Anybody who has known me for very
long knows that I have always had a fascination with animals lying dead by the
road. Yes road kill!
But before you picture me cooking up a long dead possum or raccoon, let me
explain. The fascination revolves around the chance to look at these animals up
close and personal without risking my health and safety. I would never dream of
killing most of these animals myself, so if they are already dead…why not? It
always kind of seemed like meeting a celebrity to me.
I come by this trait honestly. When I was a kid we often stopped
and inspected road kill, and if it was something rare like a big rattlesnake or
copperhead, we would take it home and save the skin. I still remember the look
on the bag boy from A&P’s face when he opened the trunk on our VW Beetle
only to stare in to the eyes of a quickly thawing road-killed bobcat! If I
remember correctly that was the last time he hit on my mother. Let’s just say
that not everyone shared (or understood) our fascination.
Over the years inspecting road kill
gave me a great understanding of what lurked in the woods around our home. I could brag that I had identified
and touched most of the wild animals native to middle Georgia. Sure they were
dead, but I petted foxes, coyotes, skunks, wild hogs, and countless species of
snakes, hawks and owls. This up close and personal inspection allowed me to
make positive identifications in the field as well as those drive-by
inspections done at 60 miles per hour on the way to school. “That was a grey fox” I would counter
when one of my brothers said “poor dog”
or just simply “awwwe”. Maybe DOT would hire me as an amateur biologist!
But even the truest of pleasures has
a way of fading over time. After years of poking these deceased creatures with a stick I was beginning
to think I had seen it all, and the number of times we actually stopped decreased.
It had to be something we couldn’t identify or something really special. Of
course my wife-to-be knew of this fascination, and while I can’t positively say
she enjoyed stopping and viewing the carnage, she did a good job of at least
playing along. It wasn’t long before she could tell the difference between a
red fox and a grey one at almost 80 miles per hour! Looks like I had chosen a
good one.
So as I approach my wedding
anniversary of twenty four years, I am reminded of one of the most unusual road
kill identifications of my illustrious career. We were married on February 4th,
and while I won’t say that the groundhog’s search for his shadow had any
influence on our destination, we chose to head to the cold mountains of North
Georgia anyway. In spite of the frigid weather we had a wonderful time and I
somehow managed to keep my eyes on the road; tougher than it sounds for a guy
like me traveling through an exotic location with potentially unidentified
species of animals unable to safely cross the road.
We had almost made it to flat and
familiar ground when we zoomed by a reddish, immobile lump lying a few feet off
of the side of the road. “Was that a grey fox?” my
wife asked as I applied the brakes and pulled on to the shoulder of the road. I
had been wondering the same thing, but I was delighted that she was the one
that brought it up. Nothing kills a honeymoon quite like loading a dead animal
into the back of the truck beside a busy road! The joy of adding a new animal
to my long list of positively identified road kill quickly faded as I realized
the irony this one. His prediction of six more weeks of winter was incorrect…he
only managed four days!
No comments:
Post a Comment