Disney Gator, When I'm Human

Got nobody checking up on me now.

I had a a one-day $10,000+ party.

They call it a wedding. Worth it, maybe?

Here's to you, Louis.




>' omnomnom

Renewable Energies

Ah, the final entry for nature writing. It's been truly eye-opening.

It seems as though we've finally found a couple of sources of renewable energy that respect nature. The windspire at the Pittsburgh Zoo collects energy to power the front gate. Made in the United States from recyclable materials, the windspire is eco-friendly, rotating at a lower safer speed. On top of that, the zoo, like many other places, uses luminescent solar poles to light the pathways. The poles capture sunlight during the day and use that harvested energy to show light throw the LED bulbs when it gets dark. Of course, I can't help but be a little cynical about all of it. Who would I be if I weren't cyncial, right? While the street light luminescent poles seem to be a perfect alternative, how much energy does a slow turning windspire produce if it's only powering the marquee for the Pittsburgh Zoo? Can we afford to have that many spires, and what would the world be like if it were a land of windspires? 100 years from now, will human beings regret the invention of the windspire and the windmills that generate electricity because we've run out of wind? Probably not, because we understand science now. Look, I'm being sarcastic again.

People fight age; people fight wisdom. A teenager feels much smarter than a child, a young adult wiser than a teen. In middle age a lot of people reflect upon their foolish decisions for all those years because now it seems they've reached stability. But if the middle aged person or older person understands everything, they're only pretending.

Do we pretend that we understand nature as our species gets older?

Or are we finally understanding sustainability now?

Otis the alligator and the baby alligator haven't come back in time for the class to end. I could despair over this fact or I could think of it in terms of writing. Sometimes when a writer begins a piece, it's not headed in a certain direction. Just like letting the narrative take the route it has found by surprise, I've let this blog do the same. And believe me, this is not the end for writing about nature. Along with my classmates, I've been going well over the minimum word count from week to week. It's evident this assignment excites many of us. So for now, I'll end this short. Brevity, short and sweet at 514 words.

I understand now that I have to start nature essays with a topic of interest rather than start with the memoir mentality. This is my defined process, which I've learned not everyone has. I admire those who can write otherwise, and I think that I've met some of the most amazing and beautiful writers (or gotten to know them better). They teach me so much, whether in class, over Pamela's pancakes, over Ritter's pancakes, or at a future visit to the zoo together- they just really get me, and I'm fortunate to have met these people. By researching, interviewing, and writing about things that interest me, the metaphors and similes come naturally rather than forced. Researching is my source of renewable energy.



(I dig when Ryan posts a song, so here's what's going through my head right now. Dawes wrote this song thinking of the lack of life experience and having not really that much to sing about- being so young and lacking life experience. Looking to the future works well, I'd say.)

 

"Summer" Xia, Red Panda

(Probably making a sound effect somewhere along the lines of "nyum nyum nyum.")

Remember this stuff from a couple entries ago?

I listed nearly a hundred grasses I knew were NOT this plant.

Since people are walking around, since Pittsburgh is waking up to spring and at the zoo some more people are interested again, or at least about the twenty folks I've seen today are, I ended up asking someone, an old man dressed in a black sweatsuit, what the "funeral flower" was. I hold one stereotype very strong- that old people are so much smarter about the natural world. Maybe because my other stereotype is people my age grew up with too much televisions and video-games or whatever, but that's an aside. How silly now, of me to think it was a funeral flower or some kind of grass. I never realized this: bamboo grows in two forms.

There are of course the woody bamboos I know about. This is the kind I imagine the pandas and red pandas and those weird lemurs are munching on. Animals like rats will eat the fruits that come out of bamboos and mountain gorillas, chimps and elephants will eat it as well, and receive an effect from the fermented sap as a sort of animal alcohol. Drink up, fellers. Also bug larvae will eat this and the caterpillars which eat the sap are considered a local delicacy in Thailand and some parts of China. This further supports my argument that bugs are delicious and should be eaten with a smile.

Anyway, the smaller, softer "harbaceous bamboos" are known as "olyreae." This is what the plant is and it is strange that the more popular wood-like bamboo has been the only bamboo in my mind. At least the red panda knows better.

The first time I ever saw a red panda I thought for sure it must be a red-headed relative to the raccoon. They wear a white bandit mask of fur and use their long bushy striped tails to balance. They've got claws and look a little bit like cats in the face, with their whiskers and sharp teeth. And if they got the chance, they'd probably eat garbage, too. 

However, these animals are not raccoons. They have been classified as ailuridae, a complicated and debated species classification only given to these special animals, all of the like-species ailuridae extinct. For a small summation of the information I've found about the species, check out this wiki.

As you can see, Xia, delivered to Pittsburgh, PA from a zoo in North Dakota, paces without stopping, at least for the twenty minutes we watched her. Even watching her movement made us a little dizzy. I immediately thought of earlier in this blog project, when I caught a polar bear pacing back and forth, shaking her head to and fro and wiggling to a silent samba. I thought of the tigers pacing back and forth, a roller coaster of grunts and groans over the same mounds of land they'd seen for all of their captive life. For as long as I can remember, I've seen animals pacing at zoos. I've assumed it meant the same thing it does in human beings: boredom, anxiety, unhappiness.  So I took a step further and searched online to figure out the pacing.

Blogs on pacing:

"Abnormal behaviour such as a stereotypic movement is very much a concern when it occurs in relation to animals held in captivity. From a behavioural standpoint, the behavioural and spatial requirements of nondomestic animals in captivity greatly depends on the species."

