The Program

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To the bemusement of the tourists and a third-grade class shepherded by a portly teacher, the woman crouched naked near the fourteen-foot mammoth and urinated. Her hands gripped the kinked-wire fence encircling the vast Lake Pit, the La Brea Tar Pits' main attraction. Her face was smooth and unlined; she could still have been a teenager.

A few of the children laughed. A stout man in a white Vandyke and a pinstripe shirt ceased his lethargic tapping on a set of bongos, gathered up the bills he'd accrued in an overturned boater, and scurried off. A golden-years tourist clucked disapproval, clasping her strap-held camera to her side. Her husband gazed on, mouth slightly ajar, as if unsure whether the vision before him was real or a preview of senility.

Heedless that her ankles were getting splattered, the young woman stared through the fence at the fiberglass family of Columbian mammoths, life-size props for the prehistoric death trap. The baby mammoth stood in its father's shadow on shore, watching its mother mired in the hardened surface a stone's throw out. The mother stayed snapshot-frozen in her sinking terror, her upper legs midflail, trunk extended.

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