It was raining on the interstate a week ago, and even the five-foot snowpiles lining the median were melting into greasy, gunpowder-colored sludge. Every few miles the snowmelt revealed a secret: a dead deer emerging from the melt like a tundra-bound mastodon, released to rot in the 60 degree weather. I never give much thought to dead deer on the side of the road; maybe a brief lament for the animal's awkward death or perhaps a thought to the human lives inconvenienced by it. But these deer were different, sitting as they were in the worsening gloop of winter, their once-brown hides now mottled gray yet still perfectly preserved as if they all had been killed that very day.
More than once I've walked into an abandoned building only to find the rotting carcass of a dead dog not far from the door. The feral animals, seeking some dignity at the end of lives that afforded little of it, seem to prefer to die indoors. I have also found dead dogs in vacant lots, and even the most dessicated of these corpses reveals some hint of a breed (such as a tuft of Rottweiler hair). The breeds of dogs whose bodies you find in fields or alleys usually tell you they were dumped there after losing an organized fight. Life in this town isn't easy for its people. You can imagine how hard it is on dogs.
Last night I was out walking our own former Detroit street dog (saved one day before his date with the needle), when we happened on a stray. Pinch-faced and skinny, the wild dog was only-slightly skittish. I ordered Wendell to sit by a tree while I approached: calming and petting it while looking for any sign of ownership. I brought it back to our porch where I fed it and then told it to get lost. I glanced out the window twenty minutes later and the stray was still sitting there, looking at me. The temperature dove into the low twenties last night. I begged my wife to close the blinds. "If it's still out there in the morning, I'll bring it to the shelter." But this morning it was gone.
On one of my first house scouting trips to Detroit, a friend gave me a tour of Belle Isle, the massive island park in the river between the city and Canada. He drove me past a barbed-wire fence enclosing overgrown foliage with a dozen albino deer huddled together. "European fallow deer," he said. "They've lived here for generations. They used to run wild on the island but now they're penned off in the abandoned zoo."
"Abandoned zoo?" I was intrigued.
Detroit does still have an operating zoo. A good one, in fact, built on an island of city-owned land two miles north of the city border, within wealthy Oakland County. But for over a century the city operated a separate facility first known as the Belle Isle Zoo (which opened in 1895---the same year the European deer were introduced to the island) and then the Children's Zoo (starting in 1947). In 2002, disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick closed the Belle Isle Children's Zoo despite opposition from the City Council, claiming the pressure of the city's $75 million budget deficit. City council overrode his veto and freed up $700,000 to reopen the zoo. In that year's November election 88 percent of Detroit voters approved a nonbinding ballot initiative to reopen it. Kilpatrick ignored both and shuttered the zoo, shipping off the animals and calling the move temporary. "We need to really figure out what we want there," Kilpatrick said. Of course the "temporary" closure became permanent. Kilpatrick used money appropriated for the reopening of the zoo to fund a "Nature Center" on the most remote and unvisited part of the 982-acre island, including $1 million for a brand new enclosure for the island's dwindling herd of 20 fallow deer.
Seven companies submitted bids to build it, and the city building authority (run by the mayor's cousin), selected a company that had never before built an animal enclosure against the bids of several experienced zoo contractors. The first act of the winning bidder was to subcontract the construction to a company owned by the former mayor's longtime best friend (and fellow convicted felon) Bobby Ferguson [source], a man who has benefited from an untold number of similar schemes over the years (to the tune of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars). That is how business is done in the city of Detroit. And these are some of the results:
Miles and miles of perfectly adequate chain link animal enclosures abandoned so the former mayor's friend could pocket $1 million to build one on the opposite side of the island for 20 inbred European deer.
