Elephants and Stealth Bombers

It’s been a few weeks since my last trip. I took a few notes then, but haven’t been able to sit down and put together a story until tonight. As I warned you, it was a boring trip, and I’m hoping that’s why I’ve been so slow the write it up. At least I hope it’s not a case of the dreaded writers block or a sign that my procrastination is becoming terminal. Anyway, here’s part 1 of 2.

A strange caprice of airline pricing allowed me to take a triangle flight from Laguardia in New York to Minneapolis and then to back to Vermont at no extra cost, so after a Passover trip to New York I send Isabel back to Vermont with her mother and headed to Minnesota.

While we were there Isabel and I got to see the Bronx Zoo again. I’ve become a big fan of zoos since she was born, and the Bronx Zoo is one of the largest as well as one of my favorites. In particular, I adore the older buildings arranged around Astor Court (near the Sea Lions). These buildings made up the original Zoological Gardens. The Great Hall is the winter home for the elephants and year-round home of the tapirs. My friend Pat, who has worked at other zoos, describes a baby tapir as “a watermelon with legs.” But I digress. The building is an amazing three-domed gilded-age confection that looks like a Mosque from Oz decked out in rhino and elephant gargoyles. It’s one of my very favorite architectural spaces. If I were Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei or for that matter John Jacob Astor, I would build a replica of this place and live in it.

It’s a shame that today we enter the zoo from the main parking lot near the Bronx parkway, past the Bison and Pére David deer. A stroll around the grounds or a look at a map of the zoo (http://www.wcs.org/zoos/bronxzoo/bxzoomap/) makes me wonder what it would have been like to arrive here at the turn of the century when the zoo was new. I would have driven my carriage through the formal gate off Fordham Road. A short formal driveway would have brought me to the magnificent fountain decorated with all manner of fauna. From there it would have been a few steps up to Astor Court, a stroll through the court to the wonderful Great Hall and its resident pachyderms.

Behind the Great Hall there are two giant bronze rhinoceroses. I was dismayed to find a “no climbing” sign and a low chain fence around my old friends the Rhinos (“kid lost a finger last summer” said a guard). I have a fond memory of climbing up there with my stepdaughter some years back. I knew they were dangerous — about 8-10 feet high at the shoulder, cold, slippery and scary to climb, but it seems to me that a sense of fear and adventure are totally appropriate to an encounter with a rhino. I’m sad that the thousands of children who polished the rhinos’ backs won’t be able to watch in trepidation as their children do the same.

Back in the great hall a woman behind a desk explained that the Bronx Zoological Garden was started by Teddy Roosevelt and some of his rich friends (including Astor). They wanted a place to keep a herd of buffalo which they knew would soon to be driven to the edge of extinction. This information desk is smack in the middle of the main dome of the Great Hall. What a great workplace it must be, notwithstanding the smell of elephant and tapir poop.

The flight to Minneapolis involved one leg on a noisy puddle-jumper and one on a jet with a free first-class upgrade. I don’t often get to talk to people on airplanes, but on this flight I had a fascinating discussion with a young guy who winged around the country consulting with clients on the visual display of quantitative information. I’ve long been a big fan of Edward R. Tufte’s works (“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” “Envisioning Information” and others) and this fellow was a sort of disciple of Tufte. He’s met Tufte, taken his seminars, and gotten some client referrals from him.

It was fun to talk to him about his work. Part artist and part scientist, he does a lot of consulting for lawyers and prosecutors who must boil down complex information into simple but accurate charts for use in courtrooms. Lately he’s been working on a humongous lawsuit for the federal government against some “Stealth Bomber” contractors. Seems the planes were too heavy to do the job, so the government backed out. But defining “too heavy” isn’t as simple as you might think, and now it’s a lawsuit. He talked about the frustration of working with engineers who have worked all their life in secrecy — they call it a “black box” environment. It hasn’t been easy to get the neccesary information from them, much less to translate it into simple graphs that a jury could understand.