Just your average boy-meets-girl story … if by “boy” you mean “young man with a penchant for computer hijinks who leaves Iraq for the U.S. and becomes a dark-web kingpin by putting real fentanyl in fake pills,” and by “girl” you mean “the DEA.” Maybe that Tor browser isn’t everything you thought it was.
Allawi wasn’t content dealing on the street anymore. He was chasing a broader market than San Antonio—hell, a broader market than Texas. He bought a manual pill press on eBay for $600, eventually upgrading to a $5,000, 507-pound electric machine capable of spitting out 21,600 pills an hour. He also used eBay to purchase the inactive ingredients found in most oral medications, such as dyes. On May 23, 2015, Allawi created an account on AlphaBay. He named it Dopeboy210, most likely after the San Antonio area code, according to investigators. That fall, Allawi dropped out of school for good.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/zLGeU8i
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
In a piece that stares down tragedy and refuses to give up, Jen Agg recounts the agonizing weeks following her husband’s stroke, which took place at the onset of the pandemic. This is a gripping essay about being strong for someone else, but it’s also a piece about the devils and angels in the medical system: those who think dashing your optimism is some sort of sadistic duty vs. those who understand their role is to offer not only medical help, but most importantly, kindness and hope.
I started describing a stroke as a twenty-car pile-up on the highway of your brain’s quickest route. Recovery is the next car getting off the highway just before the devastation and twisted-up metal of cars blocking the road, except it’s night time, and the power is out, and it’s a thunderstorm and actually, turns out there is no road. So one car slowly and timidly draws a new path where there never was one. Your brain is resourceful this way, but it’s slow going. After a while, all the cars start taking this newly formed exit and your brain learns a whole new way of communicating with your body.
At first it was the destabilizing uncertainty: would it be a bad day, or a rare good day? How could I keep both our moods afloat when I was working really hard on the basics of our survival while maintaining an unbreakable facade of hopefulness? Was there effort in that? I don’t remember. Roland was sad a lot at the beginning and I knew I couldn’t let that sadness drown us both. Many of life’s challenges force reaction and demand a change of perspective, but particularly with health issues, you have to really be committed or the ugliness of it can win. I absolutely refused to let it. This was not going to be the thing that unwound our love—a love born in a fireball of attraction, bonded over a shared enemy and nurtured over decades of simply never being bored of each other or running out of fascinating things to talk about while remaining enthralled with each others’ faces.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/edFDVru
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Blankets (Laura Vukson, The Quarantine Review, 2022)
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
E. M. Wright’s statistical accounting in “One Month” at Reckoning
Jessica Ripka’s family instability in “Right the Ship” at Unlimited Literature
Trudy Hale’s runaway nephew in “A Plague Tale” at Streetlight Magazine
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Gml2OcN
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
As 2022 wound down, three of the most talked-about movies seemed to share one very obvious trait: disdain for the wealthy. But as Pat Cassels argues in this critical essay built around The Menu, Glass Onion, and Triangle of Sadness, that’s a facile reading. The root of the rot here isn’t money, but power.
There’s real danger in Musk and our current “age of the petulant oligarch,” as Paul Krugman recently called it. “[T]he top 0.00001 percent’s share of total wealth today is almost 10 times what it was four decades ago,” he writes. “And the immense wealth of the modern super-elite has surely brought a lot of power, including the power to act childishly.” Glass Onion’s Bron would get along fantastically with Triangle’s Marxist captain and Russian capitalist. All three are perfectly willing to get drunk (on power or booze) and dispense half-understood economic axioms as geopolitical truth bombs, even as they steer their boat into dangerous waters in the name of free speech.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/yec9rTD
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
Professor Paco Calvo believes that plant behavior is the key to understanding how human minds work. Plant lover Amanda Gefter clearly sees the logic in his work and delights in explaining it to us in this fascinating piece.
Artificial neural networks have led to breakthroughs in machine learning and big data, but they still seemed, to Calvo, a far cry from living intelligence. Programmers train the neural networks, telling them when they’re right and when they’re wrong, whereas living systems figure things out for themselves, and with small amounts of data to boot. A computer has to see, say, a million pictures of cats before it can recognize one, and even then all it takes to trip up the algorithm is a shadow. Meanwhile, you show a 2-year-old human one cat, cast all the shadows you want, and the toddler will recognize that kitty.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/RN1nsUY
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
At age 90, Jane Miller relates her ongoing battle with a self that wants to “indulge my lurking wish to spend longer in bed in the morning reading the Guardian and listening to the Today programme than I already do,” and the one that obsessively logs steps and reads classics in their original Russian, to make the most of her physical and mental abilities.
