Notes on the uncertain borders between civilized and untamed
i. Ashes. Burned chunks of wood, chicken wire, metal scraps. That’s what is left of the empty buildings at the defunct Las Vegas Zoo. The smell of smoke still permeates the air on this spring morning, along with a palpable sense of finality. The three-acre zoo was open for 32 controversial years on this ramshackle stretch of Rancho Boulevard and was home to more than 100 animals, from alligators to cougars to emus. As I stand by the bulldozed remains and look at the perimeter fence, I remember Midas, the lion that made news when he fell ill after chewing a ball thrown in from the thrift shop next door. He later died of cancer. I remember Terry, the chimpanzee who, despite pleas from animal activists about his need for socialization, was caged alone for 18 years. I remember the Chinese alligators in the tiny pool within earshot of traffic, the Eurasian lynx panting in the 110-degree summer heat, the random chickens strutting the grounds. When the cash-strapped zoo finally closed, the surviving animals were sent to other zoos, exhibits and sanctuaries. The empty buildings drew squatters, and the fire decimated the compound, creating this smoldering denouement. I feel a peculiar sense of relief.
ii. A landscaper opens up the green plastic lid in my suburban front yard to turn the water valves. In the hole, a black-and-white king snake flinches. The landscaper reaches in with large pruning shears and lifts it out. The snake wriggles in the air, fighting capture. The man drops it in a garbage bag and takes it away. Later I will wonder what he did with that snake. I’ll wonder how it got here, how long it lived here, whether it left babies. I’ll be leery about leaving the front door open for air — can a snake slither through the gaps at the bottom of the mesh security door?
Security. That’s what the snake was seeking in that dark hole.
iii. An upset woman on the news says her pet terrier was attacked by a coyote in her Summerlin yard. Her dog barely survived. The encroacher was a wild canine, a scavenger that sees any small creature as food: a rat, a cat, a terrier.
A few weeks later, a pest control technician is attacked by large pit bull terriers when he enters an unlocked backyard to spray for bugs. Social media explodes over the issue of boundaries: He was hired to spray the property, but should he have waited for the owners? Were the dogs protectors, or are they dangerous, wild, menacing?
iv. For years, my neighbors have called different pest control companies to get rid of pigeons. For some reason, their house — amid rows of identical houses — is the pigeons’ favorite. Their tiled roof is covered in anti-bird spikes, big and small, sticking this way and that like unkempt hair, making the house itself look flustered. A wind-blown plastic owl is fastened on top. A real owl might scare off the pigeons, but then, a real owl might also attack a domestic pet.
Early this morning, as most mornings, I woke up to the clockwork pigeons: coo, coo, coo. Sometimes I’m irked. But most days, like today, I can’t help but giggle at their enduring victory: coo, coo, coo.
v. “Hummingbird nests are very hard to spot because they are so small and so well camouflaged,” says worldofhummingbirds.com. Not true for the mama hummingbird on my back porch, who has balanced her nest precariously between the rafter and a string of lights. From my kitchen window I watch her fly in and sit, and sit and sit and sit, the strangest thing to see: a hummingbird perfectly still. I worry about her and that nest. Though they live in the suburbs, they are small, wild, fragile creatures, and I want them to live farther out in the wild. Somehow it seems like it would be safer than here, where cats roam and people tinker. I want the nest to be more hidden, somewhere in Red Rock, in a bush no human will see. At the same time, I want very badly to climb up and look at them. As if they were in a zoo.
vi. “Las Vegas is an island surrounded by vast tracts of open desert space,” Dave Nielsen, a Nevada Department of Wildlife educator, tells me. “People are very surprised at how much wildlife lives in the Mojave Desert ...
“But this place was criss-crossed with natural washes, and we plowed over them and built on them, and then later we built around them, or built neighborhoods with lakes and added water and vegetation, and that just created a wildlife habitat, squared (multiplied). We built in food sources for the little critters, like mice and rabbits, which are the food sources for predator animals, and we perpetuate this in the way we develop. We enjoy it and, well, so do they.
“You can’t roll out the buffet and then pick and choose who comes.”
vii. On the drive to Red Rock, a sign: “Do Not Feed Wild Horses or Burros/$500 Fine.” I walk past rural homes where other horses are corralled, right up against the wilderness where we are asked to leave wildlife alone. I hike until I see nothing but nature. A lizard runs from rock to rock. A kangaroo mouse dashes under a creosote bush. Then something loud buzzes by my ear. I flinch. A bee? The zip of a hummingbird’s wings? Or, just beyond the next hill, where the desert meets the encroaching suburbs, the high-pitched rip of a motorcycle?
It is the motorcycle I fear here: people. That’s the fine line I live on. I want to be able to trek into the desert on foot, abandon civilization, commune with nature, see cottontail rabbits and zebra-tailed lizards, not feed the wild burros, nod to the corralled horses, and drive back to a snake-free home and feed my kitten, who will live his entire life indoors.
The kitten climbs into my lap and purrs. He claws at the string hanging from my hoodie — the one that looks like a tiny snake.
viii. The lot where the zoo stood seems even smaller, now that it’s cleared. It’s hard to believe there were ever so many displaced animals confined here. Beyond the issue of whether the zoo was humane — the word itself speaks to our arrogance — it seems like folly to imagine that the boundaries between man and nature are ever anything but malleable, constantly in flux. Nielsen told me, “We have to recognize that we are not alone. We share this place with multiple other species.” That is both true and perpetually challenged — fences, categories, control. I stand by the debris contemplating the differences between what we consider civilized and what we think of as wild. Two men approach the burnt pile with a shopping cart. While they quickly scavenge, loading up scrap metal and charred boards, I remember that I have a kitten at home to feed, an animal totally reliant on my understanding of humaneness. Two birds circle confidently overhead, waiting for their turn to dive in.