The Belle Isle Zoo has been closed now for over six years. Many people from this area have fond memories of visiting it as children. There were elephants here. Bears. Monkeys. Tigers. Some of the zoo's big cats were rumored to have been rescued from lives guarding Detroit crackhouses. In 1980, the zoo was completely rebuilt to adhere to more modern ideas of natural habitats with a lengthy elevated boardwalk and African-style architectural elements throughout. 22 years later it would all be left to rot:
Kilpatrick lied about this zoo as effortlessly as he lied about nearly everything during his tenure. He once put forth some cockamamie idea about turning the zoo into an X-Games style park with skateboarding and "zip lines." But that will never happen. It will sit like this until the scrappers find their way in, followed by the graffiti artists and the drunks and vandals, though the place is a block from the island's main police station and not easy to enter (it's a maze of 10-foot barbed-wire fencing) .
I did not go there with any intention to trespass. I often take the dog for hikes in the woods on Belle Isle. Inside of him a wild hunter sits dormant, and it is necessary to occasionally make him feel useful. Earlier this year a pack of wild dogs were harassing us, keeping their distance. They were smaller dogs than the ones that attacked us at the playground years ago, and once we started chasing them they led us right into the abandoned zoo. Inside the zoo, we followed their tracks through a maze of fences and walls. I could see that everything remained much as it had been left. The felid cages still had trees nailed to the walls for the scratching of giant claws. The monkey house sat silent, still smelling slightly of its occupation.
The dog loved the smells of the old zoo, rooting around every corner of the cages or the big cat enclosure. He was the Teddy Roosevelt of German Shorthaired Pointers, the Hemingway of birddogs: a big game hunter, sniffing at ghosts.
It was strange to stand inside the enclosures and look up to where countless people would have watched whatever animal dwelt there.
Even stranger were the plants growing inside each enclosure, non-native species probably chosen carefully long ago to resemble the flora of wherever the animal was from but not to tempt them into nibbling. Even a simulacrum of wildness, abandoned, will become truly wild given enough time.
Every building and every enclosure chokes with overgrown plants in the summer. Dead trees have fallen to crush the boardwalk in places. The buildings are mostly intact, filled with snake and spider exhibits, educational displays. Scrapping damage seems light, though I do think the copper is gone. Signs inside the once-heated felid cages still warn KEEPER IN THE YARD.
A brush in a big cat cage sits next to an empty 40oz.
An animal transport trailer slowly rots into the ground.
From their earliest days, we teach our children about wild things. Even as more and more of them grow up in cities or suburbs, seemingly isolated from anything truly wild, we tell them stories and read them books about elephants and bears, monkeys and tigers. When you're a kid, almost all the good books are about these wild things, most anthropomorphized and friendly. To those of us reading these stories, this obsession with the wild might seem pointless or silly. But to a kid these pages are an introduction to our world and its amazing capacity for strangeness and beauty. We take our kids to the zoo---even ignore the unnerving vacant glaze in the eyes of penned polar bears---because we know there is nothing quite so magical to those tiny minds as seeing what was fiction become suddenly so real.
But in time, of course, every child will see a zoo for what it is: a place where nothing is real, a place where wild animals cannot be wild, where every instinct is curbed by confinement or scheduled feedings.
This place will never be a zoo again. It is home to a pack of wild dogs now. A reclusive badger or two. Red foxes and red squirrels. A bluejay and a cardinal. A mile away, the fallow deer sit in their million-dollar home, but within the zoo I still find a broad-tined antler shed by a buck during his temporary stay. Half buried in the ground, it is already starting to rot.
We take our kids to the zoo and think we're teaching them about wildness, but really we're teaching them about dominion. A lesson in the power of fences. While all the time, along our highways, outside our very windows, wild things are there. Waiting.
I am so tired of trying to write thematically-unified blog posts with not-quite-clever-enough titles and tidy conclusions. And Christ, aren't you tired of reading them yet? I worry that the way I write on this site has become so formulaic. Sometimes I finish a post and then wonder if it's real or if I have just written another parody of myself.
