- bison in Golden Gate Park
I was reminded today of Golden Gate Park when I got an email about bison - perhaps many people don't know it, but there is a herd of bison in the heart of San Francisco :) ...
Bison have been kept in Golden Gate Park since 1891, when a small herd was purchased by the park commission. At the time, the animal's population in North America had dwindled to an all-time low and San Francisco made a successful effort to breed them in captivity. In 1899, the paddock in the western section of the park was created. The animals today are cared for by staff from the San Francisco Zoo.
I love Golden Gate Park. I can remember my grandparents taking us there to visit the Steinhart Aquarium with its crocodile pit and letting us play on the moon bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden when we were kids.
- - the moon bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden
I later spent a lot of time there when in college going to art exhibits at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and checking out the dinosaur skeleton at the Kimball Natural History Museum, and visiting the Conservatory of Flowers.
- Kimball Natural History Museum
I guess that's why so many of my short stories had scenes set in Golden Gate Park. Here's the start of one of my old fiction stories which begins in the Steinhart Aquarium. For this story, which I wrote for a challenge at the Writers BBS, we had to start each sentence with the next letter of the alphabet - we got to leave out Xs and Zs, fortunately, and I cheated a bit with the ellipses .....
4:00 am
As San Francisco PD Homicide Inspector Dane Ramsey parked his Ford in a spot between a patrol car and the large forensics van, he tried to forget his disturbing lunch date with his partner, Inspector Samantha Green, and focus instead on the task at hand ... a murder in Golden Gate Park. Barring the entrance to the Steinhart Aquarium, yellow police-issue boundary tape fluttered gently in the late-night ocean breeze. Catching the tape in one hand, the Inspector ducked beneath it and walked through the open glass doors, giving his name to the uniformed officer who stood just within.
Dane strolled through the aquarium's foyer, glancing down into the swampy habitat of the crocodile pit that graced that room, before turning into one of the darkened hallways lined with fish tanks. Everywhere he looked, brilliantly hued denizens of the deep, both large and small, traversed their tanks with frictionless ease or simply hung, motionless, returning his stare with bug-eyed indifference. Fishsticks ... memories of the lunch-gone-wrong with Samantha at Neptune's Restaurant, once again drifted through Dane's mind, unbidden.
Glad enough to have another loner like Samantha as a partner, Dane had found it easy to keep an emotional distance from her, just as he had with everyone since his wife's death. He hadn't expected Samantha's lunch invitation and was even less prepared for the way she acted during their meal ... it was as though she needed to tell him something very important yet feared to do so ... she seemed to crave an intimacy he'd worked so hard to avoid. Ill at ease, he'd let her see his dismayed resistance and she'd left in the middle of the lunch, upset. Jarred, Dane felt the first of a series of cracks in his emotional defenses ... he didn't like the feeling.
Knitting his brows, Dane pushed these useless thoughts aside and noticed that the fish tank-studded corridor through which he walked was exiting into a large circular room holding a beautifully engineered rendition of a coastal tide pool. Left and right, around the room, forensic investigators crouched, collecting trace evidence, dusting for prints, snapping documentation photos ... Mark Douglas, a beat cop with whom Dane was acquainted, came forward upon seeing him, notebook in hand.
"Mark, what have we got?" Dane asked as he stepped over to the tide pool, glancing down. Numerous layers of kelp fronds swirled underwater, set in motion by the skittering of tiny hermit crabs ... barnacles and delicate sea stars clung to rocky outcropping. On the edge of one of those outcropping, half submerged in the tide pool, what looked like a ragged piece of scalp with short blond hair attached, lay bobbing in a diluted wash of blood.
"Pearson and I arrived here around 3:30 am," began Officer Douglas, flipping through his notes, "and found signs of a struggle in the tide pool and a DB in a tank in another part of the aquarium."
Quickly locating a forensic kit, Dane took out a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on before picking up the scalp fragment for examination. Repressing a sigh, he wondered if he'd ever become inured to such sights. Swallowing dryly, he carefully set the macabre particle back where he'd found it and turned to Douglas.
Tempering the desire to wipe the blood from his gloved hands, Dane said, "Let's see the body."
"Um, you here on your own?" Douglas asked, as he led Dane through more labyrinthian tank-lined corridors to the location of the corpse.
Vague feelings of foreboding, roused by the mention of Samantha's absence, tugged at Dane's consciousness but he simply shrugged. "Well, I believe she had some personal business to attend to. You know how it is when ... "
As they approached a huge tank built into one wall, Dane's voice died away, his sentence unfinished, as he tried to make sense of the tableau before him.
Brown colored fish with red underbellies floated, torpid, in murky blood-tinged water, their half-foot long bodies bloated and engorged. Countless sea weeds near the bottom of the tank gently swayed and Dane caught a glimpse of a diver engrossed in some task. Digging down, the wet-suited figure grasped something and then rose above the sea weeds, dragging a skeletonized corpse along with him to the surface.
Eyeing the diver's grotesque burden, Officer Douglas shook his head, visibly disturbed. "For what it's worth, contrary to popular belief, it's not blood in the water that sends piranha into a feeding frenzy but the prey item's frantic efforts to escape ... when the killer threw our vic in that tank, he or she was still alive." ........
