Mammoth

20

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.

"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 a 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).

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.

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.)

But it was true, and everyone agreed on it: Fuzzy the baby mammoth was the reason all this was here, and without him it might very well all dry up and blow away. Everybody had a great time at all the surrounding attractions with all their bells and whistles, they enjoyed the first act of the circus performances, which featured the very cream of lion tamers, clowns, jugglers, and daring aerialists, they got a big kick out of the opening of the second act with its giant overhead hi-def screens and its elephants and Big Mama... but what most people came here to see was the world's darling, Little Fuzzy. "Most people" meaning those who could afford it. Fuzzy's show was put on twice a day, except Mondays—separate ticket required, and that ticket was three times what you paid to get in, and that wasn't cheap—so not everyone who visited the park on a given day would get in to the show.

The operators went to a two-tiered system within a week of the opening day: reservations and a much higher price for the skyboxes and front rows, and a lottery of park attendees, who won the privilege of paying for the open seats. An hour before showtime scalping was strictly dog-eat-dog, with crying children and parents sometimes coming to blows.

Twelve shows a week, and practically everyone in the world wanted to get in, even the hard-core environmentalists who opposed the park, the circus, and everything it stood for. Everyone, that is, except for Susan Morgan, who had to be at every one of them.

Twelve shows a week.

She had been doing it for one year, and it was starting to look like a life sentence.

SUSAN left the elephant/mammoth compound at eleven P.M., one hour after the end of the final show of the night. She climbed up into the cab of her super-heavy-duty Dodge pickup, emblazoned on the door with a magnetic smiling baby mammoth logo of Fuzzyland. The beast burst into life with a rumble of its huge 6.2-liter diesel engine.

Now she traveled the route visitors took from the entrance and parking lots, but in reverse, and by pathways visitors never saw. Off to her left she could sometimes glimpse the maglev rail perched on its big concrete pylons, but usually it was concealed behind rows of trees or high fences. Cenozoic Park was, for the most part, a world of illusion—that's what the trees and fences were designed to hide, because the magic went out of the trick if you knew exactly how it was done. Back here, there was no illusion, just utilitarian blacktop and concrete and nondescript cheap sheet-metal buildings that housed the workshops and electrical boards that kept the machines running, pumps that kept plants and animals and visitors watered, and storage warehouses that fed the insatiable appetites of the thousands who entered every day, from cotton candy mix to tons of frozen hamburger patties to bottles of champagne to Cenozoic Park bumper stickers and T-shirts to Little Fuzzy refrigerator magnets and rubber keychains.

"Hey, you, how about moving that piece of crap?"

"Friggin' air conditioner broke down again," Fred called out. He stopped the mechanical monster, made it turn and lower its head until it was staring right through her windshield, and then it opened its mouth and roared. There was a little bear in it, and some elephant trumpeting, and maybe even a hint of Star Wars Wookiee, something whipped up in the sound labs. It was sure loud enough.

After the Indricothere had slouched across the road and the crossing alarm shut down, Susan drove past the phony redwoods and skirted the Ice Dome, to the employees' gate. The guard waved her through. A short drive through real forest and she passed by the Animal Vigil one hundred yards from the arch of the main park entrance, the closest they could get without being on private property. They had been there round the clock from opening day. This late there were only half a dozen of the hardest of the hard core, but on weekends there were often a hundred or more. They were not allowed to pitch tents—twice temporary encampments had been torn down by park security. They were forbidden to build fires and on a rainy Oregon day they could be a lugubrious sight, but their morale apparently remained high and even tonight they were slowly marching up and down on the dirt path they had beaten down, chanting slogans and carrying signs:

CIRCUS = CRUELTY

MEAT IS MURDER

ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS

FREE WOOLLY!

Not even the mighty Howard Christian could prevent them from doing that, though he had tried, and they had vowed to stay there until the place closed down. Since Fuzzyland had been pronounced the most successful entertainment extravaganza since Disney World, Susan figured they had a long wait in store. Or maybe not....

The sight of her truck with its Fuzzyland logo on the side set them off, shaking fists and shouting slogans. She sped down the road and through the blossoming commercial strip of Zigzag, then another mile down to a side road and two miles into the hills. Around a bend, up a steep grade, and there it was. Her hideaway.

She pulled up the short gravel driveway and parked next to her huge fifth-wheel trailer. It was what was called a "garage" model. She could drive up a ramp at the back in her dune buggy. Andrea had suggested she should have something to do, some activity or hobby, on her Mondays off. She had chosen off-roading. Other than that, she didn't have much of a life. She got out and wearily mounted the twenty steps to the deck.

Her weariness went away instantly, though, when she saw the man sitting with his back against the glass wall next to her front door, right there under the porch light.

His clothes were well used, just short of ragged, jeans and high-top sneakers, a blue down vest, and a flannel lumberjack shirt. There was a small backpack sitting beside him, with canteen and bedroll. His hair was long, black streaked with gray, and fell forward around his face. He seemed to be asleep.

He might be one of those animal rights protesters, he had the look. Should she call the sheriff? And wait half an hour or more for them to get here?

The hell with it.

"Hey, get up and get out of here," she said.

Matt Wright looked up and smiled uncertainly.

"Can we talk for a moment first?" he asked.

She just stood there for a moment, then slowly walked the three steps between them and slapped his face as hard as she could.