Mammoth by John Varley

Author:John Varley [Varley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781440624469
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2006-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

20

CENOZOIC Park had been erected over the next few years in what had once been farmland not far east of Portland, Oregon, along the newly widened Route 26 that went by Mount Hood and across the Cascades toward Bend.

There was not a lot of middle ground when it came to the theme park. Oregonians either loved it or hated it, and were just about equally divided on the matter. The only thing everyone agreed on was that nobody but the planners and builders called it Cenozoic Park from the moment ground was broken. Everybody called it Fuzzyland.

Portland had been fighting urban sprawl for decades, and having better luck with it than many another metropolitan area. When the plans for Fuzzyland were announced, a year to the day after the slaughter in Los Angeles, environmental activists were stunned to discover it was already a done deal. Several millions of Howard Christian’s money, discreetly applied, had obtained variances to land-use regulations. The hearings that followed were a formality. In only weeks bulldozers were at work on the much loathed Mount Hood Freeway, something planners had thought dead and buried for forty years. It was almost finished by opening day, the remaining construction just enough to make the traffic delays getting there merely dreadful rather than nightmarish.

But Fuzzyland was promoted as “environmentally sound,” so an extension of the local light-rail system, known as MAXX, was built on an elevated track right down the middle of the freeway, stopping at Fuzzyland, Zigzag, and Government Camp, where a funicular railway would take skiers the rest of the way to Timberline Lodge. This MAXX line was no ordinary two-car light-rail system like the one that served the rest of Portland, though. This was a monorail that levitated on a magnetic field, and its ten-car trains reached speeds of 150 miles per hour.

“A shot in the arm for tourism, and the ski industry!” proclaimed all the various chambers of commerce in the affected areas.

“A blight on the Cascades!” the environmentalists sneered.

Though the words “tasteful” and “circus” are not traditionally used in the same sentence, Howard instructed his architects to do the best they could, and they did manage to avoid the worst excesses of Las Vegas and Orlando. You could barely see the place from the highway, camouflaged as it was by hundreds of Douglas firs. (The trees were actually metal frameworks supporting colored Styrofoam bark and easy-to-clean plastic needles, but who cared?)

When you drove through the forest toward the vast underground parking lots you barely got a glimpse of the park just before plunging into the depths. It was mostly low-slung, sprawling, hugging the ground, dominated by the largest plastic and steel geodesic dome ever built, gleaming in the spring sunshine—or, more likely, glistening in the Oregon rain. It wasn’t until you took the long escalators to the monorail that circled the park and took you to one of the four themed areas, three resort hotels, two RV parks, and one campground that you got a sense of the scale of the place.

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