Mammoth (24 page)

In fact, by the time Big Daddy was hauled off at noon the next day, Wilshire Street and Curson Avenue were already almost back to normal. All the damaged vehicles had been towed away. Glaziers had replaced all the windows either shot out by police or broken by mammoths. Street sweepers had sucked up the shards of broken windshields and the sawdust spread to soak up spilled crankcase oil and gasoline, city crews were replacing or repairing streetlights. The new palm trees to replace the ones in the median strip on Wilshire, their roots wrapped in big burlap bundles, were being lowered into freshly dug holes.

By two that afternoon, not much more than fifteen and a half hours after the arrival of the mammoths, traffic was flowing smoothly again, and Howard Christian, bone weary by now, retired to his aerie in the Resurrection Tower to begin writing the checks to pay for it all.

But he was smiling.

IT
was not much later than that before Susan had a chance to catch her breath and realize, with a flush of shame, that she hadn’t thought of Matt more than once or twice the entire day. There had just been too much to do, too many places to be at once, trying to see the baby mammoth safely to his temporary new home at the zoo, monitoring and advising during the operations around Big Mama and Big Daddy by cell phone cameras,
with barely any time to weep when Big Daddy breathed his last, mighty breath.

But at last she and the zoo veterinarians completed their checkup of the little mammoth, who stood calm and compliant for all the poking and probing, either in shock or unable to fathom what had happened to him and thus ready to accept any friendly attention, and she sat down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee and wondered why Matt had taken off as abruptly as he did. He had said he might be gone…how long? “A while.” One of those maddeningly inexact English words describing time. A bit. A moment. A tick. A spell, a flash, a jiffy, a shake, a space, a stretch, a breath.

In this case, a while would be five years.

CENOZOIC
Park had been erected over the next few years in what had once been farmland not far east of Portland, Oregon, along the newly widened Route 26 that went by Mount Hood and across the Cascades toward Bend.

There was not a lot of middle ground when it came to the theme park. Oregonians either loved it or hated it, and were just about equally divided on the matter. The only thing everyone agreed on was that nobody but the planners and builders called it Cenozoic Park from the moment ground was broken. Everybody called it Fuzzyland.

Portland had been fighting urban sprawl for decades, and having better luck with it than many another metropolitan area. When the plans for Fuzzyland were announced, a year to the day after the slaughter in Los Angeles, environmental activists were stunned to discover it was already a done deal. Several millions of Howard Christian’s money, discreetly applied, had obtained variances to land-use regulations. The hearings that followed were a formality. In only weeks bulldozers were at work on the much loathed Mount Hood Freeway, something planners had thought dead and buried for forty years. It was almost finished by opening day, the remaining construction just enough to make the traffic delays getting there merely dreadful rather than nightmarish.

But Fuzzyland was promoted as “environmentally sound,” so an extension of the local light-rail system, known as MAXX, was built on an elevated track right down the middle of the freeway, stopping at Fuzzyland, Zigzag, and Government Camp, where a funicular railway would take skiers the rest of the way to Timberline Lodge. This MAXX line was no ordinary two-car light-rail system like the one that served the
rest of Portland, though. This was a monorail that levitated on a magnetic field, and its ten-car trains reached speeds of 150 miles per hour.

“A shot in the arm for tourism, and the ski industry!” proclaimed all the various chambers of commerce in the affected areas.

“A blight on the Cascades!” the environmentalists sneered.

Though the words “tasteful” and “circus” are not traditionally used in the same sentence, Howard instructed his architects to do the best they could, and they did manage to avoid the worst excesses of Las Vegas and Orlando. You could barely see the place from the highway, camouflaged as it was by hundreds of Douglas firs. (The trees were actually metal frameworks supporting colored Styrofoam bark and easy-to-clean plastic needles, but who cared?)

When you drove through the forest toward the vast underground parking lots you barely got a glimpse of the park just before plunging into the depths. It was mostly low-slung, sprawling, hugging the ground, dominated by the largest plastic and steel geodesic dome ever built, gleaming in the spring sunshine—or, more likely, glistening in the Oregon rain. It wasn’t until you took the long escalators to the monorail that circled the park and took you to one of the four themed areas, three resort hotels, two RV parks, and one campground that you got a sense of the scale of the place.

