An Adult Saturday Night in Los Angeles
A few weeks ago we took Lily to a high school friend’s birthday party at a mansion on the Los Angeles side of the Hollywood Hills. Adults were invited to be the wine-drinking chaperones. Many of us arrived by Lyft or Uber.
The house is in a canyon two miles behind and above the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, on a cul de sac with four other mansions, against a steep hillside covered with trees and brush. These are the homes that must be evacuated quickly when the fires come, and they come every year now.
These homes are perfect for big parties, but parties are also a necessity if you want to have friends. It’s hard to ride your bike to a friend’s house. It’s easier to have twenty friends over, all at once.
We got to the party just after nightfall. The kids jumped in the pool, attended by two lifeguards from Valley Junior College, and the parents gathered in the kitchen and drank lots of wine. Food was everywhere, mostly from El Pollo Loco. We were all thrilled, adults drinking and laughing in a big comfortable home with our kids safe twenty yards away on the other side of the plate glass.
I started to talk with Mike, our host, about mountain lions, and he pulled up a photo on his cell phone that a neighbor on the next cul-de-sac had taken. A mountain lion had killed a deer in the middle of the night, then dragged it down the hill and onto his back patio.
The neighbor heard the noise, got out of bed and snuck into the kitchen and took the photo through the sliding glass door. The lion was circus big, but with a small head. He had eaten the deer’s chest and exposed its ribs, which looked just like a rack of ribs you buy in the supermarket. His face had no blood. Either he is a very clean eater, or he licks his paws and face after every bite. In the photo he’s crouching next to his kill, staring right into the lens, without fear. He seems to be pondering whether it’s worth knocking through the glass and eating the guy taking the photo.
The next morning both the lion and the deer were gone. The lion had dragged the carcass somewhere and buried it so he could return to eat later. Until then, foxes, raccoons, and vultures would feed on the carcass too.
The lion was probably P22, who lives in Griffith Park, but sometimes crosses under the 101 freeway, maybe near the Hollywood Bowl, to hunt in the Hollywood Hills. Can you imagine wolves walking past Lincoln Center in New York City? Bears wandering through Berlin?
Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States. We have tremendous wealth, but we also have over fifty-thousand homeless people. Almost half of the children born in Los Angeles County every day are born below the poverty line. Over 40% of available housing and vacant lots are owned by corporations, planning to use them as investments, so they sit idle and empty.
Our problems are growing, but P22 is hunting and doing well. They have found cougar skulls in the La Brea Tar Pits that are thirty thousand years old, essentially the same species, with only some variation. P22’s descendants may be here thirty thousand years from now, but we may not.
Mike spotted some of the kids sneaking up the stairs to the roof of the pool house, where Mike built a sundeck against the hillside. Vaping is the current big worry, because it’s so addicting and so easy to hide from adults. Mike opened the door and yelled, “don’t go up there, there are mountain lions out here at night!”
All the kids came down.
