The castration of elephants has until recently been a fatal proposition; the testes are lodged in a web of circulatory vessels near the kidneys, and mortality from the surgery used to approach 90 percent. In 1983, seeing the long-term need, Schmidt and several other veterinarians joined forces to solve the puzzle. The team has done six castrations so far, all on circus bulls facing execution as they matured and grew more dangerous. “We have yet to lose a bull,” Schmidt told me. “We developed the surgical approach to the abdomen, and more understanding of the anatomy. And we know more about anesthesia now.”
Schmidt is aware that some people consider all animal research exploitive. He is quick to point out that none of the elephant research at Washington Park contributes to human health; it is all for the benefit of the elephants themselves. “I think these animals’ contributions will echo down the years,” he said. “We always felt that way—that they were contributing to the preservation of their species. I tell them so—‘Pet, you’re making a contribution to your species.’ She has more than paid her dues.”
RECENTLY, I VISITED the elephant barn again, stopping first at the elephant museum next door, which opened in 1986 and is privately funded. It is a half-moon-shaped building filled with ceremonial helmets, paintings, and tusk rings—the trappings of the human relationship with all things elephantine. Its centerpiece is the complete skeleton of a mastodon, on permanent loan from the Smithsonian Institution; it seemed unimposing here, so near the living thing. Then I walked over to watch the cows awhile, as they tossed hay about and rocked in place, their spongy feet compressing and springing back with every beat. Rama, back from the zoo in Tacoma only a few weeks and still nervous, was darting back and forth in a quarantine room, his trunk wild and fast. (Bets told me that when she splashed a sample of urine from Rosy, Rama’s mother, on the freshly washed floor of the room he flehmened thirty-five times in a row.) Packy was in the crush, relaxed, downing carrots, seeming not to know—or care—that he couldn’t walk out at will. Jay Haight took me right to the bull’s gigantic, warm side. His trunk, as thick at its base as my torso and three times as long, snaked back to where I stood, questing for me. A wet print of his left forefoot had made a near-perfect circle on the concrete; Jay and I stood together inside it, with room to spare.
Roger Henneous was there, as he almost always is, his stained ranger’s hat cocked back on his head, his feet spread wide on the damp, hay-covered floor. Behind him milled a wall of dusty gray. He talked about the research, and the keepers’ efforts to help, no matter how great the inconvenience or the danger. A considerable amount of extra work is required of all the keepers, and much of it is dirty and difficult. “I have many times, over the years, found myself cussing and stomping my feet, wondering, Goddammit, why couldn’t I have taken up rabbits?” he said, with a glint in his eye. “In the overall scheme of things, our efforts here may not make a nickel’s worth of difference. Not in the big real world out there. But no other breeding program like this one exists. If we can’t—or won’t—do the work, who will? We have the facilities, and we have the animals. If Betsey isolates and identifies the pheromone, then, theoretically, it can be synthesized. If it can be synthesized, it could be used to lure wild elephants from inhabited areas—essentially trick them out of harm’s way. It could save a lot of bulls in Asia from getting the lead pellet.”
Down the hall, Belle has planted her face against the crack of a door. Behind her in the room is a trio of younger cows. The elephant guards the tree of life; the elephant worships the moon and stars. Elephants were once supposed to have had wings. Belle greets me with a grim stare, blocking me like a house matron uncertain whether I’m fit to be let in. I stand quietly for the inspection. Her trunk slides up, loose and confident, and rapidly slips under my collar, through my hair, down my sleeve, my pant leg. She’s close, her trunk is enormous, the two huffing nostrils at the end strangely naked and pink, vacuuming in my smell, my volatiles, myself. All the while, she fixes her moist brown eye on mine. I remember—because I can’t forget—photographs I’ve seen of butchered elephants. What was left of one bull knelt in apparent calm. The body, its head missing, was eerily still, as though waiting. John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s great masterpiece … the only harmless great thing.” As I submit to Belle’s precise, intelligent examination, I remember that and the dead elephant’s calm, and look straight back into her cautious and curious eye.
New Yorker, January 23, 1989
When I began writing an essay about a scientist’s long search for a mysterious pheromone, I was given the keys to the kingdom: access to the elephant herd at what is now called the Oregon Zoo. The story felt like a gift—it was a great problem and it gave me a chance to go inside, to be close to animals I prize greatly.
I’m not particularly interested in the campaign to stop zoos from keeping elephants in captivity. I want them to be treated well, preferably in open spaces with the chance to socialize and wander in the most natural way. But we’ve been too busy killing wild elephants and destroying their habitat to stop keeping captive herds. That this animal could disappear from the Earth is a tragedy beyond words for me. Imagine a world without elephants: I can hardly think about it.
Burning For Daddy
EVERY WINTER NIGHT OF MY CHILDHOOD, MY FATHER built a fire. Each element of the evening’s fire was treated with care—with the caress of the careful man. The wood, the wood box, the grate, the coal, black poker, and shovel: he touched these more often than he touched me. I would hold back, watching, and when the fire was lit plant myself before it and fall into a gentle dream. No idea was too strange or remote before the fire, no fantasy of shadow and light too bizarre.
