Desert zoo

Laurie
Desert zoo
Museum café, Tuscon, March 8, 2008

“Don’t disturb him,” the boy says to his father, as they stand shadowed beneath an awning of rock. Before them, a puma lies on a stone slab, his back to the window, his face turned toward his simulated canyon in the Sonoran Desert Museum. Above him a brilliant blue sky promises the same photograph of itself each day. The puma stretches his mighty haunches and shifts on his slab, exulting in his tan fur. His thick tail hangs straight over the edge like a plumb line, and you have to wonder at its power to thrash and at the violence of its containment. The tail doesn’t so much as twitch the way horseflesh does under buzzing flies.

The father is tall, his remaining hair scraggly, a camera slung around his neck. He bangs on the glass. “Stop,” the son says, mildly. The father says, “I want to wake him up.” The son says, “How would you feel if you were asleep and someone banged on the glass so they could take your picture?” The father does not understand the comparison. He leans toward the window. The son winces, as if his father’s failure to understand is a hand with missing fingers. He points to another wild cat further away. “That one’s waking up. Take his picture.” The father isn’t interested. He wants to get something from the creature that ignores him, as we all do. The son is thirteen, maybe, gangly, with a thick mop of hair and a bobbing Adam’s apple too big for a boy. He studies his father, trying not to impose himself over the form of his father, trying not to leave an impression.

Richards says the animals here have been rescued from harsher captivities. They are sacrificial representatives of wild life presented to people with the power to destroy or preserve them. In asking us to protect animals, are zoos suggesting we identify with their plight? What aspect: their cages, their ersatz environments?

In another display, an otter swims in the pattern of a star, criss crossing his watery world with unflagging energy, his webbed feet propeling his missile body across his pool with one push. In a third display, three wolves wander their cliff domain, their dog faces puzzled about the narrowing of their world. Around and around they loop: up an incline, along a ledge, then down to a stream, as if surely on one journey a door will open and release them into a dream forest where the path stretches out like a line and they forget about their past confinement, the way we do when we leave home.