Under the Quiet by Marley Medina

A narrator’s firsthand experience of wildlife in Los Angeles.

On one Los Angeles morning in July, the air still soft and damp from the sweet pour of cold that blanketed the grass and crackled asphalt the night prior, I stood outside and watched through my window as 25,000 bees were removed from the inside of my bedroom walls. 

The bee guy my landlords paid in cash quoted us 25,000 bees, after he’d sucked the bees out with what he called his “homemade bee vacuum,” which was really just a tube attached to an orange Home Depot bucket with teeny tiny holes poked into it. Through the screen of the window, I could see the wand of the vacuum glide, picking up bees with it as it went. He used a smoker to draw out the bees from the walls, presumably making them think they were in danger of being burnt down, puffing out curls of smoke, sinewy and weak. I felt anxiety overcome me, feeling deeply spiritually bereft. 

The discovery of the bees had begun with a different insect altogether–I’d noticed maggots of unknown origin rolling around on my floor. I went on a caulking rampage, filling each crevice between the wall and the flooring that I could see with the stale putty I had bought five years earlier to cover all of my renting sins. The maggots continued to appear though, and a couple days later, when I felt something fall past my face, I discovered where they’d been coming from. I screeched, digging my hands into my hair and crawling onto my bed on the other side of the room to watch the ceiling. A small speck began to wriggle out of the light fixture, from the space between the plastic of the bulb and the drywall of the ceiling, and I watched as it exposed the full length of its small body, inching into air, and then, as its weight met nothing, dropped to the ground. They were coming from above. I felt creepingly, paranoidly cursed. 

I turned to the internet. There are quite a lot of insect loving communities online and it was in one such forum that I learned the true identity of the larvae: wax moths. Wax moths are parasitic creatures, infecting beehives and getting fat off the pollen and wax. If you’re a beekeeper, or if you frequent r/beekeeping, you know that you can often lose a whole hive to the evil, interloper moth babies. The bees, arguably the smartest insect on this planet Earth, try to war with them, but the maggots nestle down, burrowing deeper into the hive to hide away. 

I also learned that bees–specifically, Africanized honey bees–have taken to inhabiting the dark, slatted wood of California craftsman style homes. There’s a reason for this, too: though there are many types of honey bees in Los Angeles, bees are not indigenous to North America. In the fifties, some guy wanted to engineer a perfect bee hybrid; an optimized honey bee that had the gentle disposition of European honey bees and the productivity of African honey bees. After this man brought boxes of African honey bees to Brazil with this goal in mind, a box of the bees were accidentally released, and a swarm of them flew off into the wilderness, never to be seen again, and eventually, their babies and their babies' babies found themselves in the USA. African honey bees in particular seek out dark, safe enclosures, and can burrow into wood, not unlike the bee boxes used by beekeepers. Or, old California homes. 

As recommended by the bee experts of the internet, I stood with my hands flat against the wall in my bedroom, looking for the markers of bee existence. Behind the thin veil of drywall, I felt soft pricks of undulation on the flat skin of my palm, the warmth of life. I brought my ear up to the wall and was greeted by an angry, seething vibrational hum. A buzzing that sounded more like a deep growl, the warning of a rattlesnake's tail, something carnal and ancient untenable nature, misplaced, determined. 

I am no stranger to the whims of nature. I grew up in the mountains of New Mexico, where nature was in control without choice. Two squirrels once slinked their way down my family's chimney and into our house. My parents chased them around while my sister and I watched an Arthur marathon on PBS. Snakes were found, more than once, nestled cozily against the wall, shaking their tongue in greeting upon being discovered. Stink bugs, leggy spiders, furry fuzzy moths that would land on my face in the middle of the night. I hated it. 

As the bee guy carried out the bucket, he held it out towards my roommates and I. “You can touch it,” he said. Hesitantly, each of us reached out and placed our hands on the plastic. I felt the same heat I had through the wall, but amplified, angrier and faster. The buzz like a tickle on my palm, the feeling of individual fingers making contact with mine, and then leaving. “Do you keep them?” I asked. He looked into my eyes and said, with intensity, “That’s the reason I got into this business.” 

While the bees were being moved and the giant gaping hole in the wall was still open, I moved in with my friend, who was house sitting for the summer in a lush, three bedroom Beachwood Canyon home. I moved everything that I could fit into the guest room, where I couldn’t sleep at all, maybe because this was the home of a stranger, maybe because of the ghost I felt roaming the halls. So every night, I fell asleep on the giant couch in the living room, the homeowner's small dog who farted mercilessly and relentlessly wrapped in the crook of my arm. We cuddled as the echoing, warbling shrieks of coyotes forcibly spilled into my dreams. 