"Despite this, red pandas do adapt well in captivity, and they are found in zoos worldwide. Many Carnivores (order Carnivora, not ‘things that eat meat’) traditionally do very poorly in zoos; just think of a polar bear pacing back and forth repetitively in its enclosure. Red pandas, however seem to do just fine, which is a good thing for them because captive breeding programs can go a long way to restoring and maintaining the native population."
(Refer to my video in rebuttal to the second excerpt)

And I also found this, from the website of the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife charity dedicated to protecting animals:

"If the captive environment does not cater for the species-specific needs of the animal, there can be a deterioration in both physical and mental health such as the development of abnormal behaviour, disease and even early mortality...
Pacing and Circling:

Continuous walking back and forth or in a circle, following the same path. Signs of regular pacing include definite paths worn in the ground. Seen in many captive animals, especially big cats and canids (eg wolves)."

It's not the scientific proof I was hoping to find, but it reinforces that pacing is pacing, regardless of which mammal we are. I knew the pacing of human beings and I knew that this was a bad thing, just by the human experience and relating that to the animal experience. I knew this from realizing we are the same. Pacing is sometimes like searching for understanding- it can be really frustrating and lead to nowhere. And yet, we keep moving forward, trying the same path to notice something that might not have been so lucid the first couple of rounds. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I find my wallet after looking in the same spots for hours. Sometimes it doesn't help. But let's try to figure out how Xia came to be "Xia."

Xia is the red panda's name given by the zoo in North Dakota. She is almost three years old now. Sun, my friend from Handan, China, has taught me a lot about understanding the way Chinese names and symbols are formed.

夏[Xià] is a mixture of radicals. The two radicals are:

𦣻 [Shǒu] from the archaic symbol    for "head." To me, it looks like the head of a dog.

and
夂 [Zhǐ] for the archaic symbol   for "a man who makes an effort." They look like axes or clubs, some sort of tool.

Chinese mythology tells the story that there were ten suns in the sky, rambunctious brothers who made the world too hot with all their antics. Nothing could grow with all that hot air. So Hou Yi, a Robin Hood-like hero, shot down nine of the ten brothers, therein allowing the Earth to grow plants and survive with the heat of the surviving brother. To add to the mysteries of the sun, an eclipse was explained with stories of a magical dog of heaven biting a piece of the sun. So of course, as I continue to learn we've always been this way, human beings would yell and holler, making lots of noise to scare the magical dog away and end the eclipse.

We always think we're the heroes. That we're solving problems. That we can solve the problems. That the red panda's population is down to 250,000 in the wild so we should keep them and make them safe, safe from the destruction most likely we have caused. We label things. We make it so. And maybe it does make a difference. I'm not an expert and have no plans to be. 

Working together with the meanings of a "head" to ward away and the "hard work of man," the Chinese, through years of history, came to the meaning for Xia, or 夏, as the character for "summer." The red panda's name in English is "Summer," or Chinese for summer/great/grand/or big. 

The weather feels like it's restless, much in the way that Xia is. Pacing. The weather goes back and forth, cold and hot, undecided on whether the plants will live. One day the weather is 30°, the next it's 70°. Hou Yi has done his work to make sure it doesn't get too hot down here, but the weather is still restless, so do something humans. The weather is restless, like the insomniac battle I work through during the week, sleeping for only a handful of hours during the week. Almost every Friday is spent in sleep debt remittance, usually snoozing from 4pm to 9am the next morning. It'd be nice to find a balance, to figure out how spring will wake up from the sheets of snow and bring life into the bamboo for Summer to eat. I want this eclipse of bad weather to be over with, to be another thing of memory, to not seem so bad after all, in retrospect.

So what, in the end, should we do to fix everything?

Maybe make some noise for summer, everyone.

In A Whipray Name

More people come to the zoo in warmer weather. As the ice thaws, as molecules begin to move, people begin to move. In fluid motions, they drip along the sidewalk, they find their way through the zoo to the opening exhibits.

At the visitor's center

They've told me

Otis will be free

In a couple weeks

As I was researching for today's topic, I found the creepier side of the zoo:

http://blog.pittsburghzoo.org/

Webcams. The invasion of privacy. Animals are being watched not only in person, but through technology. Big Brother. The age of surveillance and numbers.

When I was flying and being screwed over for even thinking of flying this past week, I kept thinking about what an awful experience it is. How it feels so unnatural. How the air is stale and while flying I feel a cold dry sweat on the plane. My right ear is slow to pop and I can barely hear anyone out of that side for a day after the flight. But really, what is flying and what makes it such a pain?

1. Flying is a form of checking for citizenship.

Why do we accept spending money on something so expensive? Why is flying rather than taking a bus, or should I say, why is high speed travel any different from an automobile? It is a chance for someone to look at your ID, it is a chance to filter illegal immigrants. Border control. Air control. Controlling everything. Why are we okay with being rubbed down, patted down, and asked if we like to take things from strangers?

2. If your flight leaves without you, it is very often your fault.

Two minutes to run to the terminal in a connecting flight? A physically impossible feat to breach? Your fault. A flight leaving early for a reason unprovided by your air carrier? Your fault. "You'll be able to get a hotel voucher when you arrive in Salt Lake City." Upon arrival to Salt Lake City, the terminal is closed. No one to ask to get a hotel voucher, no promised accommodations given. Your fault. So stubborn you sleep in the airport anyway. I person waxing the floor asks you to sit up so he can wax underneath your feet.

