Inanma prefers the farmer. I don’t know why. The signage doesn’t say, and I can’t read cuneiform.

I’m at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul looking at a small collection of Sumerian literature: about a dozen clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform (which means “wedge-shaped”). They are from various sites in Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq. Most are about 4,000 years old.

The most famous is the Code of Hammurabi, one of the world’s earliest set of laws, created by the eponymous Babylonian king in the early 18th century b.c.

Some 200 years older and more interesting, I think, is the “Oldest Love Poem,” which includes these lines:

Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me

Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies

My father, he will give you gifts

This is also perhaps the first parental endorsement of a child getting laid. Let me speak for the 21st century when I say, Eeeeeeew.

There is a letter from one Ludingirra to his mother. Huh. A Sumerian Momma’s Boy. There are numerous legal documents, including “A Verdict About Murder” and “A Judicial Decision Regarding the Breaking of an Engagement.” The hilariously named “Short & Terse Business Letters” apparently have a cold brevity that in light of our modern equivalent—Long and Bureaucratic Corporate Communications—sounds quite appealing.

Other tablets are educational (“Proverbs Book” and “Multiplication Tables”) or instructional. The “Medical Recipe Concerning Poisoning,” for instance, includes eight remedies to counter having been slipped a mickey, which was apparently a choice method of murder in the 18th century b.c. One prescription requires:

mustard

pistachio

nuts

sweet mixed drink

meal of roast grain

thyme

barirato [?] plant

wine

These ingredients are to be mixed in a small cup—don’t supersize that vessel, yo—and then smeared on the skin. Yes, that’s right—there is no actual ingestion of said potion. The mere application of this tincture, the tablet assures us, will save the victim.

“He will live,” it declares.

But I am most intrigued by Inanma. Why did she prefer the farmer? What did he offer her that all the other suitors didn’t? Who did he beat out? The shepherd? The scribe? The brewer, the priest, the guy who had a monopoly on ferry service across both the Tigris and the Euphrates?

Nearby are 4,000-year-old clay tablets inscribed with erotic scenes. There’s a lively variety to these tablets, which could be easily slipped into, oh, say, the pocket of a robe, and feature all the combinations that you might expect: men and women, men and men, facing, from behind, on some sort of angled bench…HOTT. They are almost cartoonishly pornographic, with fist-like eyes, scalp-yanking braids, and dopey smiles.

Aah, afterglow.

There’s nothing here that I haven’t seen before. There’s something comforting in that. We’re all the same, the world over, and we always have been. There’s nothing new under the sun.

“Everyone keeps saying about us, “Oh, look at the foreign journalists,” Sercin tells me gleefully as we squeeze between the flapping Turkish flags and yet another portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, revered founder of the country. This one is behind glass in a wooden frame, as if it had been hastily dehooked from the living room wall.

It’s Sunday, April 29, and Sercin and I are at Istanbul’s Caglayan Square. (Caglayan, like many Turkish proper nouns, has several accent marks that I’m not capable of typing in. Just for the record.) It’s of those beautiful cusp days in spring that confuses the skin—it tingles in the sun and gets goosebumpy in the shadows.

Sercin, a medical translator here in Istanbul, looks the part of photojournalist better than I do, with her olive green femme flak jacket, skinny mauve scarf, and jeans. (I have the jeans, but somehow my jacket is too soft, too afternoon brunch, and it doesn’t have the requisite number of pockets for all those film canisters we don’t use anymore, having gone digital.) She’s just finished a photography course and has a brand-new Canon she’s both eager and nervous to use.

Though new to the camera, she’s old to charming the pants off people. She fearlessly closes in on her subjects without making them feel uncomfortable. It’s something I’m still too timid to be good at.

Perhaps as many as a million people are protesting the current elections for the second time in as many weeks. (The first rally was in Ankara, the capital, and at least three more will follow in other cities in the month after.) It’s a complicated situation that becomes even more confusing, at least for this American, because of the nuances of parliamentary democracy and Turkish electoral law, which even the Turkish high court is confused about.

But at the heart of the debate is a simple question of identity (alas, without a simple answer): What does a Turk look like?

*******

It seems that for these protestors, Turkey is unveiled—even though some of the protestors themselves are.

