So, You Followed Your Husband to Hadley – Lake Lennucks and He Still Won't Take You to the Animal Emporium?

Listen, girl, Hadley – Lake Lennucks isn't exactly a place twentysomethings flock to. As your new husband surely knew when he proposed this move, most people your age are moving to the big city, not away from it. But that doesn't mean you have to feel like you're stuck living in the old folks’ home.Hadley – Lake Lennucks is one of the Adirondacks’ top tourist towns, which means there's plenty to get up to. We've got hiking, swimming, rafting, tea rooms, arcades, Victorian photo parlors, a spa — even a river cruise. Whatever you want, you can do, including checking out all the amazing animals at our local big cat zoo: Boyd's Corner's Exotic Animal Emporium. How many times did your man sell you on a date here, back before you two actually moved?But if your man seems intent on sitting around like a bump on a log, you may start wondering why you two moved all the way out here in the first place. After all, back in the big city, couch-potatoing was the only thing you guys could afford to do.So, if your man refuses to pop the only question that matters — “Hey, babe, want to go to the Animal Emporium today?” — here are a few ideas to get you both moving in the same direction (toward Boyd's Corner, obviously).After all, maybe your new husband feels bad that you dropped literally everything — your three-bedroom (and both roommates) in Flatbush, your budding career as a vintage lounge singer, your friends, your volunteer work, your city-based hobbies. Meanwhile, he had everything literally handed to him the moment he agreed to move back to his hometown — his job at the family restaurant, a cute little fixer-upper house, a secondhand BMW, even — by his Monopoly Man father and the entire extended Montague family.Yeah, maybe he does feel bad. Bad that all his promises have so far come to nothing. “Oh, you'll make friends so easily!” With whom? There's no one your age to befriend! “You'll get a singing job in no time!” Yeah, at his dad's Food Event, but who the fuck else in Warren County is looking for lounge acts? Why can't nepotism help you too? “We'll spend so much time together — we'll do so many new things. Hiking. Scenic mountain drives. Tubing. Whitewater rafting. Hell, I'll take you to the Animal Emporium. You'll love the Animal Emporium,” he said. But will you? You wouldn't know, now would you?No, no. You're being unfair. You agreed to this move. You wanted this move. And you know the house and car were handed to you, too. So . . . okay, tone it down a notch. Maybe ask him about himself. How's he doing? You two have been here for only six months now. Is he feeling unsettled? After all, home renovations aren't easy — and while, yeah, you're doing most of the metaphorical heavy lifting, you can't do everything (including actual heavy lifting) and he often comes home from work just to roll into doing more work. Aren't you supposed to have dinner waiting on the table for him or something? Maybe a more experienced wife — one who has been a wife for longer than six months and that one week spent honeymooning across France on Daddy Montague's dime — would know how to do this without both a properly functioning stove and a kitchen table. But hey, he brings leftover food home with him every night from the Food Event. Maybe he's tired of filet mignon and lobster mac and cheese?Nope. You're being unfair again. Maybe he's overwhelmed working for his dad. Managing a restaurant's finances — and stock, and catering, and special events — probably isn't easy, and his dad has been talking about opening a second location recently.Ask him if it's hard being back in his hometown again. Maybe what for you is a step forward is for him a step back in time. He's got friends he grew up with here — some of whom have never left — and you've seen how he struggles to talk to them sometimes, how he falls back into old thought and speech patterns and then turns to you, startled, because he never thinks of himself as a “bro” — a “Broseph,” a “Broleo” — with you. His grandma still pinches his cheeks, even though he's nearly thirty, and his mom talks to him sometimes like he's five — “Leo, baby, you gotta stop leaving your water cups all over the house” — and sometimes like he's fifty — “Leonardo Luca, why haven't you set up your retirement account yet? What's your beautiful wife gonna say when you're sixty-five and can't afford to retire?”That's gotta be frustrating, right? You're frustrated by it, and you're just the “beautiful wife.”Or, you know, maybe he's just a butthole who thinks now you're married, he doesn't have to take you on dates.Okay, so maybe he's overwhelmed and needs a break. He's too tired to plan a date, but you're no trad wife. You can do it, can't you?Buy tickets online — maybe splurge for the Sloth Encounter (it's for four people, but it'll still be fun with just two!). The website says plan to stay several hours or so, and to avoid the crowds, get there when they open at ten — which means plenty of time to head up to the Traveler's Rest for a nice lunch (that, you know, isn't the Food Event). He'll still have the whole afternoon to himself.Then, on Saturday morning, just tell him to get ready — you have a surprise planned. Everybody loves a surprise, right?So, okay, he refuses to go. Has plans already with his parents, and insists he can't cancel. Even though he was stuck at the Food Event till well past closing last night; his dad, on a whim, wouldn't let anyone leave till the walk-in freezer was deep-cleaned.But, girl, you can still go by yourself. The tickets are still valid. He isn't stopping you; he