29. La Crescenta

I have a daughter in La Crescenta which, while not Africa, has signage suggesting a lion situation nonetheless.

Although the mountain lion presence has generated the billboards the black bears are apparently more frequent.

One local legend, nicknamed “meatball” (due to his fetish for Costco meatballs), was relocated numerous times but kept coming back. As the story was related to me, on one occasion they drove him to Colorado and asked the locally controlling authorities if they could release him there. Colorado apparently said ~ “No thank you; we have our own bears”, thus emphasizing the well-known fact that it is easier to obtain forgiveness than permission. This is especially true if the need for forgiveness is finessed by the dark of night—no head lights—quick getaway…..technique.

So Shaving 1 called two days ago to report successful setup in their new home. She called yesterday to report a black bear in the street, at 9:00AM, on their way to church.

This is on top of Shaving 4 calling three days ago to report that a cobra had been milling around in a tree outside his abode.

Which just goes to show that it is, as it has long been and hopefully will remain “a jungle out there”.

Have not heard from Shavings 2 & 3 recently and hope they are watching their “6s”.

ML

9.10.12

28. Togo

I have a son in Africa.

In hindsight it was prescient; which I guess is how prescience always reveals itself.

It was the summer of 2010. We had been making regular trips to the “upper Choccolocco” (the first upstream shoals from the Hy 77 bridge) and decided to walk the Rita 2 over the rocks and see what lay beyond. What lay about a half mile beyond was Jackson Shoals. It was late; we were tired and as far as we could see up stream were rocky waters. A subsequent inspection from Google /map/satellite indicated we chose wisely.

On the return, as we walked the canoe down upper Choccolocco shoals I reflected upon absent hazards as what we were doing  you couldn’t do safely  in Africa; the waters looked a lot like places hippos and crocodiles might be. Of the existent menaces my concern was a cottonmouth coming at me stomach level. Shaving 4 was more worried about underwater turtle attacks on his “privates”; possibly an age thing.

Well he graduates from Eckerd College with a double major in physics and East Asian studies (he’s an “old China hand” by this point), joins the Peace Corps, and gets assigned to Africa! He flew out of the Birmingham airport with a fresh buzz cut, two passports (one regular, one US government) saying he was starting to feel like Jason Bourne.

The first month, in the general vicinity of Lomé with a guest family whose mother felt he was not eating enough, was orientation: customs, language, open a Togo bank account. He had started working on French right after the Peace Corps indicated he looked like their kind of skill set and said “start learning French”. I’m not sure if he has a gift for other languages but he likes learning them and works hard at it. It is not true that “you can do anything you set your mind to” but it is true that you can do a lot more setting your mind to it than not.

During this first month the new Togo Peace Corps volunteers had to deliver a technical speech in French. Since Eckerd, he has taken to memorizing his presentations, e.g. no note cards, and it had gone over well. After he delivered his talk, in French, he noticed that Peace Corp officials he did not know seemed to know who he was.

This is the 50^th year of the Peace Corps and the 50^th year of the Peace Corps in Togo and there is going to be a celebration in the capital attended by Togo’s President, other dignitaries and the distant refrain of Madame Classé –“I told you French was important” –because guess who gets to deliver some remarks on behalf of the new Peace Corps volunteers? While his French is not technically the best of the groups there seems to be something about his delivery that is well received by the Togolese.

So if he isn’t waylaid by a lion, elephant or mamba (or turtle), on September 7 ol’Shaving 4 is going to make his television debut. Togo is only 5 hours ahead of USA central daylight time but I have yet to find anybody that gets Togo TV no matter how many channels their provider brandishes. Well that’s what YouTube’s for, right?

ML

8.31.12

27. Dead in the car

 We traveled west to northern New Mexico on a trek charted by Shaving 2

Snake road hunting inclines one toward watching for fauna, squished and otherwise, when driving and the twelve hundred miles from Birmingham to Red River presented a panorama of road kill that I attempted to share with the shavings.

 In the beginning I would wait until close enough to identify what we were passing and would shout out something like “dead badger”.

This proved an unsatisfactory pedagogical approach as the result was always spinning heads in the back seats and yelps of “where, where?”

In the interest of more timely alerts I changed to “dead on the left (or right or in the road)”.

This worked pretty well and produced a round table discussion after each sighting regarding just exactly what was sighted. While not designed for high speed identification, Flattened Fauna (R. M. Knutson, 1987) might have been of some use.