3. Being identified as a number.

This one's pretty familiar to me. Undergraduate college, for one. Nearly everything. As well as when I wrote prisoners at the Appalachian Prison Book Project. I always felt deep regret at the inmates who didn't write their ID number when requesting a book. Their name is nothing to our society within those walls. They are accounted for by their number, and while I personally only have to think of being a number lately in terms of air-flight, I feel a remnant of that feeling of insignificance.


Flying is a demeaning, abusive thing, and I'm late in starting to understand what fresh air really means. What sea salt and the smell of an aquarium, that salty, algae, green smell, can do for me. I feel alive. I feel happy. I feel like nobody can keep me from walking around, from trapping anyone just as they did every time we landed.

I'm looking at the hands-on exhibit of the white-blotched River Stingray and a Leopard Whipray.

This animal is another favorite of mine, and I'm not sure why. I remember these animals being feared after the 2006 death of Steve Irwin, and while I do think that it's so sad for a man who respected the research and discovery animals so much to die at the stinger of one, (as if I need to remind you of what I think) there's nothing malicious in an animal defending itself.

The de-stingered animal is soft, slimy. A little "nasty" to touch, as my friend says. As visitors touch this beautiful animal, as this is a thing the zoo has allowed, I wonder how it really feels to the animal (and I will return when I have some more time and ask an attendant what this happens). I wonder why this is a thing at all, to be rubbed down in front of an audience. To be patted down. Is it invasive or welcomed?

***

A little kid climbs under the built-in tunnel and pops his head through the looking glass. The human as a stingray. To be pet as a stingray. Is the whipray watching us or are we watching it? The leopard print it beautiful, meaningful, like every little spot is a center to another universe. It doesn't have a name posted anywhere. There is nothing posted on the internet about either animal's name, nothing that I can find even as I am internet-technology-born.

Have they simply become numbers?

He Who

     Has every piece of this earth been recorded, stepped on? By "we" I mean human beings and animals, all the mammals together, so I wonder if we as a collective being have touched every millimeter over the millions of years, over the trillions of days. I'd hike over every mountain, wade through every lake, and trudge through every desert- I'd make my life with the earth a way of life, my purpose. A step would land on every inch of earth... but I question the practical worth, and that keeps me from even trying this.

     So as I'm looking at these lizards, in their five by ten foot tank, and I'm wondering, what's the point of all my thoughts? These lizards have certainly slid across every millimeter of  their man-made fifty square feet, and now there's no land left to explore. Maybe we were given so much land because we weren't meant to see it all. We were meant to be able to still wonder, to imagine.

     The Mexican bearded lizard, known for it's colorful, bumpy and beaded skin, was formerly found through the Southwestern U.S., but now it is only found from Mexico to Northern Guatemala. The lizard has glands in its lower jaw which release venom by capillary action along its grooved lower teeth, in effect, chewing venom into its prey. There is no anti-venom for the bite of this lizard, though human death is rare.

     They no longer appear through the Southwestern U.S. It is a CITES protected animal, protected under the same Animal Welfare Act, as it is endangered by its collection and habitat loss and careless murder. The bearded lizard has a plethora of superstition and myth. It is incorrectly believed to be the most venomous animal, and that it can create lightning strikes with its tail. Stranger still, the lizard is believed to be able to make a pregnant woman miscarry at it's gaze, as many things with scales in myths cause harm just by eye contact.

     For this reason, locals have killed the lizard

on the spot.

Also, the rare lizard is poached through animal trade. We kill the animal and sell its corpse for our own profit, for pieces of paper which make us richer. The animal does not reproduce well in captivity, so it very likely doesn't reproduce well in the zoo either. It's scarcity means a very high price for collectors. Though it is too late for the United States, this lizard is protected in Mexico by law of category A (very endangered) and it lives within several dedicated protected areas.

As I look into the face of this beaded "monster" it's incredible to me to imagine the men and women who believed and still believe it to be able to terminate pregnancies and cause bad weather. I'm busy being curious about the steps, about the land, because I want to know. Nothing more. Why didn't anyone want to really know this animal before they kill it? I have no reason to think stepping and walking is an injustice to the earth. I have no reason to think a calamity will fall from the stars if I pick a plant. I'm not inclined to get behind the philosophy of how we sometimes believe we own things simply by touching or living alongside them, but sometimes it's fun to pretend. My curiosity's nature is that of physical evidence and matter. Of mattering and the physical matter. Somehow a footprint in the sand is a solidifying action to me, as silly as that seems, even if it is blown away in a sandstorm, melted in the snow, the print is still there. I'm sorry, science, but this is what I believe. A mammal's steps are somehow deeper than the first and second layers of the earth, the crust, deeper than magma in the core, and I have no science to back that up, I have no reason to feel a certain way, and I have no scientific reason to feel sad about what we've done to these lizards, but this is the science of emotion.

We've headed to Seattle, and while I'd love to reflect on the awful flight experience or coming to terms with my interpersonal relationships, I can only reflect in this way:

He who journeyed through the airport.

He who arrives two hours and thirty minutes early- he feels only on time.

He who realizes his expectations don't frequent reality.

He who journeys and feels so sad about the beauty in this world. Of people and animals and their expressions alone which could reduce him to tears.

     Why tears?

     Why sadness?

     Why is it that he who speaks freely of ills and ignorance of this world can feel so restricted?

