I've had yet another skirmish in what is mounting into an epic battle between me and
Newton's forces of nature, and I thought I would share it with all of you again.
Since I can never remember who I include on these mass mailings, I probably ought to briefly recap the events thus far.
The hostilities began early this spring when I was assaulted by a few of the half dozen amorous ducks in my yard. No actual blows were exchanged, but the INTENT for aggression was obvious. These ducks had blood in their eyes and eye peckings on their little duck brains. Understandably, I found this a little disturbing but dismissed it as hormone induced antagonism, possibly stemming from the frustration that an unsuccessful duck might feel when six male ducks are simultaneously trying to occupy one very small space inside a single female duck—obviously a few of them are going home unsatisfied and stymied and anyone who got close enough would undoubtedly receive the brunt of this frustration. Regardless of their actual motivation, I was willing to let it pass as a fluke event, hardly something to cause undue concern.
A month or so after this, however, the ducks escalated the hostilities and proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt (because I am obviously willing to embrace an illogical assumption over a reasonable doubt any day, just because life is always more interesting that way) that they were focusing their attention on me with the intention of “bringing me down,” as it were. I mean, they DID conspire to throw me from my bike into Sand Creek. I don’t think I am being too far-fetched in assuming that this was a deliberate act by an organized movement within the larger duck population.
Which brings us to today. After nearly three months of heat-induced reclusion in my house (and a general laziness and disinterest in getting out and riding my bike, or doing anything else that wasn’t absolutely necessary outside, for that matter), I decided last week that the weather was getting nice enough again that I should try to get out and ride my bike. It won’t last, of course, because fall only lasts three weeks in Kansas, so it will be around twelve degrees here by the middle of October, and then I will succumb to my natural instinct to huddle around the warm glow of my television set once again.
Now, as I’ve been out riding my bike these last few times, I think it’s safe to say that I have been a bit more wary and cautious than I previously had been. As any victim would, I now approach situations that directly reflect or bare resemblance to those in which I was assaulted. I mow my lawn with more attention to any fowl that might be nearby, and if they decide to get frisky in my yard, then I quietly leave them to their business. And when I ride my bike, I try to give possibly suicidal ducks (and since all ducks look and decidedly act suicidal, that means all of them) a wide berth. One inch of prevention is worth a mile of . . .whatever—I can’t remember the saying now, but I know it’s relevant. Some of you may laugh, but I see this as perfectly reasonable. The last thing I want is for another duck to send me sprawling into the Creek again—this time I might smash into one of the lethal protrusions along the path or, god forbid, be seen cascading over the edge by another human being.
So it is with more open-eyed awareness that I spend my time outside my house these days. But, today I learned that it would, in fact, take more than just awareness to protect me from Newton’s air terrorists. I’m afraid that I will have to take a page from our current foreign policy and bring the fight to my enemy’s front door, because obviously I am going to continue to suffer at their webbed feet as long as I remain passive in my war on airrorism (or maybe fowl airrorism would be more appropriate, I’m just coining these words on the fly, so I should probably give them slightly more thought at some point before I go MORE public with my plans—any suggestions for catchy propaganda phrases from any of you would be much appreciated and I promise to give you credit when I release my manifesto and airdrop the bomber hold full of fliers as I eventually intend to. I need to get the public on my side if I’m going to win this war, and I’m afraid that I’ve always shied away from spin and half-truths if I could avoid them, so if any of you PR or lawyer types out there who are used to lying can lend a hand, I’d appreciate it.).
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Here’s what happened.
I was once again riding my circles around Athletic Park here in town. And about forty minutes into my ride—which is about the time when I feel a bit like exploding on the inside, my arms start to go numb and my head starts to spin, which means it’s about time to begin my wobbly ride back to the house—I began what I planned to be my second to last lap. Around what I think of as the back side of the park—because it is the furthest from my house and would require the longest schlep home if I ever blew a tire or some other catastrophic event happened to my bike—I was peddling away, minding my own business. I have never seen the ducks anywhere near this spot, so I tend to let my guard down a little as I round this part of the road.
Correction! That’s the word. An inch of prevention is worth a mile of correction! Ha!
Anyway, I was heading south on the road towards the back of the park. There was a pretty stout wind today (if I had a blue screen available, I would trace out the line of the cold front that is slowly inching across the state for all of you to see, but I don’t, so I won’t), and I am not built for aerodynamics. In fact, my innate “huskiness” acts more like a sail than an engine when I ride my bike. Thus, when I’m heading into strong head winds—and especially when I’ve been out for awhile and I’m starting to pant and struggle—I tend to adopt the old nautical practice of tacking and waring to keep the wind as much on my side as possible, to keep my legs from failing as much as anything. To the untrained eye, this would look more like weaving and swirving than applied aerodynamics, but the untrained eye can try being a wide guy in a stiff wind sometime.
I also tend to hunker down a bit to let as much wind blow over the top of me as possible—also applied aerodynamics, if I am to believe all of the commercials I’ve seen with wind blowing over the top of luxury sedans (and I am, if nothing else, the luxury sedan of humans). So, as it were, I was mostly watching the ground slide by as I meandered from the middle of the road back over to the right hand side. And that is why I didn’t see the squirrel.
Squirrels hold second place on my List of Nature That I Wish to See Put in a Terminal Sleeper Hold. Over the last two years, they have become an infestation in our tree-filled yard and have made a nasty habit of eating EVERYTHING they possibly can, usually making a larger mess than one would think a smallish rodent possibly could. Sure they’re cute, but since they aren’t the kind of cute that you can put on your lap and pet, it’s a defense mechanism that just doesn’t work on me, I’m afraid.
