Tepee

The light of a full moon through desert fog cast an ethereal glow around a spacious tepee as worshipers gathered in the foothills of Palomar Mountain last weekend for an all-night prayer meeting of the Native American Church of North America. The Rev. John Nighthorse Tyler, a Northern Arapaho originally from Wyoming, beckoned 36 people to sit on blankets and pillows in a circle facing a carefully tended fire in the middle. Participants had traveled to this site, 40 miles southeast of Temecula, from as far away as San Francisco to remember Albert Bianez, who died a year ago at age 61. They emerged from the womb-like tepee 12 hours later, greeting the new day as if spiritually reborn.

What do a tepee, cosmetic surgery and adult films have in common? The possibilities are intriguing, but this trio is among a slew of colorful items submitted by U.S. employees on their expense reports. Or at least that's the claim of staffing services firm Robert Half Management Resources. The Menlo Park, Calif., company asked chief financial officers across the country about some of the most unusual things they've seen employees list on their expense reports. Their greatest hits include: Lottery tickets $12,000 for a family trip A speeding ticket A fine for crashing into a toll booth A day at the spa Golf clubs Hot tub supplies Clearly, these staffers are finding real fulfillment in their work.

At 2 a.m. the coyotes began circling, yipping and howling in the darkness beyond our tepee. I gulped hard and stared at my friend Terry. Were these fearsome beasts poised to attack? Terry just laughed. "Think they'll gnaw us to death?" he asked. We had checked in about 1 a.m. after a five-hour, after-work drive from Los Angeles. Our domicile for two nights in mid-February was one of three tepees on the grounds of China Ranch, a date farm in the tiny town of Tecopa just outside Death Valley National Park.

Although a chilly rain was pounding and there was an opening in the roof above her anvil, Heather McLarty's blacksmith shop was dry and warm for those crowding inside on Sunday. And why not? A fiery, 2,300-degree propane-fed forge was blasting away inside her shop — which happens to be a 25-foot-tall Sioux-style tepee in the backyard of her Highland Park home. The North Figueroa Street residence she shares with actor and fabrics artist Troy Evans was one of 60 studio sites in Highland Park, Mount Washington and Eagle Rock that attracted some 650 art enthusiasts to the Arroyo Arts Collective's 19th annual Discovery Tour.

Home is a green concrete tepee on a boulevard of barred buildings and weedy lots. Rudy Rios arrived late at the Wigwam Motel--50 years after it became a novelty stopping place for families driving west to Los Angeles. He got here the way so many guests now do, through hardship, after a divorce left him homeless. "Sometimes," Rios said, "you come out with nothing." The Wigwam would be just another low-rent motel on Foothill Boulevard, at the Rialto and San Bernardino border, if not for its striking architecture and iconic status on historic Route 66. The 20 tepees left over from 1950 are all 30 feet tall and clustered like an Indian village.

Although a chilly rain was pounding and there was an opening in the roof above her anvil, Heather McLarty's blacksmith shop was dry and warm for those crowding inside on Sunday. And why not? A fiery, 2,300-degree propane-fed forge was blasting away inside her shop — which happens to be a 25-foot-tall Sioux-style tepee in the backyard of her Highland Park home. The North Figueroa Street residence she shares with actor and fabrics artist Troy Evans was one of 60 studio sites in Highland Park, Mount Washington and Eagle Rock that attracted some 650 art enthusiasts to the Arroyo Arts Collective's 19th annual Discovery Tour.

There were a lot of nice places you could have spent the weekend. Tahiti, for instance. Any weekend there is fine. Or France. You could have sat at the tennis matches, drinking French champagne and eating French fries and wishing there were a third woman tennis player. Then there was Boston. What better way to spend a hot Sunday afternoon than to go inside a gymnasium and watch human beings shoot basketballs?

Before the bulldozers arrived last June, Malibu Lagoon was a fully grown habitat for egrets, voles and tidewater gobies, studded with sycamore trees and clusters of tule reeds. Today, the lagoon's islands appear almost barren, covered by a sea of tiny red and blue plastic flags marking young plants just taking root. Depending on whom you talk to, the lagoon has been restored - or ruined. On Friday, bureaucrats, biologists and birders will descend on the state beach at the mouth of Malibu Creek for the ribbon cutting to mark what state officials are calling "the long and successful journey toward restoration.

At a distance or up close, it looks like a tall Indian tepee. It was designed that way. But it's a church that has served its congregation for nearly 40 years. Now its day seems done. In this state named for the "red people," the unusual but aptly shaped structure, built to reflect its natural environment, may be destined for eradication due to blows by nature. "We realize it's a landmark," said Connie Golden, the church secretary.

