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.