But for all the long hours I spent before his fires, for all the honey-colored vapors that rose like smoke from that hearth, these aren’t the fires of memory. They aren’t my father’s fires. When I remember fire, I remember houses burning, scorched and flooded with flame, and mills burning, towers of fire leaping through the night to the lumber nearby like so much kindling, and cars burning, stinking and black and waiting to blow. I loved those fires with a hot horror, always daring myself to step closer, feel their heat, touch.
My father is a fireman. My submission to fire is lamentably obvious. But there is more than love here, more than jealousy—more than Electra’s unwilling need. It is a fundamental lure, a seduction of my roots and not my limbs. I am propelled toward fire, and the dual draw of fascination and fear, the urge to walk into and at the same time conquer fire, is like the twin poles of the hermaphrodite. I wanted to be a fireman before, and after, I wanted to be anything else.
Firemen are big, brawny, young, and smiling creatures. They sit in the fire hall with its high ceilings and cold concrete floors and dim corners, waiting, ready. Firemen have a perfume of readiness. They wash their shiny trucks and hang the long white hoses from rods to dangle and dry. And when the alarm rings, firemen turn into hurrying bodies that know where to step and what to do, each with a place and duty, without excess motion. Firemen wear heavy coats and big black boots and hard helmets. They can part crowds. They are calescent and virile like the fire, proud, reticent, and most content when moving; firemen have their own rules, and they break glass, make messes, climb heights, and drive big loud trucks very fast.
Forgive me; I am trying to show the breadth of this fable. I wanted to be a fireman so much that it didn’t occur to me for a long time that they might not let me. Fires marked me; I got too close. The hearth fire was my first and best therapist, the fire-dreams were happy dreams of destruction and ruin. The andiron was the ground, the logs our house, and each black space between the logs a window filled with helpless people, my father and mother and siblings. The fire was the world and I was outside and above, listening to their calls for rescue from the darting blaze, and sometimes I would allow them to escape and sometimes not, never stirring from my meditative pose. If I felt uncharitable, I could watch the cinders crumble from the oak and cedar like bodies
falling to the ground below and the fire turn to ashes while I, the firefighter, sat back safe and dear and cool.
At odd times—during dinner, late at night—the alarm would sound, and my father would leap up, knocking dogs and small children aside as he ran from the house. I grew up used to surprise. He was a bulky man, and his pounding steps were heavy and important in flight; I slipped aside when he passed by.
The fire department was volunteer, and every fireman something else as well. My father was a teacher. We had a private radio set in the house, and we heard alarms before the town at large did. It was part of the privilege of fire. Before the siren blew on the station two blocks away, the radio in the hallway sang its high-pitched plea. He was up and gone in seconds, a sentence chopped off in mid-word, a bite of food dropped to the plate. Squeal, halt, go: I was used to the series; it was part of our routine.
Then my mother would stop what she was doing and turn down the squeal and listen to the dispatcher on the radio. His voice, without face or name, was one of the most familiar voices in my home, crowned with static and interruptions. My mother knew my father’s truck code and could follow his progress in a jumble of terse male voices, one-word questions, first names, numbers, and sometimes hasty questions and querulous shouts. She stood in the hallway with one hand on the volume and her head cocked to listen; she shushed us with a stern tension. She would not betray herself, though I knew and didn’t care; in the harsh wilderness of childhood, my father’s death in a fire would have been a great and terrible thing. It would have been an honor.
The town siren was a broad foghorn call that rose and fell in a long ululation, like the call of a bird. We could hear it anywhere in town, everyone could, and if I was away from our house I would run to the station. (I had to race the cars and pickups of other volunteer firemen, other teachers, and the butcher, the undertaker, an editor from the local newspaper, grinding out of parking lots and driveways all over town in a hail of pebbles.) If I was quick enough and lucky enough, I could stand to one side and watch the flat doors fly up, the trucks pull out one after the other covered with clinging men, and see my father driving by. He drove a short, stout pumper, and I waved and called to him high above my head. He never noticed I was there, not once; it was as though he ceased to be my father when he became a fireman. The whistle of the siren was the whistle of another life, and he would disappear around a corner, face pursed with concentration, and be gone.
Oh, for a fire at night in the winter, the cold nocturnal sky, the pairing of flame and ice. It stripped life bare. I shared a room with my sister, a corner room on the second floor with two windows looking in their turn on the intersection a house away. The fire station was around that comer and two blocks east, a tall white block barely visible through the barren trees. Only the distant squeal of the alarm downstairs woke us, that and the thud of his feet and the slam of the back door; before we could open the curtains and windows for a gulp of frigid air, we’d hear the whine of his pickup and the crunch of its tires on the crust of snow. The night was clear and brittle and raw, and the tocsin called my father to come out. Come out, come out to play, it sang, before my mother turned the sound off. He rushed to join the hot and hurried race to flames. We knelt at the windows under the proximate, twinkling stars, in light pajamas, shivering, and following the spin of lights on each truck—red, blue, red, blue, red—flashing across houses, cars, faces. We could follow the colored spin and figure out where the fire must be and how bad and wonder out loud if he’d come back.