What do a tepee, cosmetic surgery and adult films have in common? The possibilities are intriguing, but this trio is among a slew of colorful items submitted by U.S. employees on their expense reports. Or at least that's the claim of staffing services firm Robert Half Management Resources. The Menlo Park, Calif., company asked chief financial officers across the country about some of the most unusual things they've seen employees list on their expense reports. Their greatest hits include: Lottery tickets $12,000 for a family trip A speeding ticket A fine for crashing into a toll booth A day at the spa Golf clubs Hot tub supplies Clearly, these staffers are finding real fulfillment in their work.

The light of a full moon through desert fog cast an ethereal glow around a spacious tepee as worshipers gathered in the foothills of Palomar Mountain last weekend for an all-night prayer meeting of the Native American Church of North America. The Rev. John Nighthorse Tyler, a Northern Arapaho originally from Wyoming, beckoned 36 people to sit on blankets and pillows in a circle facing a carefully tended fire in the middle. Participants had traveled to this site, 40 miles southeast of Temecula, from as far away as San Francisco to remember Albert Bianez, who died a year ago at age 61. They emerged from the womb-like tepee 12 hours later, greeting the new day as if spiritually reborn.

At 2 a.m. the coyotes began circling, yipping and howling in the darkness beyond our tepee. I gulped hard and stared at my friend Terry. Were these fearsome beasts poised to attack? Terry just laughed. "Think they'll gnaw us to death?" he asked. We had checked in about 1 a.m. after a five-hour, after-work drive from Los Angeles. Our domicile for two nights in mid-February was one of three tepees on the grounds of China Ranch, a date farm in the tiny town of Tecopa just outside Death Valley National Park.

Celia Williams decided to bust out. After a lifetime of teaching, she wanted to live differently at her Altadena property, to explore her Native American heritage. She bought a tepee. Julian Fielder needed space. The opera singer's Silver Lake house wasn't big enough for two creative people. His partner, actor Christopher Grossett, is a tennis fanatic. Fielder couldn't take the bop-bop of TV tennis while he tried to study his librettos.

Home is a green concrete tepee on a boulevard of barred buildings and weedy lots. Rudy Rios arrived late at the Wigwam Motel--50 years after it became a novelty stopping place for families driving west to Los Angeles. He got here the way so many guests now do, through hardship, after a divorce left him homeless. "Sometimes," Rios said, "you come out with nothing." The Wigwam would be just another low-rent motel on Foothill Boulevard, at the Rialto and San Bernardino border, if not for its striking architecture and iconic status on historic Route 66. The 20 tepees left over from 1950 are all 30 feet tall and clustered like an Indian village.

Uh-oh. Indians on the Mall for Thanksgiving. Yep: the other guys from that 1621 banquet, front and center in the nation's capital, and all the inconvenient truths they represent. There they are, in three tepees by the Washington Monument. A family. Just a single Omaha family and some friends. You just know they're not commemorating that nice first Thanksgiving meal, when the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe of Patuxet sat down together.

Librarians constantly face the question: Where's the children's section? But more and more the answer comes from whimsical designs, lively colors, kid-sized furniture and cozy nooks that all but shout: "Over here." For example, inside the Mid-Valley Regional Branch Library in North Hills, a colorful tepee structure attracts young readers. If you see floating bubbles, a sailboat full of books and a 600-gallon saltwater aquarium, you've reached the children's room at the Huntington Beach Library.

After studying Native American tribes for several months, students at Park View School in Simi Valley had a chance Monday to take a peek inside a replica tepee. Set up in front of the school on Alexander Street, the 20-foot-tall canvas tepee greeted students in the morning as they arrived for school. Later, 9- and 10-year-olds had a chance to tour the inside and view tomahawks, animal skins and other artifacts from tribes that lived in the Great Plains.

I often lament have left Los Angeles, my hometown, to live in San Francisco, especially now that I have a son. After Kai was born, we found ourselves making the trek up and down Interstate 5 at least once a month. On our third not-so-pleasant jaunt past the sea of cows, Kai began screaming and would not stop. Yearning for somewhere fabulous to stop so we could cuddle him without the stench of manure and diesel, we vowed to start taking the nice way. Three years later (after chalking up more than 100,000 miles)

In the spring of 1976, a group of long-haired 20-somethings dreaming of a utopia among the trees bought 304 acres of rolling woodlands and moved into canvas tepees. They slept on rug-covered dirt floors, cooked over campfires and wood stoves, raised chickens and goats, tended an organic garden and endured summer heat and winter cold.

It was 8 a.m., and the ferry to Two Harbors on Catalina Island made its way slowly through the Port of Los Angeles. Then the captain gunned the engines as the channel widened and the boat headed for open sea. It was Saturday morning. The weather report was promising and we were eager to leave Los Angeles behind us.