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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Some 15 years ago, a client engaged me to evaluate placer gold and gold quartz deposits in northern Benin in French West Africa. He had obtained some prospecting leases and had to finalize some paperwork in Cotonou, the capital which took a few days. A contact there ran around getting vehicle, driver, provisions, etc. and before we left, he invited us to dinner. He asked us if we liked wild game -‘gibier sauvage’- to which we replied an enthusiastic yes. We had wine, french baguettes and avocado with shrimp filling – a promise of some gourmet delight to be put before us. What came in from the kitchen on a metal platter was an opossum ‘complet’, fur burned off and roasted, his teeth protruding, tongue stiff and eyes milky cataracts. I tipped my wine glass up and drained it, quickly refilling it again. Of course the tongue and eyeballs were ceremoniously removed and served to the two guests. Diluted with the last of an avocado, a big bite of bread and washed down with half a glass of wine, I don’t recall the taste. Anyway, it made it easier to demolish the rest of the poor beast. I actually worried that the opossum may indeed be in danger of extinction in West Africa, like much of the other wild animals, except for the warthog,
http://animals.timduru.org/dirlist/warthog/wffm042-AfricanWildPig-Warthog.jpg
who abounds in the Muslim north where pork is not touched.
G P Hanner says:
February 16, 2013 at 12:29 pm
“BTW, oppossums are the American version of what are called possums Down Under. There are many differences between the two orders.”
In my blurb above I mentioned the West African cousin of the opossum and had forgotten I had another ‘possum’ story. The patriarch of my New Zealand inlaws, “Jim” (who has since passed away) was a possum trapper, sometime logger, fisherman, farmer and rabbit bounty hunter at the south end of the South Island at Papatowai. You may have heard the colloquialism ” to be full of piss and vinegar” meaning boundless energy – that was Jim. The epithet sprang to mind because he used piss and honey as an attractor to the bait which was poisoned. I went ‘possumming’ with Jim, who had me helping him with the possumming gear, skin boards and supplies. He kept rum and port in the possumming shed out of sight of his wife who was a teatotaler so it was a bit of a tippler’s refuge. Taking a ‘stranger’ on the rounds seemed to be bad luck as we had no possums to collect on this trip. He told me that possum fur was in great demand in the artificial textile fiber manufacturing business. They lined the pathways in the machinery for the nylon, rayon, etc. thread with possum fur because it did not build up a static charge. I never heard that before or since. Probably today they have some other way to prevent build up of static charge. Anyone ever hear of such a thing? On the journey, we crossed a recently cleared field planted in turnips (swedes – the yellow ones). It was a bountiful crop and I said we should pick up a couple on the way back. He asked what I planned to do with them. I told him mashed turnips with butter was pretty hard to beat and he laughed and said this kind of vegetable was not for human consumption but was to break up the freshly cleared land for cultivation and that it was used as cattle feed. I argued with him and we took a few home with us and I converted the family to a new vegetable.
I forgot to mention that the NZ possum was transplanted from Oz.
Quote: R.C.Sproul argues persuasively that, for science and philosophy to continue in fruitful fashion, the modern penchant for chance must be abandoned once and for all. If not, the stakes are not insignificant—the very possibility of doing science lies in the balance. Essentially, when logic and empirical data are neglected or neutralized in the doing of science, then “mythology is free to run wild.”
From Peter in Ohio on February 16, 2013 at 2:38 pm:
Keep something with a long handle handy, can be left just outside the door. Shovel, ice scrapper, whatever.
Step outdoors. And hiss at the possum. A loud hiss, also like that from a cat. Because when the possum hears that, he thinks it’s another possum claiming territory. And you’re trying to sound like a larger possum. So he will run away. Might be a response hiss first, but you look large and hiss louder and he will run away.
Do it even if you don’t see the possum. You could well be surprised by the sudden sound of scurrying, and how close it was when you weren’t seeing it.
If it doesn’t run away, even though you left it clear paths of escape, and it sees your much-larger self, hissing and waving your arms? It stands its ground, looks ready to fight, or even if it just ignores you? That is not natural, could indicate rabies. Grab the handy long-handled implement with steel on the end, and remove the threat. Dispose of remains and clean up with appropriate care (avoid contacting blood).
BTW, I don’t know about “playing dead”, but possums have problems recognizing they are dead. I once plugged one with about seven .22 shots. It would “come alive” some minutes later, start walking off, I’d shoot it again, it’d come alive and crawl off some more… Should have gone for a head shot. Ending up putting on heavy gloves, grabbing its tail, swinging it, and banging its head against a pole until it stopped moving. Then threw it deep in the woods.
