122On the Road to Extinction

Before you buy a ticket to Cameron Park Zoo, you pass a car that has no business running and a load of passengers who have no business in a car. It is a 1928 Model A Ford, rusted to the color of the dirt it sits on, white-wall tires and red wire wheels, up on a base of stacked Texas limestone behind a black rail. Riding in it: a giraffe with its neck up through where the roof would be, an African elephant with trunk raised, a rhino wedged in beside it, an orangutan hanging off the back and a cheetah stretched across the trunk lid. Every animal is sculpted in concrete over steel, the same faded earth tones as the car, so the whole thing reads as one object that has been out in the weather for a hundred years.

The piece is On The Road to Extinction, by Solomon Bassoff, the California sculptor behind the Faducci studio, whose animal pieces stand in zoos and parks around the country. It was installed in 2023. The title is the joke and the point at once: five endangered species, packed into a car from the year the world started driving, headed somewhere. The plaque on the stone says it was given by Betsy and Clifton Robinson in memory of Judge Ken Starr and in honor of Alice Starr, and in recognition of the zoo’s work to save endangered species. Ken Starr was Baylor’s president; the zoo is Waco’s. The gift ties the two together at the front door.

It is the one stop on this trail that sits at the entrance of another one: the zoo’s own trail starts a few steps past it.