One With the Tiger. Steven Church
Advance Praise for One With the Tiger
“In this engaging volume, essayist Church uses the story of David Villalobos’s 2012 jump into the Bronx Zoo’s tiger cage to launch a broader discussion on the connections people try to forge with animals—and the blurry line between humans and beasts . . . Readers expecting a narrow examination of Villalobos’s tiger encounter at the zoo will be rewarded instead with Church’s insightful exploration of human infatuation with nonhuman animals.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An exploration of the fascination with the ‘savage and the wild inside’ us, which fuels the human desire to ‘to get intimately close to apex predators’. . . a powerfully written attention-grabber.”
—Kirkus
“From the iron of a zoo cage’s bars to the expanse of our nation’s national parks, One With the Tiger examines the spaces in which humans contain animals, and how those acts of containment often fail. Church is a classically essayistic observer—curious, haunted, self-deprecating—and it’s through this lens that we’re confronted with stories of infamous animal attacks, pop culture icons, and the author›s own longing to inch forward as a bear approaches. In this marvelous collection, Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page, and in it we can see an entire civilization’s clumsy, sometimes desperate, attempts to understand our relationship to the wild.”
—Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This
“Some of us are born with a lust for the ledges, for any chance to make the leap. In this mesmerizing collection, Steven Church proves, once again, that he is a master of evaporating lines between fact and fiction, imagination and memory. ‘It’s strange how a subject overtakes you,’ Church tells us. This book overtook me.”
—Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t and editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction
“One With the Tiger explores the deep human need to participate in an atavistic ecstasy; to be, as Church puts it, ‘absorbed but not destroyed.’ Church’s approach is not clinical, moralizing, or gee-whiz superficial; it is, to our benefit, essayistic. By circling rather than simplifying, he illuminates the taboo, ever-shifting boundaries between man and animal. Church is the rare author who knows what’s interesting—which is to say, uncomfortable—about his chosen subject.”
—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
Copyright © 2016 by Steven Church
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Church, Steven, author.
Title: One with the tiger: sublime and violent encounters between humans and animals / Steven Church.
Description: Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016040116
Subjects: LCSH: Animal attacks—Anecdotes. | Human-animal relationships.
Classification: LCC QL100.5 .C58 2016 | DDC 591.5/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040116
Cover design by Faceout Studio
Interior design by www.DominiDragoone.com
SOFT SKULL PRESS
An imprint of Counterpoint
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ebook ISBN 9781619028579
For Andrea
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
DAVID’S LEAP
PART ONE
STEPHEN HAAS
PART TWO
TIMOTHY TREADWELL
PART THREE
CHARISMATIC BARBARIANS
PART FOUR
THE ANIMAL WITHIN
PART FIVE
IRON MIKE
PART SIX
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
EPILOGUE
ORIGIN STORIES
SOURCES CONSULTED
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.
—OCTAVIA BUTLER
On Sept. 21, 2012, twenty-five-year-old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a $5 ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. The ride, built in 1977, promises on the Zoo’s website to take the visitor “above mud wallows, pastures, forests, and riverbanks to the heart of Wild Asia.” After leaving the station, David would’ve first crossed the mud wallows of the Bronx River, a shallow and polluted urban waterway, before making his way quickly into said heart of Wild Asia.
In September 2014 when I purchased my own ticket to ride, the conductor and tour guide, Devin, a twentysomething guy in khaki pants and a retail haircut, told us that the Bronx River was home to a pair of beavers, the first wild beavers spotted in the river in over a hundred years. One of them, Devin told us, was named “Jose.”
“His partner, the other beaver,” he said, “voted on by the public, is named ‘Justine Beaver.’”
Everyone laughed at Devin’s joke and stared down, searching for the beavers below, hoping to catch site of the local native celebrities. The monorail’s cars are built so that you only sit on one side, facing the left of the track instead of toward the front of the train; and though they have roofs with translucent skylights, the viewing areas open to the elements, bordered only by a short railing of metal tubes. It can make for a great show as you skirt the perimeter in what feels like a moving couch or section of sports bleachers; but on this day, we saw no celebrity beavers.
Devin drove the train, talked into a microphone, and played some prerecorded narratives about the animals and the zoo’s conservation efforts. The track circles the perimeter of the “Wild Asia” exhibits, and it feels like you’re waiting for a show of some kind. On his own ride, David Villalobos positioned himself in the last car, far from the conductor, and he listened patiently along with the rest of the visitors, waiting for his chance.
The exhibits in Wild Asia mostly consist of various species of deer and cattle, all of which look only slightly different in size and shape from the deer and cattle that we all know. If he had been looking for them, David might have