The Comfort Of An Acronym
I looked out just now and all I could see was a little baby rabbit under the pine tree, hopping out towards the hay fields. I did not see the other thing but know it is out there. It was in the front yard this morning walking in circles and except for emaciation and rib protrusion was showing most all the signs of a progressive neurological disease, although one not yet reported in this state. I took some up close photos and it's not pretty. And it wouldn't run away which was perhaps the scariest thing. Wild animals should run away when you get close. I didn't get too close though, that's what the zoom lens is for. After I got a local government official on the phone, who gave me a number for a wildlife biologist I might like to call on Monday, and told me also that there was up to this point in time not a single reported case of CWD in Virginia, I felt a little better. But not that much better because something is very wrong with that deer. I got up enough courage to blow up the photos a little and it could be that the deer was shot in the face and is just suffering from that. There is though so much to look at in the photos that it's hard to tell. The head is coated with flies, as is the left flank. The ears are thickly dotted with both flies and swollen ticks. I have a gun and could kill the deer and take it to the burn pile and set it all on fire but without a front end loader the scooping up of a potentially diseased deer is difficult. On farms, when large livestock dies and burning is impractical the front end loader is also useful for digging the hole to bury the dead animal. I've seen a pickup truck drag a dead cow with a heavy chain around its neck down a gravel road in Texas to...I'm not sure where he was taking it but what he was doing, unpleasant though it may seem, was taking care of business.
Well, just in case it is CWD the state requests that you do nothing until you contact them to check it out. They don't want you to kill it. Which lets me off that hook, I'm frankly not keen on killing, although as I understand it, you can develop a knack for it.
What are the chances that during those hours I wasn't paying attention, between the time when I saw it this late morning, acting in erratic fashion, and this early evening when I noticed all my roses eaten, that it had come within five feet of my living space and munched and drooled and pissed and left behind a few flies and tics? I would say about 93 percent.
Really, is it any wonder people have nightmares? I've been wondering lately about post traumatic stress disorder. Partly about how nice it is to have a name for something which on the surface might appear, to the casual observer, as simply bad manners, and partly wondering how many people could be suffering from it just by nature of their environment? Worldwide for sure but I'm mostly meaning in these United States.
Deer and Elk have the acronym CWD to cover them in the event they start acting really weird. The downside to some of the acronyms is that they lead to slow and horrible death. Oh, I should have told you this by now that CWD stands for Chronic Wasting Disease. It would appear there is no sensitivity training for the disease naming committees of non-sentient creatures.
I don't know what else to tell you. I've brought my cat inside and locked up her cat window. I've washed my feet and (dammit to hell) put on shoes when I leave the house. I extracted that deer tick a few minutes ago and am feeling fine about it. The thing about nature is that while it is sometimes pretty, it is also sometimes not. Not pretty can be good though, we would have no extraordinary art and literature without it, so in the end what we have, what we always have, is win win. Does this screen look blurry to you?
...more recent posts
The Lacking Of Probability
After driving the 950 miles northeast he was still in the South, but a cooler, breezier, more mountainous and decidedly more rural South. There were fewer sidewalks here and they were not coated with black dots of gum or broken glass or steaming gobs of spit. Having made the drive in one sprint he was not so removed from that former place as the mileage would suggest and in his mind the two places clashed as he made the turn into the long gravel driveway. He drove uphill past the pond and surveyed the 40 acres that would constitute his new territory. A crooked smile replaced what had been the firm cast of his mouth and he heard from afar a cackling, hysterical laughter. It seemed to be coming from the lush green foothills which surrounded him on all sides. It closed in too quickly though and he realized the laughter was his own, and, not particularly comfortable with the sound, he shut himself up.
But the former place was less a memory than part of his makeup so that over the first few months on the hill, while sitting on the back porch of the bighouse enjoying the gentle breezes, or floating in the cold swimming pool, or hiking in purest isolation the nearby mountain trails, he found himself transported back, way down the hill, all the way back to that thick heat and dark night where he had spent his last ten years.
That first Fall on the hill was hideously beautiful as the leaves on the trees all around him burst forth those vibrant colors which precede death and became like snapshots from a perfect life; postcards he would speak of but not send because he could never find a stamp.
