City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  In 2005 Dad came to town and I organised to take him out to dinner. He wanted to meet in a bar, which I then couldn’t get him to leave. We finally made it to dinner, and he ordered many entrees then didn’t eat a thing. Maybe this is the trip where he got upset that I wouldn’t organise tickets for him to various shows? I can’t remember. I do remember that he never paid me back in those days, not because he was ungenerous but because he’d forget to do so, and I could not afford to spend thousands of dollars on his account. Later I realised that he was pressuring me to organise these things for him because he no longer knew how to use the internet, but instead of understanding that, I just got really annoyed.

  In 2006 Dad bought a house nine hours’ drive from where I lived and left Indonesia so he could live there. He did not seem to understand the logistics of this: that I could not easily visit. I drove up one Melbourne Cup weekend and spent most of the trip looking for lost paperwork so Dad could sort out his partner’s visa situation. I did a lot of cleaning.

  In 2007 Dad turned sixty. He abandoned the idea of living on the south coast of New South Wales and moved back to Bali, though sometime that year he also came to Melbourne for a visit. Probably to see the dentist. There is a dentist living in the suburbs of Melbourne who made tens of thousands of dollars out of Dad’s final years. Anyway. I got a phone call. He was stuck down the side of the house he was staying in and couldn’t figure out how to get inside the house. I suppose it’s obvious to readers that my Dad had dementia and it crossed my mind, it’s true. But he was so young. Everyone who knew him would testify to this. His youthfulness.

  In 2008 Dad got married, at short notice, in Bali. My brother and I flew over for the wedding. He was overwhelmed with joy to be marrying his wife. They loved each other. Soon after the wedding he visited Melbourne to see the dentist. He called me to say there was a problem with the key to the house he was staying in, so I drove to the house, opened the front door, and took him to the pub for a drink.

  In 2009 Dad stayed in an apartment four minutes’ walk from my house. I was cooking dinner for him. He called to ask me to pick him up because his knees were hurting. I told him that I lived in a one-way street and that it was not easy to drive by. Half an hour later he still hadn’t arrived, so I looked, then found him, lost, in the middle of the street. He’d forgotten which house was mine but he’d been talking to people along the way and made some new friends. Dad was always making new friends. I brought him home and gave him his meal but he pushed the meat around on his plate and made shapes out of the vegetables. He said he didn’t like the food. He was sixty-one. Too old to be behaving like this. Too young to be behaving like this.

  The next day I got a phone call from Dad. He wanted to be taken to Victoria Market to buy a shirt. We went to the market and bought a shirt.

  The day after that I had a phone call from Dad. He wanted to be taken to Victoria Market to buy a shirt. We went to the market and bought a shirt.

  The day after that I had a phone call from Dad. He wanted to be taken to Victoria Market to buy a shirt. We went to the market and bought a shirt. That day I stood in an aisle at Victoria Market and watched Dad exclaim with pleasure over the various shirts hanging there, and suddenly I understood. Just like that. Clear as day. Dad no longer knew how to find the shirts he’d packed, or that he’d worn once and thrown aside (in the dishwasher I later discovered) to be laundered. Dad was losing not just his shirts but his mind.

  My memory is a bit hazy and it’s hard to remember if we had lunch the day I understood that Dad, despite his youth, had some kind of dementia. Maybe it was the next day. Whatever. We had lunch. I planned to tell Dad that I thought there was a problem and that he needed to see a doctor. But what actually happened was that Dad took my hand and started to cry.

  We saw a GP called, I kid you not, Dr Hope, and it was suggested that Dad had Alzheimer’s but more tests were needed.

  ‘I can beat this,’ Dad said, then took the next plane home, forgoing further tests. I don’t blame him. Tests weren’t going to change things, we all knew that.

  In 2011 I was writing a book, which required me to spend time in Darwin. When I was there Dad and his wife decided to join me: it was easy to get there from Bali, and they needed access to healthcare.

  One evening I took them to the sailing club to eat a meal as the sun went down. Something about the food reminded Dad of his childhood and he talked about potatoes and how his mother used to cook them. The memory pleased him. When the waitress asked him if he liked his meal, he told her they were the best potatoes he’d ever had.

