The Last of the Winnebagos

“I’ll bet,” I said. I looked back down the multiway. Nobody at all was coming now. Maybe that was what all the Amblers’ anxiety was about—I should have asked Ramirez what their average daily attendance was and what sort of people used up credits to come this far out and see an old beat-up RV. The curve into Tempe alone was three point two miles. Maybe nobody came at all. If that was the case, I might have a chance of getting some decent pictures. I got in the Hitori and drove up the steep drive.

“Howdy,” the old man said, all smiles, holding out his reddish-brown freckled hand to shake mine. “Name’s Jake Ambler. And this here’s Winnie,” he said, patting the metal side of the RV, “Last of the Winnebagos. Is there just the one of you?”

“David McCombe,” I said, holding out my press pass. “I’m a photographer. Sun-co. Phoenix Sun, Tempe-Mesa Tribune, Glendale Star, and affiliated stations. I was wondering if I could take some pictures of your vehicle?” I touched my pocket and turned the taper on.

“You bet. We’ve always cooperated with the media, Mrs. Ambler and me. I was just cleaning old Winnie up,” he said. “She got pretty dusty on the way down from Globe.” He didn’t make any attempt to tell his wife I was there, even though she could hardly avoid hearing us, and she didn’t open the metal door again. “We been on the road now with Winnie for almost twenty years. Bought her in 1989 in Forest City, Iowa, where they were made. The wife didn’t want to buy her, didn’t know if she’d like traveling, but now she’s the one wouldn’t part with it.”

He was well into his spiel now, an open, friendly, I-have-nothing-to-hide expression on his face that hid everything. There was no point in taking any stills, so I got out the vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me around the RV.

“This up here,” he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, “is the luggage rack, and this is the holding tank. It’ll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic electric pump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five minutes, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.” He held up his fat pink hands palms forward as if to show me. “Water tank,” he said, slapping a silver metal tank next to it. “Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four of headroom. That’s plenty even for a tall guy like yourself.”

He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have thought they wouldn’t have any customers either.

A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.

“I’ll just look around while you tend to the paying customers,” I told him.

I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it now—she’d run a caption like, “The old zoo stands empty today. No sound of lion’s roar, of elephant’s trumpeting, or children’s laughter, can be heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind, while just outside its gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10.” Maybe it would be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.

I went inside. I hadn’t been out here in years. In the late eighties there had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn’t covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then. I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director who had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo’s renovation project cold and giving the money to a wildlife protection group.

“I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we’ll have nothing to put in them. The timber wolf, the California condor, the grizzly bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it’s our responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last survivors.”

The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn’t he? The grizzly bear isn’t extinct in the wild—it’s Colorado’s biggest tourist draw, and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited hunting.

In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savannah land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar bears.

They hadn’t really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs had taken up residence in the middle of it.