Presumably it didn’t walk off after that, but I didn’t bother to check afterwards. It probably didn’t. I don’t think it did.
Just make sure you’re prepared to finish what you start. A few years ago I gave one that got too close to a cat some heavy whacks with a handy chunk of branch, drove it off, let it run away. Next day, while we were on the back porch, a possum came right up to us, hissing, looking aggressive. Pretty sure it was the same one, and it was pissed I left it alive, wounded and sore. Took care of it, had no choice.
The problem with the head shot is that most of the head is bone, with a teeny tiny little brain hidden in it. A head shot with a 12 gauge shotgun should do the trick, though.
I think hissing is preferable if it works 🙂
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 16, 2013 at 5:18 pm
Good advice in general, KD. They’re not something to mess with, they will bite if cornered. However, they rarely get rabies, supposedly because their body temperatures are quite low compared to similar sized animals.
And great animal stories, humans and animals have had a long and hilarious relationship …
w.
Coming west through Placerville with my wife on Highway 50 late one evening, I came to the Bedford light and stopped at the red. A possum was crossing the highway through the intersection and simple dropped, right there in the headlights. I got out of my car and chivvied him off the highway by boosting him along with a boot toe. He never moved a visible muscle except to snarl and growl through entire process. Happily, it was late at night and back then Placerville pretty well rolled up the sidewalks at 9:00 PM. There was no traffic throughout the fun.
Pamela Gray says:
> Nasty hissing things! And there is no chasing them away.
As a few of us have already noted, your experience may vary. Opossums play dead for Willis, hiss at Pamela; in my experience, they have always retired towards where they came from, slowly and somewhat ceremoniously, with their heads turned back at me, making them bump into an odd tree in their path (which apparently troubled them less than the prospect of losing sight of me). Every time I tried to give one a chase, he would increase his speed, but only enough to keep the distance. Maybe they were not the same kind of opossums; maybe it’s me who is not the same kind.
Regarding things we do under the influence of adrenaline, they can be funny, and are often revealing of our evolutionary history, if one cares to pay attention.
On a dark, moonless night, I walk home on a seldom-used forest path. Suddenly, I hear intense rustling in the bushes on my right, then the darkness in front of me grows significantly darker for a moment, then the rustling on my left indicates that something massive has just crossed my path. A moment later, I feel a whiff of disturbed air loaded with the smell of a moose. I must have nearly run into one. A really interesting aspect of that encounter was how scary it was. For a few long seconds, I could feel intense tension in the skin on my back, on the back of my neck, and on my arms. If I had any hair on my back, I am sure it would stand stiff, making me look bigger. That would have been superfluous, because I knew I was the largest animal in that forest. I am taller than a moose. I am so big that if you hit me on the road, your car will be totalled. But this little defence routine that I inherited, perhaps, from an ancestor the size of a shrew, kicked in nonetheless. Just in case…
In a similar, but much funnier incident, I was accompanied by a colleague on my nightly trip to a nearby farm to pick up fresh milk for my daughter. We had an unfinished conversation about multiplexing twenty serial data lines on a single PC board he was designing, and he chose to join me on my trip to the farm so we could keep discussing his stuff. Like during the moose event several years prior, we were crossing a dense forest in near-total darkness. While listening to my friend, I accidentally stepped on a fallen tree lying across the path, rustling the dead leaves in its crown some distance away. Immediately, I heard a distressed shriek and I found my friend hanging on me, with his hands latched around my shoulders. To him, it was not the obvious sound of a dead tree trodden upon. It was the sound of something invisible rushing towards him. The transition from peaceful walking and talking to a somewhat unexpected pile-up of the smaller man on top of the larger one took no time at all. Apparently, one of the automatic routines we have inherited is to jump high and hold on to something when startled.
Years ago I was hunting the thirty pointer. Got in the ground blind before daybreak. Two hours passed and nothing happened. The deer showed, I screamed and the deer runnoft! I told my wife (I was married for a pretty good while) sorry I didn’t mean to do that. I was real quiet when the skunk squirted me. And when the snake went slithering between my feet. And when the opossum hissed at me. But when that squirrel ran up my leg and started storing for the winter…
That word “opassion” is genius. 😀
schistophrenic says:
February 16, 2013 at 11:26 pm
Thanks, Cap’n Stonehead. I was very happy with that word, especially gently balancing the sound of it against the sound of the preceding “optimal”. I’m glad you picked up on that. I was calling it “optimal opassion”, but then I decided that was too obvious a play, so I chose to split them up to make a more subtle connection …
I had also used “opassion” further upstream in the piece, but then I decided to pull it out above, to increase the power at the end when it does appear. And finally, I echoed it in “survival of the ospecies” …
Dang … usually I just do this writing stuff, I don’t think about it much, just move it around ’til it works. I have a huge advantage, in that I never took a lesson …
w.
