Mar/Apr 2007

Elephant Alert!

The day my writing career turned into a circus gone awry.

By Larry Maddry

Sometimes people stop me at a coffee shop or supermarket and ask what I miss most about writing a daily column for the newspaper.

I miss so many people at the Virginian-Pilot and had such pleasant experiences that it’s difficult to list just one thing or even a half dozen. It would be far easier if someone asked: “What do you miss least about writing a daily column?”

The answer to that would be riding an elephant. I rode one once. That was enough.

The snappily dressed public relations man for “The Greatest Show On Earth” who showed up at my desk one morning explained that riding an elephant would give me firsthand knowledge of the circus experience and make good copy for my readers.

The idea was for me to sit atop the elephant and ride in the parade of animals scheduled to plod through the city streets all the way to Scope in Norfolk. I was asked to appear at a railroad siding where I was told the elephants would be unloaded the next day. When I explained that I was a poor horseman and could barely stay in the saddle of a spirited horse, the agent smiled.

“Don’t worry; we’ll find a good one for you,” he said.

He lied.

When I arrived at the railroad yard, there were several gray elephants as tall as the gray waves caused by a category four hurricane huddled by the railroad tracks with their handlers (holding long sticks) standing beside them.

The elephants seemed neighborly enough, often draping their trunks on the head of a fellow elephant in a friendly gesture.

“Yours is over there. His name is Cita,” the circus agent said.

I’d hoped for a smaller, perhaps baby, elephant. But Cita stood apart from the other pachyderms, and unlike his friends, he was occupied with stomping on Coke and beer bottles littering the siding until they were mere particles. Once that process was completed, Cita scooped up the dirt and glass with his trunk and showered it over his head and back.

A few moments later, a burley circus hand with a whip escorted me to the place where Cita stood. “Doesn’t Cita have a saddle?” I asked.

The man with the whip thought that was very funny and told the other elephant handlers about my inquiry. He then somehow persuaded the elephant to kneel, and I used a tall footstool to climb aboard.

“Put your feet under his ears!” the man with the whip instructed. I did as he said, sliding my behind over the hundreds of glass particles that dug into my skin. It was like having parachuted onto a desert cactus.

I don’t know whether you have ever ridden an elephant or not. The experience is very much like riding a whale that has somehow crashed into a giant palm tree, with the elephant’s ears resembling the palm fronds.

I hooked my feet under his ears and we were off. Several men with sticks followed us through the city streets, sometimes yelling orders to Cita that he unfailingly ignored, such as: “Stop Cita,” “No Cita!” and my personal favorite, “$%%#@!! Cita ... stop!”

It was obvious after the first block that Cita was fond of grass, plucking it with his trunk and stuffing large quantities of it into his mouth. The grass was usually growing beneath trees with strong limbs that whacked me soundly as the elephant proceeded up the street. Cita was as oblivious to the limbs crashing past his head as to the tap of a fly swatter. The branches lashed against my head and once almost knocked me off.

They say an elephant never forgets anything. It may be so. Sometimes I thought the assault by tree limbs was finished, but Cita would soon remember that the grass behind her had tasted pretty good and back up, the previously cleared tree limbs whipping past and whacking my ears again.

I wrote a hot letter of complaint to The Greatest Show on Earth that I later put in my column. Several readers criticized me for being too self-absorbed and insensitive to the plight of circus elephants in chains, who suffer loneliness and indignities merely for the entertainment of audiences.

Truth is, it’s hard to be concerned with the suffering of others when you have just plucked enough glass from your butt to make a church window.

Trust me, I’ll never ride one again.