You quickly realized that the dome was a lot bigger than you had imagined. A structure like that, with very little to give it a sense of scale, it could sort of sneak up on you, it took a while to realize you were farther away than you thought. It was
big.

Placed between the parking lots and the park itself were the hotels, each with its monorail stop.

First was the smallest, the Alpine, on the side of the nearest hill, a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff of dressed stone and polished wood and glass, cantilevered over a rushing river à la Falling Water, hangout of those who had come mainly to sample the year-round winter sports under the dome or the winter recreation nearby. Ski bums, hotdogging snowboarders, slumming Euro trash tired of the slopes of Aspen and Gstaad, aging snow bunny wannabes from the RV parks there to take
their first and only bobsled or luge ride on the short, hair-raising, but guaranteed safe indoor course.

Next was the Timberline II, “the World’s Largest Log Cabin,” patterned on the WPA structure on nearby Mount Hood, famous from exterior shots in Stanley Kubrick’s movie
The Shining
, only TII was ten times as large and seemed from the outside to be made entirely of Lincoln Logs. (More Styrofoam, but who cared?) This was the cheapest of the three, with its retro ’30s decor and its bellhops dressed as forest rangers (but not
cheap;
for cheap you had to go to the little town of Zigzag, to the Motel 6s and 8s and Comfort Inns that had sprouted like weeds when Cenozoic Park was abuilding, and take a shuttle bus to the park entrance).

Just before the park itself you came to the hot ticket hotel, the Cave, a place that had sold out a year in advance purely on the strength of artist’s sketches of the exterior, lobby, and rooms, and was in fact adding on two new wings before the park even opened. It seemed to be built entirely of stones,
giant
stones, heaped together almost at random (more Styrofoam) in the fashion of the eccentric Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, a favorite stopping point for Howard Christian on his drives up the California coast…except, of course, much, much bigger. The cavernous lobby and the dark, meandering, random hallways were lit by torches and featured cave paintings cribbed from the walls in Lascaux, France, and the rooms were grottos—plush-carpeted, television-and-telephone-equipped grottos with comfy king-sized beds and stone-surfaced Jacuzzis, but grottos all the same. If you wanted the full Cenozoic Park/Fuzzyland experience you had to stay at the Cave, which quickly came to be almost universally known as the Flintstone Hilton.

The trip wound through lakes and hills, not Styrofoam this time, but not natural, either, having been scooped out and piled up by Howard Christian’s devouring earthmoving machines and landscaped by armies of gardeners, here and there getting glimpses of an ever-growing Ice Dome, until finally the entirety of the park was visible.

First the monorail plunged into the dome itself and all the newcomers would gasp as snow began to swirl around them, melting instantly when it hit the glass and metal of the train
cars on a summer day, clinging in the winter. It was always snowing in the dome, somewhere, but only when and where the designers wanted it to snow. Promoters liked to boast that the snow removal budget
every week
at the Ice Dome was greater than that of the city of Portland for the entire winter. (Well, sure, but Portland tended to simply spread a little sand around on the rare occasions when it snowed.) In the center was Mount Mazama—which had destroyed itself thousands of years ago in the explosion that created Crater Lake, but who cared?—five times the height of Disney’s Matterhorn and just as hollow, with a bobsled ride that ran on real ice. There were the animal exhibits: the polar bears, the musk oxen, the penguins, the arctic foxes, arctic owls, Seal Island, the white wolves, the caribou herd. There was Frosty’s Snowman Lane and Toboggan Hill and Snow Fort Country for the little ones. There were
three
ice rinks, and a roller coaster. All the themed areas had roller coasters.

Beyond that was Redwood Empire, Fuzzyland’s obligatory nod to the Sierra Club, where you could wander in the perpetual mists among the towering giants—not Styrofoam this time, but plaster so realistic that crews were kept busy patching woodpecker holes—and learn about Mother Earth and endangered species and how to recycle your newspaper, where most people paused long enough to walk around a massive tree trunk, maybe take an educational ride, pretty much like at Epcot, and then hurry on to less earnest amusements.

Which were to be found in Cenozoic Park itself, now called Cenozoic Safari, originally intended to be the heart of the development but now just one of four areas and only the third most popular. Here were more exciting nature rides, on open-topped robotic excursion buses painted in jungle camouflage, down paths with names like the Eocene Trek, the Oligocene Adventure, the Paleocene Expedition, and the Pleistocene Experience. Here you encountered the amazing mammals of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, so long upstaged by the big reptiles of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.

No longer. Fuzzy and Big Mama had changed all that; extinct mammals were sexy now. And Cenozoic Park worked hard to make them even sexier. Down these jungle and swampland and savanna paths the armchair adventurer could
now encounter them in all their cyber-animatronic glory. Here was Gastornis, a seven-foot nightmare top predator (and, okay, a bird, not a mammal) that ate ancestral horses for breakfast, and Phorusrhacos, a
ten
-foot bird that could have had Gastornis for lunch, if they hadn’t lived twenty million years apart. Down these dusty Eocene paths Brontotheres did battle like overgrown rhinos on steroids. Dwarfing even these giants were the Indricotheres, the largest land mammals that ever lived, twenty-ton Oligocene behemoths, fifteen feet high at the shoulder, that could have kicked a full-grown elephant through the uprights of a football goalpost. Waiting to spring out at you were Entelodonts, possibly the ugliest mammals that ever slobbered, two-thousand-pound pigs that were all head, jaw, and shoulder, things that made warthogs look as pretty as sea otters.

And you want big? You think dinosaurs were big? Down the swampy ways of the Cenozoic lurked Basilosaurus—a mammal in spite of the reptilian name—an early whale that grew to eighty feet or more, ate great white sharks like minnows, and could lunge onto shore to dine on primitive hippopotami…or it did that in the park, anyway, in one of the animated diorama showstoppers that splashed gallons of water on the delighted safari bus passengers.

Ambulocetus, Durodon, Andrewsarchus, Hyaenodon, Amphicyonia, knuckle-walking Chalicotheres, turtle-shelled giant Glyptodonts, Ancylotherium, Deinotherium, Propaleotherium, Moeritherium…by now the kids had had about all the
-theriums
they could take, it was time to get to the Pleistocene Promenade, time to get to a place where the animals had names you could pronounce and remember, names like Mammoth, Mastodon, Irish Elk, Cave Bear, Cave Lion, Woolly Rhinoceros, Saber-Toothed Cat, and Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium, if you wanted to get technical, which nobody but the guides did by that point). Here they were, the fabled creatures of the various ice ages and interregnums, many of which had been hunted, maybe to extinction, by our ancestors, and like all the large cybers in Cenozoic Park, these didn’t just stand there and wave their trunks and nod their heads and maybe paw the ground, they
walked!

But the most popular area, hands down, was the last stop
on the mono-maglev train before it completed its loop back at the parking lot, was Fuzzyland. If you would rather snowboard on real slopes, if you got your fill of environmental indoctrination in junior high school, and if thirty-foot rubber chalicotheres left you cold—and that was the case with virtually all of the teenagers and most of the young adults—Fuzzyland was the place for you.

The theme was Circus. Turn-of-the-century circus (the
twentieth
century, 1901 if you want to get picky), with lots of wood and brass, calliopes playing ragtime and rock and rap, penny-pitches where you actually pitched silver dollars, vast Victorian canvases depicting two-headed women and snake boys lining the midway—which actually featured fire eaters, sword swallowers, contortionists, and other carny acts rather than human freaks—big tents containing virtual reality video games, dance halls, funhouses, and shops selling a million kinds of souvenir and every type of fattening fried food known to humanity.

And rides. Ordinary carnival rides and multimillion-dollar vertiginous coasters that had been the centerpieces of theme parks since Walt Disney opened Space Mountain.

(So how did that fit with winter wonderland, ecology, and paleontology, the naysayers asked? Badly, of course, but Fuzzy himself, the reason for this entire carnival, was intended to be part of Howard Christian’s circus from the get-go, and thus Ringling Bros. B&B maintained its only permanent installation outside of its winter quarters in Florida right here, so circus it would be, and circus it
was.
)