O Lord, not the Lancet study again. The Iraq Body Count people debunked that most beautifully in 2006, but your true believer can’t be bothered to keep up with events. Once upon a time The Lancet was a reputable journal, but that was before they published that Iraq study, and the series blaming autism on infant innoculations, and a number of other studies they also had to subsequently withdraw. Very sad, really, to see a journal founded on sharing the truth of science descend into falling for the truthy.
See http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/ for eight pages of details. And this article and discussion thread at PJ Media as well http://pjmedia.com/blog/joisting_with_the_lancet_the_p/ Not that Mr. Jaggar will bother — his sort never do.
Science done in the dark by a few learned boffins is already dead in the 21st century, the practitioners just didn’t notice when they ran past their use-by dates, and as a result that dark corner of the scientific world is populated more and more by zombies. Zombies with PhD’s to be sure
————
Willis, you haven’t a clue about science or the people who do it. This is just tired old anti intellectuallism.
Science is not done by arm chair philosophers or in this case blog philosophers. Science is done by people who do stuff, not by BS artists sittin on their backsides glued to a keyboard. Very few of the WUWT crowd have actually done any experiments, with a few notable exceptions, to prove or disprove their wonky ideas.
Sure Anthony has his surfaces stations thing but we have yet to see that put together as a publication.
LazyTeenager says:February 17, 2013 at 5:00 am
Science done in the dark by a few learned boffins is already dead in the 21st century, the practitioners just didn’t notice when they ran past their use-by dates, and as a result that dark corner of the scientific world is populated more and more by zombies. Zombies with PhD’s to be sure
————
Willis, you haven’t a clue about science or the people who do it. This is just tired old anti intellectuallism.
Science is not done by arm chair philosophers or in this case blog philosophers. Science is done by people who do stuff, not by BS artists sittin on their backsides glued to a keyboard.
Glad to see you declare yourself not doing science.
From LazyTeenager on February 17, 2013 at 5:00 am:
Oh good, you’re still ignorant and indolent. Please don’t change, we enjoy laughing at you.
The Surfacestations project was previously written up, peer reviewed, and published as Fall et al 2011. Whatever you’re imbibing, apparently it made you forget the many times it’s been referenced here before. Feel free to keep doing whatever substances you do. You’ll only need those spare brain cells in your 60’s and older, and why would you want to plan to live that long?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/11/the-long-awaited-surfacestations-paper/
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 16, 2013 at 5:18 pm
kadaka – thanks for the advice. If my neighbors don’t already have doubts about my sanity, (and I’m quite sure they do), waving my hands and hissing is bound to seal the deal. It’s a good thing I let my pride go a long time ago.
I was born and raised in suburban South Africa and we didn’t have all these nocturnal creatures roaming the night.
LazyTeenager says:
February 17, 2013 at 5:00 am
And yet my work is published in Nature magazine … and yours?
You’ll have to send a letter to the Editor of Nature to straighten them out, tell them I haven’t a clue about science … then they can pass the word over to the the scientific journal “Diversity and Distributions”, where my scientific work has also been published … and yours?
You see the problem, Lazy? I’m a published scientist, and you’re an ignorant random anonymous internet gadfly, who never contributes anything to a discussion but is always willing to try to tear someone down, to slime someone’s work or motives
Go away while you still have some shred of dignity, little boy, you are just making yourself look very, very foolish, and people are starting to point and laugh … does your mom know you’re still up, by the way?
w.
Great tribute to Anthony, may his ears burn for years.
I share your perception of the evolution of science, here science lives and grows.
I love this aspect of WUWT, I am happy to donate, I had to abandon the “science”magazines when they abandoned science.
In academia something else moulders, their collective dismissal of the common mans intelligence speaks volumes about their own. .
The inability to acknowledge ignorance in oneself prevents wonder and discovery.
Willis you write beautifully, keep it up but please do not try to convince Lazy to smarten up or go away, I get a cheap chuckle and sense of self satisfaction from Lazies comments.
Its always nice to know someone is even more stupid than I.
[snip. — mod.]
[snip. — mod.]