He who notices strong hair follicles, the strong tissues or scales holding a skeleton covering, a woman

     SH

         SH

             SH

                Sh

                   Sh

                      sh

                         h

                            her crying infant as he can only

                                                            B

                                               Ba

                                   Bac

            Back away.

He who journeys the world in such small ways.

He who loves this world so much he hates it.

He who refuses to enjoy himself for fear of seeming strange.

He who notices all the beauty until it turns ugly.

Justice For All

The Pittsburgh Zoo has been open to the public since 1898 thanks to the generous donation of $125,000.00. I'm sure real Pittsburgh buffs know or at least might have heard the name Christopher Magee, the founder of the zoo. A refresher for the yinzers who haven't caught up and we foreigners:

One man halves the debt of an entire Pittsburgh. 

One man generates thousands of jobs. 

One man then controls a city with his partner. 

One man takes piles of human being currency and ravages entire plots of land, uses materials from the earth to construct automobiles and building sites. 

How does one single man or one woman ever have such a giant impact on this earth? 

How do we consider what is "earned" and "fought for" when the question of ownership is so one-sided? 

A little boy named Maddox was mauled and eaten by a pack of African dogs in 2012 at the Pittsburgh Zoo. He was leaning over the rails, his mother trying to help him get a better view of the dogs. In terms of ownership, and devoid of our moralities, the dogs had this piece of meat fall into their hands. They had chance fall into their laps, just like luck falls into the hands of a human being. Just as a bloody medium rare steak splats onto our plates when we have enough money to order it. Who is to say what property is and what ownership is?

Obviously, we are.

And we've since removed those dogs from the settlement, only to replace them with cheetahs. It's just another motion we've got for handling iffy situations. The parents sued the zoo, which I truly don't understand, given the liability of holding your child over a banister. And the zoo just reached another part of a settlement last week, in which the zoo will pay the U. S. Department of Agriculture $4,550.00. 

Why?

Under the Animal Welfare Act, the only Federal law to protect the treatment of animals, we have decided that the USDA is due these finances. Statute §2157 section (d) states: "Any person, including any research facility, injured in its business or property by reason of a violation of this section may recover all actual and consequential damages sustained by such person and the cost of the suit including a reasonable attorney's fee." As my class has learned from our Eden Hall adventure, what the attorneys do with this lawsuit money in terms of agriculture is really up in the air.

What exactly does all this legislation do for the animals? I'm not entirely sure, though I'd like to think that the rationale behind this decision is: human beings fear losing money. And the fear of that loss prevents (most) people from harming animals, if not for just common human decency. Hurting an animal means losing money, simple.

I wonder then, if the animals would like more. They don't exactly see any part of this settlement, do they? Sometimes they get relocated rather than executed, so I guess that can be considered a small victory. 

I see Otis the alligator in his best tux, ready for court over being put in such a small bathtub of an exhibit for so many years. He's adorned with black shimmery satin on the lapels, a stripe of the same material sewn into a stripe on the pants, should he choose to be so decent to wear pants, too. He's holding an Alligator Welfare Act 2013 copyright LexisNexis in his right arm. A Venti cup of Starbucks caramel machiatto and a yellow legal pad in his right.

But that is probably not at all what any animal would like to see.

They're not into all the pageantry of the human world.

All this snow, do I even want to talk about it right now? There are stronger minds who have already written pages and books on it. I can't stomach it to consider snow again this week. I'm standing on a snowy bridge, nobody's bridge, and considering the legality, not the morality, of my previous blog thoughts of throwing a kid over the ropes to Otis. I have very unpopular opinions sometimes, but I think neither I nor the Animal Welfare Act have it right when it comes to justice for the animals. If that's even what we're really after.

A Revisitation of Snow's Livelihood; A Not-So-Meditation

I wait for Otis. I wait. Even if the alligator doesn't show his face until after the course is over, I will write about him. This is my goal and this is something I'm looking forward to, something I have great anticipation toward. I hope I can do it justice when the snow melts and the alligator comes out to play.

My human buddies at the visitor's office,

who now know me by name (or probably 

when I'm not around they know me by 

"that alligator/biology weirdo"), say

this plant is called a "funeral flower" though 

I'm not entirely convinced they're so 

worried to be correct. A search of "funeral 

flower" yields exactly what you think it 

would. More search soon, must buy guide.

My little buddies, whatever they are, are holding on for dear life. Let's see, they're not: Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, rye grass, cheat grass, rescue grass, quaking grass, oat grass, orchard grass, nut grass, bermuda grass, picklegrass (thought they resemble each other), clubawn grass, saw grass, windmill grass, mosquito grass, rosette grass, western panic grass, crab grass, cockspur grass, barnyard grass, billion-dollar grass, Indian goosegrass, fall witchgrass, bottlebrush grass, quackgrass, wheatgrass, lovegrass, lace grass, stinkgrass, cupgrass, finegrass, mannagrass, skeletongrass, limpograss, porcupinegrass, mudplantain, velvetgrass, orangegrass, Junegrass, rice cutgrass, whitegrass, moorgrass, dunegrass, melicgrass, miletgrass, Chinese silvergrass, scratchgrass, bent grass or zoysia.

I literally just clicked through all of those on the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service website, first overwhelmed by all the grasses (currently existing in PA) I don't know, secondly worried these buddies are actually flowers with the petals missing. What's scarier still, how could I not know any of these grasses by name? Now I have all these images floating in my head, and I must try to place them, one by one, over the course of my life. I have to figure out what this "plant of action" is called, or at least name a plant before I finish the semester.

