course description included » bartlett

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-14)

jake — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 06:10:03 +0000

The artificial insemination of bears took hold in 2004 with the successful impregnation of Woodland Park’s Malayan sun, one of the world’s rarest bears and the most likely candidate for extinction, which ushered along the Seattle biologists’ urgency in undertaking the pregnancy; San Diego’s 1999 impregnation by way of artificial injection of a Giant Panda was the testing ground, and the biologists from both zoo’s maintained constant communication throughout the process. Given Luisa’s age, she was deemed an unlikely candidate for insemination, but the couple at Woodland Park – Gregor and Ingrid – had been living together for four years and not produced, so it was decided that Ingrid would be inseminated to continue the population at Woodland. Once Bartlett was born, however, it was decided she should be donated due to the ailing condition of Luisa.

The new-born Polar bear was transported by air, and Bartlett accepted the young cub at the airport with a couple of other zoo officials, on the off-hand chance that there would be a photo opportunity.

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-13)

jake — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:33:02 +0000

When the bear first came to the zoo it was a cub, its vanilla white hairlets just coming out of oily black skin; Bartlett became attached instantly to the bear’s oafish and lumbering personality as small as it was. The zoo’s staff speculated on the degree of uniqueness the bear possessed, in view of its oncoming maturation and ability to provide the zoo with an ongoing polar bear presence. At that time there were two older polar bears – Charley and Luisa, the latter of which has died of old age in her sleep since; onlookers, after reading the informational plaque that detailed Luisa’s life, frequently suggested the silvery sheen of her coat was in fact due to her age and not a survivor’s trait after spending year after year on endless ice floats that extended limitless onto the horizons of the Chukchi or Beaufort Seas. The bear itself grew so quickly, almost unbearably, to Bartlett. She was her bear, her little bear – and so, as the bear became larger, so too did the need to respect it and refer to her animal handling training for safety concerns at the very least. And yet Bartlett trusted her — all could see it, how the bear let down her defenses when she approached, the way her eyes would leaven and relax, and the edges of mouth once taut would lax.

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-11)

jake — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:06:08 +0000

Occasionally she would go out with coworkers and other members of the staff, where they would carpool downtown to a bar and surround one of the large tables in the back of a bar and trade stories about their days, friends, the management (regardless of presence as a real complaint can always be escalated) or their families. Bartlett often marveled at the generosity showed byt he lower level functionaries, and she, perceiving herself as a higher level employee at the zoo, would often over-compensate to prevent anyone of the lower level functionaries from perceiving her as overly punctilious vis-a-vis her position and/or relativity to theirs (and its respective social requirements) which led irrevocably to the lower level functionaries impression of her as being a precocious cougar of sorts and an easy mark. When Bartlett would get a little tipsy, due in large part to her generosity, she would often find herself in the middle of a screed, condemning the very institution that put food on all of hteir tables, much to the amusement of the LLF due to the rung/ladder type of relationship they had to the whole institution and/or Manager of the Day.

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-10)

jake — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:57:30 +0000

The Pimlico bus left Gate C every twenty minutes until 9pm, when it began arriving every 30 minutes; this meant that if Bartlett was unable to finish her day’s work early enough she would often loll around until 9:20 before making her way to the north gate, or she would pop in to see Bartlett resting up to the rocks that were beginning to cool in the night air and often she would take the specially designed beach boll shaped toy designed for zoos (it was made of a high-density polystyrene grade compound that would feel substantive to the bear and not be torn to pieces immediately in play and also would not collapse a member of the staff should he or she be on the receiving end of it in a game of catch), and so Bartlett enter would the cage gently and place it next to the bear so that it would be available to her in the morning when the direct morning sun from the east was quite jarring despite the coolness of the mornings. Often the bear would still be ambling about her quarry, or going for lap swims around it in the dark, now with only the sparsely placed night posts reflecting their ghosts on the surface of the black, rippling water.

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-9)

jake — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:47:32 +0000

When Bartlett left the bear for the night, she would always exit by way of the zoo’s north entrance, having received special permission from the security guard at Gate C (that being the north gate) to catch the bus that ran down Pimlico Ave to the Heights where her $750 1-BR apartment with washing machine and jacuzzi equipped bathtub was, which she was aching to get to if in fact she was working past the animal population’s retiring for the night and was required to secure permission to get past Gate C to catch the bus on Pimlico.