Nonetheless, I don’t go out of my way to harm squirrels. I wouldn’t object to a largish occupation force of slightly disturbed adolescent boys with bee-bee guns coming in and liberating my yard, of course, but I don’t personally believe in soiling my hands with the blood of those who cross me and mine. I am a much bigger man than that. Possibly, and I’m just going out on a limb here and trying to divert attention from my physicalities, it is THIS bigness rather than my physical broadness that makes me a good wind block. I think this seems perfectly reasonable. Regardless of which bigness catches wind, I make it a rule to never go out of my way to harm anything. If nothing else, it’s bad karma and my life doesn’t need anymore of that.
So, had I seen the squirrel BEFORE it jumped from the curb on my right hand side and ran with suicidal accuracy straight for my front tire, I probably would have tacked (or wared, I’m not sure which it would be, I didn’t invest THAT much of my time on Jim Stein’s Nautical Terms web page. Actually, I might have only been doing one or the other all along. It’s not like there were illustrations on the web page to benefit those of us from land-locked locales who have no mental image of what ships actually DO on the water. Stupid, inconsiderate Aussies and their lots of ocean all around them!) to avoid him. But I didn’t see him, so I squashed him good. It turns out that, unlike ducks, who are large enough to survive, unharmed, a head on collision with me on my bike, squirrels lack the body mass to affect a “bouncing over and into the river” outcome and, instead, put forth a “recently flattened but still twitching” result.
I am not a squeamish person. I grew up on a farm that could have as many as four dozen cats running around at one time, and frequently they ended up run over, stepped on, carried off by coyotes, mangled by the dog or otherwise terminally molested by the fates that bend to no cat. I saw no less than six family dogs die of natural or unnatural causes. I’ve seen countless livestock—and bits of livestock after bloated, decayed explosions of gas—dead after lightning strikes, drownings, diseases and other acts of whatever natural force who hates to see cows live. And, speaking of livestock, I grew up EATING animals that I had personally raised by bottle feeding and who I had hand fed grain. Usually they had names. The one I most enjoyed eating was Larry. He was a 700 pound steer that I took to the 4-H fair. While at the fair, he tried to mount me. He tasted like victory. Growing up, being a slightly disturbed adolescent with a bee-bee gun, I killed many, many little animals. I killed slightly larger animals with a shotgun when I got old enough to do that. I have seen death. Which might account for all the bad karma I’m living down now.
But, for some reason, the sight of that twitching squirrel set me a little ill-at-ease. I didn’t stop, mind you, but I did look back as long as I could and then I quickly decided that I would be heading home instead of making another round—I wasn’t interested in being reminded of the negative repercussions of inattentiveness. So I pumped my little legs to get around the bend and began my trek back north, to our home.
It didn’t take long, however, for the guilt to subside, only to be replaced by a slight feeling of vindication. Nature had beaten me twice and I had had no opportunity for retaliation. Maybe I had successfully scored a point for the good guys!
It was this very option that I was considering as I pedaled casually back towards the house—along the path that runs adjacent to the Creek (I don’t feel comfortable calling it a “river” because I’ve seen what it is when the damn is released, and it barely ranks as a creek), where the ducks were quietly eating bread chunks that were being tossed to them by an oblivious Texan who appeared to think that what he was doing was a novel treat—he was smiling like a big dumb, well, Texan who just heard that gay rights, abortion and capital punishment laws had all been combined in the most horribly implausible but religious righteously satisfying way. I’m not sure what that would be, but you figure it out. The guy was smiling like a big, dumb oaf while he chucked large fistfuls of wadded up bread at the ducks, that’s all I know.
Had I noticed the ducks congregating along the path and not been entirely distracted by the Texan (and, yes, I KNOW it was a Texan because his car had Texas tags. Yes, yes, I know that’s not definitive proof, but what if he was wearing a ten-gallon hat and whistling Yellow Rose? If that would convince you, then he was doing exactly that), I would have chosen to take the road alongside the path, which would have put me far enough away from them (ducks, I believe, have poor far-sight because they never seem to notice that it’s ME coming until I get close to them. Either that or they have attention spans too short to process the information until it is directly upon them. This is obviously a part of the duck psyche that I will have to better familiarize myself with if I am to conquer them). But, because the front of my consciousness was distracted by the Texan and the back of my mind was still arrogantly considering my squashing of a hapless (and I have to say incredibly stupid squirrel, because how hard is it to avoid a BIKE in the first place, it’s not like I could have been going more than ten miles and hour and my wheel base is only two inches wide) squirrel, I wasn’t paying attention.
So one of the bastards took the opportunity to shit on me. On the side of my face, actually, as it flew over to land where the Texan was feeding them.
Now, some of you might still consider this just one more coincidence in a long string of coincidences that in no way proves that I am being purposely and deliberately targeted by one of nature’s most seemingly harmless animals. But consider this. The duck was flying north, with the wind. I too was heading north. He was obviously flying faster than I was riding, since he overtook me. Consider how very nearly IMPOSSIBLE it would be for a duck to actually shit on my face specifically; not my arms or legs, not my cycling helmet, not my back, MY FACE, a part of my body that was almost inaccessible. It simply HAD to be deliberate and, for that matter, very carefully aimed. There is almost no chance that it could happen on accident.
Possibly the ducks sought vengeance for their squirrel brother. Possibly their vendetta is their own and not a part of a larger conspiracy held by Newton Nature in general. Either way, they are most certainly out to get me.
And, so, it is with deep regret that I simply must declare war on them. And, in the spirit of war, I must destroy not only them but their supposed allies—namely, Newton Nature—whether I can prove they are actually allies or not is inconsequential. So watch the national news, because I’m sure this is going to get ugly and, when it does, everyone’s going to hear about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment