By now I am sure that you are getting the general picture that my older sister and I were very different characters. She has always been a bit of a follower while I have always been a bit of a leader. The only times that I can recall her taking on the role of being the leader of our tiny pack was if she had a horribly dangerous or stupid idea. These were the times that Ophelia seemed to perk right up and want me to go someplace with her. Why is that you ask? I have come to the conclusion that this is because I am her voice of reason and there is no sense in doing something dangerous unless someone in your party is constantly reminding you of the dangers you are sure to face.

It was at the age of six years old that I assumed my role as the protector of Ophelia. While Ophelia was older she had retained a lot of book smarts and no street smarts whatsoever. I, on the other hand, had attained a healthy amount of both kinds of knowledge. We were going on a road trip to some place called San Diego, California one long weekend and it was exciting! This was the first time in a long while that we had been on a road trip to a completely different state. We went somewhere almost every summer. We traveled to Canyon De Che, the Grand Canyon, Montezuma’s Castle, the petrified forest, to see where the four corners meet and Monument Valley to name just a few places, but all of these places were relatively local in comparison.

During the 90’s my mother worked for the only major home phone company in the United States and she made $20 per hour to talk to people. My dad was an electrician and while there were often times between when a job would end and when another job would start up again he made a good chunk of money a year as well. However, we never really spent money with reckless abandon, which is a skill that I am glad my parents bestowed upon me. In fact, we were so cheap that whenever we went on long road trips we rarely stayed at hotels or motels. Instead like many American families we chose to stop at rest areas, sleep until first light and continue on our way. No camping for this family just good old-fashioned car sleeping. I doubt that my parents would do this now considering all the murders you hear about at rest stops but it was a simpler time.

My father was also not the kind of guy to stop at a local Denny’s or chain restaurant either. We would eat at truck stops or the weirdest, seediest, diners you could find. To this day if I see a lesser-known diner I would rather stop in there and grab a bite to eat than make my way to the closest Red Robin or Olive Garden. The people are usually more than friendly and while their coffee may be burnt I’ve always kind of liked it that way. And I enjoy the feeling of getting to know these strangers on a personal level. However, to look at it from their perspective people like me have been and always will be just pleasant passersby in their own lives.

As a side note I would like to state that my father is not the best driver despite the fact that he thinks he is. He consistently pays little attention to what’s in front of him and instead spends time seeing the sites on his way to our destination. “Oh look at that hawk!” he’d scream and veer off into oncoming traffic on a two-lane highway. He refused to rest except for a few hours a day and at least two or three times a night we would all be thrust into waking life by the divots on the side of the road. You know, the ones placed there to keep you awake because you clearly aren’t paying attention to your one job in the moment; which is driving.

My father was also incredibly great at making his wife and children hold off on having to pee for miles on end. However, whenever he had to “take a piss” as he would say he’d just pull off to the side of the road. One time I remember holding off on using the restroom for over 50 miles because we were just going to “wait until we got to the next town”, which he had stated two or three times, before my mother laid down her iron fist and made him pull off at the next closest town. You know that feeling where you have to urinate so badly that it literally hurts to walk anywhere? If you don’t then great! Pray you never have to.

On our trip to San Diego I remember waking up in the car despite the fact that I do not remember falling asleep. However, this time we were not sleeping at a rest area instead we were sleeping in a parking lot. It was warm so my father had rolled his window as if he had complete trust in the people of this city. How could he just trust people like that? I, myself, trust no one and even at an early age I realized that this was a stupid move on his part. My mother was awake in the front seat like the early bird she is and Ophelia was groggily dreaming next to me. The front windows had a sunshade in them to block the sunlight and my mother had strung blankets around the backseat windows so that any miscreants would not see her precious cargo asleep in the backseat. As an impatient child after I awoke I began speaking with my mother gradually getting louder so that my father would wake up and we could continue on our journey to our ultimate destination.

Eventually my boisterous voice awoke Ophelia and then my father who reluctantly got out of the car to urinate. All the while the rest of us individuals without penises were stuck hoping and praying for a bathroom until we found a place to eat breakfast. It’s a wonder we never wound up with a urinary tract infection, bladder infection, or kidney infection from all of that holding off on using the restroom.

