Whatever you do, don't think of elephants*

Except, I can't stop thinking about elephants.

The book I'm writing is very sad and personal and to offset those things for myself, I've also made it a bit wacky. Like, there's a werewolf. And a gnome (yes, a real one). And a family of former circus freaks (except it's mean to call them that, so don't). Said family also just happens to have an elephant living in a large barn-like structure behind the house.

I am a big proponent of imaginative, original writing. I like the fantastical (in fact, my favorite genre to read tends to err on the side of dystopic fantasy with a dash of the supernatural). But I'm also a firm believer in authenticity. I can make up whatever I want about werewolves and gnomes, because they don't actually exist. But when it comes to this elephant, I need to do some research. I need to know what they smell like, what it feels like being in the presence of one, exactly how it feels to brush your hand against one, the way they move, etc. (And, even if I find out in the course of my research that no elephant would ACTUALLY eat ice cream sandwiches and bread and butter pickles -- spears, not chips -- well, then I'm just going to have to take some creative license with that.)

This need for authenticity and to do some real-life research is what led me to google "pet an elephant in New England" yesterday. (I'm sure you're astounded to find that I didn't really come up with much for results.) That's when I turned to Facebook, asking if any of my friends knew a place where a girl could go to pet an elephant.

I was astonished how many replies I got. Unsurprisingly, most of the responses were about zoos. This makes me sad (and raises a bunch of moral/ethical quandaries about patronizing such establishments). I have fond memories of being a very small child and riding an elephant at Catskill Game Farm. Although Wikipedia refers to it as a zoo (technically, I guess it was), I still think of it as an animal preserve. There weren't the traditional cages or small enclosures. The animals always seemed well cared for and roamed in large fenced-off areas of a mountain.

My MFA mentor Suzanne posted a link to this video, which elicited a response from me something along the lines of: OMGTHATISSOAMAZINGIWISHICOULDDOSOMETHINGLIKETHATWOW. (And, while the location in the video is a zoo, at least they seem to strive to enrich the lives of the elephants living there. I feel like I can get behind that.)

So, I'm still trying to figure out which of the many options my friends suggested to pursue in my quest to get near an elephant. But then something dawned on me. I haven't been in very close proximity to any exotic animals in a long time. Me + exotic animals = wackiness

The first wacky encounter was with the least exotic animal, a baby goat. I was four and we were at Catskill Game Farm, in the special pen where the baby animals ran loose and you could feed them from bottles. I had bent down to feed a baby goat and got its nubbly little horn up my nose. (Yeah, I know. You can't do it if you TRY, but I manage to do it completely by accident. Thank goodness it was just the nubbly horn.)

Wacky encounter number two was approximately 11 years later at the Orange County Fair. There were a few years during my adolescence that, in addition to the typical 4H enclosures with various livestock, the fair featured pens and cages with exotic animals. The summer I was 15, they had some tigers (in very small cages, I might add). We were standing a good several yards back when there was a stream of liquid from the cage of a white tiger. (I tried to convince myself that said tiger had only kicked his water bowl and that's what splashed my arm. My sister laughed and said I was deluding myself.)

A year after the tiger peed on me, I was back at the fair and this time they had a petting zoo -- a tent with little pens filled with potbellied pigs and goats and a water buffalo. I think there was even a giraffe. You could put quarters into a gumball machine nearby and get handfuls of food for the animals. I stood in front of the water buffalo with my cupped hand filled with something that looked a lot like the stuff I feed my guinea pig. He ate it all up and rather than licking his plate (so to speak), he bit. My hand.

And that is how I got a goat horn up my nose, was peed on by a white tiger, and got bitten by a water buffalo (all before the age of 18), and lived to tell about it.

Getting up close and personal with an elephant may not be my wisest idea yet, but it's still worth pursuing....




* My favorite part of the book The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd (which is AWESOME) is all about that phrase.