I am freer than I’ve ever been, yet I quite often feel edged out, and it’s clear that I have become actually and metaphorically deaf to significant contemporary sounds. My spectator’s view of it all doesn’t fail to remind me that other people are not so lucky or so detached, that some of them are sad beyond hope, that there are young people who don’t want to stay alive and people who worry to distraction and despair or who suffer all kinds of untreatable pain. I became an adult just after the end of the Second World War, and I think of the 1950s, so often described by younger generations as bleak and impoverished, as a time of idealism and optimism. I find it difficult to detect that sort of faith in the future now, though I hope against hope that it’s there in some form I’m simply too old to recognise.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/xPmJDi0
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/KzlCM3B
This is an excerpt from issue no. 136, “Sanctuary.”
Prologue
Hurricane Michael crashed through southern Georgia in a fury. Winds whipping at more than 100 miles per hour sheared off rooftops and stripped cotton plants bare. Michael had fed on the tropical water of the Gulf of Mexico, gathering strength. By the time it made landfall, it was one of the most powerful hurricanes in U.S. history.
In its aftermath, Carol Buckley gazed out at the wreckage strewn across her land. It was October 2018. Three years earlier, emotionally broken, she had come to this secluded place just north of the Florida Panhandle in search of a new beginning. Now she feared that she would have to start from scratch once again.
The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.
Buckley fired up a Kawasaki Mule and steered the ATV across the rutted fields to get a closer look at the damage. At 64, Buckley had a curtain of straight blond hair, and her eyes were the pale blue of faded denim. Years spent outdoors had etched fine lines into her tanned face. The Mule churned up a spray of reddish mud as she bumped along.
Michael had toppled chunks of the nearly mile-long chain-link fence ringing Buckley’s land. She was relieved to see that the stronger, steel-cable barrier inside the perimeter had held. Felled longleaf pines lay atop portions of it, applying immense pressure, but the cables hadn’t snapped. Installed to corral creatures weighing several tons, the fence stood firm.
Here outside the small town of Attapulgus, near quail-hunting plantations and pecan groves, Buckley had built a refuge for elephants. It was the culmination of a nearly lifelong devotion to the world’s largest land animals. But at the moment, Buckley’s refuge lacked any elephants—and one elephant in particular.
There are many kinds of love stories. This one involves a woman and an elephant, and the bond between them spanning nearly 50 years. It involves devotion and betrayal. It also raises difficult questions about the relationship between humans and animals, about control and freedom, about what it means to own another living thing.
The woman in this story is Buckley. The elephant is named Tarra. They met at a tire store in California, and together followed a serpentine path from spectacle to safety: from circus rings to zoo enclosures to a first-of-its-kind sanctuary. But now their bond was being tested. For complex reasons, Buckley had lost custody of Tarra, and just before Michael struck, a jury had deadlocked on whether the two should be reunited. In a few months, the case would go to trial again. If Buckley won, she would bring Tarra home to Attapulgus. If she lost, it was possible she’d never see the elephant again.
The uncertainty was a nightmare. But the fence Buckley built for Tarra had withstood a monstrous storm. This was, she thought, a good omen.
I.
Anyone who has ever had a beloved pet can tell you that the relationship between an animal and its owner is special. Pets aren’t property in the way a house, a car, or a pair of shoes is. Some people love their animals in ways that defy logic. They don’t think of them as things; they think of them as family.
Even more nuanced are the relationships people have with highly intelligent animals like chimpanzees and dolphins. And elephants. In the past few decades, research has piled up showing that elephants are some of the brightest and most emotionally complex creatures on the planet. Like humans, they are self-aware—they can even recognize themselves in a mirror. They can also experience pleasure, pain, and grief.
Discoveries about elephant intelligence have helped bring about a sea change in the way the animals are treated. Some circuses, under pressure from animal rights groups, have stopped featuring elephant acts. Ringling Bros. retired its elephants in 2016, then shut down altogether the following year. Some U.S. states have banned exotic-animal performances and toughened animal welfare laws.
Activists are pushing for governments to do more: In 2022, the New York Court of Appeals considered whether Happy, an elephant in the Bronx Zoo, had the legal rights of personhood. If the question seems preposterous, consider that courts have held that corporations can be considered people in certain instances. So why not an elephant, which is a living, breathing creature?