As for the other people out here, there's one older man at the zoo scraping at the snow. He hasn't asked me why I'm past the barrier and hanging out on the bridge. He's not interested in the police work, I assume, busy scratching at the earth, taking some snow and some history from the paths of this zoo.

From what I can only assume is man-made, the snow today is pinched firmly along the edge of blacktop filling in mounds. This would allow people to walk along his clearing if there were any people visiting the zoo today. He turns into a baker in my eyes, the hours before the bakery is open in the morning. The snow looks like crust, crumbly and green, brown, grey, flecks of salt which look like sugar powered along the edges. The zoo becomes a giant white pie with tough black filling. A bakery.

The way I see a pie like this in the snow makes me feel embarrassed yet I have nothing to fear but myself. I immediately think, "people will think this is a stupid analogy" when really it's my own demons who think this is stupid. It's my own demons holding me back from simple metaphor. Seeing this pie, this southern home-cooking image of a pie, makes me think of how I feel so ashamed of nature.

When I think of conventional nature, stopping to smell the flowers and grass, identifying a plant, thinking of ownership of land and crops and an intimate relationship with the "mother" Herself, I think of the countryside nature from which I was born. I say I'm from "Charleston, West Virginia" but I'm really from Alum Creek, thirty minutes out, the countryside of Charleston, the trees, sticks, grass and forest of Charleston. This home and having to write about nature now makes me think of an overpowering estrangement I must mend. I think of getting as far from trees and plants as possible. I think of all the West Virginia stereotypes (as if you needed a link). I think of how people like Dick Cheney can joke freely about how we are an inbred group of people. I think about how Jon Stewart, bless him and his humor, can make people laugh about fracking, how we shouldn't drink our poisoned water from a chemical spill ("Freedom Industries"- you can't write this shit). "Nature" makes me think of my family's natural southern twang and how I changed my own accent when I was seven because I'd noticed instances of people in person and on the national news who thought that innately people from my area are stupid, inbred, redneck farmers and hillbillies who frequent racism, bestiality, incest, and most other Neanderthal-like behavior city-folk shan't touch upon.

But fuck all that noise, Jonny.

The snow looks like pie crust. My parents speak with a music, a beautiful banjo to their voices, that I can never get back. As for nature, I'm doing my best to just accept it.

And what about the snow? Can I find some excitement in it?

Snow makes me think of whiteness. It makes me think of purity, boredom, of sadness. If I'm being serious and unafraid of inhibition, whiteness makes me think of white skin and the horrible history that comes with it. It makes me think of privilege. It makes me immediately think of Morgantown, WV's student-run newspaper, Daily Atheneum, and how they just allowed a young man to post an article about how it's hard out there for a white dude. I'm serious. They really did that.

I'll try to think otherwise, less dark and cynical, and think of this snowy whiteness in terms of light.

The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. Most of us know that in art mixing blue and yellow makes green, red and yellow makes orange, red and blue makes purple, etc. But in terms of light, it can be strange and doesn't seem to make sense that all the colors equal something different, and combined they equal white. White reflects all colors. We can look at snow and see its sparkle, its plainness, and not realize that it actually contains every color from the spectrum. Snow is vibrant. Snowflakes are alive. In life, they are full of connections, they've compacted together and befriended other snowflakes to make a blizzard. The light blinds me. In the same way I often don't wear my prescribed glasses to avoid seeing people, to feel more brave when staring at a blob of color rather than into the eyes and soul of another being, the glare of this snow reminds me of not wanting to make too deep, too personal, too vulnerable a connection. Then again, maybe I'm projecting my emotions onto the poor pure snow. It's just my nature estrangement blinding me again.

The snow prints I can see near the goats' area look like a pulse. A dotted line. A Pulse. Snow alive, snow being alive. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to have a pulse? Is there a hiccup in the pulse when there's a dirt or browning of the clear, full of color, white? I don't think so. I love the focus on browns. Maybe they're considered hiccups but I like to think of smudges in the white as a break in formalities. An ease and a relaxation from all this "trying to be perfect all the time." Relax, snow. No one is judging you, snow.

I say hello to Sea Kitty Maggie before I leave the zoo.

Sea Kitty Maggie

An enchantment cast upon Pittsburgh made it warmer around here these last couple of days.

The lighter layer of snow melted and melded into the thicker colder layer of snow, forging that compact icy crisp- the kind of snow we use for snow forts and battles. I pine for at least one more snowball fight before I turn thirty. I've got a couple years, and I don't fear getting older at all. I've chosen thirty as it's a socially constructed landmark of "aging." I've chosen thirty because you can reverse all the damage you do only unto hitting thirty, then science says it's permanent.

I do fear surrendering to age and getting more and more accustomed to acting according to it. In a dozen more seasons, when it's the perfectly packed snow like this, will I be guarded and too mature to ask the frozen water to assemble the battalions, too brittle to lift it all up into one perfectly healthy sphere? 

My guess is for everyone to watch for snowballs this season as well as the next twelve. No one is safe. Snowballs are the white fluff of enchantment.

The maximum temperature this past week probably wasn't above 40°. I'm jealous of how much warmer it feels when you're around 220-660 pounds with a coarse, short fur coat. Once again, there are no people. I won't get to hit anyone with a snowball today, which I guess is better for everyone involved.

The mid-winter spell has temporarily fizzled out and this city's starting to dip back down into colder temperatures. There has been another dusting of snow along the paths and plants. Another batch of white-out to correct all our history. All our footprints erased, our daring sculptures censored, snow angels now with their wings clipped, as if they never flew in the first place. 