The leading presidential candidate—the only presidential candidate—up for election before the Turkish Parliament is the current foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. He’s from the party that controls parliament, and is considered a former Islamist. Gul’s wife wears a head scarf, which sets up on interesting conundrum, as head scarves are banned in government offices.

Some, but by no means all, Turks are suspicious of how much Gul would incorporate sharia, or Islamic law, into Turkish law. Turkey has been staunchly secular since its creation in 1922. In a sort of reactionary twist, the military has been secularism’s guardian. Like its warrior breathren the world over, the Turkish military ain’t subtle: there have been four coups over the years. The last time was in 1997, when the military forced the breakup the Islamist-bent Welfare Party, which Gul was a member of. Now, with Gul’s election on the horizon, the military has been making noises that it might interfere once more.

The protestors seem disgusted with both the veil and the mil. They argue that both religious fundamentalism and military usurpation of the democratic process are equally at odds with a modern Turkey.

This is all on my mind as we wander through the protest. Despite seriousness of the issues, the atmosphere is quite jovial, with lots of laughter, music, and poetry (Communist poetry, apparently). Sercin keeps laughing at the wit and humor of the chants. She does her best to translate them for me. There’s one that puns on imam bayildi, a sort of dessert pudding. [Note: Sercin wrote in to say that imam bayildi is not a dessert, but a main course. Ack. I should’ve double-checked my source.] Imam bayildi means “fainting imam” in Turkish.

“Now they’re saying that for the imam to faint isn’t good enough, ” she says, delighted. “He should be dead! Ha!”

This strikes me as a bit bloodthirsty, especially as it relates to a mild-mannered dessert.

Around us stream people and their flags. The crescent and star wave from poles, drape across people’s shoulders, are patched on baseball caps. From beneath his quintessential fez, Ataturk looks out on pins, shirts, posters.

An enormous balloon bobs overhead like a strange sky luer. Beyond the balloon is a broadcast tower, a metal spindle probably beaming the sight of this protest all over the world. People are staring at it as if they might see themselves on TV.

But that’s not it, actually. “There’s a man up there!” Sercin yelps, pointing. His whole body sways as he waves extravagantly at the hundreds of thousands below him. No one waves back.

He has no safety attachments, no ladder, no sanity. Is this patriotic fervor or jumper madness? Or both?

Back on the ground, we pass a woman holding above her head a sign on which she has drawn a lightbulb, the symbol of Gul’s party. Among the Turkish words, the word “Edison” jumps out.

Sercin notices it at the same time and grins. “It says that Edison would be sorry if he knew what happened to his lightbulb.”

*******

“How do they know I’m a foreigner?” I ask Sercin as we pardonne our way through the crowd. Since arriving in Istanbul, I’ve felt incredibly comfortable, like I fit right in somehow. Just another face in the crowd. It’s been a relief after three months of being so noticably different from everyone.

She looks at me as if I’ve just asked to kiss Ataturk. “You don’t look Turkish.”

“Well, I know that,” I say, sheepishly. “But when I look around, everyone looks so different from one another. I don’t look like them, but they don’t look like each other, either. Turks don’t look like any one thing.”

Black hair. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Tall and leggy. Short and squat. Patrician noses, nub noses. Hair uncovered, hair covered. The list goes on and on of all the ways Turks—at least ones in Istanbul, around which half of the Turkish population lives—don’t look like each other.

More than anywhere I’ve been, here faces reflect history. I won’t attempt to cover the enormous length and complexity of Turkish history when Wikipedia has the basics, but suffice it to say that as the crossroads of Asia and Europe, a large percentage of humanity, for a huge span of history, has been born in, come through, or settled down in Turkey. They’ve all left their mark on the landscape. Turkey is covered with an amazing array of ruins: Neolithic settlements like Catalhoyuk; the fortified Bronze Age city of Troy; the Greek settlement of Ephesus; the Lycian-Roman ampitheaters of the Mediterranean Coast; the gilded glory of Byzantine Istanbul; Ottoman mosques with their minarets needling the clouds. The list goes on and on.

With this sort of history, the question of what a modern Turk looks like is a complicated one. How do you establish a “national face” in a place whose history is a testament to both the diversity and unity of the human race—current national borders be damned?

