Looking for Little Joe
Finding education, dedication at Franklin Park Zoo
I'm looking through triple-pane glass at Little Joe. He was born in captivity, like virtually all zoo animals today, but I'm convinced he gets subliminal bursts of something more. Some vast somewhere he can't quite see. Call it a nostalgia for something that never was.
Joe sits inert, then lopes slowly across to another spot in the gorilla quarters. Chews on a piece of straw. Lies on his back and holds his ankles and stares up at the new roof and beyond. Locks eyes with you to take your measure and make you ponder, ever so briefly, the whole concept of zoos.
You know zoos are invaluable tools to educate us about the richness of life on earth. You see the delight of kids taking a gander at their first camel, which remains one of the damnedest looking things I've ever seen.
But despite the best efforts of excellent staff at the Franklin Park Zoo to provide a great environment for these guys, you can't miss the claustrophobia of it all for a great ape. Little Joe, remember, flew the coop because he wanted breathing room. He wanted more.
We're not talking crustacean here. More than 98 percent of Little Joe's DNA is the same as mine. Fred Basilico, a top cardiologist at New England Baptist, treats Joe and the other six gorillas there. John Linehan, president and chief executive officer of Zoo New England, was so impressed with how Basilico took care of the seven that he made him his own cardiologist.
(Zoo New England is the public/private partnership formed in 1992 that includes Franklin Park and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham.)
I hadn't thought of Little Joe when I showed up at Franklin Park last week. I went there because when the going gets tough, the tough go to the zoo. Nor had I thought about the litigation over the injuries sustained four years ago by a toddler named Nia Scott when Joe escaped from his digs and attacked her. (Two days after my visit, a jury awarded $175,000 to Nia's family for her pain and suffering.)
But once there, I realized I had to see the perpetrator of the crime. So off I went to the Tropical Forest Pavilion and its new, more secure gorilla habitat in search of Joe.
He and the others looked vacant, but that can be misleading. "You never put two big males together," explains Dave Lead Keeper, a top staff member in the Tropical Forest facility. (His badge read "Dave Lead Keeper" but he didn't want to give his last name, so I call him Dave Lead Keeper.)
A big male, Kitombe, is already separated from Joe and his pal Okpara. Kitombe hung out above ground the day I was there while the rest remained below. Kitombe, explains Dave, would go after Little Joe and Okpara in a heartbeat given the chance. It's not all testosterone, by the way. You wouldn't want to catch 35-year-old Gigi on a bad hair day either.
Joe and Okpara, both 14, are considered teenagers. Raised as brothers, without a blood connection, they have yet to reach the point where they must be separated, as male gorillas inevitably are to avoid serious mayhem. Their air sacs are still developing too, which means it will be awhile before their chest-thumping roar reaches basso profundo.
Beyond this building, the zoo looks ragged. Some buildings are dirty, some exhibits are closed, others in sketchy shape. The glare from the floor in the Little Critters building makes it almost impossible to see anything there. I tried desperately to glimpse the prehensile-tailed skink without luck.
Linehan, 48, acknowledges the situation and is doing something about it. He is spearheading a 10-year plan that should be finished by the end of this year to chart the future of both zoos, and he's starting work on a shorter project to spiff them up.
You root for him and his staff because you know they're trying like hell with limited resources. With years of underfunding and management chaos, you assume they're holding on by their teeth. Wrong.
Despite its manifest problems, Zoo New England is actually on the way up. It has been in the black for the past four years in a row, a record. It enjoyed record attendance last year. Record membership, too. Where the annual budget dropped below $3 million in the early '90s, it's at $10.4 million now, one-fifth of which goes to the Stone. About 60 percent comes from the state.
I like Linehan for a couple of reasons. First, he has spent 26 years at the zoo - more than half his life - and he knows what he's talking about. Second, he speaks plainly.
"Fifteen years ago it was a dismal place," he says. "We literally went years without paying our utility bills. In the '80s, I could close it for a day and no one would notice. The zoo has been underfunded pretty much since the end of World War II."
Last week I noticed new fauna at the zoo - species of suburban women with strollers from exotic places like Needham and Brookline. Ten years ago they'd have never gotten near the place. Too scary. You still hear the sirens along Blue Hill Avenue, but the women's comfort level has risen.
So I say, to paraphrase the E.E. Cummings line about the circus, "Damn everything but the zoo!"
Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com 