CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Spiritual Moment at the Henry Doorly Zoo

Saturday, November 29, 2008

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "paranoid android"








The zoo that we went to in Omaha, NE, called the Henry Doorly zoo, had the ape exhibit set up in a nontraditional way, so while they had a full pen, it was all behind glass, and the exhibit was set up so you never had to strain to see the apes. They were all right there, behind the glass, and essentially anywhere they sat in their spacious surroundings, you were never that far from them. They made these glass bubbles that extended into the ape's area, so you could stand in them and be right next to the animals. We climbed in one and there was a gorilla in there. One gorilla, however, that we didn't see, suddenly sprung up from the side and pounded loudly on our glass bubble, creating deafening reverberations. I'm not sure, but I don't think he was angry at us. In fact, he didn't make eye contact with us at all, but instead kept his eyes locked on another male in the exhibit, as if he was trying to show strength to the other one by his ability to scare the shit out of us.

But there was one moment that I most took away from this trip, and I don't just mean the trip to the zoo, but the four days in Missouri in general, and it was one other gorilla, the largest one in the zoo. As mentioned before, there are bubbles where you can go up into and be inside their areas. But there's also one bubble that extends from their area and into the area you're in so the gorillas can come up and be next to you. The oldest gorilla there, Michelle says it was a he, but I swear I saw female parts, came up to this bubble and sat down and peacefully, pensively looked out as us. It had large, kind eyes, a wrinkled, interested brow, a pleasant gorilla-smile, and it held its feet in its hands as it leaned against the glass and looked out at us, friendly and satisfied. You've heard environmentalists and animal experts go on and on in a hippie-dippie way about how magical animals are, and when you're that close to a gorilla, her taking a long, introspective look into your eyes without breaking eye contact nervously or disinterestedly, it's difficult not to wax philosophical. The gorilla didn't seem to want to be anywhere else, yet didn't seem silly and wanting to amuse, like you see some apes doing when you go to the zoo. She merely wanted to sit there and absorb what she was seeing. Other apes would come up to the window (one in particular came up and gave us a fierce, king-of-the-jungle look, then moved along), but this one seemed positively satiated, and though she took long, pensive looks out at Michelle and I, she took a particular interest in children that would come by, looking deep into Celest, the way a mother might when her own children are grown up, but she sees a child while out in the park and thinks about the time when her own was that young. I kept taking picture after picture, and would have been satisfied to stay in the exhibit much longer were it not for my nagging hunger pangs. But it's difficult for me to describe this without dipping into hippie hyperbole: it was honestly magical. There was a certain oneness that I couldn't get out of my head, and the idea that my species didn't evolve from the same species as this one seemed beyond absurd.
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with love from CRS @ 8:09 AM 

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