Day 5, Sierra Madre and the edge of the High Desert
We
left Manhattan Beach in the morning. In an hour, we were at the base of
the San Gabriels; Los Angeles' eastern perimeter. It was a small town
called Sierra Madre, where so little happens that the entire community
came together just a week before, in a candlelight vigil to protest a
lady, who built a fence that was sharp enough to slay a fence-jumping
deer.
The
town itself is a mish-mash of architectural styles; clapboard villas and
orchestrated gardens, all hanging on to the waterfall-clad mountains that
originally brought people to Los Angeles in the first place.
The
story of the deer, which would die slowly as they tried to writhe free
from the fence-posts, enraged the community to such an extent, that it
created the emergence of a leader, the deer lady. The deer lady was no
ordinary slave to local small town politics. She brought this incident
to the papers. Soon, it was national news, Mrs. Wilkinson was famous and
then it all hit the AP Wire. All of Los Angeles was talking about it.
I interviewed Mrs. Wilkinson on June 22. "Exactly what happened?" I asked.
"We all found out about it the same time, just before Memorial Day weekend,
that four deer had died tragically, gruesomely, horribly in or on the
spiked fence which surrounded Ms. Lender's property." "Why did Ms Lender
continue to maintain her fence despite the protests?" I asked.
"She
allowed four deer to perish, and I'm convinced that had we not put so
much pressure on her to do something, we'd have scraped the flesh of yet
another beautiful animal from the razor-sharp spikes. What kind of person
would insist that she was right all along, using these defenseless creatures
to emphasize her point? After all, life is life; animal or human should
be held equally sacred. Lender's senseless, unnecessarily prolonged slaughter
of deer has made her a pariah where she lives. She will never be forgiven
and her actions will never be forgotten."
Mrs.
Wilkinson, perhaps, is a symbol of the suburban town trying to cling to
its own identity. People get bored in Suburbia, and eventually create
their own imagined drama. Mrs. Wilkinson and the other ladies of Sierra
Madre have given names to all of the characters in the town. There is
"Killer" (Ms. Lender), and "bat-faced lady" and, for example, "Wild Bill",
who, according to Mrs. Wilkinson, is feral and lives in the mountains
with the cougars, occasionally dropping into someone's yard to eat lettuce-heads
or broccoli stems.
