A Man’s Quest to Be “At One” With a Tiger

In 2012, David Villalobos dove into the Siberian tiger pit at the Bronx Zoo. The author retraces Villalobos’s steps in an attempt to understand the impulse that drove him to get close to a predator.

This piece is part of a series called True Story Classics, a special collaboration from Narratively and our partners at Creative Nonfiction in which we’re republishing classic pieces from the True Story archive. True Story was an endeavor published by the editors of Creative Nonfiction magazine showcasing one exceptional longform essay each month in a unique pocket-size format. This story was originally published as “Trip to the Zoo” in True Story’s 2nd issue.

On September 21, 2012, twenty-five-year-old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a four-dollar ticket for a ride on the Wild Asia Monorail. The ride, built in 1977, promises on the zoo’s website to take the visitor “above mud wallows and pastures, forests and riverbanks to the heart of Wild Asia.” After leaving the station, the train first crosses the mud wallows of the Bronx River, a shallow and polluted urban waterway, before making its way quickly into said heart of Wild Asia for a twenty-minute ride.

In September 2014, when I took the ride, the conductor and tour guide, Devin, a twentysomething kid in khaki pants and a retail haircut, told us that the Bronx River was home to a pair of beavers, the first wild beavers spotted in the river in hundreds of years. One of them, Devin told us, was named José. The other beaver’s name, voted on by the public, was originally Justin Beaver, but then they realized Justin was likely female and changed it to Justine.

Everyone laughed at Devin’s joke and stared down, searching for the beavers below, hoping to catch sight of the local native celebrities. The monorail’s cars are built so that everyone sits on the same side, facing out to the left of the track instead of toward the front of the train; and though the train cars have a single rear wall and roofs with translucent skylights, they are otherwise open to the elements, bordered only by a short railing of metal tubes. You ride along in what feels like a moving couch or section of sports bleachers. On this day, we saw no celebrity beavers.

Devin drove the train, talked into a microphone, and played some prerecorded narratives about the animals and the zoo’s conservation efforts. The track circles the perimeter of the Wild Asia exhibits, and it feels like you’re waiting for a show of some kind. When he took the ride, Villalobos positioned himself in the last car, far from the conductor, and listened patiently along with the rest of the visitors, waiting for his chance to express himself.