So how does everybody know I’m a foreigner? After all, I’m eastern European. Russia and Ukraine are north, directly across the Black Sea. Poland borders Ukraine. There are plenty of transplants from these regions living in Istanbul.

It’s not the eyes, Sercin says as we slowly work our way towards the edges of the rally. It’s time to go. For hours, we’ve been shooting the red Turkish flag against the creamy blue sky—if gelato came in the flavor of sky, it would be this color and consistency—and we’ve exhausted its potential. The viewfinder on my camera shows that I have captured too many backs, too many tops of heads, too much flapping red fabric.

Nor is it the freckles or even the red hair, which she knows I get from a bottle. The upturned nose is unheard of on Turkish faces, she says, but still—the nose isn’t it either.

“There’s an individuality to Westerners,” she says. “I can see you are an individual in your face.” Her quarter-size hazel eyes scan me from hairline to chin. “There is a self-confidence. A way you move that says you don’t care what people think.”

Turks, she says, are curtailed by their obligations to family and culture and country and family. “In Turkey, we always have our families on our faces.”

I feel irrationally defensive, as if she’s just accused me of being indifferent to my family and culture. My upturned nose suddenly seems like the leaping-off point to the very heights of American self-involvement. I admit to Sercin that even for an American, I am fiercely resistent to joining a tribe, whether it’s national, corporate, ideological—or even geographic, roaming the world as I am. But that doesn’t mean I am completely disloyal.

“Here I am without context,” I protest. “In America you could see me with friends, family, my home, my city, my work—all the things that place me in the world, that I feel a responsibility to.”

“It’s not that,” she counters. “I’ve been to America. I’ve been to European countries. And it’s the same.”

I try to puzzle out what she means, and if I’ve seen it myself. “Americans have a big presence,” I suggest. “I can usually tell Americans from Europeans not only by the way they dress, but by how big they are,” I continue. “They take up a lot of space.”

Her eyes widen with recognition. “Yeah, yeah!”

I’m suddenly compelled to confess something I haven’t told many people, because I’m afraid I sound crazy. But I tell her anyway. More than two months before in China, one night I was hit by the strongest sense of disembodiment I’ve ever experienced. I was on my way to dinner in Lijiang when an overwhelming sense of unreality crashed into me. It was as if the veil had been lifted. I held my hands out and looked them. This is me? I thought. I watched, detached, as my hands began to shake. They looked familiar, sure: the ragged nails, the long knuckles, the increasingly prominent veins, the wrists going carpal tunnel from too much typing. Characteristics of an object I had seen before. But what did they have to do with me?

What was this “me,” anyway? Was “I” in here in this body, jailed in this meat? Or was “I” the meat itself? Did I—whatever that was—exist? Did anything exist?

Either I was having spontaneous spiritual realizations or the anti-malarial medication was finally kicking in.

Knowing the state was medicinally induced didn’t help to quell it. I continued walking towards the restaurant because I didn’t know what else to do. I moved the strange fleshed bones through the winding alley only because I understood that’s how locomotion occurred. I was puppeteer and marionette both.

At the guesthouse, I joined the family-style dinner, chewing and talking and drinking tea as if I hadn’t been cleaved like a gutted fish, grateful for the presence of creatures I didn’t entirely believe in. I was desperate to believe in them. Look at that, I marveled. I say something to these fantastic beings, and they respond!

The sensation continued the rest of the evening, even as I fell asleep. As I have on countless nights on this trip, I awoke in the middle of the night to see nothing but shadows, to feel nothing in the bed but blankets and my knees. At home, Steve and I make a mammal pile with the cats, limbs and snores in warm layers. But that was all gone. As I travel through country after country, the only real, consistent thing of material substance that I encounter every day is myself. This body. The meat.

In the darkness, even my body had become of dubious reality. When that happens, you know the lack of context is really pushing your buttons.

By morning the sensation was mostly gone. But it’s persisted since then, even though I stopped taking the anti-malarial medicine at least a month ago. Periodically, it yanks me 45 degrees perpendicular to reality. This “foreign journalist” with her camera and upturned nose, shouldering her way through the crowd in that space-greedy American way: that’s me? Am I this thing?

