The Most Fun I Had
The Most Fun I’ve Had as a Dad Was Breaking Into an Abandoned Zoo
I AM NOT a particularly adventurous person. I have a gluten allergy. I can’t go outside without slathering my many high-risk moles with SPF 1,000. I once brought my own sponge to the office kitchen because I felt my coworkers weren’t properly caring for the communal one. Anyway, I’m a lot of fun.
I am also, however, a dad. One who doesn’t want his children to inherit his limp personality. So, on rare occasions, I allow my kids to talk me into doing something way outside my comfort zone. A few years ago, that actually involved committing a crime.
This was several months into the COVID pandemic. I wanted to get my then-6-year-old daughter out of the house, so I took her to the most open-air place I could think of L.A.’s historic Griffith Park.
Griffith Park is home to the hollywood sign, the L.A. Zoo, and the original L.A. Zoo, which was abandoned in 1966 but still stands to this day. It is, to put it mildly, it’s creepy.
As my daughter and I hiked past the old zoo’s boarded-up remains that day, she noticed that a section of the chain-link fence had been pulled back and there was a hole just wide enough to allow passage for a 6-year-old and her gluten-intolerant father.
Even from the outside, I could see these cages were dank, filthy, and likely used as a place for local vagabonds. Plus, this was during that era of quarantine when we were still wiping down our apples with Clorox wipes, and I couldn’t imagine the CDC would condone rolling around in a turn-of-the-century chimp enclosure.
Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to not go in—but if you’re a parent, you know the power of your front-toothless child beaming at you while shouting, “Don’t be scared, Dad, let’s go!”
So we did go—even though I was scared—and the experience was somehow even more terrifying than I anticipated. As we crawled through empty beer cans and mummified tiger stool, we were greeted by a 10-foot painting of a skull and a gallery of graffiti. We then discovered that this was actually not just a cage but a series of interlocking hallways where various sets of rusty bars could be raised and lowered.
The whole place felt like a cross between a Russian gulag and Rob Zombie’s guesthouse. My pulse was pounding. I was convinced that at any moment, all the cages would slam shut. But then something even more unexpected happened: A thrill set in. All of a sudden, we were laughing and joking and talking a mile a minute. Yes, we were trapped in the Arkham Asylum of a haunted ostrich farm, but we were also having a blast. I think my daughter was delighted by the immense novelty of the situation—not just the location, but the fact that she was doing something risky with her dad, a man who uses three different types of eczema cream.
Was this illegal? Sure. Was this marginal danger worth seeing my daughter’s eyes light up because she was doing something exciting with me? Absolutely.
