So this is going to be sort of animal heavy.
I'm very interested.
I'm returning in a lot of ways to issues
and concerns of childhood, animals and our relationship
to them.
And so that's sort of on my radar among other things
these days.
This is a short piece that is thinking
about that very weird situation in Zanesville, Ohio,
which you might have heard about.
A man had an exotic animal farm and then sort of lost it,
and let them all free, and they had to be rounded up and shot.
It was a completely horrifying situation.
And so weird and so odd that the form of this essay
kind of takes on the really basic
questioning that I found myself doing.
I had to keep trying to reframe what happened like,
wait a minute.
This is the situation, this is what happened.
So it both sort of responds to much, much younger concerns.
And also kind of imitates that way of questioning we
have as kids.
You just keep going back and trying to get it somehow.
"Preserve."
Wild animals are kept on a preserve of sorts.
The rules are lax in Zanesville, Ohio.
The town has been worried about it for years.
Before ending his life, the owner of the place,
overwhelmed by the upkeep, heavily in debt
and personally distraught, opened the cages,
destroyed the fences surrounding his property,
and set the animals free.
Animals are put in a preserve where they're kept.
This is the act of one man's will.
He's like a God who feeds and provides.
Not well, but then God himself dies
and others have to fix the mess, keep in check
the forces unleashed, and take on the restoration of order
and balance.
It was, one official said, like Noah's Ark wrecking right here
in Zanesville, Ohio.
Questions get raised about zoning and permits.
I raise others for myself, for example,
the animals are kept for someone's pleasure.
If they had a choice, and could assert it,
they wouldn't be caged, but they don't have a choice.
They can't even talk, which invalidates their right
to a better fate.
Why?
That sort of thing.
Then they get out.
Again, not their choice, and have to be shot.
They're ill kept in captivity and free they're dead.
Where, then, could they be on this vast, wide, Earth.
Animals that shouldn't be together.
Camels and wolves, lions and black bears, grizzlies
and cheetahs are kept in one place, and when they get out,
they're shot.
There's no logic to the group, no way
to predict their behavior, no order of herd,
or pride, or pack.
No single instinct governs their movement.
Each would hunt, sleep, procreate in its own way,
but can't.
Until now, the animals existed to be seen,
to contribute atmosphere.
To fulfill one man's dream.
The basics, hunt, run, et cetera,
were not on the list of reasons for being.
Imagine paradise as a place where the simplest urges
are fulfilled.
As the chance to fulfill them, and being caught, torn, eaten.
Even that end, a form of rightness.
The animals get out and are shot by police.
By the sides of highways, in woods, fields, and backyards
fast before nightfall before someone gets hurt.
Schools are closed, the town is locked down,
TV stations warn everyone to stay in.
It's a cold, wet day in Zanesville, Ohio.
Portable roadwork ahead signs are reprogrammed
to read, caution exotic animals, and set up
along the interstate.
The signs flash yellow in heavy rain.
They don't make sense unless you're in on the story.
Without the story, you might scan
the trees for loose toucans or ditches for pink flamingos.
You might not know you're in any danger.
I talked with a girl whose father was there,
but he was stuck in meetings all day.
By the time his conference ended, the situation
was pretty much over.
He said, a lot of people were sorry they missed it.
By the end just a wolf and a monkey are left.
Then, just a monkey.
Then, the reports correct, it seems
the unaccounted for monkey was eaten by a lion
before the lion was shot.
Before it was shot it ate part of the monkey,
and that's what got counted at first.
Imagine in the moment before death for the first time
behaving most like yourself.
Recalling instincts you once very briefly, long ago knew.
Imagine becoming familiar again.
Being unthinkingly you.
I mean this to describe the final moments of both
the lion and the monkey.
But of course, that's what had to be shot.
The entirely natural lion had to be stopped.
Did not belong there, could not live among people
as the owner might have hoped when he governed
a realm, when his will was all.
Maybe he felt like a duke with his duchy,
imagining his subjects content in their cages,
and that quietude reigned throughout the land
as it did in the peaceable kingdom.
Yesterday at 3:00 in the morning,
my neighbor saw a fox carrying a squirrel, jump her fence,
bury the squirrel in the vegetable garden,
take a drink from her fish pond, and leap back over.
It was nonchalant, she said, and knew exactly what it was doing.
Then in no rush at all, the fox passed
under the streetlight's glow, and slipped back
into the darkness.
Hawks live here as well.
I saw three the other evening.
It was sharply cold and the moon was full,
which I imagine they must like.
A barred owl visit sometimes.
Raccoons walk the telephone wires
at dusk like fat apparitions.
Rabbits, squirrels, rats, the sleepers, the hunters,
those bent on increasing at ease in their burrows or alert
and prowling.
While I myself sleep, lives are arranging
on terms that have nothing to do with me.
That is, the more lives that intermix,
that gather together undirected, but dependent on one another
Yes, praise even the microbes.
They mean to live too.
The 500 plus species in our bodies
outnumbering our cells 10 to one.
The unseen chains and cycles ongoing.
The persistence and efficiencies prey, host, and predator, each
the other and balanced in their interpenetration.
That is, the more fates that coexist freely, the better
the quality of peace at night.
If peace can mean systems of perfect need,
a working order not confounded by excess.
Peace with foxes.
Solo, omnivorous, stalking rats and squirrels.
Tearing the half-buried wings of crows.
Peace with barred owls rustling in trees, darkness
back filling the spaces they leave.
Purple, dusky, evening peace with bats dive bombing
pond mosquitoes, and goldfish siphoning threads of larva.
Raccoons in the sewers, opossums sifting
spilled trash near dumpsters.
The habits of those whose compulsions
are perfect, reproducible, necessary who go on despite us
as if we were gone.
The quality of evenings without us so good.