P22 is dead, long live his impact

At the celebration for the late catamount P22 at the Greek Theatre on Saturday, tribal elder Alan Salazar spoke about how his people – the Chumash and Tataviam – divide themselves into different animal clans. Since I can remember, I have felt myself to be a member of the mountain lion clan. As a child, I read and watched everything I could about the mysterious, majestic “ghost cats,” with their tawny fur, striking Gen X-worthy facial hair, silent stealth, deadly strength, and ridiculously cute spotted kittens. I even started my own novel about one (the first of too many unfinished manuscripts to come). I had feline fever in general – the cat child to grow up into the cat lady. But I was particularly drawn to pumas, in part because they are the only big cat found in multiple areas of the United States, but mostly because one of the places they have long thrived is California. I am a third-generation Cali girl who was abducted by my parents and relocated to a small Midwestern town when I was just four years old. Panthers were my people; I went to the library and visited them in books.

It took me four decades to come back home. Just a few years after my return, LA welcomed another new resident, this one with a Los Angeles Times front-page story: a mountain lion rather dorkily named P22. The P stood for puma, one of the many names given to Puma concolor. The number indicated his ranking in a study of his breed taking place in the Santa Monica Mountains. Except this handsome fellow wasn’t with the rest of his kind in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific Ocean: He was in the middle of Griffith Park.

Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation spoke at the P22 celebration.

Over the next 10 years P22 became a cause celebre and a celebrity. Instead of freaking out about an apex predator in their midst, Angelenos rallied around this cat of mystery who somehow snuck through suburbs and across multilane interstates and past In-N-Out Burgers to shack up in a park that’s ample for humans but litter-box-sized for a big cat. Amazingly, for a decade, he sustained himself on park deer and the occasional house pet and koala – a long life for a cougar. The world rallied around P22. He became the poster kitty for the preservation of this imperiled population of pumas, his image used to raise funds for the biggest wildlife crossing in the world, now being built across Highway 101.

Like so many of us, I watched all the stories about his sightings and misadventures, his sickness and his chihuahua snacks. I even got to write one of those stories, for LMU Magazine, interviewing Beth Pratt – the National Wildlife Federation organizer and writer who has led the efforts to create the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, and Jeff Sikich, one of the NPS rangers leading the study that gave P22 his moniker.

I knew that at 12 years old, P22 had probably lived out eight of his nine lives. So I wasn’t shocked in December when he was found in a back yard in Los Feliz, injured from a car crash, emaciated, dying. Still, I cried when I heard he was euthanized. And I wept a couple times yesterday, at the celebration in the park that was his home.

The sold-out event featured speeches from Pratt, Sikich, and many of the scientists, activists, artists, citizens, politicians and schoolchildren who loved him, including the musician Diplo, representatives Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu, and actors Rainn Wilson and Julia Butters. It was so LA. And I loved it. With people – okay, mostly women – dressed in cat ears and tails, I felt a little like I was at Cougar ComiCon. Like I had found my clan.

The Tokens perform “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Sure the event was sappy, goofy, long. Exhibit A: The descendants of the Tokens played their hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But the overall message was important and timely. As Sikich said, this wasn’t just a memorial for a Hollywood star: it was a “celebration of coexistence.” That was the theme sounded over and over, that there is no such thing as wild, as one speaker remarked; “it’s all home.” As Salazar said, we have to move from a policy of extermination to a “policy of living in harmony.”

Cougars have always symbolized the place of my birth to me, but I would never have imagined that one would become the most famous animal since Lassie, as P22 was called, in the years of my homecoming. The king of Griffith Park is dead, but long live the mark he made on the world – including an in-progress safe passage for his kin and other animals, and a changed understanding of human’s relationship to our fellow animals.

People Have the PowerPoint

Patti Smith was radiant and fierce in her performance at the Saban Theatre Monday night. I’ve been to dozens of shows by the writer and musician during the last three decades; at this Songs & Stories event for the Aloud series of the Los Angeles Public Library, I saw aspects of her I had never seen before. First of all, she had a PowerPoint. A PowerPoint “to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” (Sorry, that was my riff on her anthem “People Have the Power,” not hers.) Smith clicked through images from her new book, A Book of Days, projected on a screen behind her as she told stories, jokes, and history lessons and sang songs, accompanied by longtime collaborator Tony Shanahan. Actually, an unseen technician advanced the slides for her; Smith laughed about this tour being her first experience with presentation software. In fact, despite her 75 years on the planet, the award-winning author is no Luddite. Book of Days is inspired by Smith’s third act as a social media influencer; her daily Instagram account, ThisIsPattiSmith, has 1 million followers. “I’m not capable of being square,” she said Monday.