  The waitress was brusque: you’re kidding me, right? I took her aside and asked her to back off. This was happening more and more: Dad could no longer cover up, hard as he tried, and people didn’t know how to respond to him. I watched Dad perform for the doctors. He was valiant. He was given a revised diagnosis of frontal lobe dementia. Similar to Alzheimer’s, but different.

  ‘He’ll live with it longer,’ the doctor told me, ‘and he’ll know what’s happening for longer than is fair.’ I had to hand it to this doctor. He was a straight shooter.

  It was on that same trip that I took Dad to a morning tea and trivia quiz for people with dementia. These folk might have had cognitive impairment, but they sure could remember the details of movies they’d seen decades ago. Old ladies leapt in the air, hands raised, yelling, The China Syndrome! Dirty Dancing! There were some films that didn’t make their way into the quiz, I noted. I found myself thinking of one of Dad’s favourites, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nope. Too close to the bone. That wasn’t going to get a look in.

  In the last category they played snippets of songs so people could name the tune and at one point John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ came on. I looked for the door, desperate to get out before my sobs became too loud but it was too late. Everyone was singing along, waving their hands in the air as if they were at a concert. Dad could no longer sing along but he smiled and smiled and smiled.

  Imagine.

  In early 2016 I was in LA because I wanted to do some more research on Eucalyptus in California. Something Maggie Nelson wrote about the city stayed with me: ‘The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes.’ Yes. A second reason I was there was that a mountain lion called P-22 that lived in Griffith Park had recently eaten an elderly Australian koala called Killarney. I’d written dozens of emails, to biologists, journalists, city councillors and magazines hoping to get some traction on a story about P-22. I’d only had two replies. Both negative, though one very kind, from an editor who said he liked the story but the koala was a bit too tenuous a link to an Australian audience. Discouraged, I was still keen to do what research I could in the days that I had.

  Fifteen months after that trip I finally had a chance to write about P-22. It had been a long break, so I decided to paint my way back into writing. There are many photos of the lion but I used a photograph taken by the National Geographic photographer Steve Winter back in 2013. You may know it. P-22 strides from the left of frame to the right, down a hill, muscles rippling, eyes glowing, enormous paws padding. The Hollywood sign is above him in the middle distance. One of the things that happens when you paint with watercolour is that the water and the pigment act in ways that are suggestive. So, for example, the umber I chose for P-22’s body melted into the sienna of the earth below him and the indigo of the sky above. I looked at the photo closely. Registered his enormous paws. His eyes were a dull gold, as, indeed, was his coat, though that blended into the beige and white of his underside—neck, belly, inner thighs and forelegs. In the photo he was looking directly ahead but my painting was slightly off so it made the most sense to have him looking away from me. I found that I hadn’t left enough room on the paper for his enormous head. He exited the side of the page just before the tip of his nose. I didn’t get his eye right, either, so my picture has him glancing back at me warily as he tries to slip away, rather than looking confidently ahead as h
e does in the photo. I took that as part of what the painting had to teach me. A reminder that this wild animal was shy, alert to danger. That he could disappear into the background if needed.

  P-22 is the only mountain lion (also known as the cougar, or puma) to have got himself successfully from the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park, at least since 2004 when scientists began tracking such things. The trek involves crossing the two busiest freeways in the United States and most of the animals who try it—mountain lions, coyotes, mule deer, bobcats, raccoons, skunks, foxes, American badgers, long-tailed weasels, ring-tailed cats—have died in the attempt, though it seems that coyotes do better than other animals. The freeways are such a barrier that the population of bobcats living east of Interstate 405 (out Pasadena way) and south of Route 101 (down towards Malibu) are genetically distinct from the bobcats of Thousand Oaks. It’s possible, of course, that P-22 found a less hazardous way across. A culvert, perhaps, or one of the bridges that cross the Hollywood Freeway. (A young relative of P-22’s, P-64, was known, before his recent death in the Woolsley Fire, as the Culvert Cat because of his ability to negotiate the freeways by moving through the drains underneath them.)

