July 11, 2009

• Unexplained Occurrences

   

  I hypothesize about everything, including what might have split the tree in the photo above.  If a cause/effect relationship isn’t obvious, I speculate.  In human behavior, I seek meaning and motivation.  (Greyfox laughs at me for that.)  Almost always, I find more than one explanation for each occurrence.  That’s okay.  The questions matter more to me than any answers.  I’m curious.

  I found a few things that piqued my curiosity on Friday’s water run.  As we often do, we bypassed the spring on the way down and went to Camp Caswell for ice cream.  As Doug and I got out of the car, we heard barking sounds coming from a pickup truck parked across the lot beside the propane pump.  I looked, expecting to see a dog.  No dog was there — just a round-headed, button-nosed kid about six years old, barking at us.

  The shape of his head was evident through his sparse buzz-cut hair.  There was a definite air of hostility about his bark, his facial expression, tension in his shoulders, and the tight grip he had on the side of the truck bed.  I gave my head a shake and turned to go into the store.  When Doug saw the barking kid, he started laughing.

  Since that truck was the only vehicle in the lot and a young couple were the only customers in the store, I supposed the barking kid came with them.  I said, to no one in particular, that it was a funny-looking dog in that truck out there.  Nobody seemed to pay me any attention.  We made our purchases and left.  By the time we were out there, the truck had gone.

  As I drove from the lot, I asked Doug if the kid’s barking had struck him as funny.  He said, yes, it was pretty funny.  I said it hadn’t seemed funny to me, that I had sensed fear and hostility.  I paused a beat and said, “I saw no tail wagging.”  That got the laugh I was going for.

  I thought off and on about the barking kid and discussed him with both of my guys.  The Kid’s opinion is that he was just goofing around.  I felt that he might have been venting some repressed anger or imitating a vicious dog of his acquaintance.  The Old Fart says he was obviously a feral child raised by wolves.  If he had been howling, I might credit that explanation, but he sounded more like a doberman than a wolf.  A child reared by feral dobermans?  Maybe.

  At the spring, someone had moved the big rock from the middle of the little stream.  Now, it is on the ground at the edge of the stream, and a bigger rock is in its old place as stepping stone.  A lot of effort went into that project.  The smaller rock is fairly big, obviously heavy, and had been half-sunken in the bed of the stream.  The bigger one would be more than I could lift.  I’d probably even have a hard time rolling it.

  Previously, it had been possible for a long-legged person like me to get from bank to bank of the stream without the stepping stone.  With the original rock there, even a small child could cross the stream without getting wet feet.  Now, crossing the stream is absurdly easy for anyone, and one could perch one’s butt on the flat top of the big rock in the middle, and still have room for one’s feet, or at least the heels.  Maybe a cool place to sit was the motivation.

  

  My other unsolved mystery from yesterday involves something seen at a distance through trees.  In this telephoto shot, the tawny color and rounded “ears” suggested to my imagination a reclining Asiatic lion.  Reason suggests otherwise, but other than a big rock or a bear (but the color’s not quite right for a grizzly), reason suggests no alternative.

  

  Pizarro, AKA “Berzerko” met us when we got home.  The photo below, of a hazy sky over the big muskeg along Sheep Creek, is available in a large enough version for wallpaper, here.  The photo of the split tree at the top of this entry was captured from approximately the same POV as the long shot below, in a slightly different direction.

    

  

  • 4:09 pm
  • 4 Comments