43 Minutes With... Happy

Meditations on loneliness with a 50-year-old Elephas maximus.

- By Molly Young

ONE RECENT MORNING, I zipped toward the Bronx in a Lyft outfitted with a murder room’s worth of plastic. My task: to seek the meaning of solitude from an elderly female who has lived alone, more or less, for 15 years.

Her name is Happy, and she is an Asian elephant. Happy was captured, along with six others, in the early 1970s, “probably in Thailand,” according to The Atlantic. The calves, named after Disney’s seven dwarves, were sent to the U.S. and dispersed among zoos and circuses. Happy and a companion, Grumpy, ended up at the Bronx Zoo. The facility has had a number of elephants over the years, but they have mostly died off, and today there are just two: Happy and a second Elephas maximus named Patty. Owing to interpersonal conflicts of the past, Happy and Patty are kept in separate enclosures. “I always say they’re like sisters who don’t want to share the same room,” Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, told me.

Zoo personnel travel the property’s 265 acres on golf carts, and it was on the back of Breheny’s cart that I flew past flamingos and sea lions and, for some reason, a kid wearing a bucket over his head. The zoo was open and teeming with visitors. I hadn’t been submerged in a crowd in months; it was intoxicating. Peacocks roamed. The head coverings worn by the females of New York City dazzled in their variety: Hasidic, Muslim, sun-avoidant, sporty, political, fashion-oriented. Dippin’ Dots everywhere.