What is a zoo without bears?
Sunday afternoon, after a full morning of viewing the art at the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City, I went to the Kansas City Zoo to see what was new with the birds and the bees. It's been a full twenty plus years since my last visit and I remember this zoo was big in my childhood. I must have come here a dozen or so times on school field trips or with my family on Sunday afternoons, just like this one and each time I was in heaven.
There is a tiny train that you can ride through the park. There are seals in a small pool that you can watch swim around and be cute. There are stinking goats that you can pet. There is a monkey house full of poo-slinging monkeys. It's all there...
The sun was bright, but the spring winds were blowing. Blowing might be too soft a way of saying "gale force" but I think you understand. Spring has always brought strong winds to Kansas City, so its nothing new. They tell the Kansas City faithful of strong, menacing storms somewhere over the horizon and that we should prepare to lose a house or two. As humans we can't see the storms but we can pretend to prognosticate based on odd and irregular ideas that we feel makes us look like a weather genius: "I see that the clouds over there are silver on top and grey on bottom, that must mean heavy rains are coming." "Hear how long that cat is meowing? That means rain!" Of course, it could just mean, "Shadows under a cloud" and "I'm hungry, feed me." but never argue with a weather report.
The animals at the zoo knew what the winds meant and most of those animals weren't even from here. Most of the animals hail from Asia or Africa and apparently their attitudes toward Kansas City were much the same as their neighbors outside of the zoo; if they could leave, they would. And that's not just because they were incarcerated. I think they feel that Kansas City just isn't cosmopolitan enough for them. Like all creatures - comfort is paramount and Kansas City isn't a comfortable city.
Or they could have been agitated by the pending storm, who's to say....
The zoo seemed to be a mess. It seems that laws and animal rights activists have somehow stripped my youthful zoo down to nothing and what remains in it's place is a huge barren wasteland with some lemurs running around in it. What was once a zoo FULL of animals, is now a shadow of it's former self. More vegetable now than animal. The zoo of my youth was wall-to-wall animals with small little concrete or limestone cages with bare iron bars to keep the animals safe from a BBQ crazy world. The animals were stacked ten deep in a cells no bigger than the average studio apartment. Each cell had a big red ball for the animals to play with amid numerous piles of feces laying everywhere. If the animal wasn't there, walk ten paces to the next cell and you could watch the next animal pace around a bit. It wasn't uncommon for all the large cats to be housed in the "cat house" which was several bathroom sized cells all clumped together like a human prison, each with it's own cat inside. All the monkeys were housed in the "monkey house", which was several open cages with large pits separating the monkey from the gawker. Hippos and rhinos were all stuffed into a building no bigger than your average sized McDonalds. The smell was amazing and still lingers in my mind. The zoo was bursting at the seams with animals of all sorts. Your mind would be dizzy after just ten minutes of walking. Bears next to snakes next to camels next to seals next to elephants. All for the greater good of Midwesterners that could never travel to see these animals in their natural habitates. I'm sure a great deal of the people that saw these animals felt that these animals lived on concrete slabs and played with big red rubber balls back in their native jungles. I know I thought they did.
Somewhere between the glory of those days and now, people came along and stripped all the fun and value out of the zoo. Now the zoo is seven times LARGER with less concrete and more trees, grass and other natural stuff, and quite possibly the greatest sin, there is barely a tenth of the animals that there used to be. Maybe an eleventh....
The walk between the TWO tigers (no panthers, cougars, lynxes or pumas) and the lions (which were "inside because they were frightened of the pending storm" was an hour and even then the animals looked tame, relaxed, well fed and entertained... Even though they didn't have a red rubber ball. The two gorillas, which looked ready to eat a bullet given the chance, were miles away from the chimps and the baboons, who were also inside hiding. The elephants were a no show in their cage which was big enough for a NASCAR track and filled with trees and not one hint of concrete. (oh the humanity!!!) And they were a time zone away from the giraffes and the camels.
It was madness!
The rather cleaver and at the same time cruel trick that the zoo-minded Napoleons played on me, was to leave all the old cells there for me to walk past on my long trek to see the next animal. The condition was that of an old parking lot that hadn't seen a car in some years. There were cracks in the concrete and native grasses were growing. The walls were crumbling and falling away and they stood like relics of an ancient civilization for curious onlookers to comment on. The iron bars that held back the bears were twisted and mangled and one could imagine that the bear finally figured it out and took a few Chiefs fans with him in his mad dash for freedom. Most of the limestone cell blocks had been back filled in and had I dared, I could have walked down into the old cages and felt what it was like in those cages from my youth. If I had children, I could imagine telling them as we past these structures, "There! There in those former cells is where they used to keep the bears!" and then I can see myself having to tell my children what a bear is and why they don't have them at the zoo anymore.
Maybe all this came about because someone said Midwesterners were fat and lazy and we needed to move more. The trip to the zoo, which used to be a fairly easy walk of maybe a mile, is now a forty mile walk that produces less than one animal per mile. You have to WALK baby! Either they want to deter the locals from coming to the zoo or they really want you to feel some pain while looking at animals.
Kansas City has been morphing into something new and old structures of the past have given way to other attitudes and interests. Four of the major malls in the area stand empty or have been leveled completely. The ones that are still open are filled with flea markets or low end jewelry stores or off-the-boat clothing boutiques. Just walking through the mall makes you feel like you have been cast in an odd "Twilight Zone" episode where you're the only one left alive in the world. And like the zoo, the architecture is thirty years old and packed full of childhood memories. (my grandmother and I spent hours in that mall together)
It was a trip for walking around in the past and viewing it as a stranger. Such a turmoil is evolution and how odd it is to see it play out before you. Perhaps I wish I hadn't seen it in my life time. I think it's hard to witness your strongest memories fade and to watch former glory become simple garbage. Perhaps I relate these things to my own sense of self-worth and watching them die or change means that perhaps I was wrong and that my value has, like them, lost it's former glory and become garbage. A symbol of a bygone era.
Now I know why the caged bird evolved...