just can't (or won't) come. Get brave and get going. The Animal Emporium awaits!Yeah, you've heard the stories of Hadley – Lake Lennucks's rival tourist attractions — Haight's Corner and his Rollercoaster and Thrill Park, versus Boyd's Corner's big cat zoo. How they're situated on opposite, otherwise isolated hills. How Boyd and Haight built their empires to spite each other — and now everyone in the sister towns has their favorite, which they cling to (half in jest) to fuel that rivalry. And maybe you'd like to weigh in, and have an opinion, and be a part of this stupid feud, too. It's no fun being left on the outside of a long-running, town-wide inside joke.But what's more, you could never have afforded these tickets in the city, let alone the added extras. And even if you could have paid your own way, not one of your friends would have gone with you. You'd follow them all the way to Brooklyn, or the Bronx, for happy hour pricing, but in all the time you lived there, they couldn't be assed to go a block out of their way for a museum or a park or any new thing you wanted to do — something that just maybe, if you tried it, would mean something to you.They'd laugh at you now, if they knew what you were up to.When you park the BMW, odds are good you're going to be like “What the fuck?” Because of this feud — the hype around these institutions — you're probably going to be expecting, you know, a zoo, not a dirt parking lot and a dinky path past some ramshackle sheds. Yep, it looks like someone's backyard, and dollars to donuts you're going to wonder if you're about to be a witness to obvious animal abuse. Maybe this is why Leo hasn't wanted to take you, once push came to shove — because how are you gonna look at him, and your new town, the same again knowing they're all complicit in rampant animal abuse?But listen. They already have your money. Why not just show your e-ticket to the yawning man working the turnstile? If it's as bad as you fear, you can leave. Besides, if you need to file a complaint with the ASPCA or wherever, it's best they know what they're dealing with.Doubled-up chain-link fences enclose “habitats” the size of your postage-stamp backyard, and restless big cats pace along them. You're the only one here, and the tigers huff, as if to say they will not be your tourist attraction. In a cage near the entrance, some kind of sickly looking dogs — dingoes, maybe — trudge back to their plywood den. The only sign tells you not to feed them — though with what? And why would you? — because they're under veterinary care. And no wonder they're ailing, wasting away, with their only company the geese and drooping peacocks and buzzards roosting overhead in the trees.In the adjacent row, over the duck pond and past the shell-scarred and shambling tortoise, a baboon shrieks and rattles its confines, and this sign warns you not to make eye contact. These creatures, it says, become easily agitated and quick to take offense — and who wouldn't be, when they're meant, by nature, to live not down here, stuck with man, but high among the branches and leaves?Go ahead: Think about shrieking, too — just like you did on the drive over here.Instead, you're drawn to a tucked-away glass enclosure, near the vending machines, and the tiny sun-colored tiger hobbling within upon a narrow, slatted boardwalk. There's something wrong with her back legs, her hips dropped low to the ground, her stricken tail quivering.“What have they done to you?” you ask, this poor trapped soul, stuck behind glass and then ignored. Left to wallow and founder, broken by her years bound in by the narrow perimeters of Hadley – Lake Lennucks.You turn to go. They can keep your money — and choke on it.A teen in a bright-red shirt comes bouncing up, beaming a golden grin. He introduces himself as Cox, this year's intern, and laughs, and slips through a door into the enclosure. Bouncing still, he tells you about this tiger, named Edith, to whom he beckons, and she — miraculously — limps right on over, to rub her cheek against his fingers, and — you're flummoxed — you think she even purrs.You've never heard a tiger purr before, you say, or seen one this up close, cuddling a zookeeper and ready to play. Tigers can't “purr,” he corrects you, as she thumps to the floor of her enclosure, and asks, inexplicably, for belly rubs. But rather, they “chuff,” in which they blow shortly through their nose, often lifting their head; a greeting, a comfort, a sound of joy. Stroking her red-striped stomach, he tells you she's a Golden Tabby Bengal, and like the famed white tigers, this gentle sunburst color is due to a recessive gene.You stand there, clutching your little park map, and she rolls over and hops, heavily, her back legs dragging, back onto the plank trail. The teen says she limps and hobbles because she lived the first years of her life in a backyard cage, under someone's porch — because someone thought, as you have, in daydreams, that a tiger would make a great pet, and then actually went out and had to learn the hard way.“Mr. Boyd rescued her,” he says; he blows her a kiss as he steps back through the door and bolts it. “He rescued all of them. We're the number one wildlife sanctuary upstate. This here's Dumas,” he says, pointing, and just like that, you're on his tour. “Our ti-liger.” A cross between a tiger and a liger (already tiger and lion), and a victim of irresponsible breeding.There are Barbary Lions brought back from the edge of extinction, and white tigers rescued from photo op companies; even the dogs at the entrance — New Guinea Singing Dogs — came from another zoo, forced to close its gates. Big cats play with cardboard boxes — soaked in donated perfumes and essential oils; “enrichment” he calls it, and most enclosures hold more than one. The white-handed gibbon habitat boasts homemade bunting and paper ribbon, a sign that reads Happy Birthday, George & Eliot. He says they're hosting a party at noon and invites you to join; you can buy a feed cup in the gift shop, he says, and throw them “a confetti” of peanuts.