(As an aside, my 2021 Los Angeles Times article about Patti’s online renaissance during the pandemic took a second place prize at the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards presented Sunday night by the Los Angeles Press Club.)

Patti was funny and sharp and sentimental Monday. She offered professional advice: to develop your “writer’s muscle” by having a “daily practice.” Hers is to get up every morning, grab a coffee, and open a notebook, she revealed. Appropriately, Monday was Joan Didion’s birthday; Smith and Shanahan played Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” for the writer. “When I think of dark glasses, I think of Joan Didion and Bob Dylan,” she said. In response to an audience question, she spoke about the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was young, revealing that they are in each other’s lives “but she’s very private.” Answering another inquiry, she said, “Michigan is where I had the saddest and most beautiful times of my life. I cherish them all.”

In her eighth decade, Smith is just getting better and more appreciated. She is on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, with the headline “The Radical Hope of Patti Smith.” Her voice is more assured, rich, and beautiful than ever. She and Shanahan delivered a stunning version of their 2004 song “Peaceable Kingdom.” But probably my favorite moment of the night was when he goaded her into singing, a capella, a holiday chestnut from her childhood by the Ray Coniff Singers. Roll the tape.

Speaking of Patti Smith cover stories, the first one I wrote was published 27 years ago by The Village Voice.

Cougar Town

I neglected to post the article I wrote about the mountain lions of Los Angeles for LMU Magazine. Here it is!

A new day, a new dawn

It’s a new dawn, a new day, a new life.

The first few minutes, I think I’m crazy. The water at Cabrillo Beach is never what a sane person would call warm. A deep trough off the shore provides a steady chill stream. And then there’s the wind. The channel off Point Fermin is nicknamed Hurricane Gulch for a reason. If you swim in the afternoon you have to watch out for the windsurfers that tack back and forth, into the shore and out toward Catalina. This time of year, the sea temperature hovers around 57 Fahrenheit. Even with a wetsuit on, the cold stabs at your face and fingers. When I first dive in, “I can’t do this” is my immediate reaction — every time, every day — even though I know I can. It takes a good 100 strokes for me to acclimate. And then I can’t stop.

Water has always been my element. I stumble on land, am scared to be high in the sky, but take to the sea like a fish. Still, I never thought I’d be an ocean swimmer. Body surfer, sure. Lake swimmer, yes. But for the first several decades of my life, I stayed close to shore even when catching the big waves. Then I moved next to Cabrillo Beach.

Cabrillo is a half-circle bay bordered by the cliffs of Point Fermin on the west and an artificial jetty of rocks on the east. Actually, it’s two beaches: The outer one I just described faces the Pacific, and the inner stretch faces San Pedro Bay, aka the Los Angeles harbor. The inner beach, also called Mother’s Beach, generally gets an F from Save the Bay because let’s face it, it’s a city beach with little ocean current. Tankers barrel in and out. Boats anchored in multiple marinas dump crap, literally.

But the outer beach earns an A, thanks to that gulch. I paddle the inside but only swim in the outside.

Swimming is not just exercise; it’s meditation. I count my strokes like a yogi counts breaths. The strokes are breaths too, of course: nose up for air every four counts. I’m scarcely alone out there: The Cabrillo Beach Polar Bears, a club that sponsors a New Year’s Day plunge, keep an orange buoy moored several hundred yards off shore, with a thermometer letting visitors know yes, it really is still 57. Sometimes I run into neighbors out at the buoy, stop and ask them how their family is doing. The first several times I swam to the buoy, it seemed impossibly far, and I clung to a boogie board for safety. Eventually I graduated to no board, just flippers, then no flippers. Nowadays, I swim right past the buoy and keep going.

These days, I need that swim more than ever. There’s a kind of ecstasy I get, pulling my body through the water, watching my hands cut through the sun on the surface, or lying on my back and staring up at the sky. And then there are the days when I think I am alone out there, in my groove, a trance — and suddenly, a dolphin swims right underneath me, or I roll over and discover I’m in the midst of a chattering porpoise pod.

The joke in my neighborhood is that we live in a small town called San Pedro. When I look across the inner beach and see the cranes and cargo ships of one of the busiest ports in the world, I know that I also live in a big city called Los Angeles. But when I’m out there in the ocean, floating alongside the kelp forest, I feel one with the world.

Of course today was a day to feel wonder and unity: a new dawn, a new day, a new life — “fish in the sea, you know how I feel.” A day of unity, of the renewal of accords and the return of water rights, of embracing the great middle of our country and its edges, of poetry and music, of a cowboy’s grace, of seasons of love, of a Boricuan from around the Bronx block singing this land is your land, a land of hope and dreams. The first day a woman, a Black woman, an Asian woman, became second in command of the United States. Hallelujah.

