12-23-2002

Wildlights

Every year, the Denver Zoo celebrates the holidays with an event called Wildlights. Not only do they hang festive lights in the trees, but they also create clever animal artwork from strings of lights. It’s like your worst Lite-Bright nightmares come to life…garish lightbulb outlines of giant spiders eating giant dragonflies, elephants hosing each other down with trunk water, and there’s even one that shows Denver’s famous “painting rhino” picking up a brush and dabbing colors on an easel. Sure it’s garish, but we are charmed by it, cuz it’s the holidays!

Actually, these displays are quite well-done; and if you can get past wondering if it bothers elephants to be sprayed with water that’s been collected in a wrinkly gray behemoth’s nose, you can probably have a good time appreciating the beauty of it all.

There’s music wafting from speakers hidden in the trees and bushes. Some of it makes you want to dance, some makes you want to sing along. There were a few songs, however, that gave me visions of the morning custodial crew coming in and saying “Aw, crap, somebody barfed on the African veldt again – they really should stop playing that Kenny G garbage.”

More lights are added each year, bringing the 2002 total to somewhere around 50 gajillion. I understand that astronauts have even seen Wildlights from outer space (though they can’t hear the music. Just as well…cleaning up barf in Zero G is a real challenge. Hmmm, I wonder if Zero G is related to Kenny G?)

Though many of the displays are in the shapes of animals, the actual denizens of the zoo are not on display. It’s dark, it’s cold, and some of the animals would probably assume that all those lights meant an attack by 50 gajillion bioluminescent insects, which means they would instinctively go berserk, knock down fences, and perform the Lion King’s stampede sequence through downtown Denver. No, it’s better to put them into their little concrete condos for the night before throwing the switch to release the photons.

Despite the absence of real animals, human families are still willing to wait in long lines, fight for parking spaces, and push strollers for miles in order to experience the kilowatt-eating glories of this unique holiday festival. I, myself, was recently drafted into participating.

My wife and I picked up the surrogate daughter and granddaughter and headed for the zoo. The baby is 13 months old, and I have been told repeatedly that she is the sweetest, best-behaved, and most wonderful child on the face of the earth. I will not dispute these assertions…I will simply describe the events that followed our arrival at the zoo.

I was assigned stroller duty. Bailey was adorable in her little Maggie Simpson star suit. Though it was quite cold, her little index finger would occasionally snake out of the suit’s arm so she could point at something and coo. Very cute.

We paid our admission fees (which I can only hope go toward buying some bananas for the gorillas and alfalfa for the Dik-Diks, rather than another layer of wax for the Zoo Director’s Cadillac). Then we joined the throng as it pulsed like a giant amoeba, moving its pseudopod in the general direction of the lighting displays.

Perhaps it was my general old age and senility – perhaps it was the headache I’d contracted after watching a very mediocre Broncos team snuff their playoff hopes by losing to the evil Raiders – but I was hit with a blast of vertigo as we entered the “hot zone”. I was hunched over and walking awkwardly from the fact that the stroller had been designed to be pushed by someone the size of Gary Coleman. I couldn’t find a walking rhythm because of the ebbs and surges of the crowd. There were hundreds of thousands of lights, every color of the rainbow, stabbing at my eyes from every direction – and then there were all those kids with the shoes that blink when they walk. Music. Voices. Lights. The odors of hundreds of long-unbathed bodies crowding up next to me. Augghhh! Sensory overload!

I wanted to go home. But not nearly as bad as I did a few moments later, when Bailey turned on the ol’ shriek engine.

She cried for the next 45 minutes. Oh, no…not the little sobs that mean “Golly, I’m uncomfortable” – but the kinds of banshee roars that mean “If I gotta be miserable, then every single person in this damn park is going to be miserable! Bwaahh haaa haa ha!”

Her mom, of course, tried to comfort her. “Does widdle Bazey Wazey wanna boddle?” (Apparently, she doesn’t know that such baby talk is cited as a factor in fully 84% of the events falling under the heading of “Going Postal”.

“Does Baze want a hotty doggie?” No good. Pretzel-wetzel? No. Uh, wanna get out of the stroller and walk? Shall we switch which adult is holding you? No? Need a clean diaper? No?

Hmmm. None of those attempted solutions are going to quiet you down, eh? Well, then WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?

Sigh. Parenting becomes a whole lot easier when the kid can tell you what’s wrong. (Of course, it also becomes more difficult in a way – cuz to a kid, pretty much everything’s wrong, all the time. See the definition of “teen-ager” for more info.) Sigh.

Well, after trying every type of kid-trickery we knew, we finally concluded that Bailey simply did not want to be at the zoo. Maybe it was the Kenny G, maybe it was the gazillions of eyeball-searing lights, or maybe it was just another exercise to see how much control she had over these silly, stupid adults. But she certainly did NOT want to be there. OK, then, let’s go home.

Slight problem with that idea. It turns out that we had been walking for 45 minutes under the assumption that the wildlights “trail” was a loop that would lead us back to the front entrance. Wrong. Whether you are enjoying every delightful minute of your stroll, or whether your baby is channeling Ozzy Osbourne in full concert mode, you’re just gonna have to walk ALL THE WAY BACK the way you came. And, oh yeah, there are several hundred thousand people blocking your way.

Under other circumstances, I think it might have been fun to share the evening with all those other festive folks. People are smiling, humming, and holding hands with their loved ones. We saw your standard nuclear families, teenagers on dates, grandparents pulling wagons, and an occasional lone individual who simply seemed to have an electrician’s appreciation for the creative use of AC power. There were people who would be disappointed when their film was developed and they realized that their camera flash had overpowered the wildlights to the point where photos would only show the metal framework holding the bulbs. There were people who were enjoying a makeshift zoo-vendor meal right now, but would wake up in the middle of the night, suddenly realizing why Zoo food is never reviewed in the finer gourmet magazines.

A substantial percentage of the crowd was wearing what appeared to be the kind of 3-D glasses that you’d put on to watch movies like “It Came from the School Basement” and “Spear Hurlers from Rigel 7”. Maybe they were receiving some sort of altogether different visual effect than I was assuming, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to tell them, “Hey, it’s reality – and reality is already in 3-D”. But I did not speak to anyone, knowing that the only possible response they’d have to anything I said would be, “Would you please SHUT THAT DAMN BABY UP!”

Anyway, we made it back to the car without being lynched, and poor Bailey did eventually calm down. Shortly thereafter, my wife and I left her with her folks so that we could go home and get a good night’s sleep. I can’t say we had fun, but we did get to see some very pretty and festive holiday lighting designs. And despite my own failure at enjoying the experience, I would still recommend an evening at Wildlights for all my friends. But because there may be other families there who might resemble my family, just remember to take some earplugs, OK?

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