"Connie Willis - The Last of the Winnebagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

He was well into his spiel now, an open, friendly, I-have-nothing-to-hide
expression on his face that hid everything. There was no point in taking
any stills, so I got out the vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me
around the RV.
"This up here," he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal
ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, "is the luggage rack, and
this is the holding tank. It'll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic
electric pump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five
minutes, and you don't even get your hands dirty." He held up his fat pink
hands palms forward as if to show me. "Water tank," he said, slapping a
silver metal tank next to it. "Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just
the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four
of headroom. That's plenty even for a tall guy like yourself."
He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of
slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug
came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have
thought they wouldn't have any customers either.
A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a
man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.
"I'll just look around while you tend to the paying customers," I told
him.
I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward
the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it
nowтАФshe'd run a caption like, "The old zoo stands empty today. No sound
of lion's roar, of elephant's trumpeting, or children's laughter, can be
heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind, while just outside its
gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10." Maybe it would
be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.
I went inside. I hadn't been out here in years. In the late eighties there
had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn't
covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then.
I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director who
had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo's renovation project cold and
giving the money to a wildlife protection group.
"I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we'll have
nothing to put in them. The timber wolf, the California condor, the grizzly
bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it's our
responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last
survivors."
The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you
how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn't he? The
grizzly bear isn't extinct in the wildтАФit's Colorado's biggest tourist draw,
and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited
hunting.
In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went
to an even more comfortable prison in Sun CityтАФsixteen acres of savannah
land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar
bears.
 They hadn't really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The
old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a