You Can’t Trade Africa for a Treadmill,
Rob Carney
but that’s what the humans are up to lately. Up in Alaska—this was just on the radio this morning—up in Alaska, they’ve got this elephant in the zoo—her name’s Maggie; how cute is that?—and anyway, she’s spent years alone in this indoor pen with barely any room to walk around. So okay, so you’re up to speed now; here’s what they did: Since activists caught wind of this, the zoo’s been catching hell, but rather than move her to anywhere better—I’m thinking someplace less freezing and dark for half the year—they socked a hundred grand into this giant treadmill and they’re bribing her to hop aboard with apples and radishes and hay. I mean, wow; I wouldn’t’ve thought of that. But then again, there’s this painting on the wall in my bedroom that no matter what I do, it won’t hang straight, so who am I?—I haven’t got their skills; I’m not that visionary. Me, all I’m thinking right now is just how much that sucks, and if someone ever made me trade the sky... I don’t know... for an oxygen tank, then I’d damn well better be scuba diving. Somewhere where the water’s blue and clear. Where it’s warm as my woman in bed, and everything’s a fish kaleidoscope, and the coral reef’s not dying yet, and there’s manta rays gliding like the breathing of my sleeping boy, and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll hear whales if it’s that time of year... That type of trade, that kind of oxygen tank. Where the hunger I’ll feel after diving is a hunger I can eat and drink and fill.
