briefcase with other family history stuff in these old photo albums. And so I found that and then the other things as well. So this was another poem that went through several revisions. And so it was probably written earlier in the process and then revised much later when I had some space from it, but it it is supposed to be making a direct reference to the idea that these are nursing students.
Kathy, thanks for coming in and talking to us. Thank
you so much for having me.
Kathy Gilbert teaches creative writing at Heartland Community College. Her work was featured in the art exhibit type poetry. In 2015. She spent a sabbatical cleaning fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California libreria and her great grandfather's early excavation work there has been an inspiration for much of her writing. This has been random acts of knowledge. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and hear more. Thanks for listening
