Confirmation

I grew up in Southern California until I was 12 and part and parcel of that experience included a regular round of field trips via our school: to the Getty Museum, to the Zoo, and to the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits are in, cleverly enough, La Brea, California (formerly Rancho La Brea) and are as advertised: several pits of bubbling black tar (and one bubbling black lake of tar) that have been around millions of years. As such, they are a treasure trove of fossil record in that part of North America – thousands and thousands of fossils have been found in the tar pits, including my favorites: Mastodons and Saber Tooth Tigers.

I mean, when you’re a kid, are you going to be wowed by the pinecone they found in there or the small bird bones? Or are you going to be wowed by the giant, large, toothed creature whose skeleton now rises over you as you read the little plaque?

I remembered six specific things about the tar pits: the wall of dire wolf skulls (they’ve found so, so many), the giant Mastodon (and accompanying Mammoth) skeletons (so you could compare them!), the black iron fencing outside the pits so you can “get close” without being “in danger”, the interactive pulley system they have with large and small footprint cylinders stuck in tar (so you can do your darndest to pull them out and discover that the wider the footprint the more stuck you would be), and the La Brea Woman.

They’ve only ever found one human skeleton in the tar pits, and that was of a woman. I remembered this, because there was an exhibit where if you looked at it from one angle you saw a human skeleton (hers), and if you looked at it from another angle you saw an artists’ representation of what she may have looked like. (They still have one of these perspective-view thingies for a Saber Tooth Tiger and it’s cool). As a kid it left an indelible impression.

I had recent occasion to revisit the Tar Pits, for the first time in something close to 40 years. Fortified with these memories I checked them off as we went through: yep, there’s the iron fence and the bubbling lake tar pit. Yep, there’s the large skeletons rising over us. Yep, there’s the dire wolf skull wall. Did I try to pull the cylinder with the biggest footprint? Absolutely. And while I did find the perspective-view for the Saber Tooth Tiger, I found no La Brea Woman.

Well, I do have lapses in memory, and maybe the exhibit I was remembering was from somewhere else. But it *felt* wrong that that box could not be checked. It tickled the brain.

You know what didn’t tickle the brain? The smell of the tar pits is akin to fresh tires, but like, a LOT of them. I didn’t remember that. The bulk of the exhibits are really the tar pits themselves, in a winding outdoor walkway of the park. I hadn’t remembered that either. The actual inside museum is not as “big” as I remembered it, the scientists in the lab (there’s one of those “hey look at our scientists doing lab things”, like in Jurassic Park) looked more like regular people, the gift shop treasures were okay but with adult eyes I know that I do not need a fridge magnet that says “Live Laugh Love” with a mastodon face on it. (No. Not hyperbole.)

I was only in California for two days, one of which was occupied already with an important endeavor (if you can, support your local community college), and for the other my dad asked me what I wanted to do. “Let’s go to the La Brea Tar Pits” was my reply. It is both what I remembered and not.

Memory is a funny thing. It latches on to things, burnishes them and stores them neatly into little labeled shelves in your brain… for some things. For other things it evaluates the inbound information, says, “meh”, and dumps it. The La Brea Woman was on a neatly labeled shelf, and the smell of the tar pits had probably been ejected from my brain each time I visited as a kid. The mind takes in what it thinks will be useful (I didn’t quite go this far in school, but I think there’s some play of what hormones are running around in your brain when the memory is being stored) and in my case it absolutely ejects the rest. My parents, who are older than I and have more cause to forget things, can remember crisply things from when I was 8/10/12 and into and up to when I was 18 that I just do *not* remember. Not the faintest of a hint of a memory: my brain ejected it as “not useful” and went on its merry way. But I can remember the Sunday edition cover of the Los Angeles Times in 1984 (I was 10) for the Olympics, and the tan 2″ tile on the backsplash as I looked at it, and that it was breakfast time. What possible use that has is beyond me.

Memory relies on an incomplete and biased data set: for better or worse, and with no malicious intent, the data stored is “curated” by this proxy self and sometimes you don’t get a choice. When it comes time to recall and to make forward-looking decisions, without additional data, the memory can lead you to a different destination.

Now, I’m NOT saying I wouldn’t have selected the Tar Pits if I had looked it up online and gathered the additional information that in 2004 the museum removed the La Brea Woman exhibit in order to be sensitive to the native population and culture of which she was (which wasn’t quite clear anyway and the artist rendering was also perhaps stylized/influenced). I am saying that took me going there, walking through the memories and matching it up to reality, to seek the additional information (when I got home) of what happened to the La Brea Woman.

Relying on memory is a useful capability we have in the absence of additional objective data — or even shared memory. It cannot be the only thing we rely on when making critical decisions, should we have the luxury. “It’s okay we can dig for a new bush there I’m pretty sure I remember there aren’t any cables/lines in that part of the yard”; “I’ll get this bottle of hoisin sauce at the market I’m pretty sure I’m out”; “I remember this code does XYZ and there’s just no way we can have a memory leak…” Famous last words.

It is hard, in the moment, to remind yourself that a brain and memory can be fallible, even for those of us with a reputation for near-total recall (it works *great* when it’s in a topic I care about). It can be humbling to have to say, “I don’t know” or “I am pretty sure I remember X but let me check on that”. It can also be freeing to do so.

Re-reading, double-checking, and cross-referencing can take some time. If the worst that happens is your memory is confirmed accurate? Well, that’s a nice confirmation to have.