Shoulder Savages

May 31, 2013

Shoulder Savages

            A fight broke out in my neighborhood at three a.m. the other morning and woke me up.  Neighborhood is a little misleading, since the houses in my subdivision are separated by large, wooded lots, and the noisy altercation was a lot closer.  I was awakened by the thud of bodies hitting my roof! The vicious growls and high-pitched squeals of desperation indicated a raccoon brawl was taking place just above my bedroom.

            Ordinarily, I wouldn’t write about the fight, since it didn’t take place on my daily shoulder walk, but the next morning, as I walked through the narrowest, most heavily wooded section of my gravel road, I heard a distinct growl in the underbrush nearby.  Suddenly, I reconsidered whether the menacing growls I heard on the roof were really those of a dominating raccoon.  There have been cougar sightings in our county.  One of the big cats decimated a livestock herd last summer in a nearby town.  Could that have been what I heard in the undergrowth?

            I have to give my mom and dad credit.  When I told them my theory about the sound from the bushes, they managed to keep completely straight faces with almost no eye rolling at all.  They’ve listened to my wild imaginings for fifty-eight years and have learned how to respond.  Could the source of the sound have been something other than a wildcat running amok in High Ridge they asked, using the calm, deliberately neutral voice of skilled, mental healthcare workers dealing with an excitable patient?  I conceded that it was possible the sound might have been the deep-throated croak of a bull frog; although, I quickly pointed out that the two sounds are similar, so we couldn’t completely rule out the cougar possibility.

            It’s true that I haven’t run into too many wild critters on my daily walks, and few, if any, of those could truthfully be described as savage.  The largest animal I’ve encountered was a white-tailed buck standing in the middle of my little gravel road very early one morning last July.  If I understand how to count the prongs properly, he sported an eight point rack and considered me with something more like disdain than savagery. After giving me a bored glance, he strolled---it’s the only word for it---up the hillside into the woods.

             Other animals I’ve met on the road were considerably smaller than the deer.  Rounding a bend on my street last week, I was surprised to see a line of three tortoises, each separated by twenty or thirty feet, moving down the road.  I felt like I was bringing up the rear of a very slow moving parade.  None of them took note of me as I passed by.  Actually, most of the animals that cross my path on my walk pay little attention to me.  Rabbits and squirrels dash back and forth across the road as I march along, taking care of their business despite my presence.

            Not surprisingly, the animals I’ve had the most contact with on my daily stroll are dogs.  When I first started walking, I carried a large stick, but only through one section of my route where there were lots of dogs.  I stopped toting the stick when I realized that my neighbors are pretty responsible; for the most part, the dogs were all secured.....with a couple of exceptions.

            One morning last summer as I was returning home, a dark streak moving through the trees caught my eye.  I wasn’t sure what the movement was or even if I’d really seen something, but as I entered a straight section of the road, I could see two hundred feet in front of me, standing stock still, a large, black Rottweiler. I came to a halt, uncertain whether I should continue toward the dog, and it stared straight at me without moving. In my head, I began to hear the music from The Omen.  Remember that old movie from the ‘70’s, where every time the large Rottweiler appeared, accompanied by mysterious Latin chanting, some type of horrible mayhem occurred?  (This is the kind of melodramatic thinking that my parents have had to deal with for years.)  After a moment, the dog turned away and raced off up the road.

            My neighbor’s Rottweiler is a mild-mannered sweetie named Raven. I decided she had escaped somehow and was the dog I’d seen that morning.  When I commented to her owner that I’d seen the dog on the road, however, he maintained that she’d never left the yard……cue the music from Twilight Zone.

            My other canine encounter had a different outcome.  As I was moving through that section of the neighborhood with the strong dog presence, I saw a medium-sized, shepherd-type fellow racing toward me across a couple of unfenced backyards, yapping all the way.  I grabbed up a completely insubstantial tree branch and tried not to panic. Deciding that the best defense is a good offense, I turned to face the dog, pointed my stick at him like Moses condemning Pharaoh with his staff, and, using my best James Earl Jones voice, bellowed, “Nooooo!”  Instantaneously, the dog’s perky tail clamped down between his legs, his ears flattened, and he dropped to the ground.  From his belly-dragging posture, his whole demeanor whined, “Geez, lady! I was just trying to be friendly. Chill!”