To make matters worse, I can't stop thinking about all the people who have recently discovered this site and its archives. My parents, for example, now know about it after three years of blissful secrecy. I don't know how they figured it out (and I'm still not sure if my dad reads it: he doesn't have much use for computers other than finding sweet deals for used car parts and tools on eBay). I also recently received an e-mail from my freshman-year roommate whose sordid sexual history and lousy laundry habits were detailed in a recent post. And now the nice Mormon girl I took to prom e-mailed me about the site this week. It was just so much easier writing here when none of the people reading it knew what kind of underwear I wore as a teenager.*
And I have to admit I have been struggling with the very concept of my life being remotely interesting to anyone. Sometimes we watch Intervention on A&E and I think, "Damn, that junkie's lived an interesting life. Why does a boring yuppie like me have a blog when your average meth addict is so much more interesting." Sometimes I wish I'd chosen a subject for this blog that people actually seem to find interesting, you know, like the Indian Diaspora or food. Most of these days my life is so boring I wish I could just invent a pair of meddlesome first-generation Desi parents or tell you about all my hilarious mishaps at culinary school.
Today, for instance, I did what I try to do every day: I avoided the interior of our home at all costs in order to prevent the kids and myself from making it look like the interior of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. You know: that building I've now milked for two posts, several dozen photos, and an appearance in Harper's Magazine? Seriously, what's up with that? Enough already! So today we went to the zoo.
And I totally forgot to put shoes on the kid.
Also, remember: I'm too much of a goddamn asshole to use a stroller. So I had to carry a shoeless three-year-old kid around the entire zoo with a shoeless three-month-old baby strapped to my chest. I also had all your typically-unnecessary baby accouterments stuffed in a bag over my shoulder (but no shoes). I felt like how the Joad family jalopy must have felt sputtering towards California. At some point this shoeless old man hitched a piggyback ride talking about how he was gonna git himself a whole bunch a grapes and squash 'em all over his face and just let the juice dreen down offen his chin but he really creeped us out so we dumped him near some carrion birds.
Then my radiator busted and all the children was hollering so I sat down on a park bench by the rhinoceros enclosure and said to myself twice, "At least the house is clean."
Now see: that story could have totally been its own Sweet Juniper™ blog post if I'd just added some reference to ancient mythology at the beginning or somehow figured in something about living in Detroit. Like, Hey, what's up with all the white people at the zoo? I probably would have toned down the whole Grapes of Wrath bit. Or maybe I would have gone off on some pompous screed about how Juniper feels Henry Fonda's performance in that film transcends John Ford's flawed vision of Steinbeck's masterpiece. Then I'd try counteract this bragging about her precociousness by flagellating myself for being a flawed parent. Voila!
This blogging thing sure is easier than it looks.
So next week if I write a post contrasting my parents' arranged marriage in Mumbai with how unfair it is that they disapprove of me dating the chisel-jawed Anglo coxswain of the Brown crew team, trust that I'm probably making most of it up. But at least it will be more interesting than what I'm actually going through.
*just kidding, Ruth!
But I did take the kid to the zoo the other day, and this stork was clocking me the entire time we walked past, as if to say, "I've got your number, pal."
I finally set up an etsy shop for some of the photographs people have been requesting. I had them printed in small editions and they are matted and ready to frame.
Today was Juniper's second birthday, and because her mother left for work before she had even woken up, I was prepared to let this be the kind of day where anything Juniper demanded, Juniper would get. I would ask her what she wanted to do, and we would do it. If she wanted to eat her birthday cake for breakfast, she would eat cake. This was my first mistake.
After wiping the chocolate frosting from her lips and forehead, I asked her what she wanted to do, and she answered, "go to zoo; see animals?" We go to the zoo almost every week, and it's one of three possible responses she could have given to that query. I actually prefer the zoo to the other two possibilities--- the playgroup where little white boys beat on her and the exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit where stuffed creatures urinate against a stuffed-animal shantytown (Juniper calls it "Babies Pee-pee!"---I'm sure this is what the artist was going for)---so we went to the zoo.