The first known zoo was just discovered in 2009. In Hierakonpolis, Egypt, a discovery of an ancient zoo, called a menagerie, dated 3,500 B.C., was found to have contained skeletons of hippos, hartebeests, elephants, baboons and wildcats. It's hard to believe we've been doing this for so long, through all these winters. Through King Ashur-bel-kala, Empress Tanki and King Wen of Zho, Solomon, Semiramis, Ashurbanipal, Alexander the Great and many more after that, we've trapped animals in cages and watched over them for more than 5,000 years. A menagerie symbolized power in aristocrats who kept wild expensive animals captive, and it wasn't until the 19th century that we decided calling something zoological in the name of science was perhaps somehow a nice form of public entertainment.

Just think, all those fucking winters.

I really hate hate hate the cold, and I could complain so much we'd run out of the earth's oxygen from all the hot air, but jump through all those years and the California sea lions seem to have never minded it. 

(Annoying the visitor's office has become 

a regular culture of my visits. The clerk told 

me the friendliest sea lions are Selina and 

Maggie, so out of guesswork and the sake 

of my people friend Maggie (and fun), I'll 

assume this sea lion was the one who 

shares the name.)

Sea Lion Maggie pauses again and again and I lean in forward a bit, just to get to know her a little better. I get as close as I can to the scratched glass wary of catching germs from the baby hand residue. I want to feel nearer Maggie. I want to share the same water so I can know and understand her even closer. I'd run my hand along her forehead, the color of my grandmother's grey hair, to see whether she's slimy or smooth. I'd tell her how jealous I am of those strong wiry whiskers, being outgrown by a beautiful bearded lady. Sea Lion Maggie's got the friendliest eyes with a yellowish brown tint. They remind me of a drop of the natural honey, the dark honey I buy from West Virginia hives, plopped on a ceramic plate. She blows bubbles out of her nose to help her swim around just as we do. I consider her mortality. I consider that she and I wouldn't be so different from each other swimming side by side, blowing bubbles from the same body of water. We sea kitties would live just about the same as large land kitties. We'd travel in packs called harems. Just like land lions, there'd be a male, a bull, who heads a groups of females, or cows. I'd have to fight a 660 pound sea lion to stick around. I could take him, or I could convince him to compromise. They work as a pack just as I work best as a pack, though I wish I were strong enough to be alone. We're both so utterly codependent. I understand too well the need for a tribe, for a colony. 

I imagine Sea Lion Maggie feels like those ultra-Mormon tribes, all those women packed around one husband, but she's blissfully ignorant of all that. She has no need for a religion. She might pray for more fish or a shiny red ball to play with. She might pray that her family stays safe and maybe she prays that life gets a little more exciting than swimming around that little pool all day. But she doesn't need it. I don't need it either. All we need is the love of meeting and knowing other beings. Our lifeblood is connection.

Maggie seems young, she seems to have a young spirit and I think we share that, too. I hope she doesn't change any of her behavior as she gets older and more cynical about it all. She's not trying to judge my actions or win me over, she's just watching, curious, and I wish I could ask her, if nothing else, to not let her curiosity fade away.

I wished I could ask or talk to Sea Lion Maggie about our history. I wanted to tell her what my beings have done to her beings and come to some sort of understanding. She'd learn about the zoological societies and the oldest zoo still in existence, Tiergarten Schöbrunn, in Vienna, Austria. I'd tell her about Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy part of the extensive list of human exhibits, and we'd philosophize about why keeping humans contained was suddenly not okay, yet containing animals presses forward in the name of "science." Maybe she wouldn't care, but I wanted to talk to her about anything at all, really, and maybe the feeling was mutual, as she swam to and fro returning to watch me every couple of minutes.

I stood there staring back at her, until it seemed inhuman to stay there any longer.

Chilling

The road down the hill from my street to the zoo was anything but easy. The cars go as the snow falls; the weather changes but the people keep moving, keep living. Bunched brown snow collected in the center of the road with tread-marks painting a safer guideline. My brakes jerked and ground against the pads at the new stop light. I swerved right and decided to just go for it, sliding into the double football field length of the Pittsburgh Zoo's driveway. The weather was grimly gray and hazy, and the sun seemed trapped behind clouds forever.

I made my way to the tunnel before the fork. Icicles hung like glass beads from cracks of the ceiling. They horded what little light exists in Pittsburgh inside their tiny crystal bodies. The brightness jumped all over its body with each step I took.

The plants along the edge of the walkways from my last visits were now missing. I imagined they retreated and sought refuge beneath the dirt. Or someone yanked them out from the roots."Are they weeds?" a sign read. The information read that they want the plant-life to be natural. So if I trust the zookeepers, maybe the plants were consumed. Maybe the zoo could have a scavenging animal eat them up. I couldn't imagine an animal outside of the cages, for some reason.

I continued on. A couple of the garden's leafless stalks poked straight from the white puffs, reaching for some air. The air is thick when it's cold. Because of my asthma, I always feel like I'm smothering when the air gets anywhere below 30°.

At the visitor's office again, I am forbidden from seeing this gator. I told the lie that I'm a doctoral candidate of biology at the University of Pittsburgh. For some reason a title like that seemed more demanding, yet I still needed some sort of permission slip or divine right.

     When I did see Otis Alligator last October the air was still warm. He was drying up, in his boredom, or he was getting warm, in his relaxation. Always at the center of his rock slab.