******

Sercin looks thoughtful, but she doesn’t have much of a response. She looks at this traveling “foreign journalist” and sees freedom, an independence from the constraints of country and culture. But the moorless existence of long-term travel—immersed in alien family, country, culture—sometimes doesn’t feel like the epitome of freedom. Sometimes it feels like a dangerously untethered existence, like a balloon gotten loose, taken by the wind in whatever direction it feels the whim to pursue.

Being without a place can feel like having no safety attachments, no ladder, no sanity.

The election complexities will continue long after this rally, long after I leave Turkey all together. There will be more rallies, and even a suicide bombing in Ankara, the capital. The courts will weigh in, and so will the politicians, the military, and the public. Turkey will consider using the popular vote to decide the next president—a monumental change. The elections on July 22 should make things clearer. Maybe.

We leave the protest, kicking through discarded water bottles.

I look back to see if the man on the broadcast tower is still there. Doesn’t he know he’s in danger? Doesn’t he know he could die? Is this what happens when you are so cut off from your self that you lose the mammalian ability to know that your body is in danger?

But he’s gone. Fervor or jumper, he’s gone.

As the sheer amount of everythingness has nearly become too much for me to get my back under, the elastic waist around where I am and what’s reflected on the site has gotten irreversibly stretched. (Jesus, what a tortured double metaphor.)

That is to say, I’m waaaay behind. I’m in London and still haven’t posted anything about Turkey or Poland or even the three-day train ride through Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary that I took to get from Istanbul to Warsaw. I’ve been photographing and recording and writing like mad, but it takes a while to put it all together in a coherent form for the site.

I’m trying to wrap up some Turkey entries before heading home in a week (!), but I am so very tired.

Planes, trains, and automobiles have taken me around the world, mostly driven by others. (Steve’s heart just stopped as he imagined me bossing my way into flying a rickety Russian plane somewhere in the developing world.) But I prefer to imagine that I’ve been buzzing through international borders on a motorbike, and that you’ve all come with me.

Like this.

So this for now, and more later.

More. There’s always more, isn’t there? It’s downright exhausting, this world. As Elbert Hubbard knew, life really is just one damned thing after another.

But okay. Because when it isn’t, you’re, um, dead.

It’s Vishnu’s birthday, and I’ve gotten him nothing.

I peer over the wall separating the hotel from the Krishna temple. It’s 6:30 am on the morning of the Vishu, a religious festival unique to Kerala. Anub tells me the queue is already a couple of hours old. It looks it; hundreds of people coil through the temple grounds to kick the New Year off right, with a god-dose of good luck.

Puzzled looks, whispers, and giggles spread through the crowd as people begin to notice the fuzzy-headed white woman staring at them. The humidity Stevie Nicks-ifies my hair.

I retreat with Anub to the gate of the hotel grounds, where he is making sure no one parks in front of the entrance. “Have you been to the temple yet?” I ask.

He shrugs. “We’re watching the pretty girls.”

There are a lot of them. Mostly they have the same Keralan hairstyle, their wavy black locks neatly oiled and woven into a long thick braid, which flows down their backs against a dramatic background of brand-new kurtas in white, purple, yellow, and carnation-pink.

I am in Allapuzha to catch a local ferry through Kerala’s famed backwaters to Kottayam, and then a bus—a six-freaking-hour bus—to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary on the eastern border of Kerala. Delhi’s heat drove me to the Himalayas; Varkala’s takes me to the Western Ghats, which smokily spread in green-purple waves across the border with Tamil Nadu.

Another guy who works at the hotel—whose own birthday was the day before, I know, because I ate a piece of birthday cake—calls out to Anub. He needs to attend to something.

“You will tell people no if they come to park here?” Anub asks.

“Okay,” I agree nervously. How might I explain in Malayalam that I am a guest at the hotel, a mere temporary sentry, but that I somehow was invested with the authority to deny them a parking space when they’ve come to score some good luck? I don’t even know how to say hello.

Of course, it doesn’t take more than a headshake, a wave, and an entirely English “no” to convince a woman and her daughter to take their motorbike elsewhere. I am relieved, and relieved of duty, when Anub comes back.

After last night, I’m eager to leave Allapuzha. As I had returned from dinner, kicking through the streetside dust of downtown, a man abruptly neared me. It was possible he was just dodging an autorickshaw, which recklessly bang through potholes and pedestrians. I looked at him suspiciously anyway. Without seeming to notice me, he passed by, and then flagged down a rickshaw. Okay, then. I kept walking. The streets were far less populated then they had been when I had ventured out a couple of hours before, and most of the shops were shuttered for the night. Of the few women on the street, I was only one alone.