“Look there,” he says, of a little double-wide at the corner of the property. “That's where Boyd lives, with his son, Ranlo. I know a lot of guests think we look sketchy as hell, but that's only because Mr. Boyd spends every penny we earn on the animals, not aesthetics. One leopard came to us with a severely broken leg — we thought it'd have to be amputated, maybe even put the poor thing down. But Boyd took care of him day and night and hired a specialist with the funds earmarked for repaving the parking lot; heck, I think Ranlo even offered to dip into his college fund.”“Did it survive?” you ask. “Did it keep its leg?”“Oh yeah,” Cox says, and changes course. “He's right over here — Dostoyevsky.” He's cozily snoozing against his glass windowpane, all four of his legs in the air. “We're like a big family, here. Us and the animals,” he says, and you feel it — this place that is not the prison you first thought, but a home. A chance at a new and better life.They don't let you do the Sloth Encounter alone. You and Cox are joined by the man who'd been working the ticket booth — and this, you learn is Boyd himself — and a bevy of volunteers, bored while the park has slowed, post-season, and they all laugh with you as you coo at the little sloth hanging upside down from a rope line, and they pet his bristly fur with you and snap photos with your phone and swap stories of zookeeping wins and woes.And you remember now why you left the city — why you're so glad you did. You could never have had this in the city — not you — because, even if, magically, you and your friends had been able to go, and to make it past the parking lot, and the shabby structures, not one of them would have had a kind word to say about any of it. Not about Cox, nor about Edith the chuffing tiger, not even this contented, leisurely sloth, unhurriedly accepting your proffered watermelon, and munching. They were so relentlessly negative, in the city, and never wanted to try new things.And, you know, you became a naysayer there, too.“Are you looking for new volunteers?” you ask.You go home singing. You sing for the first time in months, excepting prime rib nights at the Food Event. They are always looking for new volunteers.Your husband emerges from the dining room smiling, happy to see you so happy.“How did it go?” he asks, and then his gaze drops, to the plastic feed cup you brought home as a souvenir. His smile, too, drops when recognizes the emblazoned logo: the big cats prowling the bridge above the River Ames.“Your surprise was the Animal Emporium?” he asks, his composure breaking.You nod and add, “And the Sloth Encounter.” But you don't say it shittily — rather, earnestly, gleefully, so eager are you to tell him all about it. The names of the animals and their stories and the kindness of the volunteers — complete strangers — and their enthusiasm for your enthusiasm and how you think you just might want to volunteer, too.He tells you that's great, that he's so glad you had such a good time, that you should volunteer if that's something you'd like to do, and you hug him and he hugs you. But, you notice, he won't quite meet your eye, and when he thinks you're not looking, the corners of his mouth pull down.“What did you and your parents do today?” you ask — again, not bitchily; you do want to know. And that's when you hear the fumbling in the unpacked dining room, and the footsteps, and:“Leo, baby, what's taking so long? Honey,” your mother-in-law appears and says to you, “come on in! Our Leo has been working on a surprise for you.”You look to him, running his fingers through his thick okay, he says, and the whole thing no big your her “He was so she tells you, and your you to the dining room a dining room not just in but a dining room moving boxes that the are gone — — and in their place are and a table a vintage which your the and kitchen unpacked He you to look inside the big — and there, and new to you, is a set of better than the set of six you at the & in when you and your first moved or for that could a of and your says, “Our gift to this here is your says, her the – dining room with place and — the table set for could right into your where did you get you and while your to — be the your says; too. you some Mr. Montague — he tells you how they went to a living in — an moving together to a retirement home — and up their dining room set in its Because — and he — he just couldn't live the way you two have been a old in of the It's the same way he lived in his in and thought this move would mean for you two a dining room, and between you. And he was — he was — that if he do something about it you'd be out the door back to the city — and he couldn't take that of another And you, to cup his cheeks, have to that you about the Animal Emporium exactly the he is he it. wanted to take you there as as the house last he says, when your file back in, with and and of “We'll the for the stove kiss him and tell him it — even a to — you two will get to on a working and the time there's a room to do up or you'll be there, too. And as for the Animal Emporium again, you say, you just the your family, when they come to and your friends from or new you and new you meet — at the Food Event or — tell them about the Animal Emporium. the word — you're in Boyd's Corner