The Parc Exotica

What follows is an account of a trip Vanessa and i took last Sunday to what we thought was a "Botanical Garden." When i sat down to write a blog entry on it this week, i found that the whole experience was so rich and surreal that i had a need to hand write it first, and when i sat down to hand write it i realized that the only way i could really do it was in third person. So here it is, and i hope you enjoy it, tho, as i said to Vanessa after rereading it, it's a good thing i think i'll make a reasonably good lawyer, because i could never make a living as a writer.

The Parc Exotica

They had been out late the night before, and so it happened that they were in the perfect mood for the visit that took place: tired, perhaps a little hungover, and that Sunday Morning freeling that the world does not quite exist, or that you do not quite exist in it.
The first thing that met them after walking in the gates was a water slide on which a young woman was playing with a small child. Except perhaps in its unexpectedness, this would not set the tone for the entire visit. Walking on a ways they fround a ticket booth, where a creole man, just shy of being elderly, who gave the impression of being taciturn despite having welcomed them several times, sold them their tickets.
The entrance sign directed them up a set of stairs, but there was a ramp to the right with such an alluring air that they decided to ignore the suggested suite de visite. Walking up the gentle slope, bushes on each side, they were both filled with a sense of expectation. "Well this is very..." Vanessa trailed off. "Like a Ray Bradbury short story?" Monica suggested. They had developed a disturbing tendancy to occasionally finish one another's sentences.
Everything seemed reasonably normal in the cactus garden at the top of the ramp, though they were somewhat displeased to discover that the only information provided about the plants was their latin name, and rather pleased to discover that one of the cactii bore the latin name "notocactus." It was on descending a set of stairs, near what appeared to be the back of the park, that they came across a sign post bearing the word "dragon." "That must be the name of that dog over there," suggested Vanessa, pointing to a German Shepard chained up in a grassy area beyond the park fence. Monica was unconvinced. She thought maybe it was a nickname for a particularly large and evil cactus. But a few steps later it became clear - rising above them in slender green glory, born aloft on columns stylized to suggest waves, was a ceramic statue of a Chinese dragon. Curiouser and curiouser.
The next section of the park was a terraced bonsai garden which they drifted through wordlessly until attaining a small hut at the far end containing a wall display of large shining butterflies and a few extraordinarily menacing stag beetles, which Monica tried to avoid looking at. The butterflies all bore labels with things like "FROM S. JAVA" and "FROM BALI" written on them. "They're all from Indonesia," Monica observed, then a beat later, "hold on, why are all the labels in English?" "I reckon this entire display was just stolen whole from some museum in Indonesia," Vanessa responded. It seemed like a reasonable assumption.
They turned a corner, went down a set of steps, and found temselves facing what at first presented itself in Monica's head simply as a jumble of pinkness, then resolved itself into a pile of rose quartz in the centre of a pond, and finally, on closer inspection, into a model of Reunion Island rendered in semi-precious stones. There was nothing they could do but stare in wonder. "Do you know what's sad?" asked Vanessa, "I reckon this was somebody's dream."
It was almost a relief to come to the orchid garden - this was something they had been expecting to see - and they lingered through it, and through a chamber of waxy red anturia, taking pleasure in the simple joy of looking at the flowers. "Do you think they only employee here is they guy who sold us our tickets?" Vanessa mused. "No," Monica replied decisively, "There are four others but they all look just like him; they're the neglected and slightly psychopathic quintuplet sons of the eccentric billionaire who built this place." As if to confirm her suspicion, they came out of the anturium hall to discover that the entrance-way had been built in the shape of a giant gorilla sitting over the door.
To avoid being snatched up and taken to the top of the Empire State building, they hurried down the path to a pond dominated by a malevolent black swan and a small waterfall flanked by a stone crocodile. White and orange koi drifted below the surface, and one floated at the top, its colourless and ravaged corpse in the dark water seeming to embody everything that was sad and strange and broken about that place. "Do you think we should tell them there's a dead fish?" Vanessa asked, but Monica was filled with a sense of the futility of such an endeavour and quickly distracted by the park's next marvel: "What IS that statue? It looks like a rhinocerous on acid!"
By this time they hd come in a circle back to the King-Kong replica and were unsure as to where to go next, but a suggestive gap in a hedge proplled tem past two wooden statues reminiscent of early 20th century anthropological depictions of Fiji-islanders and a fiberglass statue of a man on a turtle reminiscent of late 20th century video game depictions of working-class Italian men, onto an open space filled with empty round tables and covered by two white tents. "I might get married if i could have the reception here," commented Vanessa, at the exact moment that Monica was opening her mouth to say something along the lines of, "wouldn't it be insane to have your wedding reception here?" This was another disturbing trend that they had noticed in thier conversation.
Walking past various statues of Buddha and through a Chinese-style gate, they came into a completely different world - that of the park's attached hotel. Here neat white bungalows and perfectly trimmed hedges encircled a pool filled with happily shrieking children and lazily lounging adults. This was clearly not the place for them, and so they went back the way they had come. To the side of the reception area was the park's restaurant and bar, and by this time Monica was mpore than ready for a cup of coffee, but the building was locked and appeared deserted, despite the fact that the tables on the terrace were set. At the exact moment that Vanessa was daring Monica to steal a wine glass, a man appeared and informed them with words and gestures that they should not be there, and ushered them back through the gap in the hedge. Disappointingly, he bore only the vaguest of resemblances to the ticket-seller.
At this point they were at an impasse - the trail seemed to have ended, but they park quite clearly had not yet delivered itself of all its secrets. Blaming this on their choice to ignore the signs at the entrance, they retraced their steps all the way back, and mounted the previously spurned staircase to find themselves once again surrounded by cactii. Here, at the front of the cactus garden, was a faded and strikingly unedifiying sign explaining the worldwide spread of succulents in the golden age of navigation. At the back of the model of the island, and equally fading and unedifying sign listed the general properties to be found in minerals, and then the specific minerals used in the model, without ever relating the two. At the back of the dead fish pond Monica experienced a mild thrill when a sign indicated an "island of crocodiles," but of course they were statues.
Rounding a new corner, they started walking drown a tree-lined path. Ahead of them was a building that they would soon find to contain more minerals (including a piece of agate the exact colour or a "electric magenta" in a box of Crayola neon Magic Markers) as well as a woman who looked nothing like either of the two previous employees and who asked, surprisingly, to see their tickets. But before all this, suddenly and yet inevitably - as if they had known somewhere deep inside that there was only one thing keeping the experience from being complete - there at the right, in all the glory of the March afternoon, was a brightly coloured Nativity scene, complete with sheep.
After Christ had made His appearance there really didn't seem like anything else could be added to the afternoon. They completed their tour of the mineral hall, made their way back through the park, and out past the now deserted water slide. They passed a young Indian man playing guitar by the side of the highway, and went home.



love y'all