     I balanced on his roped bridge, swaying, listening to the boards creaking. The grass was soft and green with only a couple of brown flecks. People were passing by, chattering or screaming about the alligator. A couple of kids threw pennies and quarters at him just to see if they could get a rise out of Otis.

     Usually I wish kids would just shut the fuck up, in the nicest way possible. Very rarely, but sometimes, I wish them harm. The inherently evil ones. Those money-throwing brats believed they weren't being watched, and maybe they weren't. So what if I tipped them over the bridge? Those children believed they should throw change at an animal so he will "perform" for them.

     What if I make them perform for me?

      I would never actually do that. People are watching, and I guess I kind of love children right in the middle of hating them.


A friend recently labeled me as "the nicest misanthrope." For a reason, I guess.


Three months later, I'm sitting on the same bridge where the bullying happened. Nobody's here now, and in this particular spot, nobody's ever here. I'm no longer nervous passing over the barrier. I merely think of it as a strange bump in the regular pathway.

Of those I saw walking toward the exit, I heard them say "This was a bad idea," and "I can't believe they make you pay for this in the winter." At the bridge and at the petting zoo, there are no people. No mean-spirited children. No kind children. Not even Otis. Just me, a couple of goats, the sea lion and the polar bear.

The goats have a cashmere undercoat which grows longer in the winter, so they're just as bundled up as I am. Aquatic animals generally don't have a difficult time in the winter.

The polar bear's dancing again. She literally paces forward and paces backward, shaking her head and bottom to and fro like a samba or shuffle. It's not a meditative, focused pace. It's very clearly a fun thing for her. She is having a frosty good time. I legitimately feel good about this. She's always miserable hiding in the cool corner of her cave in the summer months.

I wish I could be "the coldest scholar on earth" and think of snow as "a book to be read" (Haines) or throw a personal nippy party like the polar bear. I wish I could dance and growl and think these white mites falling from the sky aren't a constant reminder of where I'm from, where I am. I wish I could say I've gotten used to this after twenty six years.

Questions for 1-21-2014

Kathleen Ayers

• There are two personalities present, one an extrovert and the other mostly an introvert. When you return to either place, do you resume each lifestyle smoothly? Or is it more like jet lag, something you have to get over with time and rest?
• So skunk cabbage is bear candy. How did you find out about that? Do you have a friend who studies nature or do you have a special way of finding interesting facts about nature?

Christopher Bakken

• In Nea Potamia, when you speak to the old man from the middle of the road he mentions the places you'll pass and the phrase "It was once a very long way by foot. May your road be good." I'm just curious to know how you can remember so many details so vividly within your stories. Do you carry around a journal or do you take creative nonfiction freedom and try to make the history as accurate as you can remember as soon as practical?
• In your essays you include a recipe at the end to wrap things up. I think I have a pretty good idea as to why you do this (what with the luminous details about what you're cooking and eating), but can you explain the idea behind this in your own words?

Cookies, Pale Bridges and Baby

I'm out of hit points, stamina, low on mana. My diurnal other half finds me waking up late on the couch and going to sleep early in the floor, time passing without balance— avoiding people when I can. Though some of my behavior unveils itself only for winter, it's also my "chronotype", as Till Roenneberg suggests. Unfortunately, I'm nocturnal. I am meant to creep around in the darkness.

Alligators are also mostly nocturnal. They do their hunting around dusk. I'm reading a lot of suggestions online that warn to keep a flashlight near if you live in an area with alligators. Do people scan for flashes of yellow alligator eyes floating along bodies of water? It sounds magnificent, just scary enough.

Alligators are swimming along disguised as logs in order to sneak up on some meat. I'm creeping around the house hoping not to step on a groaning floorboard in order to sneak up on a crunchy cookie or two or seventeen. I'd like to share a cookie with the gator. Chocolate chip. Maybe peanut butter. I wonder if he would appreciate the crumbly sugar. More likely than not he'd probably just eat me instead, and that's no problem. Chances are there's a really good mincemeat pie recipe calling for actual meat, or I could be one of those vogue cooks who throws bacon on a sweet scoop of vanilla ice cream to make it "edgy." He might like that.

The point is, neither of us have self control. Be it drugs, cookies, the works, we are predators.

I'm at the zoo again.

I pick the right path this time.

Over the barricades.

At the bridge.

The snow is light today. It fluffs up like powder bunched together at the face of my boots. I pace back and forth on the bridge. The cables of the bridge are dusted, just like the ropes, rails and rods. And the rocks. The would-be small river. This living space for this alligator is so so small. Otis's rock looks like a tiny naked Oreo suspended on a small cloud of milk. Cooookie.

I'm not a solitary television watcher, but China made me a lonely enough person to get into it. The snow today reminds me of all those skin product commercials in Handan. Skin like milk, the commercials would say. Get the skin of an egg white in two short weeks, they'd say, gallons of white liquid pouring against a pale sky blue backdrop. They'd advertise products for skin-whitening with models white like a bleached corpse. But this is the culture there, a culture we used to follow. Though it's not like we're better now. We've got orange paste and bronze makeup to create the darkening effect. Paleness is beauty when it means we don't have to work hard outdoors. Tan is beautiful when it means we don't have to work hard indoors. Keeping a dream in mind, maybe soon every color will be the new beauty.

Skin is whack.

The tracks from one side of the bridge and the other look like a couple four-wheelers have passed through. It looks like a lot of people have come through, but today nobody has broken the rules but me.

They are my tracks.

