Years ago, I began exercise walking, increasing gradually over time. My running brother Joe has a 40-some year head start. Putting our covered distances astronomically, like traveled starlight: his years are “run-years,” mine, “walk-years.”
I began by walking the little quarter-mile cul-de-sac where I lived in 1996, multiplying it till I reached 2 miles.
Walking after dinner, I befriended a little brown bat who always darted over and in front of me. It was only friendship “of sorts,” due to his also being out and the fact that I was never bitten. Some neighborhood ladies walked too, but seeing the bat, had immediate concern for their hair.
I even called the bat “Bela,” but as is the general conceit of bats, it only cared to hear its own “speech” echoed back.
Becoming bored with the cul-de-sac, I went out earlier and started walking in the country, meaning that I was far away by the time my “little friend” appeared.
When asked what he saw through the opening to King Tut’s tomb, Lord Carnarvon said: “Wonderful things!” While walking for my health along country roads, I have seen the following wonderful sights:
A red-spotted newt crossing (not D.O.T. designated), where dozens of them, just like me, headed in one direction.
Toads “hopping for their lives” and wooly worms “putting it in third” to cross a very busy road.
Beautiful, distant, wary red foxes.
Kudzu’s road-crossing efforts halted, not by mowers, but “rolled” back by the products of Goodyear and Firestone.
Eastern Box Turtles crossing the road like maneuvering tanks, their “guns” (heads and necks) “objective” oriented.
A startled wild turkey, who flew. I was equally startled by him, but didn’t.
Unfortunate opossums who had left this life with a smile (grin) which would have made any undertaker jealous.
These following sights, seen the same afternoon, made a great impression:
On that leafless, fall day, beside a stream I saw a deer skeleton, apparently having been “dressed in the field” by a hunter. Scavengers had dropped some bones in the water, which had then “trans-flowed” them downstream.
In a plowed tobacco field, I found arrowheads and empty shotgun shells. I was struck by the idea (nothing else, though it was deer-hunting season) that the shotgun shell’s spent force paralled the ancient expended energy of the Native-American’s arm in using his bow.
These artifacts were probably all that physically remained of those particular ancient people, such “red men,” now likely only red clay. Even after Peter Stuart Ney’s first 50-some year exhumation at Third Creek Presbyterian, not much remained.
Along the road’s shoulder, I saw the melancholy remains of an apparently lost hunting dog. The leather collar’s brass nameplate was unintelligible. Being mostly bones, but with some dried flesh and fur, the dog qualified as “partial mummy.”
I thought it sad that the dog was going back to the earth on top of the earth, instead of beneath it, as his owner would have provided if only he had known. I had the strange thought that it would have been appropriate for a Victorian dressing screen to have been placed around the departed dog, so its “disrobing” could have been done in private.
The road dipped and the twilight air became filled with flying, stinging ants. Miraculously, bats dived from all sides to consume them. I cheered the bats on, though I’m sure they didn’t notice (since, as previously stated, they are only pleased with the sound of their own reverberations).
I survived and returned home to the cul-de-sac, where Bela was also “diving.” I wondered if he had missed me, found me on my walk, and continued with me, observing from above. Maybe he had seen some of those “pause for thought” things I had seen (possibly giving him pause for thought too). Perhaps, seeing me in trouble, he had rallied his kin to my aid, then raced back home to give me “greeting” when I returned.
Later, in reflection, I decided that my joy in returning home was evidently so much that I had attributed something un-batlike, to something un-human.