            Okay, so maybe savages is a bit of an exaggeration,…..but I’ll keep looking out for that cougar.

Off the Shoulder

May 20, 2013

Off the Shoulder

            The first official Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. I was wrapping up my freshman year in high school, and, thanks to some community-minded teachers, I took part in a celebration activity that first April.  In all honesty, I don’t remember which teachers headed up the push to get involved or exactly what we did to mark the occasion.  I think we worked to clean up a local stream or highway.  Regardless, I was excited to be part of the nationwide effort to improve the country. Mine was a generation instilled from our earliest school days with a desire to make things better.  Just a couple of years ago, while going through some old boxes, I found a Weekly Reader with a cover story about Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America, so the desire to “Give a Hoot. Don’t pollute.” has been drummed into me for a lot of years.

            I thought about all those efforts and all that idealism on my daily walks as the 43^rd Earth Day celebrations were being covered in the news a few weeks ago. Before my shoulder walking days, when I zipped along the road in the car, the appearance of road crews with their bright, yellow bags, picking up trash along the highways made my heart swell with pride and satisfaction.  It felt good to think that our efforts have had a lasting impact, have made a difference. The regular appearance of crews picking up trash allows us to convince ourselves that the problem of roadside litter has been solved. The up close and personal point of view I have now while walking on the shoulder, however, makes me think we might be kidding ourselves. One glance under the trees reveals hidden oceans of trash that don’t go away.  The crews clean up the edges of the highway, and we feel good about the job being done because we don’t look off the shoulder.        

            I know that some roadside trash ends up there by accident, but too many items can only be on the road because folks choose to toss them there.  Just recently on a side section of my daily walk, a sofa and chair were left on the shoulder.  The two items didn’t just fall off a truck; someone left them to…what?  Such big pieces will sit there for months slowly breaking down, a blight on the scenery.  On my own little street, someone dumped a mirrored, bi-fold closet door, the glass shattered.  The broken glass makes the door both a danger and an eyesore.  Are the trash dumpers simply able to pretend they had nothing to do with the mess?  In the coming weeks as they drive by the spot will they simply avoid glancing at the side of the road? I’m puzzled by the thinking that allows folks to leave their garbage for others to deal with, and I know it’s a odd segue from litter to self deception, but I wonder if the cavalier litterbugs illustrate the fact that being human means being able to delude ourselves. Goodness knows, I’ve done it enough. 

            Recently, while changing my winter wardrobe for warm weather clothes, at the back of a high shelf, I found a pair of slacks from my pre-weight-loss days.  The pants are the only piece of clothing I’ve kept.  I knew they were on the shelf; they weren’t a surprise.  This time when I looked at them, however, I had a surreal, disjointed moment where I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that these were my slacks. If I’d been in a movie, there would have been that strange in and out of focus effect to illustrate my confusion. I was suddenly struck by how large they really were.  I knew that I had worn these slacks weekly when I was working, that they had actually started to fit snugly.  I knew it, but suddenly, as I held them up with my hands nearly three feet apart, I knew it. Standing easily in one leg of the pants, I realized how deluded I’d been about my size, and I was overwhelmed with shame and humiliation. I flashed on moments from my teaching days when I struggled to move up and down the classroom aisles or to slide into a desk to sit next to one of my students, and the reality was simply too painful to dwell on.

            And maybe that’s the answer; perhaps self-delusion is a survival technique, meant to help us humans survive the difficult realities of life.  Maybe it’s too cruel to ask us to face the cold, harsh truths about ourselves and our lives every second of every day. Maybe it’s a blessing that we’re able to turn a blind eye, ignore the obvious unpleasantness, conveniently forget our past mistakes, or kid ourselves about the real motives behind our actions.  So I guess it’s a good thing that spring has arrived, and the hillsides are leafing out.  For a few months, at least, the scenery off the shoulder will be lush and green, and we’ll be able to feel good about the appearance of things.