She never liked leaving Bartlett in the afternoon and had, on occasion, returned to the zoo to see her asleep, at which point she would resign herself to the berating of her colleagues, namely Gary Graveson, the man with the audacity to have named the bear after her when she had shown such devotion to her (the bear) upon her arrival as part of the zoo’s population. Graveson’s ancillary reasoning stood to fact — and he thanked Bartlett profusely for the connection her name solidified in his brain — but that he was naming this young pup polar bear after Hollywood legend Bart the Bear, and wasn’t this one much smaller, a “Bartlett”? Nevermind Bartlett the Bear was not a Kodiak bear from the forests of Alaska, it was all awash in the end to Graveson for the befuddled look he could arouse from staff with questions like “has Bartlett received her shots yet?” or “do you think Bartlett’s tendency to shit with children watching is a disturbing reflection of some kind of personality disorder?” The staff adjusted to these juvenile antics and even adopted a few of their own, all of which pushed the two Bartletts ever closer and served to undermine the depth of their relationship to which others at the zoo: workers, animals, guests or otherwise, could not be expected fully to realize and/or understand.

When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-8)

jake — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:42:36 +0000

The most acute disturbance to the museum concept came 3 months past the inaugural opening, and of course there had been complaints about the stuffed birds posed dramatically under single overhead 115 watt directed lighting designed to cast dramatic shadows onto the exhibit’s painted black flooring, but rather the disturbance in question had been a teenager’s succinct 4-word observation in front of the management upon looking at a stuffed puffin that had actually died in the zoo a month after the upscale museum-cum-café had opened and was well-known by his prescribed Christian name “Peter” as the oldest puffin in any zoo in North America. The idea to intern the puffin in the taxidermy corridor was seen as a “light-bulb” eureka-grade moment, a way to both honor Peter and give the taxidermy corridor some real gravitas to justify the 115 watt directed lighting which some guests had complained about on the yellow 3×5 “Your Opinion Is Valued” medium weight Berkshire bond cardboard stock as being “a little too dramatic” or “upsetting to my appetite”, but it was the addition of Peter, which was no small feat and required an inordinate amount of paperwork for such a small bird, led to management throwing its arms up in a tirade that questioned whether the zoo in fact “owned anything” and as such led the management into a more hands-on approach to the whole taxidermy corridor project, which set it on the inevitable crash course with the teenager’s 4-word outburst that cut management to the quick indeed, and put the whole project into “jeopardy,” a catch-all idiom at the zoo for floundering projects, animals and employees that had somehow filtered down from upper management to the lowest levels of the staff and as such was endemic to any of the management’s constant enjoinders to the staff that they were both keepers and guards of the zoo’s actual population.

When Bartlett Left the Bear

jake — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:42:14 +0000

Disclaimer:

With no less than 9 partially written movie reviews dating back to Watchmen, I’m going to try something else with this blog. I wanted it to serve as a dumping ground for writing I wasn’t fully comfortable with, while at the same time trying to learn a “voice” that might work on a blog (how apropos!). It seems I’m pretty bad at it, and instead of panicking about the fact that The Day the Earth Stood Still is the featured post going back two months, I’m going to start dumping writing I’ve been doing for a story the past couple months here. It came from a writing exercise Ken gave me, where I had to look at an image and then write about it. I’ve had a story about a zoo knocking around in my head for quite awhile (say, 3 years, since rediscovering Karen Tweedy-Holmes’ photography) and on top of this, I haven’t actually written anything I could call “finished” in awhile. This is because I get wrapped up in line-to-line editing, which is one of my weaknesses (thanks, VM!). So here it is – a dumping grounds for unfinished, unedited writing. I.e., if for whatever reason you’ve subscribed to my blog, this is ample reason to part company (if you like). I’m going to try and post a couple sentences a day, maybe a week – I don’t know. But a lot of this is going to be writing done directly within WordPress (maybe even from my iPhone^TM. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. But I’ve found myself writing around the story a lot, not really sure yet what it should be and I’ve never approached a story in this manner yet, but it does seem to at least be producing something.

A failed experiment of the zoo was its upscale museum/café, the intent of which was to lure tourists and residents into the zoo’s quarters and give them something to do beyond grabbing a bite to eat and moving onto the Arctic Mammals’ refrigerated confines, which were so popular on hot summer days in the city, and the whole idea (that of the upscale museum/café) was based somewhat backwardly on the notion that baseball stadiums and recreational animal containment facilities were more alike than they are dissimilar, which is to say, a specious observation in the least.

Yet the idea itself was not so bad: a hamburger and fries in a zoo is a common occurrence and won’t raise any eyebrows, so why would someone expect a more gourmet offering like an ostrich burger for $10.95 to cause such an uproar (served with fries and a half-pickle, sliced diagonally), and yet the burger itself was less a confrontation than the museum section’s piece de resistance: a taxidermy exhibit in the museum corridor that led to the darkly lit dining area where elegant leather booths and beech plywood designer chairs surrounded tables made of mahogany that lined tinted windows looking out onto the Courtesy of Arthur J. Schlesinger path lead to the Arctic Mammals’ refrigerated confines, which featured the Puffin and Penguin exhibit that was so popular with children.