Last June, the appeals court rejected the legal argument, which had been presented by an organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project, by a 5–2 vote. Still, some animal rights advocates see reason for hope: The case spurred public dialogue about the treatment of captive animals and whether some species should be no one’s property, ever.
Buckley’s views on owning animals have changed over the years. Understanding how and why means starting at the very beginning. Buckley grew up with dogs, and as a young adult she had a German shepherd named Tasha. One day in 1974, Tasha broke Buckley’s concentration when the dog went into a frenzy, barking at something outside the bay window of Buckley’s home in Simi Valley, a Los Angeles suburb. Rattled by the commotion, Buckley looked outside to see what Tasha saw. And there it was: a baby elephant.
A slim man was walking the elephant with a rope. The calf must have weighed as much as a refrigerator. Buckley bolted through the front door. “Who is she? Why is she here? What are you doing with her?” Buckley asked the man.
Buckley was 20 and had just moved to Simi Valley. She grew up south of Los Angeles in a large family. At her all-girls Catholic high school, she had been a mediocre student and so hyperactive that the nuns ordered her to run laps to burn energy. Buckley wasn’t sure precisely what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew it wouldn’t involve sitting still. She was studying exotic animal management at a community college, figuring that would set her on an exciting career path. Seeing an elephant stroll past her door seemed like fate.
“Come over to my tire store,” the man holding the rope told her. “She’s there every day. You can feed her.” Buckley was there waiting when the man and his elephant returned from their walk.
At the time, few rules governed the ownership and treatment of exotic animals. Bob Nance, the tire shop’s proprietor, had a small menagerie—a Siberian tiger, parrots, monkeys—that customers could gawk at while their new Michelins were being mounted. His pets were a selling point. And a baby elephant? Now that was something. Her name was Fluffy, which a kid had suggested in a naming contest Nance sponsored in a local newspaper.
Fluffy wasn’t Nance’s first elephant. Before her there had been Dolly, purchased from Louis Goebel, an exotic-animal impresario who’d created an LA theme park called Jungleland. But things with Dolly didn’t go as hoped. Her keepers pulled up to Nance’s shop, unloaded the nearly full-grown elephant, handed Nance a training hook, and were on their way. Nance, who had no experience with elephants, hacked off the end of a car axle, stuck it in the ground of his parking lot, and chained Dolly to it during work hours. At night he tethered her to an outbuilding. Once, Dolly yanked herself free—sort of. The police called to alert Nance. Bob, they said, your elephant is dragging a building down Los Angeles Avenue.
Nance feuded with city officials over whether zoning laws allowed him to keep an elephant at his store until one day, reluctantly, he agreed to sell Dolly to a circus operator. Soon after Goebel called him up. Jungleland was about to close its doors, and a newly arrived baby elephant needed a home. Could Nance help? A calf, Nance reasoned, would be easier to handle, at least for a while. “Of course,” he told Goebel.
Fluffy was probably from Burma, where it was common for poachers to kill mother elephants in order to capture their valuable calves. It was an act of unimaginable cruelty, not least because baby elephants are extremely close with their mothers, and suckle for as long as five years. Fluffy was about six months old when she was shipped to the U.S. Most likely, animal merchants in Thailand packed her into a wooden crate, loaded her aboard a cargo plane, and launched her on a stomach-churning flight over the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t unusual for baby elephants to arrive dead.
Fluffy became the star attraction at Nance’s store. She was good-natured and always hungry. Sometimes Nance stuffed her into the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car and drove her to nearby elementary schools, where wide-eyed students admired her. Nance outfoxed the city officials who’d complained about Dolly by keeping Fluffy in a travel trailer, which allowed him to move her when he needed to.
After meeting Fluffy, Buckley herself became a fixture at the tire store. She showed up many mornings before class. She shoveled the dirty wood shavings out of Fluffy’s trailer and fed the elephant breakfast. Fluffy consumed four quarts of formula from a bottle, along with a pile of fruits and vegetables. Twice a week, Buckley wheeled a buggy through a local produce store and loaded it up with whatever was available: apples, oranges, cucumbers, bananas, onions. Carrots were Fluffy’s favorite.
In those early days, Fluffy tolerated Buckley, but she adored Nance, who always had a pocket full of shiny jellybeans. She chirped excitedly whenever he appeared. Nance wasn’t too concerned about training Fluffy, until one day she nearly crashed through a glass door at the tire store. Nance agreed to let Buckley teach Fluffy a few things about how to behave.
