The Salad of Sadness

Dear Mr Patesh and all the staff at the Wonderful World of Animals,

I must extend my heartful apologies for the unfortunate incident I caused at your delightful establishment on Sunday last week.

What was meant to be a pleasant outing for myself, my sister and young niece turned into what has since been described in the press as ‘an unprecedented debacle of the highest order.’ I am truly sorry for putting you in such a position.

If I had known at the time that, by 4pm on that particular afternoon, I would be watching a cavalcade of four and two-legged creatures ran amok in the downtown district of our quaint little town, I think I might have stayed in bed. Instead, I made the disastrous suggestion to my sister that we should visit your park.

Of course, if we are being picky about the matter, it might have been different had you not sent out those vouchers. You know, the ones offering free child access when accompanied by an adult? And I would not have even given those vouchers a thought, if it was not for the fact my five-year-old niece, Chloe, has developed a recent passion for anteaters and wanted to see one ‘for real.’

As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Chloe and my sister Veronica are wholly blameless in this whole mess, of course, they were bystanders caught up in the drama, especially Chloe who ended up in a trash bin you had made to look like a cute frog and is probably owed some sort of compensation for emotional distress - but I am rushing ahead of myself.

Let’s begin with the cafeteria you had optimistically named The Jungle of Delights, but which seemed to largely serve overcooked soggy fries and burgers that had never seen a cow in their life. My sister’s words, not mine! Not that this was a problem, as Veronica is in her ‘vegetarian’ phase – I put it in quotations because she has a new diet fad most months and I would be denigrating genuine vegetarians by claiming she was one – and insisted we would all eat the alternative option on the menu.

This proved to be a rather limp salad consisting of lettuce, a manky tomato, some croutons like steel bolts and an uninspiring Caesar dressing. While this is meant to be an apology, I feel I must point out the failure in the Jungle of Delight’s cuisine choices. I honestly believe we deserve refunds for those meals, which were extortionately overpriced. Since when did indifferent salad cost more than burger and fries? And have you never heard of cucumber?

Anyway, our pathetic excuses for food purchased, it did not take long for Chloe to work out she was not getting burger and fries; cue disappointed snuffling and sobbing, and that was just from me.

Chloe is not a kid who enjoys salad without it being accompanied by something hearty, and while Veronica was picking at her meal as if it was personally offending her, I was watching my niece trying to hold back the waterworks while contemplating she might just have to eat that strangely mushy tomato or go hungry.

And this was meant to be our fun afternoon out! I couldn’t stand it! So, I went back to buy the kid fries, but the counter was closed, something wrong with the fryer, or so I heard the server say. A first-class Sunday afternoon disaster: people were standing in a long, bemused line, wondering where they were going to get their overhyped kids food. When I saw the looks in some of those wild, pre-school eyes I had flashbacks.

I mean, I never served in the army, but if I had, then those hungry, volatile, deep-fried-potato-deprived eyes would have reignited something in me.

It looked to me as if chaos was about to ensue, and so I aimed to get Chloe out of there as any caring uncle would. We were in the process of abandoning our salad, with promises of cake or donuts to Chloe, when your mascot made the fatal error of entering the cafeteria with a large bucket of popcorn.

Stanley the Sloth had picked the worst time in the world to roll in. I still wonder if it was planned as a really bad stunt by the cafeteria crew to see this guy get screwed over, but it was cruel, man, just cruel. No one in a six-foot sloth suit deserves to be waled on by hungry, over-excited, tiny adrenaline junkies who have just come away from their fifth ride on the centipede rollercoaster.

The carnage was like nothing I had ever seen before. Popcorn flew everywhere. Whoever was inside Stanley screamed, but there was no time to help them; I had my own family to think about. In the chaos that followed, I was bursting through the jungle doors, holding aloft a child who was wriggling and crying out for popcorn, while behind me a feeding frenzy had begun.

It was like watching piranhas.

Only when I was outside, and could catch my breath, did I discover the child I had saved from the confusion was not my niece. The kid I was holding up in the air was called Phillip. He was six and had a kick to him like a mule. After he had socked me in the nose, I put him down so he could resume feeding with the others, then went in search of my loved ones. With one sleeve trying to stifle the blood trickling from my nostril, I waded back into the cafeteria, fighting off enraged toddlers now dosed up on sugar and so savage I would not have fancied a tiger’s chances with them.