On the return leg of the trek we stopped by a small highway curio shop. There was a Navajo (E.B.) lady and her son in the parking lot and I got a small painted pot. Inside the shop I found, among other things, rabbit pelts for $2.00. I would have bought one simply based upon the reasonable price but an animal pelt, of any sort, was simply a gag opportunity that I could not let pass by.

With the rabbit pelt inside my shirt, we all piled into the van, and headed east. About 5 minutes down the road (when there were no nearby cars) I yelled “Dead in the car”, waited until somebody said “What?” (Just to make sure they had processed the alert) pulled the rabbit pelt out of my shirt and fired it back over my shoulder into the Shavings.

Instant family life classic.

ML

8.14.12

26. Rita II on patrol

Rita II on patrol:


July 10, 2011 at Choccolocco Creek ( 33.559474,-86.124079)

25. Shaving 3's first knife

Shaving 3 has always been law abiding by nature. He strove to find out what the “rules” were so that he could follow them and assist others in doing the same; more leader than authoritarian. Occasionally, however, events resulted in a tension between his orderly instincts and other deep desires.

And so it was at an Applebee’s when he was around 5 years old. We went to visit Grandma sawed-off from time to time; Saturday PM mass then Applebee’s for dinner. As he was no longer sitting in a booster chair, the waitress naturally gave him his own place setting which he unwrapped and found therein a spoon, a fork and a…KNIFE!
Now he knew knives were not to be played with (read touched) but here he was with his own KNIFE handed to him by the ~ controlling authority. So he nudges me, points to the knife and looks up. I knew he was thrilled with this opportunity to have his own KNIFE and as it was not pointed or seriously serrated I told him it was ok; he was old enough. He’s always had a soft spot in his heart for Applebee’s ever since but I don’t think he remembers why.

Shaving 4 wants a Bowie knife. He knows full well that it is more-or-less useless in almost all situations (Seraphim Falls notwithstanding) but he’ll probably get one. After all, a knife is like a rope. You don’t know what you’re gonna need it for. You just always need it.
ML
7/6/2011

24. Gun fire in Shades Creek; two out of three ain’t bad (but sometimes one’s enough)

Shades Creek runs from just west of the Birmingham race track to the Cahaba River. Though not one of the creeks I imprinted on, I’ve been in it for over half my life so that makes it… “home creek”.

It is most accessible to most in front of the Brookwood shopping mall where it appears to the many casual observers as a largish drainage ditch. It takes about two minutes of concentrated watching before the creek’s true nature begins to manifest. By the five minute mark you realize you’re looking at something like those National Geographic drawings –“Life in the You-Name-It” – where every possible animal is drawn sitting about 12 inches from each other.

Snakes, fish (bass to two pounds, carp to eight pounds, and bream so beautiful that I’ve seen the species featured in a German aquarium fish book), mink, muskrat, beaver (I never actually saw the beaver but there was once a dam which, making the most of available materials, had a shopping cart in it), groundhogs, kingfishers, great blue herons, hawks, at least four species of turtles (some individuals way bigger than you’d think possible give the depth). I keep waiting for an alligator to show up.

Mostly I’ve fished there. It’s the perfect place to go if you’ve got to go but don’t want to make a full blown expedition out of it. The only down side is the occasional critic, driving over one of the four bridges, who sees you fishing in a drainage ditch and offers a crude evaluation of your prospects. I make an effort not to be taking a fish off the line with such geniuses watching so as leave them in useful ignorance.

All the wildlife notwithstanding, early Shades creek does flow through an urban setting so there are modern human artifacts, mostly golf balls. However, one early, drizzly, Sunday morning I look down and there’s a gun, looking like a moderately realistic, but surely toy, version of a .22 revolver. The toy hypothesis was ongoing as I picked it up – the true weight masked by being underwater – but once in the air it was clearly a real gun.

So without a moment’s hesitation I cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. These were two mistakes on multiple levels. The first level was the noise, which was loud, my being basically in a sound chamber given the surrounding 30 ft high backs and a concrete bridge almost over my head. The second level had to do with the likelihood of the barrel being full of silt (think exploding gun); fortunately not. The only thing I did right was the ol’ “never point a gun at something you don’t want to shoot”; i.e. not my foot or a rock.

When my pulse settled down I unloaded the gun and started warming to the find. Demonstrably functional, I had a free pistol with only one missing grip. So I stuck it in the snake bag and fished on.

