Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
At some point, the ocean rolls in and out of many of my tales like a slightly demented uncle who lives upstairs who you only see occasionally, but since my last autobiographical piece was about tropical crime and punishment, I thought I’d continue the theme of crime and talk about home invasion on land. I live in a kind of isolated location, with some houses on one side of our property and none on the other side, just redwood forest. And thirty years ago, it was somewhat wilder.
Before the kid was born, my wife and I used to keep a loaded shotgun by the side of our bed up in the sleeping loft. Never a shell in the chamber, of course, it was just for protection.
Figure 1. The Beagle Boys, canine career criminals, prepared for a break-in.
I only ever picked that gun up in self-defense one time. For some reason I was alone that night, my gorgeous ex-fiancee was off somewhere. There was moonlight, but the redwoods are thick, so it was patchy. The house was quiet. I went to bed and read for a while, then turned off the light and was drifting off.
Morpheus the God of Sleep and I were just exchanging business cards, his was made of black onyx with black lettering, when a soft rapping on the door made me sit straight up. “Hello?” I shouted. “Who’s there?”
There was no answer. I listened for a while. Nothing. I figured I’d heard branches on the roof or something. I settled back in bed, and started sliding downhill, when the rapping started up again, more insistent than before. “Who’s there?”, I yelled. No answer. Again silence.
So I grabbed the shotgun from the side of the bed there in the sleeping loft, and I went creeping down the stairs, “naked as a jaybird” as my beloved grandma used to say. I grabbed the flashlight from where it was stored. I noticed that my hands were unsteady. The pounding had stopped completely. I had no clue what was happening. I imagined and rejected a host of possibilities. The silence continued. I jacked a shell into the chamber of the shotgun. The snick-snick of the action was flat, foreboding, metallic. I waited. And waited. Finally, the pounding came again.
I flung open the front door and shined the flashlight out through the door from inside the house. “Come out right now!”, I shouted, “Don’t mess with me, I’ve got a gun!”.
Silence. Nothing. Well, not nothing. The cold night wind blew in on my privates, I was freezing. But other than the wind, silence.
Silence. I thought about stepping outside. Silence. I thought about my privates. Silence. “Perhaps I should reconsider my options”, I thought, and I closed the door against the cold wind, and reconsidered my options. And my explanations for the pounding. I didn’t see that I had too many of either, unless hiding in my house with a shotgun counted as an option, and for me that didn’t cut it … the silence dragged on. I decided the next time, if there was a next time, I was gonna make my move, yes sirree, that’s what I’d do.
Suddenly, the pounding started again, and this time it was more urgent yet, slamming and thumping. I gritted my teeth, flung open the door and jumped through to the landing outside, my heart knocking against my ribs. I looked ahead. Nothing. I turned the beam of my flashlight and the barrel of my shotgun to the right. Nothing. I spun around to the left, shotgun and flashlight moving as one. Nothing.
Nothing?
Nothing? How could there be nothing? I looked wildly around, to the front, to the right, to the left, up, around, nothing, what had been pounding on my door scant seconds before? My mind leapt to the wildest possibilities …
It was only when I looked down near my feet, just to the left of the door, that I finally saw the two opossums. I hadn’t noticed them because they were both “playing possum”, unmoving, pretending to be dead as opossums do when startled … but unless opossum passion is a big feature of the opossum afterlife, the intertwined nature and disposition of their “corpses” left little doubt that they had been rudely and cruelly interrupted at what was clearly a critical time for the survival of the opossum species.
Now, there have been occasions when I have felt extremely foolish in my life. No one goes a lifetime without committing some monumental blunders, and I am assuredly no exception.
But this one was bizarrely crazy, because to my astonishment, I found that I felt exactly like in those dreams that I sometimes used to have as a kid. You might have had them too, the dream where you are involved in some kind of everyday public activity, maybe speaking to a crowd, when suddenly you look down and you realize to your extreme embarrassment that you forgot to put your pants or your dress on, and you are completely nude, and everyone is looking at you, and they start pointing and laughing, and you are completely humiliated and ashamed? You know that dream?
That’s exactly how I felt. I felt totally embarrassed and ashamed that the possums could see me naked, even though those opossums looked like some stuffed museum exhibit demonstrating the simplified explanation of opossum sex for the kids. And it was like the dream most especially because even though their beady little opossum eyes were closed tight, I could feel those little buggers looking at me anyways, they have their sneaky ways. They were neither dead nor sleeping, they were vibrantly awake, with all senses cranked out to the limit. They knew exactly where I was, they would know if I stepped towards or away from them. Eyes closed or not, they were wired to me, they could see my every move, and I was embarrassed that they could see my nakedness. I could hear the silent cackling of their demented interior opossum laughter, I could tell they were pointing at my exposed manhood and snickering. I melted under their unseen censure, just as in the dream.
