Chuck Palahniuk - Fugatives & Refugees

The other side of the street is lined with Santa Clauses in red velvet suits and big, white beards. It's the thin blue line versus the fat red line.

This is Portland SantaCon '96. Aka the Red Tide. Aka Santa Rampage. Every year, members of different Cacophony Societies flock to a host city. From Germany, Australia, Ireland, and every state in the U.S., they're here in almost identical Santa suits. All using the name Santa. No one's male or female. No one's young or old. Black or white. This is some 450 Santa Clauses in town for seventy-two hours of special events. From karaoke to roller skating. Political protests to street theater. Strip clubs to Christmas caroling. They jingle sleigh bells and carry spray bottles of Windex, blue window cleaner they use to squirt each other in the mouth.

For window cleaner it tastes just Like Bombay Sapphire gin-and-tonic.

This Saturday night the plan is to meet at the Lloyd Center shopping mall and join hands around the huge ice-skating rink. There, the Santas will chant and sing in an effort to manifest the spirit of bad-girl Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding.

It hardly matters that Tonya is still alive.

It does matter that the police got here first.

It's a stalemate, the police forming a line along the southern edge of the Lloyd Center—the Santas are facing them across the street, hand-in-hand, in a line along the north edge of Holliday Park. Other Santas have snuck into the mall dressed as shoppers but carrying their red suits and beards in shopping bags. Still, when they duck into fitting rooms and restrooms to change clothes, mall security guards nab and evict them.

Now the line of Santas chant: "Ho, ho, ho! We won't go!"

They do the wave, back and forth from one end of the block to the other, chanting, "Being Santa is not a crime!"

Through a bullhorn, the police say that the Lloyd Center is private property and any Santas who cross the street will go to jail.

And the Santas chant, "One, two, three ... Merry Christmas!"

Above the police line parents and kids line the railings of the parking garages. It's only six in the evening, but already it's dark and cold enough to see everyone's breath. Cars in the street slow to gridlock, so open-mouthed with surprise that no one honks.

The kids are waiting. The police and Santas are all waiting.

Me, I'm here somewhere, buried inside padding and red velvet. My name is Santa and I've been absorbed. Santa-to-Santa our marching orders come down the line in a gin-scented whisper.

A light-rail train pulls into the station next to the park.

The police lower their Kevlar face shields.

At the signal the herd of Santas breaks rank and starts running. A flood of red headed for the train. To escape for downtown. For drinking and caroling and Chinese food.

And right behind them—behind us—the police give chase.

The day I spent with Portland elephant keeper Jeb Barsh, he compared the city to a zoo. Comparing the city government to zookeepers, Jeb said, essentially their job is the same: to keep a population as happy as possible inside a confined area. Portland's size is limited by the Urban Growth Boundary—our cage, so to speak—and somehow we've all got to coexist within this limited space. Here's a look inside the other zoo, plus a few more animal-related events.

The Elephant Men

"Working with elephants is an obsession," says Jeb Barsh. "It sucks you in. Dealing with their psyches is such an honor."

In keeping with Katherine Dunn's theory that every Portlander has three lives, Jeb's an elephant keeper, a writer of songs, fiction, and poetry, and a father to his two-year-old son. He went to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he wanted to write a children's book about elephants. For research he went to the local zoo to volunteer. That was eleven years ago.

Portlands status as an elephant factory Jeb calls "an accident of nature." In the late 1950s the zoo bought Thonglaw, a highly sexual bull, and four fertile cows, including Belle, who gave birth to Packy in 1962, the first elephant to be born and survive in captivity in forty-three years. Until then, no one knew much about an elephant's pregnancy.

Tom Nelsen, a volunteer in the Elephant House, says, "The veterinarian sat here for three months because we didn't know how long an elephant's gestation period would be."

Thonglaw sired fifteen calves before dying at the age of thirty. The first, Packy, has sired seven, including Rama, the zoo's twenty-year-old bull.

"Elephants are in a crisis on earth," Jeb says. "They're running out of habitat. In the wild an Asian elephant only lives twenty-one years out of a possible seventy." He says, "My job isn't to phantom a perfect world for them. My job is to take where they are and make the best of it. I have to do today what I can do right now."

Jeb has a scar running through his top lip, near the right corner. Movie star handsome, he has longish hair curling over each ear and resting on his collar. He has gray eyes and a rough two-day start to a goatee. Maybe it's his shorts or his muscular legs from hiking and rock climbing, but every couple of seconds a different woman steps up to ask him something.

Between questions, he says, "There's a tendency among those of us who work with animals to disappear into our animals. That's why I like to keep one foot out here among people. To continue to spread the word to people about the mystery and joy of elephants. It's an honor to be here."

He says, "Every day of an elephant's life, it's collecting memories. We just try to keep mixing it up for them so their lives are interesting. They have the largest brains of any mammal on earth. We administer to their heads, not just their bodies. Every day, I know how these seven feel. From those feelings we plan our day."

In the Elephant House, Jeb's staff includes Tom, Bob, and Steve—three very big men. They care for the zoo's seven elephants, three males and four females. The females are social and will hang together, but the males each stay off alone unless it's time to mate. In 2002 the zoo's most famous elephant, Packy, celebrated his fortieth birthday. Krista Swan, the zoo's event coordinator, says, "Picture this fourteen-thousand-pound elephant eating a cake frosted with peanut butter, with raw carrots as candles, while thousands of people sing 'Happy Birthday,' all of them wearing huge, floppy elephant ears made of recycled paper." She says, "Elephants communicate by moving their ears. God only knows what Packy thought they were all saying to each other."

Elephants can live for sixty or more years. Keep April 14 free, and you too can wear the big ears and sing to Packy.

The zoo's smallest elephant is Chendra (meaning "Bird of Paradise" in Malay), an Asian elephant who was just a calf when she and her mother raided a Malaysian palm oil plantation. Her mother was shot dead, and Chendra was blinded in one eye and maimed in one leg. She was kept in a children's school until she was too big, then moved to Portland, where the zoo hoped she'd become best friends with Rose-Tu, another female Asian elephant the same age. The problem is, Rose-Tu is the daughter of Me-Tu and Hugo. "Rose-Tu is a brat," Krista says. "And she just harasses Chendra." Rose-Tu's favorite attack is to grab Chendra's tail. She'll hold the tail tight between her rear legs and reach back with her trunk to pluck out the tail's sensitive black hairs.

"At first," Krista says, "people talked about writing a series of children's books about Chendra and her best friend Rose-Tu... Then they thought: maybe not ..."

Jeb doesn't worry. "Rose-Tu's a healthy kid," he says. "She's pushing and prodding her environment."

Chendra, he says, is a "pocket elephant," from a landlocked population of genetically unique elephants, and she'll probably be a smaller adult. Her blind eye is filled with pink and white muscle. Her good eye is brown and may turn a bright gold in maturity. She's only one ton, while Rose-Tu at the same age is two tons.