This is not a pep rally

A protester in San Pedro June 6

On Saturday, June 6, San Pedro, California, had its first large gathering in response to the protests that have swept the world since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. There had been smaller protests, in front of the San Pedro police station and city hall, but this morning event was the first to draw several hundred people, in  a march from the police station to city hall, followed by speeches. It looked like a demonstration; there were “I can’t breathe” posters and chants of “No justice, no peace.” Some social media commentators called it a Black Lives Matter protest. But that activist organization was not involved in Saturday’s event. Instead, it was organized by three unlikely bedfellows: The NAACP, the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Division, and the office of LA City Council member Joe Buscaino.

Organizers hailed this as a breakthrough alliance. But skeptics — and I am one — feared that this was not a breakthrough coalition, but a cooptation. First, the march was channeled (literally, they walked down Channel Street) on to empty roads where there was no chance to engage onlookers or passersby or generally make an impact, which is pretty much the point of a march. One of the participants was controversial police chief Michael Moore, who led his officers into violent confrontations with protesters in LA earlier in the week and at one point blamed those protesters for Floyd’s death. Buscaino, a former cop, is against the cuts to the police department already agreed to by Mayor Eric Garcetti, let alone the foremost demand of BLM: Defund police. Indeed, no concrete changes were demanded or offered at the rally, except for a call to vote for change in November (agreed). Instead of singing “Lean On Me,” “Alright,” “We Shall Overcome,” or even, I don’t know, “This Land is Our Land,” a woman wailed “The Star-Spangled Banner” — as if we were at a political convention, or a football game.

The “Unity Rally” suffered from a serious existential crisis. Many of the participants were visibly and vocally disappointed by the speeches and the presence of Moore and other cops; indeed, speeches by anyone with a badge were largely drowned out by protesters. “This is not a photo op,” they chanted at Buscaino. “This is a protest!” they shouted at the politicians. “This is not a pep rally!” they shouted — incredulously — when the NAACP’s Cheyenne Bryant ended the event by thanking folks for coming to, yes, “a pep rally.” Most people around me turned away in disgust at that point. One young man jumped up and started speaking to the crowd about his dismay with the speakers’ failure to address the real issues of systemic racism. Many stopped to listen to a voice that finally spoke to the real message of this movement.

None of this dissent made the coverage of the “Unity Rally” in The Daily Breeze and the Los Angeles Times. Reading their accounts, I had to wonder if I was at a different event. As a journalist and a scholar of journalism, I can’t say I was shocked: Mainstream news outlets typically report the perspective of the powerful, not those speaking out against power structures. Sometimes the erasure is structural; reporters hang out by the stage, instead of in the crowd, and miss the true story. But at Saturday’s event, you had to be deaf and blind to miss the shouts of the protest against the rally.

All this said, there was an incredibly moving moment that did bind everyone there — a moment that lasted eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck. Bryant asked everyone to take a knee, the  gesture made famous by football player Colin Kaepernick (one of the pioneers of the protest against police violence for years now, whose work is finally being vindicated; the NFL finally had to admit it was wrong to censure him and others). Cops, protesters, politicians, parents, kids, blacks, whites, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Latinx — everyone that I could see kneeled. And for almost nine minutes we were quiet. Mostly. After several minutes that seemed like an eternity, in an act of spontaneous improvisational street theater, voices rang out:

“I can’t breathe!”

“Get off my neck!”

“Mama!”

The final words of George Floyd exploded from the crowd. Staring at the ground, I began to sob. I could hear others crying around me. It was a powerful gesture that has been deployed at protests around the world. Eight minutes and 46 seconds is a long time. Long enough to take a man’s life, just because you can.

As the crowd rose, they started another chant, again, one not led from the podium: “A silent cop is a bad cop.”

I am not against dialogue. I understand that you sometimes have to sit down with your enemies if not to negotiate change, to make them change. For 8’46”, everyone in that plaza — including many police officers — had to to contemplate one man’s dying moments at the hands of another.

Gestures can be powerful. But they can also be easily imitated. What America needs is not gestures, or even words, but action. Action like that the Minneapolis City Council said they would take Sunday night: To not merely cut the police budget, or defund the force, but to disband them.

This is of course exactly what the LAPD fears, and why at this point, they need to listen to the people, more than the people need to listen to them.

Solidarity on the streets of San Pedro

People protest peacefully in front of San Pedro police station June 2, 2020.

