One More Spring
(February 2017)
2: Zoo Trip and Sunset
Mabel was antsy. She wanted to do something. She didn't know what, but something. Maybe, she said, a road trip.
Alex and Wanda had already allowed Dipper and Mabel to drive all the way up to Oregon and back, so they couldn't very well forbid them to take a day trip into San Francisco.
As McGucket would have said, it looked mathematically feasible that weekend in February. Dipper had caught up with his homework the previous night, and as of the previous day, his second track meet was behind him. He took another first for the two-hundred-meter dash, though overall the team didn't quite measure up to that great first trial of the season, but they had tried hard and added respectably to their wins column.
However, Mabel was feeling a little blue, and after breakfast on Sunday, she had come to his room, where he lay on his unmade bed,writing in his latest Journal and, hanging on the door frame as if she were in danger of sudden collapse, Mabel proclaimed, "You know what would cheer me up, Broseph? A trip to the zoo!"
"The Oakland Zoo?" he asked.
"No. I want to get out and away from the house. San Francisco Zoo. When was the last time we went there? Like . . . five years ago? Please go with me."
He glanced at her, the urge to say something sarcastic fading as soon as he saw that she really was feeling somewhat low. She wasn't grief-stricken, not like the time they first came home from Gravity Falls and there for some minutes she thought she'd have to leave Waddles behind, but just . . . sad, at least for Mabel. He bit back his sarcasm and instead mildly said, "Sure thing." He raised his voice: "O All-Knowing Oracle, what will the weather in San Francisco be today?"
"You could just caller Electra, like everybody else in the family," Mabel pointed out.
"Shh."
The Amazone Ditto, a smart speaker that connected to the Net, replied in her cheerful, somewhat sassy tone: "Currently in San Francisco it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit with a light rain shower trailing off to the west. Today you can expect partly sunny weather with a high of 56 degrees and a low of 38 degrees. Will that be all, O my master?"
"Thanks, All-Knowing Oracle," Dipper said.
"Sometimes I wonder about you, Brobro," Mabel said.
"Sometimes I wonder about both of us," he said. "Not too chilly out today, but it'll be windy close to the beach. Better dress warm."
They both put on medium-heavy jackets, told their mom and dad where they were heading ("Drive carefully and call us when you get there," Mom said. Dad said, "Take money. Not mine, but take some.")
They set out in mid-morning, Mabel driving. As the Ditto predicted, the sky was a rain-washed blue in the increasing breaks between the low clouds. Getting from Piedmont to the San Francisco Zoo, which was beside the Pacific south of the Golden Gate, was a bit of a chore.
They crossed the long Bay Bridge (really two bridges and a tunnel, but nobody called it anything other than the Bay Bridge). Mabel said as they headed east over the water, invisible beneath a pearly surface-hugging fog, "I guess it's safer now, but I kinda liked the old suspension part they tore down last year."
"Change happens," Dipper said. "And I think it's better to drive on something that's not likely to fall to pieces."
"Yeah, you go ahead. Be practical," Mabel said. "I'll be nostalgic for both of us." Once across the bridge, she took I-80 in fairly heavy traffic, then the 101, which was more congested, and then 280 until exiting on first John Daly Boulevard and then turning north on Skyline Boulevard.
They arrived at the zoo, parked, made the duty call to Mom, and then bought their tickets, wandering in near the Primate Discovery Center. The pavement still showed patches of damp from the morning shower, but the sun broke through right about then and the patches dwindled fast.
It was a breezy, cool day, and Mabel had bundled up in her pink insulated coat, Dipper in his blue quilted one. They paused, just remembering. Zoo visits had somehow become a thing of the past for them.
Not many people had come to the zoo that day—maybe the morning was a bit too cool for most parents and young kids—and Mabel took Dipper's hand. She looked over to the left. "Remember that?" she asked, her voice low and tinged with memory.
"Oh, yeah. Of course I do!" Dipper said. Mabel had to keep pushing her hair away from her face—it was that gusty—and he was glad he was wearing Wendy's trapper's hat. Oh, people sometimes stared at him, probably wondering what kind of fashion statement this lanky teen was making, but, dang it, it kept his head warm!
Because he knew what Mabel was looking at, he walked with her over to the Fisher Family Children's Zoo. Dipper remembered the entrance arch with its red banner and its black-and-white pony and goat. "Think it's OK for a couple of teens to go inside there?" she asked.
"Long as you don't Scotch-tape a traffic cone to a pony's head," Dipper told her. "Yeah. Nobody's gonna mind. Let's go into the children's zoo."
Mabel paused at the decorative WELCOME sign, low enough to be kid height. "Take my picture?" she asked.