And that all went through my head in an instant, and I was frozen in shock, just as happens in dreams sometimes, where you want to run and your feet are stuck, or you want to scream but your tongue is glued to the roof of your mouth and you can’t catch your breath, and I wanted to move, and I didn’t want to disturb them, and I wanted to melt through the porch in total embarrassment, and I wanted to scream and run, I couldn’t think, the gears were jammed, the lines were crossed, all the fuses were blown …
I stood frozen.
The cold wind was more insistent, I could see it twitching and pulling at the hairs on the possums, and it was definitely freezing my whatchamacallit because just like in the dream, I was I was indeed completely nude.
And to my amazement I found myself mumbling incoherent apologies to the opossums, about how I didn’t know it was them, babbling that I was sorry about scaring them with the shotgun, the wind blowing over my shoulders and through my legs, a nagging, insistent wind that was stripping the heat from my body. I remember saying I hoped they wouldn’t hold it against me but I’d understand if they did, wild words, meaningless incantations of apology. Finally, the spell broke and I realized the madness was upon me, and I could move again. I snapped off the flashlight without another sound and ran back inside and closed the door and thrust the shotgun into the corner by the stove still loaded, still one in the chamber, and fled back up the stairs to my bed and dived under the covers, shivering.
And there, for the next while, I tried really really hard not to think about the colossally, stupendously embarrassing mental image, the picture in my mind that a pint of eyebleach hardly touched, the “god’s-eye-view” from above and to the side of a stark naked fully grown idiot with a loaded shotgun in his hand, shell in the chamber and finger on the trigger, shivering outdoors in the moonlight at midnight with a frigid wind blowing on his unmentionables, and babbling profuse apologies to a couple of unmoving opossums frozen solid right in the hottest, sweetest, and least optimal instant of maximal opassion.
…
After I lay there a while trying to convince the mental eraser to function just this once, the pounding started up again, and it got louder and louder. I decided the part I had said about them holding it against me, that was anthropomorphism—they couldn’t care less. Heck, I might have just upped their passion levels, danger does that. Ask any adrenaline junkie like myself, we’ll tell you. I went to sleep contented, knowing the ospecies was going to survive.
And as you can tell from this story … the eyebleach never did work.
w.
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No shotgun, no shell in the chamber, just a raccoon pulling the lid off a pot of stew left out to cool and forgotten. The night and moon plays tricks on a man’s mind, especially when naked and drifting off to sleep.
You’ve had some fun times – okay, and some embarrassing ones – in your life. This was a fun story. 🙂
One Fourth of July many years ago (pre-kids) my wife and I were at the house of a co-worker and his wife. We were admiring the view off his back porch when my host said “since it’s Fourth of July, we can let one round off for fun”, or words to that effect. My host lived on 14 acres in semi-rural Connecticut, so it was not a totally inappropriate suggestion. Gunfire was not too uncommon in that area, not having been totally gentrified at the time.
Anyway my host ducked back in the house and returned with his father’s old model 99 .300 savage rifle, chambered a round and aimed it his split hardwood pile about 50 feet from the deck. One suitably satisfying BANG later and he had made a piece of firewood jump off the top of the pile. Of course we had to see how many pieces of wood the jacketed 150 grain bullet moving at about 2600 ft./sec. penetrated, so we leaned the rifle against the deck rail and went over to the woodpile to see.
The bullet had gone completely through the top piece of firewood and when we picked up the piece underneath we found not one but two snakes in the woodpile, very unpleasantly surprised in the act of making more snakes. The one shot had killed them both and continued on through the piece of firewood below.
At least in your story, the opossums got to finish what they started.
“naked as a jaybird” Will, your always entetaining thanks.
Thanks for the story LOL but what really grabbed me was your opinion about today’s old scientists and the speed of the net overtaking their lofty place that is now slowly filling with cobwebs like any lofty place will. Some body mentioned yesterday a interesting thought it was the fact that the majority of what goes on around all of us is nothing new. From the ISS to planes, boats, elevators, hydraulics, car engines and countries laws all of those daily things are based on what scientists and other exceptional people put into place decades if not centuries ago. The zombie scientist as you aptly named are a thing of the past ( some of them just do not know it yet) their territory is opened now through the net to any one and thanks to you and others it is a place of wonder.