Fifty meters later, a rickshaw neared on my right. I moved left to get out of its way, but it kept pace with me, the driver murmuring in Malayalam. “No,” I said, “no, no, no, no, no,” with every wave of my hand. I don’t need a ride, piss off, would you? But the voice—wait, voices?—persisted. I finally looked. In the back of the rickshaw was the man who had just walked by. He and the driver wore identical expressions: eyes stupid with lust, mouths fat with, it finally dawned on me, at least one word I could understand, because they were saying it over and over: “fucking.”

Whores interested in setting up shop in the south Indian city of Allupuzha—population 225,000, the “Venice of the East,” the “Gateway to the Backwaters”—take note: you should tie your hair back in a ponytail; wear a loose, long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck; drape your shoulders with a scarf worn dupatta-style; flap around in extra-roomy black linen pants, and slip on cheap flip flops. This ensemble will apparently announce to the locals that you are a ‘ho.

Enraged, ashamed, a bit scared, I shouted, “Go away, go away!” I lifted my two-liter water bottle over my head—I’ll show you Lady of the Night, you bastards—and made as if to hit the rickshaw. “Go AWAY!” The driver sped up. I chased them for a few steps, swinging the water bottle.The one shopkeeper still open stared, his expression inscrutable.

It was a very long, very dark walk back to the hotel.

So this morning I got up extra early in order to head out as soon as possible to Periyar. I’d rather be stomped to death by the rampaging wild elephants we are driving mad than be near predators who share my physiology. I worry that the holiday will have an impact on travel, but Anub assures me it won’t. Every day is pretty much a holiday somewhere in India. They work around it.

Two hours later I decide that if this is the beginning of a new year, Vishnu is looking upon me kindly. I’ve just spent 10 rupees on a two-and-a-half-hour cruise to Kottayam, where I’m supposed to rendezvous with the bus to Periyar. It is by far the best 10 rupees—25 cents—I’ll ever spend. I’m on a government ferry that shephards locals through the backwaters, a system of rivers, canals, and lakes that feed the paddies that form Kerala’s Rice Bowl. Small thatched houses and cement churches compete with swaying palms for space on the narrow bands of nominally dry land that thread through this waterworld.

There are private holiday houseboats plying the backwaters equipped with everything from double beds and stoves to liquor cabinets and karaoke machines, and there is a tourist ferry that skirts the Arabian Sea coast. But I am heading inland, away from the sea, and am on a budget that precludes karaoke machines, no matter how much I might want to drunkenly warble (which ain’t much). Plus, I prefer this lazy-paced ferry, where I am the only nonlocal. It criss-crosses the canals to stop at one small settlement after another, the driver making impressive sideways dockings that are noisy but neat.

There are more men, but the women are more mobile, hopping on and off after just a few stops. There are lots of good teeth in Kerala, which for no good reason I associate with the literacy rate, which is claimed to be at 100 percent, by far the highest in India. It feels logical. Which is, of course, illogical.

Eventually, I take out my notebook and hold the pen over the page. Blissed out on the cool breeze and dramatic scenery, I am not so motivated to write. From over my left shoulder comes a voice—a farmer. He owns a small rice farm, five acres, far away from the “jetty,” wherever that is. The rich farmers’ lands—50- or 60-acre plots—are to the south.

Wow, what a bore. His talk is all rice and his breath is all booze. I pick up the pen and begin to write. Perhaps this encourages him, because he says hopefully, “If you have any doubts, you can ask me. I am a farmer and you are a writer, so I can tell you many things.”

I consider my doubts—why is there evil? does human existence lack a unifying theme? am I getting fat from eating too much rice?—but decide on something newsier. It’s harvest time, and there is a problem with uncollected paddies. All the papers say the rice is lingering unclaimed by government agencies and ruinously sprouting. Is he having this experience, too?

He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to discuss it. Instead, he launches into an extended lecture on—oh lord—rice processing. “There are two kinds of rice: green rice and boiled rice—” I tune out. Jesus. Why didn’t I tell him I was an accountant?

