Sometime in April, a fisherman in West Texas happened to catch sight of a strange thing. There in the wetlands was a flamingo. He was standing on one leg just like that guy from Jethro Tull. The man was looking at Pink Floyd, an African flamingo who escaped from the Wichita Zoo in 2005.
Pink Floyd, whose zoo name was a downright unimaginative #492, has been on the run for 17 years and has evidently covered over 700 miles. He escaped with a friend, #347 who is still AWOL and unaccounted for. Along his travels he has made friends and been seen in the company of a Caribbean flamingo who might have been blown off course by a storm back in 2006. But they haven’t been seen together since 2013. Otherwise, Floyd seems to be a loner.
Stories of runaway animals always make me a little leery. For as long as I can remember, they have been part of our urban legend rollcall. As a kid I remember a story about a boy who had come across a baby alligator in Florida on holiday and which he smuggled back to the Bucks County area of the Philadelphia area. His mother found out and of course ordered him to get rid of it. Then, holding a great deal of respect in the boy’s judgment and evidently having never met another teenage boy, she left him to it. He flushed the alligator down the toilet.
That was merely the backstory. The main story was that this alligator was now grown and very sad and pissed off at having been not only discarded but discarded in a toilet. He was now swimming up toilets biting off the pendulous parts of boys’ anatomy in an effort to exact revenge. Forgetting that the alligator was now too big to swim up a toilet, I still spent a few weeks peering into my toilet before using it and then tapping a nervous foot while using it. No alligators ever appeared.
There are similar, though possibly true, stories of people buying tigers and pumas and then tiring of the big cats when they realize the cat A. can destroy their furniture and B. instinctually goes after one’s jugular. Thus the woods and glens of that area get an apex predator that wasn’t meant to be there.
I also think about Gary Larson. Though I’d love to say that Gary Larson was a hamster I had in the fifth grade, this would be a lie. Gary Larson is in fact an amalgamation of several hamsters I had from the third through the seventh grades. Capable though I was in doing homework and getting to Little League practice, I was absolutely unable to keep a hamster alive. It just wasn’t possible. I did not mistreat them, nor did I neglect them. I didn’t pick one up and Lennie him (‘George, tell me about the hamsters…’). I just couldn’t keep them alive. They died usually when I wasn’t there. And perhaps it was that fact that made me wonder if there was a suicidal bent somehow heading through my hamster populations. No, I couldn’t keep one alive.
Not until Gary Larson showed up. Gary Larson (the VIII) came to me in the late fifth grade and showed himself to be a bit of a brute. Any attempts to pick him up ended with a pinch of my finger and a little droplet of blood. He didn’t cower. He didn’t use the wheel. He ate, he slept, and he looked at me. Whenever I came into the room, Gary Larson would stand up and watch me, chugging his puffy cheeks, and turn his upper body to watch me no matter where I went in my room. He would do this until I left, which I did more often now that Gary Larson was around. I will freely admit that I was terrified of Gary Larson and I will freely wonder that he knew that.
When Gary Larson escaped it was not all that surprising. It was, however, a bit terrifying. Where was Gary Larson? Gary Larson didn’t shy away from biting me and he didn’t seem like one who wouldn’t climb a bed to do it. He also didn’t seem like an animals who would avoid dangling parts. In that first week, I would hear scuffling whenever the lights were out at night. I knew Gary Larson was still with me, shuffling along the baseboard and trying to find a way out, or worse, up. I slept with one eye open for a month.
I assume Gary Larson escaped. For all I know he’s still running around the Bucks County suburban Philadelphia area, terrorizing kids and looking for me. Frankly I’d be happy to see Gary Larson again, we could catch up on old times. I never did give him a zoo name.