I’ll second all you say about WUWT and its host. Thanks.
~~~~~~~~
Atmospheric temperature increase has stopped. Surprised and shocked by this natural event, CAGW fundamentalists have been “playing possum” but there will be a new awakening and rebranding with a new scary story. The new one will be number 27 or 28; yet to be named. Stay alert.
In Vietnam, at night, the bushes moved. Grenades were thrown. Oh well, better safe than sorry.
You did good by being cautious, but this ain’t the Nam so one has to be especially careful in use of weapons. Your shotgun should have been safed immediately after the incident (chamber empty).
Ok to prepare for the worst but never act rashly (ie, fire without a clear and threating target).
“or you want to scream but your tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth”
Willis, you’re a nice guy and all… ok most of the time… ok sometimes… let’s move on..
But… I hope I NEVER encounter a scenario where my tongue is glued to the roof of your mouth. Eeew. Just Eeew.
😉
[Fixed, thanks, hilarious comment, and it is an embarrassing world. The joys of working without a net. -w.]
Ah, someone else who remembers the archaic spelling with an “o” before “possum”. It was quite distressing when I noticed people had stopped using that spelling.
Have you ever woken up, gone about your day, and then noticed there was one thing different? That one thing you always knew as existing as one way only, a thing you were certain was true, is different?
And the only possible explanation is your consciousness switched over, while you were sleeping, with one of your parallel universe selves, which was easily possible as both were completely identical except for that one thing that was different?
Yeah, that’s what it felt like.
Unfortunately, as we have lost one sweet unoffensive gentle cat who was outdoors to an opossum, and have had others mauled, I’m a bit less sanguine about their appearance around the house. I would have been contemplating o-possum o-stew. But I would have waited until they were done, and I had gotten some pants and earplugs.
I keep the chamber loaded with the gun on “safe”.
The trigger won’t work till the safety has been released.
It takes a concerted mindset to release the safety, then squeeze the trigger.
No rugrats in the house, so no worries.
Recently awoke at 2am, to percieved sounds of invasion.
It sure spikes your heart rate (as noted).
I guess I’ll get some flack from this -I’m from the South and I have lived around opossums most of my life and I have never seen a “startled” possum play possum. Usually they have to be physically assaulted to do go into their “play dead” mode. To me this event would be highly unusual for these animals.But, when I learn something new after I know everything…….
A friend of mine in Viet Nam, a claymore on the perimeter goes off in the middle of the night.
The army lights up the entire world the rest of the night. They stop when they run out of ammo.
The next day they investigate and low and behold what tripped the claymore was a tiger that had gotten tangled in the trip wire and was now quite dead. The captain came out and the tiger was skinned out and salted down within 30 minutes.
I LOLed when I heard that. I had a guy shoot a water buffalo with a LAW. Swore up and down it was a tank.
Well done for the tribute to Anthony.
I know you have had some stick for putting your personal life stories on a “science” blog. I have thought a lot about the relationship between art and science and the nature of truth which is extremely elusive to pin down. I have come to the conclusion that truth changes with context, and truth for science is only truth in the narrow context of science.
As an artist I have come to read a lot of books on neuroscience. Maybe some readers of this blog will be alarmed at the prospect of the arts becoming interested in a science. I can see their point of view, there is already too much pseudoscience around, but perhaps they should be aware of this cautionary tale.
In one of your quick witted responses to a critic of your stories you wrote “dē gustibus et colōribus nōn est disputandum”, meaning that you cannot have an argument over whether blue is terrible colour, because no two people can ever know if they are discussing the same thing. The behaviourists, who dominated studies of how the brain worked in the 20th century used similar logic to declare that scientists could never discuss consciousness, because science is about drawing reproducible conclusions from empirical data, and you can never measure what someone other than yourself is thinking.
If I understand it correctly Behaviourism was founded by followers of Pavlov’s famous experiment with bells and dogs, and they were trying to study the brain by applying traditional scientific methods that gave results that could be measured and replicated. Every school child knows how Pavlov rang a bell every time he fed dogs in his laboratory until they were trained to believe the bell was a signal for mealtimes, then he rang the bell without giving the dogs any food. Even though there was no food to eat the dogs salivated in anticipation, from this he showed how the subconscious brain could be programmed to react to stimuli in predictable ways. Behaviourists were trying to construct a rigid model of the mind that had no place for things that could not be measured, their science had no place for consciousness, neuro-plasticity and a brain that changed to adapt to experience, because for them the brain was a machine with no useful ghost in it. Behaviourists believed that consciousness was a chance by-product of the physical processes of the brain, for instance fear is a triggered response to a given stimulation (maybe seeing a snake). They argued that consciousness (the ghost in the machine), if it existed, plays no place in how we react to the snake, it is just a useless by-product and bystander of brain mechanics. This arid creed is called epiphenomenalism.
