Woodland Park is a park in the city. It’s very nice, having been created more than a hundred years ago by a man named Guy Phinney. Trees that were planted there in Mr. Phinney’s time have grown up, so the whole park has an aura of age about it that is rare in a city as young as this one. It’s on one side of a ridge (named after Mr. Phinney), and is large enough so that the city slopes around it in odd ways.
The city slopes around it but its roads do not, and so the city designers created a bevy of overpasses all around Woodland Park, in places where the hill was too steep to change, or where they needed to put an underpass for the smooth flow of traffic. These passes are old, old, old - you can tell by the quality of the stonework on their sidewalks and railings. It is solid and confident, like those Depression-era industrial powerhouses you still see in odd places.
Sometime later but still awhile ago, the city, or a group of rogue citizens, painted the walls of these underpasses. Being near the zoo, they were painted with animals, and each had a different style and different animals on it. I remember each one. When I was a child, my family approached the zoo from many different ways - so many different ways, in fact, that it seemed like there was no end to the underpasses of Woodland Park, or to the animals on those underpasses. Even so, I had a favorite, and would thrill with a secret delight when we passed by it.
Being an adult now, and possessed of many of the faculties thereto, I set out to chronicle these paintings. This one is my favorite:
Just a couple of weeks ago it had all the pictures I remembered. There was a background of vivid colors, like those in my banner except deeper and richer, like the colors you see in dreams, like the colors of artists who aren’t afraid. There was an enormous brown chicken in profile, an elephant coming towards you, glowing and just slightly out of proportion, and a golden monkey that was sitting with its head turned to look at you. Its eyes weren’t sad, exactly, but there was a soul behind them.
This next one is next to the zoo. It had zebras on it that were blended into tall grass. The zebras were painted in black, and the grass was painted in a pale green, but the strokes for each were identical.
There was a subtle transition in the background color, from a pale green to a blue. It looked like the zebras were on the edge of an African dawn that was too deep to be painted.
This one is to the south. I don’t remember what it had. You can see where they painted it over.
And so this is the only one remaining as it was:
When I first noticed that my favorite had been painted over, I set out to chronicle the others before they disappeared, too. I failed, for the most part. I was too late to take pictures, and my words have not described how beautiful I found them to be. Why did this happen? I don’t know. They weren’t dirty or anything, nor covered in graffiti. They were old, I guess, and they didn’t match, and that elephant was out of proportion anyway. I’m sorry they were painted over.