  P-22’s success made him a poster boy for Predators in the City. And there are a lot of them: leopards in Mumbai, peregrine falcons in New York and Melbourne, polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba, grizzly bears (and moose) in Anchorage, coyotes in San Francisco, pythons in Miami, great white sharks in (well, near) Perth, kangaroos throughout Canberra, crocodiles in Darwin, foxes in London and everywhere else. The stories told about these animals vary from the celebratory—only the brave and clever survive in urban environments!—to the devastating: mountain lions have been found in LA with their heads and paws cut off, grizzly bears are treated like problem children and hauled off to zoos, moose drink too much, so do some elephants, who also raid villages and kill humans before being slaughtered in return, leopards nab toddlers and as a consequence are trapped (if they’re lucky) then thrown into overcrowded territories where they cannot thrive, the polar bears are starving as their world contracts around them like a vice.

  The Santa Monica Mountains Fund is raising money to build a wildlife crossing at Liberty Canyon in an attempt to release the territorial pressure. Stasis is a death knell for mountain lions and other species: the inbreeding and consequent loss of genetic diversity that arise when populations are contained in too small an area are devastating. Greater susceptibility to disease; greater propensity for violence towards each other. On the east coast, the Florida panther became one of the first species added to the US Endangered Species List in 1973. Back then the problem was hunting, these days the problem is habitat destruction. Today there are less than a hundred Florida panthers in the wild. In the nineties that number was as low as thirty, close to extinction, but in 1995, eight female pumas were brought in from Texas to strengthen the population numbers and gene pool. It worked. Sort of. Sustainable recovery is proving extraordinarily difficult. The Californian mountain lion population (roughly five thousand) is healthy by comparison, but inbreeding is beginning to take its toll. While the numbers suggest a healthy population the truth is much more fraught.

  So. P-22. He is now a bona fide Hollywood celebrity (he’s hung out underneath the house of Brad Pitt’s neighbour, and acquired both a Twitter handle and a Facebook page; he’s a soft toy). What he doesn’t have, of course (to quote various articles), is a ‘girlfriend’. He has expanded his territory but there are no females nearby. At twenty square kilometres Griffith Park is about a twentieth the size of a male mountain lion’s desired territory, and he shares this territory with five million human visitors a year. And so he roams, late at night, alone. He’s seven now, and given that his life expectancy is ten, the odds that he’ll mate and procreate are lengthening.

  Some mammals, however, are adapting and evolving to be suited to urban environments, and it’s possible they are even developing into new species. The Eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula) differentiated sufficiently—in certain urban environments where it enjoys warmer temperatures, abundant food scraps and freedom from predators—to constitute a new species, which Menno Schilthuizen, the author of Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, calls Turdus urbanicus. ‘The constellation of European cities has become urban evolution’s Galápagos, and Turdus merula its Darwin’s finch.’1 Schilthuizen also quotes research on the London Underground mosquito, which has not just evolved into a new form, but is also genetically distinct depending on which tube line you’re on: the Central, the Bakerloo or the Victoria.

  But new species are not evolving at anywhere near the same rate as we’re losing them. And, more tragically for P-22, because he has not been able to mate, any genetic advantage that enabled him to negotiate the freeways won’t be passed on. ‘Pumas in areas like the Santa Monicas, the Santa Anas and especially the postage stamp of Griffith Park, are betting against the house. In the long run, the house always wins.’2

  P-22’s aloneness strikes me (though probably not him) as more existential because he’s been wearing a GPS collar since 2012. According to the LA Times,3 this beams his location eight times a day via satellite to one of twenty-four ground stations around the world, and then on to a computer in Berlin that researchers access from an office in Thousand Oaks.

  He tends to move around the park in a seven-day cycle, often coming very close to roads and houses and the humans who inhabit them. That is why, I assume, he ended up in a crawl space in a house next to a property once owned by Brad Pitt. A friend and I decided to visit the house. We parked down the hill, then wound our way up a canyon rim, lined by houses that overlook the park. I was struck by how steep the slope into (or out of) the park was; I tried to imagine what it would have been like for P-22 to stalk up this hill and curl up under a house, only to wake up to being pelted with tennis balls and photographed by paparazzi. Less glamorously, he’s also survived a serious bout of illness after eating rat poison. (Eighty-five per cent of mountain lions and seventy per cent of wildlife tested in California in recent years have been exposed to dangerous rodenticides. In 2016 alone, more than 4,400 small human children became ill after eating poison intended for rodents.)