But there was no sign of Veronica or Chloe, and Stanley was now just a husk on the floor; a deflated costume with parents dragging feral children off the mascot’s inanimate fluffy corpse as they fought over the crumbs, while the dude who had been inside was vaulting the service counter and running for his life.

Assuming Veronica had used the other door, I went in search of them, only to barrel straight into some of your fine security team who were coming to save the beloved Stanley – too late, of course, but it was too late from the moment that warm, buttery smell entered the cafeteria.

They saw the blood, they assumed – wrongly – that I was responsible for the panic in the cafeteria. They made a snap decision, which I think you should question them about and discuss for future protocols. Without asking me what had happened, they went to grab me, at which point I made what seemed the only choice I had open to me. I bolted.

Running through Wonderful World, overweight, underpaid security guards hot on my tail, I took the path of least resistance, which proved to be through the educational zoological gardens. A few quick turns later, and I was thoroughly lost in what I later realised was a back area of the site, and not a place open to the public.

In my desperation to elude the guards and have a chance to find my family, I ducked through an open door into what I thought was a storeroom. Closing the door behind me, I listened to my heart beating a hundred to one and leaned back against the wall. The sound of feet running past told me I had safely avoided the guards and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, imagine my surprise when I discovered the door would not open. Personally, that seemed a significant safety flaw – perhaps you should review your protocols on that matter too?

Unfortunately, my blood sugar was now dropping due to my inadequate lunch, and my brain was functioning in a daze as I stumbled down a corridor, seeking a way to exit the building. I found myself in a room with a number of control panels, one of which indicated it opened certain doors. The ‘emergency only’ notification above seemed appropriate under the circumstances, and so I pressed the button and heard a satisfying thunk of something unlocking.

Heading back to the door I had entered by, I expected to see it open, only to discover it was still locked. So, back I trudged to the control panel to figure out what was going on.

Which was when I met the crocodile.

All right, so it was less than four feet long and not an apex predator, but it made me jump and my already over-worked imagination turned it into a ferocious monster. I had just witnessed five and six-year-olds turn rabid and disembowel a stuffed sloth mascot, what was I supposed to think? Life had become hellish in the span of half an hour.

Escape was my primary concern. I had to live to fight another day and save Chloe if I could! Veronica I had already written off, if she had survived the cafeteria, she could survive anything, but I had to think of my niece.

Already planning how I might function raising the unfortunate child alone, now she had been stripped of her mother by murderous children clearly capable of anything when in a carb-deprived state, I used a handy cable to swing over the fearsome crocodile Tarzan-style and without wondering what my weight might do to the cable.

All I knew was I needed to make it to the doorway ahead, and the fact the lights suddenly went out only enhanced my desperate dash for survival.

I was in a room full of water and greenery, the repetitive strumming of crickets played at the edges of my senses, while before me was a concrete wall and iron railings. I theorised that with enough of a leap I could propel myself over the wall, but that proved unnecessary when I found the second door…

It is my understanding that you have fallen under criticism for having an unsecured door in the crocodile enclosure, but as you have pointed out yourselves, it could only be opened from the inside and who would have thought I would have come blundering through and left it wide open.

After all, who could have foreseen that a panicking, thirty-year-old, white male, who had somehow become isolated from his beloved sister and niece, would race through the interlocked corridors beneath the enclosures, opening (and, most importantly, failing to close) random doors in his search for an exit.

At some point, I realised things had gone badly. It was about the moment when a wallaby kicked me into a wall and looked like it might eat me. Thankfully, wallabies are vegetarian, but it did not appreciate having its tail stood on. As I was lying sprawled on the floor, my brain focused on the fact that a lot of very random animals were now milling around me.

A zebra relieved me of my bucket hat, but I don’t begrudge it that, nor do I expect compensation. I was slightly more put out when a sloth peed up my trouser leg, very slowly.

My goal at that moment was to herd the animals back to where they had come from before anything happened and I found myself in further trouble, but sadly this was not to be, for just as I was coaxing a pygmy hippo towards its enclosure door with some fruit pastilles I had found in my pocket, there was a loud roar that turned everything into pandemonium.

Now, I was not to know that Leopold the Lion is considered the oldest example of his species in captivity, and nor were the rest of the animals. A stampede began before any of us could consider that the threat was coming from an animal with limited bladder control and only two good teeth.