When we arrived, we quickly realized we were the only people there. I'm serious: there was not another soul at the zoo who was not either getting paid to be there or volunteering their time. I felt like a slave escorting a deified two-year-old Persian queen throughout her own private menagerie on the outskirts of ancient Persepolis. It was as though I'd I rented the entire zoo just for her birthday. Despite temperatures hovering around 17 degrees, it was pretty magical. As with so many things in Detroit, there is a certain post-apocalyptic joy to being the only ones. Juniper watched a zookeeper cram tiny fish down the gullets of penguins, then wandered around the penguinarium by herself like an emperor penguin: staccato steps with becoated arms flapping at her side. We wandered alone through the butterfly house, and another zookeeper allowed her feed mealworms directly to a bold Asian bluebird in the free-flight aviary. Almost all of the animals were out and easy to see in the snow. When the lion roared I told her he was wishing her a happy birthday. When the zebras ran up to where we were standing, I told her they wanted to see the birthday girl. When I told her the polar bear wanted to eat some of her birthday cake, she shouted, "no share birthday cake polar bear!"
The Detroit zoo is an old one. It is landscaped with a grand, quarter-mile-long concourse between the gate and all the worthwhile animals. In warm weather it is pleasant enough to stroll past the fountains and statuary, but even in warm weather that distance means that when your Joey pitches a fit in the kangaroo habitat, you've got a long walk back to your minivan, mate. Today, inside the giraffe house, Juniper decided to throw the worst tantrum I have ever seen from her. I sneaked a look at my cell phone. We had been at the zoo for nearly three hours, and we were at the furthest point possible from the car. She sat on the ground and kicked her feet. She wanted me to hold her. When I held her she wanted her mama. When I told her that her mama was at work, she screamed. Outside, her screaming roused a flock of flamingos huddled together for warmth. The chimpanzees wailed with her from inside the monkey house. Bison and antelope and wolverines ran for cover. The tigers cowered and howled with fear. Juniper's screaming reached a certain pitch optimal for agitating every wild animal for miles. Tonight, with a few hours between me and that tantrum, I can almost marvel at its scale. It was the closest I have ever come to experiencing something like what's described in the book of Revelations.
On one hand, I was glad we were the only patrons at the zoo, because there wasn't anybody there to judge my parenting. But eventually I did get a little scared. She had never screamed so relentlessly before. She had never seemed so immune to all my comforting. I suddenly imagined her appendix bursting inside her, or worse, some other, less-useless organ coming loose from its tubes, splashing blood and bile across her viscera, a source of pain that would cause her to emit such bloodcurdling screams that no animal in any kingdom is available for a convenient simile here: there they all were, with me, aghast at the display, frightened off to hide in their holes from the cold and the din surging from my daughter. None dared compete with a two-year old child.
I ran with her. I held her in my arms like a firefighter bursting from a building collapsing in flames behind him, only less manly (but that's a given: plus, I was singing Happy Birthday). Eventually we found ourselves at the otter house, a building with radiated heat coming from a long sheath of metal slung across the ceiling. She screamed as I unbundled her, setting her layers like matryoshki halves next to us, my tiny 23-lb toddler emerging from her warm winter clothes to climb into my coat and rest her wet cheek against the skin of my neck, still sobbing, and I patted her back and sang her a song and I took off her socks and rubbed her cold, bare feet in my hands and she stopped. I stood and danced with her like I did two years ago when we first brought her home from the hospital, still learning how to show her she was safe with us, that we were warmth and that her silent breathing on our chest was all we wanted from the world. I sat back down and rocked her and wondered what the mystery was. All the cold? All that cake? The fear that a polar bear would eat the rest of it before she could? I felt her breathing on my chest and I knew she wasn't in pain. I felt her fingers fumble with the zipper of my coat, and she swung her head back and she looked up at me and shouted "Name!" This is what she does when she doesn't know the word for something. "Zipper," I said, and she repeated it. "Where'd otter go?" she asked, and I pointed to the creature who had been sleeping in a hollow log this whole time. "Otter wake up!" she exclaimed, and then whimpered a bit while I put her clothes back on her.
She was two now. She showed me with her fingers once they slipped through the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She was just letting me know.
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