Buckley had never trained an elephant before, so she started by using the methods she’d used with her dogs growing up. Positive reinforcement was the most important one. Buckley would instruct Fluffy to lift her foot, then demonstrate what she meant by physically pulling the elephant’s leg up off the ground. When Fluffy got the move right on her own, Buckley rewarded her with food. Fluffy was stubborn, but dangle a banana in front of her and she’d do anything you asked.
Back then, most captive elephants didn’t get rewards for behaving as they were told. In circuses, on film sets, and at animal parks, handlers used what’s known as dominance training. When an elephant didn’t do what they demanded, they whacked it with a bull hook or punished it some other way. Buckley was aware of that approach, but it didn’t feel right. Fluffy was bursting with energy and eager to please. Training her felt like play. “It wasn’t about control,” Buckley said. “It was about trust and building a relationship.”
Years later, Buckley would question the foundation of her work with Fluffy. But for now she was happy. Fluffy seemed to be, too. The elephant learned to follow one command after another. Tricks came next. The future was rich with possibilities: of what Fluffy might do, of who might see her, of where Buckley might take her.
By the time Fluffy was a year old, she and Buckley were inseparable. When Buckley sat on the floor of the elephant’s trailer to do homework, Fluffy watched over her. When Buckley didn’t pay the elephant enough attention, Fluffy nudged her playfully with her trunk.
According to Buckley, there were nights when she brought Fluffy home with her. She would back the elephant’s trailer up to the bay window of her house so they could see each other. Buckley studied with the light on while Fluffy dozed outside in the dark. Sometimes Fluffy awoke and stretched out her trunk, 40,000 tiny muscles working in unison, probing toward the lit window as if to make sure Buckley was still there.
Today, graduates of the Exotic Animal Training and Management Program at Moorpark College run zoos, sanctuaries, and research facilities. Some manage animal acts for Hollywood studios. Moorpark has become the MIT of animal wrangling, the place where you learn how to get a tiger to open its mouth wide for a veterinary exam without being eaten alive. But back in the mid-1970s, the program was in its infancy.
The two-year associate’s degree was the brainchild of William Brisby, a onetime high school biology teacher who taught himself how to work with dangerous animals. Sporting thick sideburns, a full beard, khaki attire, and aviator sunglasses, Brisby looked like a safari guide. In a way he was. He created a teaching zoo for the Moorpark program, the first resident of which was a gray wolf named Kiska. Students took turns caring for her. Brisby later acquired capuchins, a camel, even a lion, according to author Amy Sutherland’s book about Moorpark, Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched.
Sutherland describes Brisby as both charismatic and problematic. He divorced his first wife, became engaged to one of his students, then broke it off to marry a younger one. A mythology sprang up around him, which gave him swagger. People said he’d trained dolphins with the Navy—not so, according to the founder of the Navy’s marine mammal program.
Brisby could be tough, dictatorial even. “For the next two years in this program you don’t have a life,” he told first-year students. “You belong to me.” But Buckley wasn’t intimidated by Brisby. She was audacious and headstrong. Brisby became her mentor as she figured out what to do about Fluffy.
By the summer of 1975, Buckley was dedicating all her free time to the elephant. She spent a month with Robert “Smokey” Jones, a legendary elephant trainer. She also volunteered to take Fluffy to events—people paid for the elephant to appear at parties or on camera. At a Mother’s Day celebration in Topanga Canyon, Fluffy surprised everyone, including Buckley, by plunging into a pool. When Fluffy was booked on Bob Hope’s Christmas special, she infuriated the star by reaching out with her trunk to touch his crotch.
Occasionally, Buckley recognized how precarious the whole endeavor was. She towed a two-ton elephant in a trailer on Southern California’s busy freeways and winding canyon roads. Once, up north in the foothills of San Jose, she saw a couple of boys at the side of the road harassing a snake. She pulled over and hopped out to scold them as the snake slithered into the woods. Then Buckley turned and saw the trailer; she’d parked at the edge of a steep drop. One wrong move—an emergency brake not set right, Fluffy shifting her weight just so—and the vehicle could have crashed into the ravine. Buckley felt a shiver and knew she needed to be more careful.
The more time Buckley spent with Fluffy, the less she spent on schoolwork. She sought Brisby out for advice. She told him she saw a future with Fluffy, a chance to make the elephant her career, book gigs across California, maybe around the country. Brisby leaned back in his chair as she spoke. When she finished, he reminded her that the Moorpark program was designed to help students break into the exotic-animal management industry. With Fluffy, Buckley had already done that. She didn’t need Moorpark anymore. “Don’t come back for the second year,” Brisby advised.