"Sure, Sis." Dipper took out his phone and Mabel posed beside the sign, her hand resting on the cut-out shape of a pink pig. With her other hand she tried to control her wind-waved hair. Dipper took about a dozen shots and was sure he had at least a couple of good ones, without her hair in front of her face. "There," he said. "Got you in all your glory."
Mabel patted the sign. "Reminds me a lot of Waddles," she said quietly.
"Ah-ha. I deduce that you're missing Gravity Falls. Am I correct?" he asked as they walked into the children's area. Very few kids about, he noticed.
Mabel hunched up her shoulders. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm just missing being, you know, a kid."
"Good times, good times," Dipper murmured, though for him remembering meant recalling wedgies and catcalls and other kids making fun of him. That one Valentine's day. The time three third-grade girls got up and moved when he sat at their lunch table. Stuff like that.
As they strolled, Mabel put her hands in her pockets. "That time when you and Grunkle Ford went to the buried UFO or whatever, when our thirteenth birthday was coming up, and Soos drove me to the Gravity Falls High gym to see if we could rent it for the party—well, Wendy was waiting on line for high-school registration. She kinda popped my bubble that day. She wasn't being mean, just warning me that high school could be rough. I remember her saying, 'I would give anything to be twelve again.' Now I know what she meant. Dipper, are we too young for nostalgia?"
"I don't know. Grunkle Stan says that nostalgia today isn't as good as the nostalgia he used to get."
"Ha. I don't know what's wrong. I'm jumpy and sort of unhappy but not really, and I get down in the dumps for no reason at all. Maybe I'm sensing some kind of trouble ahead. Maybe my piggy senses are tingling."
"Spider-pig, spider-pig," Dipper chanted. When Mabel didn't smile, or even swat him, he said in a comforting tone, "I think I know what trouble you're afraid of. It's called change. It' that we're about to graduate and then in the fall move away from home. I get the same jitters, Sis. It's not really trouble, exactly, it's just that we know things will change forever. But no matter what, we'll always have each other."
She linked her arm through his. "Thanks, Dip. Hey, let's go see if the meerkats are still here."
They and their American cousins the prairie dogs were still there, though that morning they remained inside, probably preferring that to the cool outside air, and the two could only see them through glass. "They're so cute," Mabel said. "But, you know, this place isn't as much fun as it was years ago."
That was sort of true. Now, halfway through their seventeenth year, Dipper and Mabel were too old to sift through the sandbox for meerkat snacks, too big to creep through the oversized plaster tunnels to give them a feel for the meerkat way of life, though Dipper said, "If you want to see if you can squeeze through, I'll cover for you."
"Don't think I'd make it. One day, though," Mabel said, "I'm gonna have kids, and I'm gonna bring 'em here, and I'll use 'em as an excuse to do everything I loved to do!"
"Good idea. Hey, if Wendy and I have our twins first, you can borrow them for the day," Dipper said.
"Yeah, right. I was kidding you when I mentioned the twins."
"Well, Wendy did have kind of a vision that we're fated to have twins," Dipper said. "And twins do run in our family!"
Mabel playfully punched her brother's arm. "If it happens, good luck with that! They'd probably drive you crazy."
"Nah," he said. "I got used to you over the years. Couldn't be worse than that! Hey, it's past twelve-thirty. Getting hungry?"
Mabel linked her arm with his again. "You read my tummy."
They stopped for lunch at the Leaping Lemur Café, where for old times' sake they got cheeseburgers and shared a basket of garlic fries. "Don't really like these all that much," Dipper said, munching on a pungent fry, "but if I have to ride back with you in the car with the windows rolled up, I have to eat them in self-defense."
Mabel was in a reminiscent mood. "I remember you always used to take the tomato off your burger," she said. "You don't do that now. When did you start eating tomatoes?"
He thought about it. "I don't really remember. Somehow I learned to like them somewhere along the way, though. Tastes change, like everything else."
"Wish they had Pitt's, here," Mabel said as she sipped her cola.
"Can't get it outside of Oregon, though," Dipper said. "Hey, maybe when we go off to college we can take a couple of cases with us."
Mabel laughed. "Ow! Almost squirted soda through my nose. Couple of cases? Like there'd be anywhere to keep them in those teeny little dorm rooms!"
"Yeah, and neither of us would have a private fridge. Probably a bad idea. Oh, well, on weekends we can hop in the car and drive up to Oregon. It's only about a half-hour drive from Western Alliance up to the Oregon border."
Mabel chuckled and stole some fries from his side of the basket. "What a great idea. The weekly Pitt's run! I can see us doing that. Hey, I get Helen Wheels, right? You and Wendy have the Green Machine."
