The summer
of 1977 was coming to an end. It was Sunday, August 28, and I was a mere four
years old. My sister Kris, who had turned eight that month, would be headed
back to school soon. But things were going to be different this year, because I
was officially a big kid now and would be going to nursery school some
mornings. No longer would I have to sit on the sidelines. Big things were in
store for me. Real big. You could even call them “elephant-sized”. I just
didn’t know it yet.
The summer
held one last hurrah for us. The circus was in town and would be putting on a
show that night. My dad was working at the golf course that day, as usual, and
my mom was out in the backyard, weeding her vegetable garden. If Kris and I
were well-behaved, we would get to go to the circus that evening. So we spent
the morning out of my mother’s hair, making forts out of the cushions and
blankets in our living room.
Our house
was the same size and shape as every other house on our street. It was tract
housing from the early 1970s: a squat ranch consisting of a two-car garage, living
room, kitchen with “dinette”, three bedrooms and a bathroom. It looked not
unlike a bomb shelter painted white with black shutters. In the backyard my
mother had cordoned off a large section of the yard for growing vegetables. She
had rows upon rows of carrots, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, squash, okra,
and other vegetables that completely disgusted me. I would eat the carrots and
carve the cucumbers into boats that my sister and I would float down the
rain-filled gutters after a storm, but that is where my interest in the garden
ended. Plus it was generally understood that many of these vegetables were for
my dad, so he could concoct his strange southern dishes that the rest of us
were forced to smell but not eat.
Kris and I
were busy shining the flashlights under our newly constructed hut when we heard
my mother’s screams through the screen door.
“Girls!
Girls! Get out here!”
We jumped
up and ran toward the backyard and met my mother just as she reached the patio.
“He’s in
the front now!” she hollered. “Go to the front door and look out the window!”
We rushed to the other side of the house in time to see an elephant emerge on
our street. Unfortunately, our neighbor didn’t see him. He had just backed out
of his driveway and was now facing down the street away from us and slowly
accelerating. The elephant, in an obvious state of agitation, followed the
little red pickup truck and placed its enormous front feet onto the truck bed.
From where we were, we could see our neighbor shift slightly in his pickup,
which was suddenly lower to the ground in the back, and peer through his
rearview mirror. And then we heard a horrified, high-pitched scream that would
have broken the windows had they not already been open.
If this weren’t
enough of a peculiar scene for a small Wisconsin farming community, it was
about to get weirder. A gang of shirtless black men in dreadlocks wielding long
sticks and whips materialized on the street behind the elephant. The men were running
behind the petrified pachyderm, brandishing their assortment of tools and
chains, shouting to each other and the elephant in a language not familiar to
this continent, much less this county.
The
elephant stepped off the back of his ride, which was not accelerating fast
enough to assure him a safe escape, and veered to his right. Across the street
from our house is a large open field owned by the school system. It may not
have been an African savannah, but it was spacious enough for the elephant to gain some
speed as he barreled away from the hordes now chasing him.
As we watched the elephant tear
away from us, my mother had time to relay the scene she had witnessed in the
backyard. She had been bent over her plants, plucking the little weeds by the
roots when she heard a crashing noise coming a couple houses back. She stood up
in time to see a black man running through the side yard. She said to herself,
“There’s no basketball game in town today,” before witnessing a great gray form
emerge from beyond a neighbor’s garage. It was an elephant, and definitely not
pink, so therefore unrelated to last night’s half a beer she had with our taco
dinner.
We would later learn that the
elephant was a female named Barbara who had been spooked while helping erect a
circus tent. The pole she was righting dropped with a clatter, causing the
skittish elephant to flee, with her front legs still in chains.
We had a
clear view across the field to watch the scene, although at a distance. Here
and there a face would peep out the door lining the street by the field or a
car on a side road would suddenly hit the brakes. My sister and a neighbor used
binoculars to get a better look as the elephant crossed the equivalent of a
couple football fields before finding what lay at the opposite end from us:
Maplewood Nursing Home.
Maplewood
is a brick one-story structure consisting of four patient wings. As the
elephant continued across the road and into the front lawn of the nursing home,
she had to make a decision. Continue forward where the two wings of the
building were now funneling her, or turn around into the arms of her captors.
She chose to go forward, and then suddenly she was gone.
From where
we stood, the elephant seemed to have just disappeared. But through the
binoculars my sister could relay that the elephant had pushed her way through a
window into one of the resident’s rooms. The trainers didn’t even pause before
jumping through the hole in the wall after the elephant.
For a while
there was calm on the streets, if you don’t count the growing number of people
and cars that were swarming the area now that word was out an elephant was on
the loose.
At the time
we had no idea what was going on inside but imagined mayhem of all sorts. Somehow
the elephant miraculously steered clear of injuring anyone, not even a heart
attack or understandably scaring someone to death. After going into a room that
was unoccupied because the residents were at lunch, Barbara turned and went
down one hallway and then another. She was about to go into another resident’s
room, that of Harley Hanick, 63, who was watching football on TV. According to
the local newspaper, Hanick reported the event as only a colorful local could:
“It sounded pretty near like a tornado, all that goddamn racket and all. I went
to see just what the hell was going on and walked over to the door and then
this elephant sticks its head in. I slammed that door pretty quick and changed
her direction fast enough, you bet.”
From our point of view on the other
end of the field, a couple of frightening minutes passed in which we imagined
senior citizens being rudely awakened from their late morning naps and interrupted
during the customary main event of the day, The
Price is Right, before another shattering of glass signaled the elephant’s exit
out a door at the end of one of the wings. Barbara continued her rampage down
the street to the north, behind some trees and then out of sight.
The beleaguered
trainers, certainly exhausted from their plight and risking their lives every
step, followed the elephant down the street, pointing to people to stay away. So
we did what any other reasonable person would do: We jumped in the car and took off after the
circus parade.
Meanwhile,
other circus workers were following with a second elephant, and in an empty lot
a couple miles down the road, the elephants met up, allowing Barbara’s handlers
to coax her into a truck to join her pachyderm pal.
I have to believe that nowadays this
story would have had a much different ending. Like the dozens of exotic animals
gunned down in Ohio after they were set free by their keeper, I imagine that in
order to save the lives of innocent bystanders, the police (who were quickly on
the scene but let the trainers round up the elephant their way) would have shot
the elephant multiple times in front of all the elderly nursing home residents
and locals who’d come out to witness the free show. But in fact, no one was
hurt or killed by Barbara, and Barbara was allowed to leave the city without
any charges being pressed.
To this
day, a yellow-and-black Elephant Crossing sign can be found hanging on the wall
of Maplewood Nursing Home. A statue of a little elephant marks the center of
the building, from which the wings all radiate. And interspersed with large
sepia toned photos of people from the area from the early 1900s are two framed newspaper
articles of the one day in 1977 when Barbara came for a visit.
The
incident left an elephant-sized impression on my four-year-old mind. Over the
years I have thought of Barbara often enough that it’s not really the incident
itself I remember but previously recalled memories of it, with additions and
subtractions made from other witness’s memories and newspaper accounts. Yet the
feeling I had that day has never left me. Even now, on warm summer mornings when
the wind blows just right, I swear it smells like “elephant weather” to me.
Sign on the nursing home wall
An elephant statue reminds residents of Barbara's visit.