There were silver Priuses and white SUVs. A fire truck, two garbage trucks, public works trucks, an ice cream truck, a city bus, and several semis honked their horns as they drove by. One rig’s blast sounded like a train whistle, long and loud — that got our adrenaline going. Lots of men in pickup trucks honked or raised their fists, even the one in a big white four-door with an American flag flying from the tailgate and a Trump sticker in the window. “He must be driving his dad’s car,” my friend Sue said. Even some police cars honked. A majority of the traffic passing the San Pedro police station Tuesday afternoon between 3 and 5 showed their solidarity with protesters waving “Black Lives Matter” and “End Systemic Racism” flags. They signaled support either with their horns or with their fists, thumbs, or fingers in peace signs. Many drivers admittedly were handicapped by their efforts to keep one hand on the wheel and one on their cell phones filming. There were only three voices of dissent, from a thumb down to a disturbing “Fuck Floyd.” Some protesters misheard one shout as “Fuck you!” but in fact it was “Fuck yeah!” I could see the joy on the driver’s face.

No justice, no peace.

We were a small crowd — about 50 — but given that this was the first protest in often conservative San Pedro since the murder of George Floyd, our presence was significant. And with every passing honk, shout and fist pump of support, we provoked a loud and clear message to the police standing outside watching us, or sitting at their desks inside the station: People have had enough. The horrific video of Floyd’s death has galvanized a worldwide protest movement against police brutality and white supremacy. President Trump’s warning on Monday that he would send the troops to clear the streets was the straw that broke the back for those of us still paralyzed by pandemic fear. He pushed folks like me off the fence/couch and out to the streets to show these protests aren’t about violent extremism: They’re about making long overdue change in our country.

San Pedro steps up. Photo by Sue Maralit

The demonstration was peaceful. Police officers waved hello as my friends and I walked up to join the line of protesters and I flashed them a peace sign. There were people I knew there — all local San Pedrans — and mostly, people I didn’t. We were a notably diverse lot, trending young and female, but my friends and I are all in our 50s. Next to me was Paul, a retired longshoreman; Erin, mother of children in San Pedro High and Dana Middle schools; and Catherine, a young woman with long purple braids. We were black, brown, and white; first-nation, European, African, and Mexican — a “broad coalition,” as President Obama says. The only infiltrators I saw were not from the far right or left but a few Jesus freaks offering the typical crazy — but admittedly timely — apocalyptic rhetoric. There were the usual socialist worker party folks hawking their wares (ironically). After all, Pedro is a union town, land of Harry Bridges and Joe Hill. Artists and activists handed out signs from the punk Pedro printers Calimucho: “Together we are stronger” over two fists clenched together, designed by Ruth Mora.

Solidarity in a union town

It felt surreal and thrilling to be out with people again, after months of sheltering in place. Almost everyone wore masks, though social distancing was imperfectly practiced. We came in peace and we left in peace, as curfew neared — and the feet and knees of us olds started to ache. The officers waved goodbye and we waved back.

Graphic by Ruth Mora, from Calimucho Screen Printing

The only scary moment of the whole afternoon was on the drive back down Pacific Avenue, past the Sixth Street business district. Stores were boarding up their buildings and a group of scary musclemen in San Pedro Fight Club T-shirts looked menacing and out for trouble. The idea that any of the peaceful protestors at the cop shop or down the street at the city hall building were going to bust some glass and steal, I don’t know, T-shirts was laughable. Remember, violence in this country historically and right now comes from the vested interests and the police who protect them. If nothing else, the protest forced locals to spray paint “BLM” on their makeshift window guards; even if they were just trying to keep vandals away, the message was there this morning, on building after building: “Black Lives Matter.”

Marquee at Warner Grand Theater, downtown San Pedro

In my element

Tomorrow I get to return to the place where I am literally in my element: the ocean. Los Angeles County beaches reopen for activities in the morning; I am grateful to the state, county and city for letting us see the light of day. I sincerely hope we don’t blow it; I’ll be social distancing and wearing my mask — when I’m not in/on the water, that is. I’ve been imagining tomorrow’s schedule for weeks:

7 am. Get up and take the dog for a nice long walk down at Cabrillo. Used to doing this at least twice every day, Alexander Hamilton has been perplexed why we have been walking every direction but the most obvious one — toward sea, sand, and sky — for the last two months. I suspect he will feel close to as much joy as I will when we stride past the beautiful mission-style beachhouse and say hello to the inner harbor.

8 am. Pull the kayaks down to the shore and paddle off. Waves and weather permitting, my husband and I plan to pack a lunch and spend a long day out on the water. We will be hundreds, if not thousands, of feet from other human beings, but hopefully not from the dolphins, seals, and maybe even whales. We may jump in and swim/snorkel. Bud will fish.

Sometime in the afternoon: Pull back ashore. Swim.

3ish: Reluctantly drag our butts back on land so the dog can get his exercise — at the beach again.

6 pm: Dinner.

8 pm: Evening walk on the beach. Who knows, maybe there will be bioluminescence?

Next day: Same thing all over again, but on the paddleboard.