"OK by me," Dipper said. "But we'll all pile into one car and charge up to Oregon, singing dopey songs along the way."
Mabel sighed. "Sounds sweet. Only—college classes and clubs and all that—I bet we won't have enough time for silly stuff like that."
"Don't talk that way," Dipper said. "There's always time for silly stuff."
"At least we'll see each other a lot, won't we?" Mabel asked softly.
"Every single day if you want," Dipper said. "We could make a habit of always meeting to have dinner together somewhere. Or even breakfast."
"Yeah, I'd like that." Mabel took a long breath. "Dipper, I'm so worried. I've never been on my own before, you know?"
"Neither of us has. Anyway, you won't be totally on your own up there, either," Dipper said. "We'll be close to you, and you wait. You'll make loads of friends at art college. And I know they'll love you."
"And Teek will be all the way across the country," Mabel sighed. "We're gonna make our best try a long-distance relationship, but—Dipper, heck, I'm not just worried. I'm scared."
"I think you know you can trust Teek."
Mabel looked as if she were on the verge of tears. "Yeah, but I don't know if I can trust me," she confessed. "Good old goofy old Mabel, go with the impulse, anything for a good time, you know. What if I'm not good enough for him?"
"You are. Sis, whatever happens, I always got your back."
She patted his hand. "Thanks."
They spent a long, leisurely afternoon at the zoo, then at closing time moved the car to a beach parking lot and strolled on Ocean Beach for more than an hour, almost the only people there. Far off to the south, the glimpsed the silhouettes of some hang-gliding enthusiasts, but here only a few beach-walkers shared the solitude.
The Pacific lived up to its name, for a change, and the water remained at nearly flat calm. No surfers. They looked for snowy plovers—a sign at the beach approach warned that they were a protected species and though you could watch them, you couldn't disturb them.
They weren't sure if they saw any. Some small wading birds darted about the wet sand down near the water, but they were wary and scuttled away if they so much as walked two steps toward them.
"Maybe that's them," Dipper said. "Next time we'll bring binoculars."
"What a disappointment," Mabel said. "I really wanted to see how the plovers plovved."
All day the wind had been gusting in off the ocean, and the Pacific can be cold in February. However, as the sun started to sink, the sea breezes died away, getting ready for the change-over, when the night wind would blow from the shore out to sea. For that reason it seemed a little warmer than it had been—it wasn't, really, but the wind chill had gone.
"Gorgeous sunset," Dipper said, standing next to Mabel and gazing westward.
"It is," Mabel said. She took out her camera and snapped a series of photos. The sun was sinking into the ocean—or it looked that way—and in doing so, it slipped beneath the lower boundary of some streaky, sinuous clouds, all red and gold above a shimmering, glittering blue Pacific.
"I might try a painting of that," Mabel said. "Or maybe make a sweater pattern."
The twins stood side by side, hands in jacket pockets, elbows touching, and watched the sun sink.
"Sunsets make me sad," Mabel said.
"They shouldn't. Imagine you're halfway around the world," Dipper said. "Over there a beautiful sun's just coming up on a whole new day. Every sunset is also a sunrise. It just depends on how you look at it."
Mabel made a little considering grunt. "Sometimes, Brobro, you can really talk sense. Hey. Thank you for making a day for me."
"It's for me, too, Mabel. We ought to do more things together."
"I'd really like that." She was quiet for a few minutes. The sun vanished and she said, "Show's over. Time to go home. Hey, Dip?"
"Yeah?"
"When the weather warms up, think we might bring Billy to the zoo? Maybe his sisters, if they want to come? If his parents are worried about the trip, we could do the Oakland Zoo with him."
"Don't see why not," Dipper sad as they crunched up the sand toward the parking area.
"Think we could fit him and three other girls in the car?"
"Three girls? Who besides his sisters?" Dipper asked, surprised.
"Well, he's met this girl in his class. Her name's China. They're like best friends now."
"No kidding?" Dipper asked. "Good for him!"
And as Dipper drove them back home, Mabel told him all about how Billy, the kid version of Bill Cipher, was learning the game of romance. In a good way, she said.
Dipper smiled to himself. If Mabel was teaching him, he thought, it would have to be in a good way. He felt better. He hoped Mabel did, too.
She turned on the radio and, like an omen, got an oldies station that had just started &ndra's "T8king Over Midnight."
"Ampersandra! You know the words! Sing along, Dippingsauce!" Mabel said.
He didn't even put up an argument, and singing that and a string of other oldies, they headed across the Bay and back to Piedmont as overhead the stars came out one by one.