It felt overwhelming, the nature of Los Angeles. That uncontrollable, but familiar, feeling of terrestrial bizarreness, of life humming underneath what is seemingly quiet. It has a way of snaking itself into every crevice of the city - no matter how many Tender Greens or Chase banks are slapped in the middle of it. The city exists because of the ongoing tradition of manipulating nature; like the water funneled into the city, stolen from the Owens Valley, saving us from being dependent on the inconsistency and sparseness of the LA River. 

The bougainvillea vines wrap themselves across every surface, choking out buildings with a near-violent reminder of their beauty. Skunks, easily mistakable for stray cats, weave between parked cars and fences, their feather-like tail bobbing with each step. Raccoons help their babies, the smallest one last, up to the roofs of apartments, into plastic trash bins, across dimly lit streets. Possums curl up with a hesitant, uneasy smile in the corners of outdoor restaurants, underneath dumpsters, their meaty, segmented tail dragging behind them. Giant rats have made appearances in reports by friends who serve at chic restaurants, the critters waltzing through the open dining area with their bellies full of mexican avocados from the dumpster. Parrots fly through Burbank, hawks at the Silverlake Reservoir, rattlesnakes slink through Runyon Canyon, and tadpoles swim the concrete waterways in Griffith Park. 

The weather, too, is wild. Before the bees, a mold infestation forced me out of my last apartment, brought on by a rare LA hurricane that caused water to accumulate underneath a house that felt like it was built with paper.

In New Mexico, I resented nature not only because of its inherent uncontrollability, but also because I felt the quiet of the mountains created a stark and uncomfortable contrast to the constant noise inside my brain. My debilitating fears about the possibilities of the world's ill fate, the possibility of my own inner evils, the quiet that was not really quiet at all, became isolating and lonely. I craved somewhere real, supernally and cosmically safe. I craved home.  

When I moved to Los Angeles, I liked that it was just noisy enough. I liked the promise of feeling good that was held in the palm of the city; sunshine, expensive smoothies, peach colored sunsets, the stores that seemed to sell nothing but hand cream and smelled like palo santo. It presented itself as a place to numb out and feel good. I’d find out that version was a mirage, an inky, blotted, oily vision in the desert. 

A month after that morning in July, there were still bees flitting in and out of the open hole in the wall. While our landlords threatened a lawsuit against the bee vacuum guy, we begged them to call in a beekeeper we found who’d gone viral for his videos of bee removals from sheds, roofs, and corporate buildings. They finally agreed and the intricately built habitat living above my bedroom continued to be exposed. He installed a respectful little box onto the window, where the bees would naturally fly into, to then be safely collected and rehomed. They’d likely begun building their hive for at least two years before you moved in, he said. At that point, that room belonged to them. The landlords denied our requests for refunded rent for the months of bee excavation, but they wanted to part with us almost as much as we did them, and so they let us out of our lease. 

My superstitions, which now had been mounting for a good twenty eight years, had me determined to find the missing ingredient to my seemingly never ending search for a permanent home. I moved to a different neighborhood, I moved away from my roommates, I used sage and black tourmaline, cloves and cinnamon, uttered a cantation over a white candle and shook salt into the corners of the house. This would be different, stubbornly, fearfully. I clung, digging my nails in. Three months later, I moved again, because of the Eaton Canyon fire. 

Today, I live in an apartment with huge windows, the mountains stand in a crescent moon shape around us and the hummingbirds stop in front of the building to sip on the plants at the edge of the street. The highway, vibrating with sound, strands between the apartment and the mountains. I love it here. I am scared shitless. But when I walk around my neighborhood, to the local bookstore, to the Thai spot on the corner, when I join my partner on the couch, I try to just be part of it. 

My life has come to feel like an unending unfurling of the unexpected. Los Angeles and its wilderness in every corner has not ceased to remind me that to be alive is to inevitably experience shock, to feel the wind knocked out of you, to feel vulnerable in your lack of preparedness; life, inextricable from nature, is unpredictable and uncontrollable.  

There is still a part of me that would trade anything to never feel that again and that maintains the hope that home, true, ideal home, is where nothing but comfort and safety exists. But trying to control only gets you into trouble, apparently. I mean, you might accidentally end up releasing a whole species of bees in a habitat they do not belong to, wreaking havoc onto multiple generations of bees and humans alike.

And although I have craved a sense of home where I just feel warm, fat, satisfied and numbed out, I think I have found something better: life underneath the quiet that I’ve feared but always known was there. The comfort I’ve found in the reminder that we’re living amongst nature, even if not always in harmony, is that we’re connected, delicately intertwined, breathing, existing amongst and because of one another. That all of us have a part to play: the animals, the bees, the people, too. 

Even in the chaos, in the vines of wilderness, I am not alone at all. I have been looking for home. But, I guess, I’m already there.