Buckley left school. She moved into a small trailer next to Fluffy’s on Nance’s property. According to Buckley, Nance started paying her on a weekly basis to care for the elephant. When Buckley asked Nance to build Fluffy a barn, he did.
But the arrangement didn’t last long. Simi Valley, ringed by hills and thick with citrus groves, had once felt a world away from the busy heart of Los Angeles. By 1976, however, housing tracts were crowding out the farms and ranches. Nance didn’t like what he saw and decided to relocate to Northern California. Buckley seized the opportunity. With a loan cosigned by her father, she bought Fluffy for $25,000.
Buckley was sure Fluffy would be a star, but decided that the elephant’s name wouldn’t do. She wanted something that would look good in lights. Buckley scribbled letters in a notebook, trying out different combinations. Eventually she wrote down T-A-R-R-A. Yes, that was it. Tarra.
The calls started coming in. Tarra appeared in an episode of Little House on the Prairie, in which a circus passes through to the pioneer town of Walnut Grove. Carol Burnett sat atop Tarra in the movie Annie. Tarra appeared on one of Jerry Lewis’s telethons.
But Buckley soon discovered that there was less demand in show business for a lone elephant than for a herd of three to five that could perform tricks together. Buckley wasn’t about to buy more elephants, so Tarra would need a gimmick to be competitive.
One day a man approached Buckley at a sports expo in Santa Barbara where Tarra was doing tricks to amuse visitors. He introduced himself as an ice skater and gushed about Tarra.
“She’s so coordinated,” he said. “I could teach her to ice-skate!”
“No, you will not,” Buckley huffed.
A year or so later, she reconsidered. When Buckley and Tarra weren’t on the road, their home base was Ojai, California, where they lived along the Ventura River. Twice a day, rain or shine, they waded into the river together. Tarra splashed excitedly while Buckley watched. The river was full of large, smooth boulders, and Tarra picked her way across them with astonishing ease. She was eight by then, and the size of an SUV; she ate about 50 pounds of food a day. But she was nimble. Buckley marveled at how Tarra balanced on the boulders, gripping the edges with her toes.
OK, Buckley thought, let’s give this skating thing a try. In Southern California, she decided, roller skates would be a better fit.
Buckley visited a local welder, who estimated that it would cost $2,500 to construct metal skates big and strong enough for an elephant. Buckley had $3,000 in her bank account. She called her mother. “You know Tarra better than anyone,” her mother told her. “If you think she would like it, then do it.” Buckley emptied her bank account and commissioned the skillet-size skates.
Then she went to a shoemaker to inquire about “boots”—really what she wanted was more like mammoth ankle braces—to give the elephant additional support. “Before you say no, just come and meet her,” Buckley pleaded. The shoemaker did and, charmed by Tarra, agreed to make the boots.
On a sunny spring morning, Buckley walked Tarra to a stretch of concrete near her home, the foundation for a house that had never been finished. Today it would be the setting for a most unusual lesson. Like she had so many times before, Buckley asked Tarra to raise one of her front legs. When the elephant complied, Buckley guided her foot into a skate—the straps were made of seatbelts, the wheels of industrial casters. Then she repeated the process with the other front foot. The leather boots rose about halfway up Tarra’s stocky legs. Buckley would only be trying out the front skates, to see how the elephant took to them.
Tarra bounded off, trumpeting and chattering, rolling and playing. She seemed almost to bounce with glee. Wobbly at first, she quickly gained confidence and control.
Two weeks later, Buckley took Tarra to an abandoned warehouse, where there would be room for her to experiment for the first time wearing all four skates. Tarra glided across the concrete floor. Her excitement was contagious.
Buckley now had a roller-skating elephant. Tarra didn’t spin or do tricks; the fact that she was on wheels was enough to attract attention. The bookings poured in. Buckley and Tarra promoted Shriner circuses on the West Coast. They appeared at roller rinks and in vast parking lots. Before events, Buckley got on her hands and knees with a level to make sure the venue didn’t slope, making it difficult to stop. Then she adorned Tarra with a shiny headdress and got ready for the show. Buckley skated alongside Tarra, dressed in a leotard cut high at the leg.
On the road, they bunked together in a custom trailer. When it was time to sleep, Buckley climbed into bed in a compartment up front and said good night. She could hear Tarra slump against the wall and slide down to the floor. The trailer shook as the elephant got comfortable. Buckley fell asleep to the rumble of Tarra’s heavy snores.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/pLHjfKE
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/9WNwzgL