There were times when he didn’t return till morning. I would come downstairs and find him still missing, my mother sleepy-eyed and making toast, and then he would trudge in. Ashen and weary, my father, beat, his old flannel pajamas dusted with the soot that crept through the big buckles of his turnout coat, and smelling of damp, sour smoke.
I SHOULD BE a fire setter. I should be that peculiar kind of addict, hooked on stolen matches and the sudden conflagration in mother’s underwear and father’s shoes. There are plenty of them, many children, thieving flame and setting its anarchic soul free in unexpected places. But I lack that incendiary urge; my Electra is more subtle, the knotty recesses of my own desires cunning even to me.
“What we first learn about fire is that we must not touch it,” Gaston Bachelard writes in his book The Psychoanalysis of Fire, in the course of explaining the Prometheus complex that the prohibition against fire creates. I talk about my father infrequently, always with hunger and anger; I build fires almost every winter night. But I’ve never built a wrong fire, and I worry over flammables like a mother hen. I’m scared of being burned and of all of fire’s searing lesions. I class it with the other primitive, deadly joys: the sea deeps and flying—the runaway edge of control.
I fear one particular fire. My father was also an electrician, a tinkerer of small appliances. I am wary of outlets and wires of all kinds, which seem tiny and potent and unpredictable; the occult and silent river of electrical fire racing behind the walls can keep me awake nights. Electricity is just another flame, but flame refined. (In this way it is like alcohol: literally distilled.) Not long ago I put a pot of water to boil on my stove, and a little sloshed over; suddenly a roaring arc of electricity shot from beneath the pot and curved back upon itself. The kitchen air filled with the acrid smoke of burning insulation and the crackling, sputtering sound of short circuits, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. I wanted my father to put it out, and he was three hundred miles away. It seemed the most untenable betrayal, my stove lunging out at me in such a capricious way. It seemed mean; that arc of blue-white current burned down my adulthood.
Prometheus stole more than fire; he stole the knowledge of fire, the hard data of combustion. I wanted all my father’s subtle art. I wanted the mystery of firewood and the burning, animated chain saw, the tree’s long fall, the puzzle of splitting hardwood with a wedge and maul placed just so in the log’s curving grain. I wanted to know the differences of quality in smoke, where to lay the ax on the steaming roof, how the kindling held up the heavy logs. What makes creosote ignite? How to know the best moment to flood a fire? What were the differences between oak and cedar, between asphalt and shake? And most of all I wanted to know how to go into the fire, what virtue was used when he set his face and pulled the rim of his helmet down and ran inside the burning house. It was arcane, obscure, and unaccountably male, this fire business. He built his fires piece by piece, lit each with a single match, and once the match was lit I was privileged to watch, hands holding chin and elbows propped on knees, in the posture Bachelard calls essential to the “physics of reverie” delivered by fire.
I build fires now. I like the satisfying scritch-scratch of the little broom clearing ash. I find it curious that I don’t build very good fires; I’m hasty and I don’t want to be taught. But at last, with poorly seasoned wood and too much paper, I make the fire go, and then the force it exerts is exactly the same. That’s something about fire: all fire is the same, every ribbon of flame the same thing, whatever that thing may be. There is that fundamental quality, fire as an irreducible element at large; fire is fire is fire no matter what or when or where. The burning house is just the hearth freed. And the fire-trance stays the same, too. I still sit cross-legged and dreaming, watching the hovering flies of light that float before me in a cloud, as fireflies do.
How I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up. I wanted this for a long time. To become a volunteer fireman was expected of a certain type of man—the town’s steady, able-bodied men, men we could depend on. As I write this I feel such a tender pity for that little, wide-eyed girl, a free-roaming tomboy wandering a little country town and friend to all the firemen. I really did expect them to save me a place.
Every spring we had a spring parade. I had friends lucky enough to ride horses, others only lucky enough to ride bikes. But I rode the pumper and my father drove slowly, running the lights and siren at every intersection and splitting our ears with the noise. We had firemen
’s children perched on the hoses neatly laid in pleated rows, bathed in sunlight, tossing candy to the spectators as though, at parade’s end, we wouldn’t have to get down and leave the truck alone again.
He would take me to the station. I saw forbidden things, firemen’s lives.
On the first floor was the garage with its row of trucks. Everything shivered with attention, ripe for work: the grunt of a pumper, the old truck, antique and polished new. And the Snorkel. When I was very small, a building burned because it was too high for the trucks to reach a fire on its roof; within a year the town bought the Snorkel, a basher of a truck, long, white, sleek, with a folded hydraulic ladder. The ladder opened and lifted like a praying mantis rising from a twig, higher and higher.
Above the garage was the real station, a single room with a golden floor and a wall of windows spilling light. The dispatcher lived there, the unmarried volunteers could bunk there if they liked; along one wall was a row of beds. No excess there, no redundancy, only a cooler of soda, a refrigerator full of beer, a shiny bar, a card table, a television. I guess I held my father’s hand while he chatted with one of the men. In the corner I saw a hole, a hole in the floor, and in the center of the hole the pole plunging down; I peeked over the edge and followed the light along the length of the shining silver pole diving to the floor below.
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