I'd paced back and forth, thinking about getting the best view of Otis's home, thinking about Chinese values, thinking about being tired of thinking, but really, I'm just trying to get over this bridge. The bridge of my life, the bridge of not finding my alligator, the bridge of you-name-it.


Before I left the zoo, I decided I ought to ask the visitor's office where they'd taken Otis.

"This is probably a strange question, but do you happen to know where the alligator is?"
"Which one? The baby or-"

Which one? The baby?

"Um, Otis."
"Oh, he's being held in a separate commissary. Off exhibit."

The use of the phrase "being held" made me think along the lines of "what are you in for?" I appreciate this explanation, intentional or not. In Otis's apparent prison, I'm sure he was feeling a little less than energized. No sunlight to speed up his coldblooded metabolism. Nowhere to make tracks. No bridges to cross.

And a baby?

I didn't even want to think about what a "separate commissary" looked like. How could his winter space be any less elaborate than the gator bathtub on exhibit?

Otis Gator

Because it was just too damn cold, the Pittsburgh Zoo was not full of beautiful slobbering children attached to harnesses today. I mean... it was painfully frigid, where the air burned then stung in pecks of bristling cold. The gift shops were not hot from the too-many-human-body, less a meat sauna, more an empty structure. Pittsburgh is getting over a "polar vortex." There are no parents rolling their eyes at their babies in strollers who cry about spilled Dip-N-Dots or truncated time with the strong, popular, elegant tiger.

"Do you need a map?"
"No thanks!"

There was one mapless man who passed up the big-headed tiger without a second thought. He was wearing an oversized black parka, his eyes just showing below a fur hood. He sweat in winter weather as he barreled up and around the hill, past where the flamingos were in the summer. That's me, barreling.

One goal: visit Otis the alligator.

I was making my way to this gator and it was taking longer than usual. Frost had taken all the plant life, crab grass mostly, along the edges of the pavement walkway. The little brown plant fingers spilled out to the path in patches of dead hay and dirt. Little shapes and pictures were patterned within this crime scene, that feeling of maybe hallucinating, maybe living. People no doubt stepped on those little bits of life, just as I do, not thinking twice about whether a plant carries life or not. A lot of people do, though. They're awake to the Lifestream.

I started to feel a little weird at my remorse for these dead weeds, then I shut that shit out of my brain.

I realize again and again how much I wish I hadn't ignored the Latin flower words I'd ignored for nearly forever: biennial, biannual, perennials, bicentennials. One I know: annual. That one's easy enough. But why am I satisfied otherwise? There is just so much I don't know. I barely know milkweeds from marigolds. Pine from Cyprus. I know to go "bird by bird" as Anne Lamott says, but it'd probably help if I could name a bird. I guess there's always a start somewhere, sometime after I get to this alligator, wherever that may be.

After I passed a vacated Pepsi stand to my left, and about fifty more feet, and some fresh poo smell later, I took a closer look at the map with worn curled edges posted on the large brown building, pictures of elephants posted all over. I smelled elephant shit. As I pinpointed the "YOU ARE HERE" sticker, I realized I'm on the other side of the zoo, pretty far from Otis. Disappointing, but funny all the same. A sticker told me where to go.

Honestly, I don't remember a single time any map has made me happy, really. And that's all the wielder's fault, of course. A little more walking.

No doubt I looked a little crazy trudging around the zoo by myself with this glossy patterned book in my hand, and who cares, I love weirdos and I am a weirdo. I'd gotten my book from my best lady friend from high school. While it was a gorgeous book, sure, it was a little too pretty. Shiny and shimmery. The pages were empty and clean, sewn into a leather binding. Smelled nice, too.

It just didn't fit me.

 If I could make a notebook that was more me, it'd have large grey scales. The pages would have to be super crusty, and it'd have a flaky ribbon which broke every time you most needed it. It would reek. However, there would be a charm to this notebook, a little curl around the lip. If you looked at it just so, it would smile just like an alligator, and somehow everything would be fine.

I'd finally reached the right area only to find the sidewalk barricaded for renovations. I thought that it seemed a little strange to leave the animals unattended and block off that section of the zoo for no reason.

I don't suppose I need to tell you how quickly I climbed over the barrier. And of course, obvious to any mildly to moderately intelligent person, what I found was frozen lake devoid of Otis. Alligators live in the Southern parts of the United States and rare parts of Southern China for a reason. It's warm there. An undersized plastic alligator in Otis's stead smiled at me blankly.

I spent twenty minutes sitting with the rocks and listening to water trickle, slipping down the sides of rocks into the frozen water. Some large plants poked up out of the rubble like the remaining hairs from a man's balding scalp. Crackling and rustling in the distance made me pop up like a prairie dog to watch for staff members, predators. I wondered if the zoo staff would find me and tell me to get lost. I almost hoped that the alligator had adapted to his surroundings, hiding in camouflage behind a mossy rock or in the darker leaves, ready at any moment for guerrilla warfare.

I have reaffirmed this is going to be my spot. I had a journey at this zoo filled with smells, sights, feelings, powerful images, whatever. I didn't really get to reflect on those yet. Here I am, sitting on the cold pavement with my shiny shimmery book, thinking about a half-natural half-man-made construct for an alligator. Very urbanatural, isn't it? Otis seems to have been relocated from the glitz and glamour of having human beings chatter about his existence, at least when it's cold. Good for him.

At the skin of the ice, leaves which used to swim around were encased at its surface.

I wondered where someone had encased Otis.