Why You Might Consider Skipping the La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea Tar Pits: a place of legend, a place of beauty. A place of statues of animals that I'm not sure could ever be found in California. A place I had only ever known anything about because of my strange fascination with watching My Girl 2 when I was a kid. The La Brea Tar Pits were something I had only imagined in my imagination. They were so imagined, I had to use the word imagine twice in one sentence.

The La Brea Tar Pits are totally stupid. Now, let me clarify that I did not have a bad time at the La Brea Tar Pits. I didn't get upset about being there. I just really did not understand the draw.

Let me preface this by saying I had already that very same day seen the Sony Lot, taken a picture in front of Wolfram and Heart's evil lawyer empire from Angel, and tasted my first bite of a Randy's Donut. It had already been a delicious, eventful, and tiring day so it's entirely possible that I was just over-stimulated. However, THEY'RE PITS OF TAR!!!

This was my idea by the way. I've got no one to blame but myself for the entire afternoon. Why did I want to see pits of tar? I wanted to see this. I'm not kidding. I talked about this. I said, "We should go to the La Brea Tar Pits. I really want to see those." What?

Let me tell you about the pits, just to give you a better idea. The first thing you see is a giant lake full of bubbling tar underneath. This is what everyone sees from the road. The lake is fenced off, and there is a beautiful tableau of a family of elephants freaking out because one of them is sinking into the tar and dying what is depicted as a painful and horrible death. Once you are walking around the park, you can walk up to this little bridge structure and watch the tar bubble up to the surface. You watch it. You watch the tar. Its okay, I guess. It's not that exciting. Coincidentally, it is the part of the pits where the scene from My Girl 2 was filmed. That gave me a little tingle, which was slowly overtaken by sleepiness when I started to realize the scene was filmed there because it's the only slightly interesting part of the park.

The museum of fossils is eight dollars to enter. We didn't see it. The only reasons to ever go into this building are either to get air conditioned, or that you have a giant boner for fossils that just could not be quelled by some sort of natural history museum. Because that's all this building is: fossils. Walls and walls of fossils, which have been excavated from the pit. One reason to not go into this building, in my opinion, is to get a map of the pits. They don't have one. They don't care that you can only see the lake, and therefore spend twenty minutes wandering around in the sun wondering if it should really be called The La Brea Tar Pit. It shouldn't. You will eventually happen upon one pit that is being excavated, and two or three more four foot square fenced in areas that have pits of tar in them. Can you feel the energy? The excitement?

The excavation pit is interesting, because you can see little pieces of where bones will come out when they start digging again in July. There is a system of flags with colors that I don't understand. There is also a sign clearly stating that there are no dinosaurs in it, because dinosaurs existed billions of years before these pits did. This really sucks because dinosaurs are way cooler than any other animal that existed during the time span the pits did. Saber-toothed tigers are pretty rad, but can you really compare with a T-Rex? No you can't. They should have a Tyrannosaurus, for that would have at least gotten me a little excited to look at the pits. Even if it's a lie, I would have been happier there with gigantic prehistoric beasts, as opposed to bird bones. Couldn't they make it up for my sake?

Next we move on to the tar pits. They are very small and they smell like asphalt. You probably could have seen that one coming, but surprisingly when planning your trip to this national treasure you either don't think about it or forget that the smell of asphalt can be completely nauseating and make your head hurt. I also think the fumes from tar stench might get you high. I say this because I spent time staring at the pits. Serious time. Here is a breakdown of what it was like at pretty much every pit:

Me: Hey I wonder how long this takes to kill you.
Friend: I don't know
(Pause.)
Friend: That bottle on top of the tar...
Me: Yeah?
Friend: When do you think it'll sink into the tar?
Me: I don't know.
Friend: Yeah.
(Pause.)
Me: Do you want to throw something in there?
Friend: Do we have anything to throw?
(Pause.)
Me: No, not really.
Friend: Yeah
Me: What?
Friend: Huh?
(Long pause. Stare endlessly at tar.)
Friend: Hey, there's a fern growing in the tar.
Me: Where?
Friend: There.
Me: Wow.
Friend: Hey don't grow there. Grow on land with the other plants.
Me: Poor little fern.
Friend: How did it get there?
Me: It has to do with spreading of the seeds...wind...stuff like...seed stuff.
Friend: But they wouldn't want to spread seeds to tar because it's a bad place for them.
Me: Maybe that's where they spread the bad seeds.
(Pause.)
Friend: Good one.
Me: Thanks.

Need I say we sound like idiots? And imagine the entire time this is going on that we are talking in a monotone with our faces leaned against the fence. At each pit, this same exchange. IDIOTS.

At the third pit, as we begin our groundhog day once more, a little boy and his father come bounding up to us, he presses his faces against the fence, says, "Wow, look! Really hot tar! Awesome!" and runs away to the next thing and says, "Wow Dad! Those buckets over there are cool! Can I get a bucket?" It was here that I turned to Meredith and said, "We're spending more fucking time caring about this crap than a schoolchild. We have got to leave."

The lesson here: If you want something exciting to happen at the La Brea Tar Pits, they'd better be making a sequel to a wildly popular kid's movie, otherwise you're screwed. And also, pits of tar equals a free high.