WEIRD WORLD

PART 1

There are plenty of times in the country when you see something, but you have no idea what you’re looking at. After a while you learn––just give it a second or two, longer if you have rogue eyes like mine. It’s good for you to encounter things you can’t understand––it’s humbling. How boring to go through a day full of the familiar.

Here are some entries from our Weird File:

√  One day a Coot dove into the pond and completely disappeared. Coots can swim quite a distance under water. I stared at the spot where he had gone under for a good five minutes. All the time that old coot was treading water behind me and thinking “That old coot can’t see.” (see February 24th entry for a Coot photo) 

 √  I once saw a black kettle cruising around the pond. It was a black fungus that broke loose and went for an evening sail.

√ More alarming was the clenched fist that rose up out of the water in front of my kayak. I paddled backwards toward––and right up onto––the shore. I’d always wondered if there were old hunters and fishermen in that pond and when they’d surface. This isn’t as farfetched as it may sound; there was a promenade of shell casings and beer cans around the pond when we bought the land. Luckily, it was not a fist, just the head of a giant snapper.

√ It was a special day when I opened our front door and found a kidney on the porch. This wasn’t the usual macerated mouse kidney one expects to find on the top step. No, this was a full-sized, human-sized kidney. The neat thing was it was clean as a whistle, dry and intact, not in any way disgusting. I mention that because yes, I did pick it up. I turned it over and examined it, looking for a clue as to how it arrived on my porch. Not a prank, for sure, not in an isolated location like ours. Or anywhere else, I suppose. We’re guessing Stella performed the first half of a transplant on a dead deer left by a hunter. We hope.

√ We had several dead trees at the end of our pond, really tall trees. They served as excellent perches for eagles eyeing our crappies and bluegills. One morning there were three basketballs perching on a branch. I stared, then reached for the binoculars. There were three baby owls, recently pushed from the nest, fluffed up to keep warm .

√ Last fall I approached the pond and saw that it was raining. Raining hard. That is, rain drops were pounding the surface of the pond so hard that water was splashing into the air. Except––it wasn’t raining. I wasn’t getting wet, nor did I feel any raindrops when I looked up at the perfectly clear sky. 

This was not a weather phenomenon––it was an animal phenomenon. Our pond had lost its fish last summer, so there was no one to feed on the frog eggs and tadpoles. When I reached the shore and made a closer examination, I saw that there was not a ¼ inch of our pond without a tadpole in it. And they were all doing the hokey-pokey to beat the band. In some places they were piled on top of one another. The pond was writhing with tadpoles.

Maybe it was all those ambient substances I inhaled walking across the Michigan campus in the 60s. Timothy Leary probably saw tadpole invasions a couple of times a day. For the rest of us, if you can’t believe your eyes, you probably shouldn’t.

Tomorrow: Weird World Part 2