Before leaving the creek, I got to wondering what that gun had been up to previously that led to its getting tossed in the creek. Recalling a drug trial (jury duty) emanating from the general vicinity it occurred to me that the gun may have been up to “no good”; and did I want said gun turning up in my position? I further reasoned “no I did not”. So I drove to a nearby police station, and with the gun still in the snake bag, proffered it to a policeman getting out of his car. We went inside where I explained to them how I came by the gun and did not want it. At first they did not know exactly what to do (the base story being a little unusual) then one said “We can impound it”. I says “Sounds good to me”. For months I kept waiting for a call from a district attorney, who having done some ballistics, knew exactly what the gun had been up to and where was I at some particular time & place. Never happened.

Yea, there’s more in Shades creek than critters. I once found one – yes one – skin diver’s flipper. Bet there’s a story goes with that.

ML
12/17/2010

23. Sawed-off Sportsman sees “the light”

Wisdom holds that you need to be careful holding your breath when skin diving. Adventure holds that you use the tricks that let you hold your breath a long time. The main trick is hyperventilating until your faces gets tingly before going down. As I understand it, in non-diving mammals, the breathing reflex is triggered by the buildup of CO2 while in diving mammals their brain monitors O2. The advantage of the latter strategy is that the animal does not pass out while underwater; the disadvantage of the other approach is thus manifest for a “non-diving mammal” that dives anyway. The second trick is to go ahead and let your diaphragm do breathing-like movements; just keep your mouth closed. You can live through using both of these tricks while sitting in bed because if you pass out you wake up and record the last number you remember seeing on the stop watch (4 min, 30sec, Tallahassee, 430 Walker Street, about 1970).Doing this underwater has more problematic possibilities.

As I recall the situation, it was summer after our first year in college. Dave and I were doing some sort of work on a private swimming pool and decided to have a contest to see who could swim the farthest underwater. As noted before, one of my famous powers in high school was breath holding. I went first and planned on leaving him with no possibility of matching my submerged lap swimming – this competition being after a big lunch of tuna fish sandwiches which probably contributed to what happened next. I’m not sure if the wet suit bottom I was wearing had any effect.

So off I went. I remember 3.5 laps in the pool. Dave’s side of the story, being conscious longer than I, was more detailed. He said I touched the pool side on lap 4 and then just stayed down. His first thought was that I was trying to be funny so he waited a while before going down to see what I was doing. What I was doing was breathing water in and out of my mouth. He tried to get me out at the near deep end but couldn’t, so he pulled me down to the shallow end and out of the water whence he a) began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, b) got only gurgling sounds, c) flipped me over and lifted me in the middle, d) out poured a lot of water, e) then back to mouth to mouth. [In truth he owed me one life saving as in the past he had stuck a dart in my back, almost blinded me with a microscope light and pushed me off a cliff at Watts Bar Lake…but I digress.]

My “side” (aka almost the “other side”) of events was different. I experienced and remember clearly, as if being trapped in a dream, that I knew I was trapped but couldn’t get out …. and it was not pleasant. I also remember seeing a large distant light centered in what was passing at the time (along with me) for the center of my visual field.

My first this-worldly recollection was not being able to see but being able carry on a conversation with Dave. I said, reasonably enough, “what happened”. He said “you drowned”. Now this response came as big a surprise as if I walked up to you, tapped you on the shoulder, and said “you drowned”. In favor of his case, however, was the last thing I remembered outside the ‘dream’ was 3.5 laps underwater in the pool.

As I began to be able to see, I noted I was wearing the bottom half of my wet suit, and as the emergency people were on their way, my number one priority was to get the wet suit off so as not to have to deal with questions about why I was wearing half a wet suit (still a good question).
Official help showed up, gave me a few whiffs off the oxygen tank, and departed.

My mother’s response to the tale was to take me to the doctor the next day but there seemed to be no lasting problems (I heard that!). She remained nonplussed as to our parting exchange. I said “thanks”. Bailey said something along the lines of “no problem”. Although, that being the day of Yancy Derringer, it remained a standing joke that Dave, having saved my life, now had to follow me around with a shotgun as Pahoo did for Yancy (this traditional Pawnee obligation – forever guarding someone whose life you saved – always seemed the reverse of the debt). In truth, Dave got the worst end of the deal; despite his heroics getting into the newspaper he had bad dreams for some time thereafter……I just had the memory of “the light”.

ML
12/16/2010