Impossible Things Read Online Free
Author: Connie Willis
vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me around the RV.
“This up here,” he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, “is the luggage rack, and this is the holding tank. It’ll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic electricpump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five minutes, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.” He held up his fat pink hands palms forward as if to show me. “Water tank,” he said, slapping a silver metal tank next to it. “Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four of headroom. That’s plenty even for a tall guy like yourself.”
He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have thought they wouldn’t have any customers either.
A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.
“I’ll just look around while you tend to the paying customers,” I told him.
I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it now—she’d run a caption like, “The old zoo stands empty today. No sound of lion’s roar, of elephant’s trumpeting, of children’s laughter, can be heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind—while just outside its gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10.” Maybe it would be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.
I went inside. I hadn’t been out here in years. In the late eighties there had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn’t covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then. I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director, who had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo’s renovation project cold and giving the money to a wildlife protection group.
“I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we’ll have nothing to put in them. The timber wolf,the California condor, the grizzly bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it’s our responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last survivors.”
The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn’t he? The grizzly bear isn’t extinct in the wild—it’s Colorado’s biggest tourist draw, and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited hunting.
In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savanna land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar bears.
They hadn’t really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs had taken up residence in the middle of it.
I went back to the gate and looked down at the Winnebago. The family circled the Winnebago, the man bending down to look underneath the body. One of the kids was hanging off the ladder at the back of the RV. The ferret was nosing around the front wheel Jake Ambler had so carefully scrubbed down, looking like it was about ready to lift its leg, if ferrets do that. The kid yanked on its leash and then picked it up in his arms. The mother said something to him. Her nose was sunburned.
Katie’s nose had been sunburned. She had had that white cream on it that skiers used to use. She was wearing a parka and jeans and bulky pink-and-white moonboots that she couldn’t run in, but she still made it to Aberfan before I did. I pushed past
“This up here,” he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, “is the luggage rack, and this is the holding tank. It’ll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic electricpump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five minutes, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.” He held up his fat pink hands palms forward as if to show me. “Water tank,” he said, slapping a silver metal tank next to it. “Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four of headroom. That’s plenty even for a tall guy like yourself.”
He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have thought they wouldn’t have any customers either.
A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.
“I’ll just look around while you tend to the paying customers,” I told him.
I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it now—she’d run a caption like, “The old zoo stands empty today. No sound of lion’s roar, of elephant’s trumpeting, of children’s laughter, can be heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind—while just outside its gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10.” Maybe it would be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.
I went inside. I hadn’t been out here in years. In the late eighties there had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn’t covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then. I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director, who had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo’s renovation project cold and giving the money to a wildlife protection group.
“I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we’ll have nothing to put in them. The timber wolf,the California condor, the grizzly bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it’s our responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last survivors.”
The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn’t he? The grizzly bear isn’t extinct in the wild—it’s Colorado’s biggest tourist draw, and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited hunting.
In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savanna land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar bears.
They hadn’t really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs had taken up residence in the middle of it.
I went back to the gate and looked down at the Winnebago. The family circled the Winnebago, the man bending down to look underneath the body. One of the kids was hanging off the ladder at the back of the RV. The ferret was nosing around the front wheel Jake Ambler had so carefully scrubbed down, looking like it was about ready to lift its leg, if ferrets do that. The kid yanked on its leash and then picked it up in his arms. The mother said something to him. Her nose was sunburned.
Katie’s nose had been sunburned. She had had that white cream on it that skiers used to use. She was wearing a parka and jeans and bulky pink-and-white moonboots that she couldn’t run in, but she still made it to Aberfan before I did. I pushed past
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