In the late 1980s, with the advent of new non invasive scanning techniques and some enlightenment, science began to take more interest in consciousness. The “hard question” (as it is known) about how a machine can create a “rich inner life” is never far from the centre of studies of the brain. It may never be answered, but the understanding of how consciousness developed is being explained obliquely.
Today Neuroscience is flourishing and has become a multi discipline dialogue between philosophy, psychology, physiology, evolutionery theory, chemistry and many others…… It is becoming very relevant to everyday life, and some people predict it will have a bigger impact on how we lead our lives that the invention of the Internet. It remains to be seen if these predictions are far fetched
For myself I have first hand experience because I read many books on this subject, and it has answered many questions about the nature of illusion, which is at the heart of my craft which is drawing movement and capturing the essence of human gestures on paper. It has taught me how to learn and changed my view of how art fits into our social landscape.
Of course the work of this forum is to debunk pseudoscience and alarmism. It is about seeking truth through the collection of reliable data and statistics, and understanding the physics that drives the thermodynamics of the biosphere (well something like that). But if this forum’s mindset is arid it will get stuck in a byway, like what happened to the behaviourists; fortunately, judging from the responses of your readers to your stories there is very little chance of that happening here..
It sounds very much like you were a more controlled :Smackwater Jack”
Now Smackwater Jack, he bought a shotgun
‘Cause he was in the mood for a little confrontation
He just let it all hang loose
etc. (but not going there)
Carole King
We live near the forest. OK, we live near what used to be a forest, except that the National Forest Service burnt most of it down (along with a portion of the town) about a dozen years ago. Anyway, just a few summers ago we had a bear come into the yard. Luckily, we were keeping both dogs in the house at that time, and didn’t have the dog door installed yet. The bear ate our ducks, and then came onto the porch and put several deep scratches into it at my eye level (which is 5 feet). By the time the dogs had woken us up to go out, the bear had gone back over the fence, bending a chain link fence gate in half. I found a paw print the next day that was much larger than my outstretched hand, so it was a fairly large bear.
By the end of that summer we had put in a dog door onto the porch, though we did make sure we could lock it from the inside at night. However, one night we neglected to lock it closed. And we were woken up by the dogs having a fit, inside the house, out in the living room. My husband leaped out of bed, with just his skivvies on, grabbed the shotgun, readied it for shooting, and then (very very bravely) stepped out into the hallway. Just in time to scare the snot out of two raccoons that were trying to get away from the dogs. They looked at him and decided he was much scarier than any dogs, and turned and fled back to the relative safety of the living room, jumping up onto a file cabinet.
We then contained the dogs in a different room, opened the door, and invited the raccoons to leave. They saw the sense in that, and promptly jumped down and scrambled out the door.
Rocks thumping around.
RECON Maries over the fence in Laos.
Bedding down for the night.
WTH,,?? Well seems the RECON Marines had found a nice little bed down place.
Only problem,, local apes came home late figured it was trespassing.
Rocks flying.
jack morrow,
Well, we live right in the middle of the big city, surrounded by about 8 million other urban jungle residents, and we still have opossums and raccoons in our yard almost every night.
I have to say that a ‘possum is one of the ugliest critters in existence, with their pointy faces and hairless rat tails. And they hiss! But when they’re young, they look cute. Ours were calico colored when they were about 6 – 8 inches long: off-white, brown and black. I think they only live a few years. But they don’t cause us trouble, so we leave them alone. They’ve certainly adapted well to city living.
Haven’t seen [nor smelled] any skunks yet. But the ‘coons are fearless — they march right up to our outdoor cat’s food dish and clean out what’s left in it. They use the freshwater runoff/sewer system to get around — sometimes they’ll pop right up out of the grate in the street in front of our house. They also have an agressive pose, where they rear up on their hind legs and spread their forearms wide. It’s effective, too; they look much bigger that way, and I wouldn’t want to tangle with one. But sometimes I’ll give ’em the same pose right back, and we have a staring contest.
Haven’t seen any coyotes yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time. Coyotes are where I would draw a line in the sand. I like our outdoor cat. For that matter, I like the ‘possums and ‘coons, too. Live and let live I say, but coyotes just see another meal.