I knew that we had arrived in San Diego because as I rolled the windows down in my mother’s Chevy Celebrity and I could smell the sea salt in the air. It’s a strange thing the way that vacations tend to have a distinct smell attached to them. The morning air was cool, fresh; tinged with sunshine, salt spray, suntan lotion and adventure. As we passed shops, parked cars, and throngs of people all in a hurry on their way to some other destination it hit me that I had no idea why we were coming to this San Diego. What was here that was so special? My mom burst the silence open like she were a popping a balloon with a pin,

“We’re here girls! We’re here! We made it San Diego!” she said.

Looking back her overzealousness was probably just the excitement that our father had gotten us there in one peace.

“Great! Now what are we going to do? What is there to do here?” I asked, which I see now probably sounded rude but I honestly didn’t know why we had traveled so far. Was it to the see the street that we were driving on?

“Well we are going to go to SeaWorld, they have a beach and a zoo.” she replied.

First off, I had no idea what SeaWorld was so my feeble brain tried to make sense of it. What I came up with was that it was obviously a place where we had bottled up the sea and all of its organisms. Ugh! How rude! Clearly at the time I was unaware that there is more than one sea and that there is a difference between a sea and an ocean. However, ironically I also wasn’t very far from the truth either. Second of all I didn’t know what a beach was or why that seemed to be important to me, and lastly Phoenix had a zoo. Why did we come all this way just to see a zoo? However, I cooled it on asking the questions because I could see that my parents were slightly flustered.

The trouble all started at SeaWorld, which as a kid was pretty awesome! They had aquariums full of sea turtles, corals, sea stars, anemones, sharks, stingrays, manta rays, and tropical fish. However, their collection was severely lacking in mermaids. I had never seen an aquarium before and it was magical! I had never seen a sea star but I remember configuring how they had arrived in the oceans. For the longest time I truly believed that sea stars were really just shooting stars that had fallen from the heavens on high and landed in the ocean. Here there were tiny pieces of the universe that had been misplaced and that was beyond magnificent. Obviously this was and is not the case but as a kid this made the most logical sense to me! Why else would they be called sea stars? Duh!

However, as you can imagine the real stars and showstoppers of SeaWorld were their sea mammals. They had seals, sea lions, walruses, dolphins, and of course their main attraction killer whales. I want you to keep in mind that at the time Free Willy was quite possibly the whole countries favorite movie so this was a pretty amazing feeling. We sat pretty far back in the audience so there was no splashing for us. However, the show consisted of two or three orcas in a small pool and two or three trainers riding these amazing creatures just like the little boy in Free Willy rode his orca friend.

Unfortunately, I was far too young to understand the concept of how large these animals were, which was really half of where everyone else’s awe and wonderment was coming from. Not only that I lacked the understanding of how horrible it was that these orcas had been harvested from the wild the way you would harvest corn from a field.

These orcas had been herded away from their mothers in the wild, usually around the age of two years old. The thing about these sea mammals is that they are incredibly intelligent and share almost the same amount of understanding as a human two-year old would at that age. Imagine being ripped away from your mother and all of your extended family at the age of two. Then being placed inside a small tank with other individuals that were taken from their homes all over the world. You don’t share their same dialect so you can’t even communicate your most basic feelings or thoughts. How would you have faired?

Now add to this that you have been kept in captivity for 25 years or more and people want to release into the wild without the basic skills to hunt for yourself because your mother didn’t get a chance to teach you those skills. What do you think the likelihood of your survival after release is? Do you think that your pod will remember you? Or will you be alone? Or will you attempt to find humans because you have grown desperate for their attention and comfort?

It is easy to see now how barbaric it is to trap such large, intelligent, social, and culturally complex organisms in a tank. This simple act speaks volumes about the way that humans view the world. The world is something to be conquered, trampled under foot, and trapped for our own entertainment and that makes me kind of sick to be a part of such a selfish and destructive species. This harvesting of orcas was senseless and cruel and has ultimately contributed to the collapse of Washington State’s resident orca population. Therefore, it is an obviously near and dear subject to my heart so I apologize for my tangent.

