WASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON POST) – Shelley Maneveld was standing inside the National Zoo’s giant panda house, wearing a cardboard panda hat, while a giant panda sat on an artificial rock a few feet away, eating bamboo.
It was September 4, 2016, and she and her boyfriend, Josh Bryant, had driven up from Chesapeake, Virginia, where they lived, to see her favourite animal.
Suddenly, Josh got down on one knee. She thought he was falling and started to help him up. But he hadn’t lost his balance. He took her by the hand and asked her to marry him. She began crying and said yes.
“It was magical,” Shelley remembered.
“She couldn’t say no,” recalled Josh.
According to snapshots that captured the moment, the panda went on eating.
It was another example of the hold that the zoo’s black-and-white bears have had on the lives of admirers over the years. Josh said he picked the giant panda house as the place to propose because he knew Shelley loved the pandas.
Last month, the couple came back to say goodbye.
The zoo’s three giant pandas – Mei Xiang, 25, a female; Tian Tian, 26, a male; and their son, Xiao Qi Ji, 3 – are scheduled to leave for China within the next two weeks.
China owns all giant pandas in the United States and leases them to zoos. Adults and cubs are subject to the leases, which require cubs to be sent to China for breeding when they come of age. The National Zoo’s current lease expires December 7.
Their departure will end an era, the zoo’s director, Brandie Smith, said last month. It will leave the Smithsonian facility without giant pandas for the first time in nearly 24 years and perhaps for the foreseeable future.
And it will deprive Washington of a precious landmark that has drawn oohs and aahs from generations of fans, spanned 10 presidencies, and lasted half a century. (The first giant pandas came to the zoo in 1972.)
During the past few weeks, visitors like Josh and Shelley have come to the zoo to say farewell and recall the role the giant pandas played in their lives.
Shelley, 35, who took Bryant’s last name, now works as a manager at a federal credit union in Virginia. Growing up in South Africa, she said, her mother introduced her to the magic of giant pandas.
“My first birthday was a panda-themed birthday,” she said in a telephone interview last month. “My mom had always promised that she would take me to see pandas.”
After the family moved to the United States in 2003, her mother, Winlyn Spruill, learned that the National Zoo had giant pandas. One day, two years following their move, she brought Shelley and her sister to the zoo.
Spruill didn’t mention that they were going to see giant pandas, but when they arrived, Shelley spotted a panda poster.
“I promised I would bring you one day,” she said her mother told her.
“I just started crying,” she said. She was 17.
She became a regular National Zoo visitor.
Shelley and Josh met when she was working the early shift as the assistant manager at a local 7-Eleven convenience store and he would stop in every morning before work.
“I thought he was cute,” she said.
By Labor Day 2016, they had been dating two or three years, she said.
They talked about going to the zoo for a visit that weekend. He agreed so quickly that she wondered if something was up. “His face was a bit funny, too,” she said.
They booked a hotel and headed to Washington. It was a Sunday.
“We got into the zoo, and then he just wanted to stay by the pandas,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Josh, you know I love the pandas.'”
But there were other animals she wanted to see. He obliged but insisted they come back later.
Once they returned, she said, a woman who was a zookeeper or volunteer asked the crowd of other visitors, “Could you guys give this lovely couple some space?”
Unaware that Josh had sought the woman’s help, Shelley thought: “Oh, she’s so nice.”
“The next thing I know, Josh just goes down on his knee,” she said. “I don’t know anything that he said. I know that he did ask me to marry him. But I had zoned out. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what are you doing? All these people are looking at us.'”
“It never dawned on me,” she said. “I said yes.”
Josh, 35, an electrician for the Navy, said in a telephone interview last month: “What better way” to propose?
“Since she was a little girl, she’s always loved pandas, talked about them,” he said, adding, “I just thought it was the perfect place at the right time [to] show my appreciation for her and my love for her, to do it in front of her favourite animal. She couldn’t say no. I thought, ‘I kind of got her if I do it this way.'”
He had a ring in his pocket. “I was on edge the whole time,” he said. “I was a nervous wreck. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I just know I’m going to do it this way. . . . I need to make it special. This is a special girl.”
He said he told her: “I love you, and I want to do this in front of your favourite animal.”
They married in 2018.
Last month, he rented a car and, with his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, a niece and a nephew, drove 200 miles to the zoo to say goodbye.
“It was nice,” Shelley said in a later telephone interview. The pandas were outside and could be seen. But when the couple went inside to the spot where Josh had proposed, no pandas were there, she said.
“It’s sad, because just walking through there, the compound is so big, I keep wondering, ‘What are they going to do with the space?'” she said, adding, “I don’t think it’s hit that they are not going to be there anymore.”
Josh said: “They are going to be missed….It definitely does take a special piece of our life.”