Eventually he trails off, then turns to the nearby passengers and begins to monologue, possibly recounting the conversation he just had with the American. They are mostly fishermen wearing the favored male Kerala ensemble: the button-down business shirt you see on every man in midtown Manhattan from 9 to 5, and a lungi, which is basically a sarong for men. (Often it is folded above the knee and tucked in, and then it becomes a dhoti.) They have bamboo fishing poles strung with the same line that is in my father’s tackle box, and weary expressions.

An hour later, we enter a canal choked with so much invasive African moss that the ferry’s propellor splutters with effort as the blades make salad of the weeds. In the rice fields to the right is what can only be described as a herd of ducks. Really. Hundreds of them, and a man tending them. A duckherder.

There is something tragicomically ridiculous about a herd of ducks. I’m not sure why.

We pause for passengers at a town about five kilometers outside Kottayam. It’s apparent we are nearing the city from the quite-nice cars parked next to a few of the homes, though the road to this seemingly waterlocked pocket of land is invisible. Boats loaded with sacks of rice bump against the docks. Little shops sell bottles of water and potato chips, which have found a happy home in India. From Kashmir to Kerala, Lays rules the grocery. Small silver packages dangle from strings draped across the shop windows. They look like individually wrapped condoms but aren’t. In this country of more than a billion people, it’s clear lots of people are having lots of sex, but condoms in window shops are a no-no. The week before, the state on Kerala’s northern border banned sex education in schools—a bucking of the national trend.

We dock in Kottayam, and I board the bus for Kumily, the town nearest Periyar. We arrive after six nerve-destroying hours; by hour five, my senses have been rendered mostly numb, overwhelmed by heat, crowd, rain, time, mountain roads, and doubt. Eventually it is merely the armpity stench of humanity that registers anymore.

Vishnu’s birthday ends with a very cold shower, cricket song, a phalanx of stars that I haven’t seen since Tiger Leaping Gorge, and more mosquito netting. I am almost but not quite cold in the middle of the night, and grateful for the chill.

From that point on until I leave India, I have at least 18 more adventures every day, including being swarmed by—ugh—leeches; making a pact with four Australians to falsely claim that we saw tigers, and not just said leeches, at Periyar; getting an Ayurvedic massage that is waaaay more intimate than I’m used to; stalking wild black monkeys in the Kumily darkness with my flashlight; debating yoga, drama, meditation, and orgasms in Delhi; exploring the sloping lines of the ancient sitars in the collection of instruments owned by my friend Ari’s mother, a classical Indian singer; and then bunking down on the floor next to her on my last night in India.

There isn’t enough time in one life to tell every adventure of one month in India, particularly since I didn’t see most of the country. In fact, a lifetime isn’t enough to explore India, let alone explain it. Perhaps that’s why Hinduism offers so many chances, even for such American icons as Lincoln and Lindbergh.

Will the next year bring good luck? Who knows. Vishnu, I fear, has nothing to do with it. There will probably be adventure, even if of a minor nature. This is a great lesson of travel: actions as elemental as crossing the street, eating lunch, or smiling at someone are pregnant with adventure. You don’t know the all the rules, and you don’t know what will happen. Maybe such minor actions have more potential in daily old life than we know.

And the thing is, having an adventure and having a good time are not necessarily the same thing.

India in a nutshell.

Shots from the Chiang Mai Zoo* in northern Thailand—especially for Zoe!

Giraffe feeding*.

Drying off.

Sweetness.

Where are the munchies?*

Tadpoles in the murk.

The zoo’s prudish star attraction has lunch.

* Only read this if you’re prepared to have your cute-animal high given a severe downer (so perhaps no Zoe eyes). Chiang Mai Zoo is of dubious standards. The animals seem generally okay, though almost all lacked water—though considering forest fires had been ravaging the north for weeks, perhaps this was understandable. But the zoo follows the typical Asian zoo policy “let the people feed them.” Visitors can buy bags full of nuts, leeks, and other munchies and throw fistful after fistful at animals who have learned to open their hands and mouths for the bounty. Staffers—guards, let alone a zoologist or two—are nowhere to be found. This is crappy animal husbandry.

Absolutely neglected were the poor otters. When they saw me, they rushed over and tried to climb the walls of their waterless, foodless, stinking cement pit, desperate to escape, pleading in otter chatter to be rescued. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.