Despite these realizations as an adult I was mystified by these amazingly gentle looking giants. You stare into the eyes of most mammals and you see a little bit of yourself in them. Is this not the reason that we keep cats and dogs as common household pets? They remind us of that childish sense of adventure and discovery that we long ago traded for knowledge and responsibility. We grow these interspecies connections and then we are flabbergasted when other mammals do the same thing (i.e. cheetahs and dogs, bunnies and cats, orcas and humans etc). I was astonished and excited to go see and do more things in this, my own version of Wonderland. However, my parents were tired and needed a beer after all of the excitement. Ophelia was playing in one of those damn fountains that kids can play in. You know, the ones with the holes in the ground that shoot water out at you from below periodically. My parents pulled me aside,

“We’ll be right back. Watch over your sister!” they stated as they hurried away from all of the stress and commotion that hundreds of children can make.

All right, I can handle this no problem I thought as I began to turn around towards the fountain. She’s older and bigger than me and where could she possibly go in the time that it takes them to come back? That was a fantastic question. They had given me one job to do and as I turned around Ophelia was nowhere to be found. Apparently she did not find the fountain as amusing as all of the other dim-witted children here. What was I going to do? My parents were going to officially kill me! This was it for me, and all because my stupid sister couldn’t stay in one place for just a few minutes! I searched high and low for her within the same general vicinity until I eventually gave up and dissolved into a pile of tears on a bench for fear of my parents’ retribution.

My mother returned first carrying her overpriced beer in her hand and as she approached her expression turned from content to fearful in an instant.

“Where’s your older sister?” she asked.

I am sure that she was hoping I was going to say using the restroom but it came out in a wail,

“I lost her. I don’t know where she went. I was talking to you and then I turned around and she was gone.”

There was no pity. My mother immediately went from zero to 60 in three seconds.

“What do you mean you lost her? How could you lose her?” she screamed at me, the panic mounting in her voice.

My dad came upon the scene and set his beer down on the bench as well. He reprimanded my mother for screaming at me and we began the search for Ophelia. My parents abandoned their beer at the bench as my dad hoisted me onto his shoulders for a better view and we began the search for her highness.

I was so mad at her! How could she have done this to me? She had officially ruined my vacation by getting lost! I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were so worried about. First of all Ophelia always had a knack for being found because she was horrible at hide and go seek and second of all if she were smart she would have gone to the lost and found office. Frankly that’s where I would go because I was lost and I did intend to be found, right? Isn’t that what the lost and found is really for anyways? The thought had not crossed my mind until very recently that what my parents were concerned about was my older sister being abducted by a sex pervert, being sold into the sex slave trade, or being kidnapped by a weird family that steals kids to raise them as their own. Man, sometimes I wish I could go back to a time where I was too naïve to think about that kind of shit.

As I bounced on my father’s shoulders scanning the crowd for Ophelias’ sign of life I saw something strange. It appeared to be a large and very wet child crouching underneath a mushroom statue cowering away from all of the other children. Yes, I knew this coward well and she was Ophelia. I screamed from on high,

“I see her! I see her!”

My mother answered my call, “Where?! Where God dammit?!”

“Under that red, yellow spotted, mushroom! She’s crouched underneath it!” I screamed.

“What direction?” my mother replied irritated.

“To our right!” my dad answered, “She’s fine. I can see her from here.”

My mother scooped her into her arms, gave her a huge hug and my dad set me down only to do the same thing. I was now standing alone watching this family of mine rejoice and despite the fact that I had found my older sister no one was thanking me and it had suddenly become all my fault.

“Don’t ever do that again to us!” my mother sobbed, “You had us scared to death.”

My father reciprocated with his sullen expression, “We’re glad that you’re okay.”

I sat on the bench and did not hug Ophelia instead my mother proceeded to ream me for losing my older sister. Ophelia sat on the bench next to me really hamming it up about how scared she was that she was lost. My father had gone to see if their overpriced beer was still on the bench where they had left it and it was not, which only added fuel to my mother’s fire.

