I have history with the San Diego Zoo. That’s where I got Monkey, the stuffed, long-tailed companion of my adolescent adventures. I hadn’t been there since I was seven—until two weeks ago.
Greg and Geoff were my jolly companions for this adventure, not Monkey. The sky was foggy but warm, the traffic reassuringly sparse. To our surprise, however, we pulled off the 101 onto a scuzzy boulevard full of gentlemen’s clubs and circus-arts studios. If it hadn’t been for Greg’s GPS, I would’ve thought hippos and lemurs never came to this side of the tracks.
Our misgivings, though, were ultimately unfounded. We found the zoo just where the electronics told us it would be, and ventured forth into Kingdom Animalia.
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There’s something wonderful and completely irreplaceable about connecting with other species—and I use ‘connecting’ as a term that can describe various types of interaction.
For example:
The San Diego Zoo is one of the only zoos worldwide with a King Panda habitat. This is certainly a good thing, considering that I spent almost the entire drive down from Orange County listening to Greg rant about his undying hatred of pandas.
“Seriously, they’re evolutionarily nonviable.” He gripped the wheel, his eyes getting wider as his vehemence grew more pronounced. “They have to eat a butt-load of bamboo, they can’t mate easily, they’re super-specialized—probably half the zoo’s budget is spent on pandas.” He nodded his head decisively. “We should just let them die.”
Yes, he is the villain of this tale.
Anyway, if the zoo hadn’t had a panda exhibit, I think Greg would’ve been secretly disappointed. All that rage, all that emotion, wasted on a no-show? How anticlimactic! As it was, he was actually given a ticket with a picture of a panda on it.
If that's not a type of irreplaceable connection, I don't know what is.
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From the vantage point of my great age, I realized that some people might go to the zoo in order to see the young of our own species. Whether it’s the kid in the gorilla exhibit yelling, “I want to see the koalas!” or the toddler solemnly staring face to face with an orangutan, the zoo is full of children. For example: standing near the lion enclosure, we noticed the dominant male taking a pee. To commemorate the occasion, the little boy next to us yelled, “Look at Mufasa’s butt!”
There was one happy little monkey who did flips and leaps and barrel-rolls on the ground in its enclosure, almost as if it could hear its own theme music in its head. A little girl gaping over the railing next to us sneered, “He’s so dirty, he must be a boy.” The dad’s response was, “That’s right, honey.”
I mean, I know that kids that age are notorious gender loyalists (and everyone thinks “Girls rule, boys drool” or vice versa is a clever thing to say at one point or another), but that dad was legitimately allowing his daughter to persist in a misinterpretation of the world. He did it again a minute later, when the girl declared, “In a race between you and that monkey, you’d always win, wouldn’t you, Dad?” His answer, yet again, was, “Of course.” Now, I might add that 1) he didn’t look particularly fast, and 2) if they were racing in a forest, that monkey could leap from tree to tree with a speed astounding to those of us who sport only vestigial tails.
Monkeys, though--monkeys don't make ridiculous assumptions about gender. One type of connection is the teacher-student relationship, and I think that all of us (complacent dads, self-assured kids, smarmy bloggers) have much to learn from the zoo.
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Of all the hyenas and Chinese ducks and warty pigs, of all the animals at the zoo, my favorite was the okapi. An elegant and tall creature, almost like an antelope or deer, the okapi has zebra-striped legs: it ends up looking like something out of the best worlds of Dr. Seuss. The exhibit included a mother and foal; the mother jaunted toward us curiously, then swerved at the last minute to reach a tall leaf with her surprisingly snake-like tongue.
The okapi is the hero of this tale: good-natured, graceful, striking, intelligent—it reminded me of On Beyond Zebra, Dr. Seuss’s adventure into the letters in the alphabet after Z. That is, of course, a purely subjective reaction. Still, it’s not every day that you discover a new kind of beauty.
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Footsore but determined to stay until we were kicked out (someone even brought up the possibility of hiding in the zoo overnight), we ran at the dusk of the day to finally see the pandas.
“Look at it!” Greg hissed in outrage. “Just lying back there, with its food it its lap—that panda is the king of the zoo! That panda doesn’t have to do anything… You can tell it’s just staring at us and thinking, ‘Chumps!’”
Greg, I might mention, is the same person who thinks that birds are constantly snickering behind his back because he can’t fly.
I’m reluctant to have Greg continue in his role of scoundrel, rogue, and anti-hero, however. There was one kangaroo who stared balefully at us, crouching over its trough of food. Maybe he could be the villain of this tale.
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