March 19, 2013
Today’s highlight is a visit to Wild Animal Safari right here in Pine Mountain.
Anticipated
experience: perhaps a warm-up for our Africa trip.
Actual
experience: we struggle to protect our camera lenses from
the slimy saliva of more species, domestic and domesticated, than we can count.
Here is how the Wild(?) Animal Safari
works. The very cheerful and helpful
person at the ticket counter convinces us that we need to rent a safari vehicle
from their fleet of beaten up old vans spray painted white with zebra stripes, their windows chopped out and
replaced with bars--she explains that the management cannot be responsible for any damage
to our vehicle from incidents like a longhorn denting our door panel. The minute we drive through the gate and are charged by a herd of animals with big
horns sticking their heads into our vehicle in search of food, we are grateful
for her wise counsel--even more grateful later when a bunch of goat-like animals rise up on their
hind legs and rest their big front hooves on our window frames, sticking their
slender heads deep into the interior of the vehicle.
By now, you have guessed the other
critical aspect to a quality safari experience--purchasing plenty of food for the
wild(?) animals that we will encounter again and again along the serpentine
road through the wildlife park. We buy
the safari package that includes four hefty bags of food pellets, so we can
each have our own bag. We spend $3 extra
to rent a big van, so we can each have our own seat, with free access to both sides. We think we are doing this to optimize photo
opportunities, but within a few minutes of entering the gates, we realize the
key advantage to each having our own wide seat is so that we can freely move
away from the window when an animal with an especially long and slimy tongue is
trying to squeeze his head between the bars in search of food. 
The park is an ugly expanse of Georgia red clay covered sparsely by mostly scrubby deciduous trees that haven’t leafed out yet, with a big red mud wallow lake in the middle. The animals roaming freely around the property include lots of deer-like and goat-like domestic and exotic species, a bunch of deer that look just like the ones in our back yard, some moose and buffalo, burros, horses, and zebras. The giraffes are in an enclosure close enough to the road to stretch their necks over the fence and stick their heads in the van. The experience of driving through this menagerie handing out food is so absurd that we cannot stop laughing for more than a few minutes during the hour it takes us to traverse the course.
But we do learn something from the
experience. Giraffes have the softest
lips, and gentle purple tongues. Zebras are way nore nippy than horses--dangerous
to feed from the hand--and their breath is vile. The tongue of a buffalo is
very long and exceedingly slimey. The nose of a moose is smoother
than you could imagine.
 |
| a sad and skinny rhinoceros |
After lunch we visit the butterfly house
in Callaway Gardens, where the
temperature is 81, the humidity is 85%, and 65 species of butterflies flutter
about the flowers. Some even land on us
when we stand still in the sun. The legs
of a butterfly upon your cheek tickle, even if you are not one to be ticklish.
Next we drive to the Callaway Chapel,
built in 1961-62 as Cason Callaway’s memorial tribute to his mother. He wanted the chapel to be
non-denominational, so he commissioned the stained glass windows to celebrate
nature. The four side windows are
inspired by the four seasons, and the glorious front and rear windows are inspired
by deciduous and coniferous trees. Joyce
and I thought they were very much like artful quilts, and could be inspirations
for our work some day. We documented
these windows well with cameras and I-Pad.
Joyce sent pictures to her friend who was married here. (What a wonderful place for a wedding!)
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