  P-22 has always known that being seen is a bad thing: is evasive for that very reason. But on this trip I found I was thinking more seriously about that experience: being looked at. Some women talk about how painful they find the invisibility that descends once you’re a certain age, but I began to enjoy mine. At fifty-two, in a country where no one knew me, I could pull on my invisibility like Harry Potter’s cloak. Eyes down, exaggerate the middle-aged stoop and—Shazam!—you’re safe. Relatively. Kim Novak, who played Madeline in Vertigo, has talked about identifying with her role in that film. The way Hollywood tried to make her over for the audience’s gaze. You would think, at age eighty-three, the work of being looked at was over, but the President of the United States recently suggested that Novak should sue her plastic surgeon, so apparently not. Novak enjoyed working with Hitchcock though, famously, Tippi Hedren—who, coincidentally, owned several lions—did not.

  Anyway. There is a wonderful photo of a mountain lion taken in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in 1986. Doug Schulthess took a photo of his wife Loye and her small daughter Natalie while they were hiking. Loye stands with her toddler, beaming, the barren hills jutting up behind her. If you look closely, behind a couple of thorny shrubs and some tufts of grass you see a mountain lion’s face, the eyes glinting ever so slightly.

  This is what P-22 knew: it is predators who do the looking, prey who are looked at.

  Cameras still seek out P-22 and indeed I first learned about him after surveillance cameras captured a picture of him prowling around the Los Angeles Zoo the night a koala was taken. ‘While zoo cameras did not capture P-22 in the act, officials said there was ample evidence to support their belief that the big cat found his way into the marsupial enclosure before making off with the koala.’ Parts of Killarney’s
mangled body were found a short distance away.

  The zoo itself did not make a fuss about the killing. It acknowledged the dangers of sitting snug against a relative wilderness, and after I visited the koala exhibit at the zoo I understood how easy the strike would have been. The fencing between the park and the zoo is patchy: some sections are failing or have collapsed altogether. Killarney lived in a sunken pit with a low fence—easy for P-22 to get into, although getting out of the pit with a koala in his mouth would have been a challenge. ‘Australia’ House at the LA Zoo was not, as described on the website, a series of enclosures, ‘brimming with change as kangaroo and koala joeys’ emerged ‘from their mothers’ pouches’ and explored ‘their new habitat’. The Nocturnal House, which featured a ‘rare’ southern hairy-nosed wombat, had an atmosphere that brought Bardo to mind, lacking even the stylish panache of the deserted shopping malls that litter the US. The website mentioned something about the shade of Eucalyptus trees but what I saw was that, despite the eucalypts that abound in Griffith Park, Killarney was kept in a concrete enclosure with a dead trunk in the middle to which (I assume) leafy branches were tied at mealtimes. Koalas at the Healesville Sanctuary are also fed by tying leaves to fake trees but they are, at the same time, surrounded by living ones.

  I don’t dismiss the notion that zoos have a role in a world that is both expanding and shrinking. But the use of animals in what appear to be marketing campaigns for zoos with inadequate facilities is distressing. Back in Australia, of course, koalas are struggling in the wild and their population sits at a single per cent of what it was before white settlement. They are the butt of jokes about chlamydia, which is killing them in large numbers. They are starving to death as deforestation lays waste to much of the east coast of Australia. The koala’s current classification is ‘threatened’ but, as Lyndon Schneiders, director of the Wilderness Society pointed out recently, there are five hundred Australian animals on that list and most of them will find themselves on another list in the not-at-all-distant future: ‘extinct’.4 If Australia’s Endangered Species Act doesn’t become more substantive, it’s estimated that koalas will be gone from the wild by 2050. Which leaves koalas like Killarney at the mercy of zoos.