The whole experience left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Looking back now I can see that the mistake was clearly on my parents’ part. Why couldn’t one of them get their beer and the other one stay to watch us? What a poor decision on their part. However, in that moment I was angry because my parents were always saying things like “Don’t worry you’re older sister will protect you.” But the truth is that I was the leader, I was the older sister, maybe not in age but definitely in maturity. Why else would you ask a six year old to take care of their nine-year old sister? This experience would unfortunately define Ophelia and I’s relationship for the rest of our lives. I was her protector and she was the one who chose to make all of the mistakes. There was no one around to protect me not then and certainly not now.

The hypocrisy did not stop at SeaWorld on our trip. The very next day we went to the San Diego Zoo, which for me is almost like traveling to Israel for adults. I have always connected with animals other than humans on a much deeper level and therefore I had no intentions of waiting around and listening to my older sister and mother bitch until we found a gift shop. By God I was going to enjoy my trip to the zoo come hell or high water and I did just that!

Despite the fact that tensions were high after losing Ophelia at SeaWorld the day before that didn’t stop them from losing me. While my family was debating the finer points of the zoo and its delicately handcrafted topiaries made to look like exotic animals I was on a mission. I needed to find the white Siberian tigers! Of all the terrestrial animals on this planet none is fiercer than the tiger. Many people think that the lion is the king of the jungle but in reality lions live in African grasslands, not the jungle. Tigers live in the jungle and practically dwarf a lion in size. Also male lions leave the hunting up to the females of their tribe and exist as pack animals whereas tigers live a mainly solitary life. The long and the short of it is that large cats have always been my favorite land predators and therefore I was going to stop at nothing to find them.

I had passed a sign with big green lettering “Siberian Tiger” it read with an arrow pointing the opposite direction of my quaint little family. My parents were still livid with me for losing my older sister and frankly they were more interested in finding something else to do than admiring the zoos caged inhabitants, so why not just slip away? It isn’t like they would miss me. I could just find the tigers and hide in the zoo until it closed and live here forever. No one would know.

So I struck out on my adventure to find these giants. I had walked a really long distance and the sign still said that I needed to keep going. It felt like I would never find my tiger friends. That’s when I stopped and asked a very large African American man if he knew where the white tigers were. I was very little so I had to tug on his pant leg to get his attention. He was very tall and he looked down at me with a smile and a gap in his two front teeth. With a slightly high-pitched voice he said, “Keep going that way.” I was unaware but I would later find out from my father that this was boxing legend Mike Tyson.

My father was not far behind me after he realized that I had slipped away. He jogged into the exhibit just after I had trotted down the path according to Mr. Tyson’s direction. My dad says that he and Mr. Tyson exchanged glances as he tried to catch his breath and Mr. Tyson replied, “She went that way to see the tigers” and pointed towards the path leading to the tiger enclosure.

As I approached closer to the tiger enclosure a woman’s voice stood out in the crowd, “They’re starting to feed the tigers, Jim. I think we’d better leave.” This woman’s concern only spurred my excitement and I rushed to stand up next to the glass. They fed these tigers huge pieces of steak and it was a beautiful sight to behold. Many people stood in fear and disgust whereas I saw only wonderment at the grace and beauty of these striped giants with their bright blue eyes. At this point I could feel my dad standing behind me as he gasped to capture the air around him into his lungs. As a smoker this jaunt probably almost killed him but I didn’t know that at the time. Instead of immediately yelling he also became captivated by the colossal creatures having their midday snack before us. After the tigers had finished their meals they decided to take a nap and it was time to leave them in peace. My father opened his mouth to scold me but I interrupted him first,

“Sorry dad. I just wanted to see the white tigers.”

“I know.” he replied with a grin and hoisted me onto his shoulders, “Let’s go find your mom and sister.”

As I bounced on my dad’s shoulders I had a birds eye view of all of the exhibits and it was awesome. We passed the exhibit where Mr. Tyson was standing. My dad and I must have made eye contact with him at the same time because we both let out a

“Thank you for the directions.”

Mr. Tyson responded with a chuckle, “No problem. Glad you found her and I’m glad you found the tigers.”

I don’t remember much else about the day except that it ended abruptly after my little adventure. My mother and sister were tired and my dad simply caved because they both needed a smoke. I remember being appalled that no one seemed upset that I had gone off on my own to run away. Granted they didn’t know I was planning on running away they seemed way more upset when Ophelia had gone missing than when I went missing. What did a kid have to do to get noticed in this family?