It was now every man, or beast, for himself, and I found myself leading the charge towards the nearest door which was handily labelled as a fire exit. I burst open to my amazement in the car park and was nearly immediately mown down by an ostrich that was not taking prisoners. As I rolled out of the way, I watched an entire Noah’s ark of animals walking towards the road and the late Sunday afternoon traffic.

At this stage, I was acutely away that I had messed up. In my defence, I did attempt to rectify the situation. While the majority of the animals had already bypassed me, I managed to grab hold of the pygmy hippo I had been luring earlier and was going to take it back inside. Except the fire exit was kicked closed by the last zebra out of it.

There was no choice but to head for the main gates again, herding the hippo in front of me, trying not to listen to the frantic beeping of horns coming from the roadway. I was really hoping the sloth had hitched a ride as I did not care to imagine that little fellow crossing the tarmac.

The pygmy hippo (who I have since learned is called Hector) was not keen on being separated from the other escapees and made life extremely difficult as we wound our way back to the front gates and the ticket booth, but we made it, only to find ourselves confronted with a new problem. We did not have tickets to enter. My wallet had vanished at some point during my escapade, along with my ticket stub, but apparently, even if I had had it, it would not have allowed me to regain entry to the venue.

The girl at the ticket booth was most insistent on this; I showed her Hector and everything. She refused to believe he was your hippo and seemed to think I was trying to pass off an unwanted pet. We were at a stalemate when someone more on the ball than your ticket booth operator, realised several animals were missing and causing havoc in traffic.

The gates burst open as keepers and security guards rushed out to catch the critters. Hector made a break for it, and in trying to grab him, I found myself dragged beneath the gates with the ticket girl screaming at me for not paying. Hector dumped me in the front entrance and made a beeline for the cafeteria. I figured he would be content to munch on popcorn and reverted back to my original plan of finding my family.

The crowds in the park were thinning with the untimely closure of the cafeteria and the demise of the furry mascot. I careened through the pathways looking for Veronica, which was when I heard an all too familiar wail.

Circling back on myself, I spied a pair of legs in pink tights with pastel stars sticking out of the mouth of one of the oversized frog bins. Grabbing at the legs, I recovered my unfortunate niece who had found herself in said bin due to a misunderstanding of how the thing worked. She had noted a sign that instructed her to feed the frog her rubbish, and in attempting to give it her popsicle stick she had tumbled in herself. The upside of this mishap was that she had avoided the chaos that had overwhelmed the park moments before and was largely unscathed, though she would need a slab of chewing gum cut out of hair.

The dear child asked after her mother, and I tearfully began to explain to her that I feared she was now an orphan when Veronica appeared being chased by an irate pygmy hippo. She had been trying to find Chloe and had headed back to the last place she had seen her; the cafeteria. Noting someone hiding under the table where we had left our ill-fated salads, and believing it was her daughter, she bent down and called her name, only to find herself facing Hector who assumed she was after the salad he had just stolen. Agitated by the over-seasoned Ceasar dressing he had consumed, Hector reacted in time-honoured hippo tradition by charging at her while defecating.

Veronica was spared from the hippo’s full wrath when I appeared to intervene, and Hector remembered who I was and the indignity of being clung to by me while he dragged me into the park. He departed, feeling he had made his point, and we were suddenly alone.

In hindsight, I should have remained on site to explain my part in the escape of multiple exotic species, but I am at heart a coward, and I chose to avoid any reckoning that might be coming my way. I ushered my womenfolk out to the carpark and drove us away with as much haste as I dared, avoiding the interstate which was gridlocked due to a pair of ostriches attacking cars.

And that, I hoped, would be the end of the matter. But then, on Monday, I read the report of the outbreak and could not help but feel that I was, at least in part, responsible for your problem and the subsequent public backlash. Therefore, this letter is heading your way, along with my heartfelt, sincerest apologies.

I appreciate that there is still a police appeal to identify myself and my family, but I am sure you will understand we prefer anonymity, which is why I have not used real names in this story. Should such a time come as a full pardon is issued for us, then we will be delighted to come forth and tell our tale publicly, but in the meantime, we must remain your anonymous friends.

Yours sincerely,

The man who saved Hector the hippo from traffic and does not deserve to be prosecuted for any of this.

PS. We would still like a refund on the salads.