Lazy Squirrelfriend
Okay, this is the
eleventh in the Lazy series. The others are getting deleted
from
CL. If you would like to read the others, drop me a line and
I'll send you the
link to the ones I have archived on my site.
FYI: Just because you request the link that does NOT mean you
wanna bang me,
have me spam you incessantly, be buddy buddies, or even like
me. It means you
want the link. I'll send it to you, and that, comrade, will
be That.
Onward.
Why am I still doing this?
I'll tell you. You can never have too many girl friends.
Not bang buddies, not mistresses, not sexy tarts on the side; Girl
Friends.
This is especially true if you happen to be a guy who spent ten years
of his life on a rock fulla men in Alaska.
Men Friends I've had my fill of... Female Friends though... that's
still a pretty new gig for me (and I'm OLD)
However, girlfriends are Not the only thing that I obsess about... I
had a squirrelfriend once...
=========
Squirrelfriend
I’m not sure anybody ever knows when to begin. I was born. *laughs*
Honestly, there was something before that, wasn’t there?
Okay, so They were born, and them before them, and so on ad infinitum,
and now we are in Genesis, with so and so begat so and so…
Boring.
*sip*
So I always start in the middle. *shrugs* It’s as good a place as any,
right?
This particular middle was just that, the middle of Everything.
I was in the middle of my life.
I was in the middle of nowhere Alaska.
It was the middle of the year.
I was in the middle of doing nothing…
All of which is going nowhere fast, but if you say ‘middle’ enough
times, it starts to sound all rubbery in your mouth…
it actually feels kind of good.
I was living in Elf Woods, which sounds a lot more romantic than it
was. Elf Woods was just another strip of swampy ground,
with a thick stand of old growth Dogwoods, waist high skunk cabbage and
shoulder high ferns. Elf Woods was between
Fredric’s Point boardwalk and Sandy Beach.
Sandy Beach also sounds a lot more romantic than it was. One hundred
years of folks taking a couple of shovels full of sand
back to their garden had pretty much turned Sandy Beach into Jagged
Pointy Sharp Little Rocks Beach With Liberal Amounts
Of Broken Glass Thrown In For Good Measure.
The thing Elf Woods had going for it was that it was far enough off the
beaten trail that no human would ever ‘accidentally’
stumble across you while camped out in the woods, yet close enough to
said trail that you could still drag your sorry butt out of
your soggy tent and trudge the five miles into town, and, more
importantly, to the fish factory where we all worked.
However, at this time of year, the fish weren’t fornicating yet, which
meant the fish weren't schooling together and running
upstream yet, which meant the fishermen weren't catching any fish yet,
which meant, yep, you guessed it, No Work Scheduled
at the fish factory.
Which is why I was in the middle of Elf Woods, during the middle of
year, and was in the middle of doing nothing. Actually, I
wasn't really doing Nothing, what I was doing was enjoying the first
heavy rays of pre Solstice sunshine and hanging out with a
squirrel.
I knew Id finally get around to it. You all thought I was going to
dwell on the middle, or pontificate upon the heady aroma of
skunk cabbage or something, but it was the squirrel I wanted to talk
about.
When you live in a tent in the middle of the woods, have read every
book you brought with you twice, haven't even Seen
another human being in over a month, and your entire life revolves
around the breeding habits of fish, you tend to do… strange
things…. for entertainment.
That was me, see. Crazy guy in the woods. Bored out of my freekin’
skull. So I started talking to a squirrel… *shrugs*
Perhaps not the most normal of behavioral patterns in the here and now,
but in the there and then, well, it seemed pretty normal
at the time.
At first she wasn't too keen on being my friend, but a few days of
bread crumbs and patience, and that was that; we were the
best of friends. She didn't talk much, but she was a Great listener. I
made a rather interesting discovery with her: City squirrels
are used to junk food, they eat a lot of sugar. It’s a part of their
natural diet. Not so with country squirrels. Especially ones way
out in the sticks like this. They Never get junk food. As a result they
have no tolerance for it.
On evening my little squirrelfriend walked into my camp (which was now
Her camp) shrugged off the breadcrumbs I offered her
and instead stole an Oreo cookie from my private stash. Five minutes
latter and my little squirrelfriend was just that, Squirrelly!
She was doing back flips, climbing trees, flying through the air,
singing bawdy songs… TOTALLY amped up on sugar.
We stayed up most of the night, chit chatting, howling at the moon,
eating Oreos…. it was nice.
The next morning was the middle morning. Both of us are having a quiet
wake up. Both of us are fuzzy mouthed and blurry
eyed. She seemed quite content to have bread and raisins for breakfast,
I was nursing my third cup of coffee wondering when
the caffeine would kick in. I was sunning myself on a log. She was just
kicking around on the ground at my feet, nibbling on
some bread crust.
Then it happened.
A blood curdling hair raising terror inducing metal wrenching
Messerschmitt versus Spitfire death from above never ending
SCREECH stopped my heart, immediately followed by an Explosion of
leaves and branches directly overhead.
Before the leaves could even reach the ground there was a physical
Whump! right in front of me, with four more Whumps! in
rapid succession.
Stunned, I peered through my fuzzy eyeballs and found myself staring at
five yearling eagles (American Bald Eagles, full grown,
but hadn’t got their distinctive white heads yet, they were still brown
all over, hence, ‘yearlings’).
The noise was incredible. Screeching, squawking, thrashing about… And
then it dawned on me… they were eating my
squirrelfriend. Five eagles had just dropped out of the trees and were
now fighting over the last fluffy remains of my
sqirrelfriend, not three feet away from me…
My squirrelfriend was not that large. In a blink of an eye it was all
over. I was in a state of fuzzy shock, so ya, I blinked two or
three times because the next thing I knew five eagles were no longer
making any noise or fighting over anything. Five eagles had
suddenly noticed that another living creature was in the area (me) and
they were looking, silently, at me, cocking their heads
from side to side in that way that birds do when they are trying to
judge the distance between themselves and their target.
That was enough for me. I did what any red blooded Alaskan He Man would
do if faced with a similar situation: I crapped my
pants, threw my coffee cup in some unknown direction (I never found it
again) dove head first into my tent, fouled the zipper
trying to ‘slam’ it closed, and started singing (screaming would be
more accurate) “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller at the
top of my lungs *shrugs*
I never heard them leave.
Twenty years later and I Still keep an eye on the sky....
rock on