After the leaves fell he found a replacement to look after the two houses and loaded up a few tools and his shotgun and drove back down to finish what he had started, his own porch, on his tenth of an acre, which looked out over a cracked driveway more dirt and grass than concrete and beyond that a buckled sidewalk and potholed street and the ramshackle abode with no electricity occupied by mostly agreeable but still practicing drug addicts (his own home had been just like it a few years previous). And next to that the sculptors' residence and next to that the perpetual work in progress, the chauffeur's home.
He found it highly illogical that his house, left untended, had not been breached in his absence, not a single broken window, no floorboards pushed up from the crawl space, no walls stripped of sheetrock for the valuable copper wire and pipe inside. All the appliances were still in the kitchen. The temporary electrical pole which powered up the place not just during construction but during his illegal lodging the previous few years still had its meter, another valuable commodity on the local black market. Even as his life here was one of lowest profile, avoiding to the best of his ability the exposure which welcomed racial slurs from passing teenagers and even though on foot he could not leave his house at night to walk two blocks to the nearest store because of a prevalent criminal intent among some of the town's youth, he still knew and felt deeply that he lived a blessed life. And while the thick humid air allowed deep breathing only at risk of drowning, he still sucked it in with great satisfaction. We are all drug addicts in one fashion or another and for him the addiction was perhaps the rather obvious thrill of surviving a single day in this environment, but he knew he was addicted to something less describable than that, and after each abysmal attempt at speaking out what that was, he willed himself silent on the subject, imagining against all probability that he would succeed.
After driving the 950 miles northeast he was still in the South, but a cooler, breezier, more mountainous and decidedly more rural South. There were fewer sidewalks here and they were not coated with black dots of gum or broken glass or steaming gobs of spit. Having made the drive in one sprint he was not so removed from that former place as the mileage would suggest and in his mind the two places clashed as he made the turn into the long gravel driveway. He drove uphill past the pond and surveyed the 40 acres that would constitute his new territory. A crooked smile replaced what had been the firm cast of his mouth and he heard from afar a cackling, hysterical laughter. It seemed to be coming from the lush green foothills which surrounded him on all sides. It closed in too quickly though and he realized the laughter was his own, and, not particularly comfortable with the sound, he shut himself up.
But the former place was less a memory than part of his makeup so that over the first few months on the hill, while sitting on the back porch of the bighouse enjoying the gentle breezes, or floating in the cold swimming pool, or hiking in purest isolation the nearby mountain trails, he found himself transported back, way down the hill, all the way back to that thick heat and dark night where he had spent his last ten years.
That first Fall on the hill was hideously beautiful as the leaves on the trees all around him burst forth those vibrant colors which precede death and became like snapshots from a perfect life; postcards he would speak of but not send because he could never find a stamp.
After the leaves fell he found a replacement to look after the two houses and loaded up a few tools and his shotgun and drove back down to finish what he had started, his own porch, on his tenth of an acre, which looked out over a cracked driveway more dirt and grass than concrete and beyond that a buckled sidewalk and potholed street and the ramshackle abode with no electricity occupied by mostly agreeable but still practicing drug addicts (his own home had been just like it a few years previous). And next to that the sculptors' residence and next to that the perpetual work in progress, the chauffeur's home.
He found it highly illogical that his house, left untended, had not been breached in his absence, not a single broken window, no floorboards pushed up from the crawl space, no walls stripped of sheetrock for the valuable copper wire and pipe inside. All the appliances were still in the kitchen. The temporary electrical pole which powered up the place not just during construction but during his illegal lodging the previous few years still had its meter, another valuable commodity on the local black market. Even as his life here was one of lowest profile, avoiding to the best of his ability the exposure which welcomed racial slurs from passing teenagers and even though on foot he could not leave his house at night to walk two blocks to the nearest store because of a prevalent criminal intent among some of the town's youth, he still knew and felt deeply that he lived a blessed life. And while the thick humid air allowed deep breathing only at risk of drowning, he still sucked it in with great satisfaction. We are all drug addicts in one fashion or another and for him the addiction was perhaps the rather obvious thrill of surviving a single day in this environment, but he knew he was addicted to something less describable than that, and after each abysmal attempt at speaking out what that was, he willed himself silent on the subject, imagining against all probability that he would succeed.