Gird your loins for battle! One morning at my country home, I almost “jumped out of my skin” when a possum hissing behind the toilet interrupted my emptying my bladder. After pulling on my jeans and arming myself with broom and garbage an epic battle ensued culminating in a small victory for humankind.
jack morrow says:
February 15, 2013 at 7:33 pm
No flack at all, everyone’s experience is different. I can only report my own experience, and that’s just how it happened me, but as they say, YMMV …
Thanks,
w.
I used to catch ‘possums and sell them to a medical school for research in embryology. I never, ever saw one “play ‘possum.” We tried all sorts of things to elicit the response, with no luck what-so-ever.
On the other hand, a Kansas hog nosed snake will roll over and play dead with little provocation. If you roll it right side up, it will roll over on its back and play dead again. Fun.
BTW… agree that ‘possums are ugly, ugly. And they have more teeth than any other warm blooded creature in North America. On the other hand, their brain is the size of a pea – they have a bony crest above it so their head looks bigger – I guess so they can pretend to have some intelligence.
D.B. Stealey says:
February 15, 2013 at 7:56 pm
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There is more, per wiki:
Didelphimorphs have a plantigrade stance (feet flat on the ground) and the hind feet have an opposable digit with no claw. Like some New World monkeys, opossums have prehensile tails. Like all marsupials, the fur consists of awn hair only, and the females have a pouch. The tail and parts of the feet bear scutes. The stomach is simple, with a small cecum. Notably, the male opossum has a forked penis bearing twin glandes.[4]
Opossums have a remarkably robust immune system, and show partial or total immunity to the venom of rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and other pit vipers.[5][6] Opossums are about eight times less likely to carry rabies than wild dogs, and about one in eight hundred opossums are infected with this virus.[7]
===========
They are old school.
My closest experience, no nudity. Once in the dark of a moonless night around 11pm, and alone at a place quite isolated from people except for an occasional passing vehicle, I was genuinely startled by an increasingly loud scuffling noise inside my cabin which I first thought I’d localized to my stove…while I remained frozen solid in my chair with my hand clutching my revolver. Thus relieved, it sounded to me like something was probably only banging around inside the oven, perhaps a trapped mouse? But then I got up to find the noise was actually outside…some large animal was making a metallic bell-like noise while also stomping around in the front yard. Again I was a little frightened but then sheepishly realized that it must be some kind of “stock”, and I found a horse with a bell on it happily grazing away about 10 yd. off. It had apparently escaped from its owner and came to rest at my empty corrals. My chills having abated, I simply put the horse away in a corral and knew all I had to do was to wait for the owner to come looking for it.
Nothing happened for about 24 hours, when this time I was surprised by a loud knocking on my door, again around 11 pm.. It was a very concerned-looking local Forest Service “guard”. Talk about “home invasion”, someone had turned me in for possible horse abuse! The horse had “looked abandoned” to some random passerby earlier. Yeah, it was all alone in there, but that was about it. So I explained the situation and thus evaded the possible charges. Finally about 18 hr. later a guy showed up actually named “Charlie Brown” and said it was his horse. He promised to buy me a fifth of something or other, apparently thinking I’d need to be bribed to give him his horse. He didn’t produce, though, and I haven’t seen either of them again.
Wild creatures are everywhere. Listen to what happened to this guy. Bit in the neck!
My observation about the Internet and science is that we going back to the time prior to around the mid to late 19th century when a scientist was anyone who chose to be a scientist, and of course could afford to indulge his hobby. Prior to that time the government’s involvement in science was restricted to offering prizes for inventing things and activities that had a direct, usually military, payoff, such as astronomy (payoff = navigation).
Up until the 1950s or 1960s, government direct involvement in science, apart from military applications, was mostly at arms length. Then governments decided that they needed to make scientific research more relevant to society. This had the perverse effect of requiring scientists to convince politicians and bureaucrats that their research was relevant to society.
It’s effect on climate science is obvious and every day we see papers that are little more than pitches to fund further studies of Arctic Molluscs or whatever, because they are going to tell us something vitally important to society.
We amateurs have no such need to demonstrate relevance in order to obtain money, so are free to pursue whatever we find of scientific interest.
“And Anthony, first through his creation and orchestration of the surfacestations project that compiled the first complete record of all of the “official” weather stations, and then through his creation and unending support of this forum as a place for the free expression and constant demolition of scientific claims plus whatever curious things his fertile mind dreams up from day to day, Anthony has been a large and significant part of the gradual shifting of the serious scientific dialog to the web.”
Well said.