BackPage: SIGNS OF LIFE

SIGNS OF LIFE

By Rob DelGaudio
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There are signs, and there are signs.

Here in the outer ‘burbs, where the corner market is ten-minute car ride away, you learn to read the rhythm of nature whether you care to or not. Each season has its markers, but the greatest onslaught happens with the Spring and the often sudden transition in the landscape from gray to green.

It is in that narrow window when the ghoulish drab of the woodlands peels off its death mask to unfurl its glorious, multicolored banners of new life. We all pour out from the stale-aired homesteads and eagerly plunge into the ample bosom of nature’s flowery showiness, seduced by the inviting pleasures of the fragrant, warm air.

It is a seductive and sinister ploy that we fall for year after year.

The reality of that natural beauty, with its luscious petals spread wide and its pistils standing proudly, is actually quite cruel and unforgiving – an ever encroaching barbed, deciduous jungle which harbors all manner of vicious predatory beasts, deadly venom-filled insects and menacing greenery that oozes paralyzing toxins. Lurking in the lush greenery are parasites atop leeches that ride on scrounging, loose-bowled vermin – and those are the cute ones. Further in the shadows are the winged scourges, the blood-sucking, disease-filled billions barely detectable until their poisonous fluids are coursing through your arteries and eating away at your marrow.

You learn to tread warily, and vigilantly, to the mailbox or the compost pile, particularly once the sun has set. With the fading light comes a rising chorus of the noisy unseen chirpers and their hypnotic trills and ratchets. After the winter months’ long nights of icy silence pierced occasionally by the spooky hoots of lurking, hook-beaked raptors with six-foot wing spans, or the spine-severing howls of ravenous coy-wolves, the syncopated cacophony of the warm nights’ ensemble can seem soothing. That is until you’re confronted with the heartless reality of the natural order.

Here in our micro-spec of the universe, a small patch in mushy bog territory of New England, the surrounding mush includes a beaver-clogged aqua system turned to encroaching waterworks that brims with creatural activity, mostly of the feathered and slippery-skinned variety.

Like the humanoids, the creature multitudes also emerge with the warm weather, particularly the amphibians. With their hearts racing once again, they dart about in search of tender spawning moments, similar to the teenage bipeds, their lust often getting the better of them, leaving them vulnerable and oblivious to the dangers that can engulf them. Literally.

On a fine day in May, the sun shining brilliantly, gentle breeze stirring the air, I noticed some unusual movement at the edge of our yard – that is to say the contested borderline between our tamed and cultivated portion of the woods and the hostile menacing undergrowth territory held at bay by regular assaults of weed-whacking and chemical warfare. I was half-heartedly engaged in such a battle and easily swayed from it. My wife, the true agro-warrior princess of the family, is more vigorous and ruthless in these confrontations. I chalk it up to the wayward bit of Viking ancestry she claims. I suspect it is those red-bearded DNA strands which come unsheathed in the garden, where she yields a merciless pruning sheer and seems to take pleasure at engaging the invasive species mano a mano, tearing and ripping them from the ground by their clutching root tentacles, thorns and jabbers be damned.

While she slashed and swore at her twisted green foe, I slipped across the yard, to investigate the rustling, which was quite pronounced and unyielding. I suspected a raw and unbridled coupling of some sort – potent and unprotected creature sex – one pair’s culminating act to the incessant nighttime chirping and buzzing come-ons. This couple, I suspected, had delayed gratification way past dawn and could not hold out for the dark, or had succumb to the lure of the sunshine and tall grass. It was easy to empathize. I glanced over at my Viking wife as not dissimilar thoughts stirred within, but a glimpse of her eagerly and effortlessly snipping a stout limb with her shears quickly dispelled such notions.

Turning back to the commotion, I approached slowly to spy the goings-on without disrupting the expected conjugations. We males must always stick together.

It took a few moments to discern the participants from the surroundings and to decipher the scene playing out, nature’s means of camouflage never ceasing to bewilder. First to come into focus was the amphibian. A sizable toad, brown as moist earth, which sat staring straight ahead with dull unblinking gold-colored eyes as if it were waiting for a stoplight to change so he could cross the yard. He looked bored and mildly bothered at the predictable expectations of hunting flies and crickets for another season.

A spasm of motion then erupted, which revealed the stark reality at hand and the other participant of the ruckus – a determined and equally sizable ribbon snake that had its fangs buried deeply into the hind potion of the toad. I felt a commiserate twinge in my lower lumbar at the thought of a proportionally sized pair of curved spikes driven so deeply into my innards.

The snake’s curled body looked like it would easily stretch out more than three feet, with its mid section about two to three inches wide – a good sized specimen for our domain and capable of activating in me a reflexive recoil at it’s large snake-ness. Not unlike the reaction of coming eyeball to tentacle with one of the super-sized spiders that inhabit the deep recesses of the wood pile. With their sprawling mass of legs and poison bloated abdomen, they invoke an instinctual sense of vulnerability, regardless of my out-massing them by a factor of ten to the something, and summon an immediate association with sinister wretchedness.

I’m sure Mr. Toad was feeling wretched. Despite the brilliant sunshine, a very dark scenario beckoned. He would be slowly and wholly sucked into an intestinal abyss, gulp by gulp. I fully sympathized with the warty little fellow, I’d recently been feeling the same was happening to our business realm, byte by creative destructionist byte.

Talk about a sign. Was this the cosmos trying to underscore what my Viking bride had been attempting to penetrate through my thick, Mediterranean skull these past few years? As in – you’re fang-bait if you sit still too long. The world is slithering and plotting all around, coiled and ready to strike, then swallow your ass-ets and move on to the next morsel. I’d like to think I’d go down with more of fight than dull-eyed hopper below me.

While the snake worked to, literally, wrap its head around the task before it, the toad simply gazed off to the horizon, his bumpy face expressionless, unfazed at the whole prospect of ending up a progressively diminishing bulge in the serpent’s digestive tract. Come to think of it, I have found myself staring out the window more of late, feeling numb and listless, but only for a moment or two. Ok maybe five or ten minutes, but then I get right back to reading the newspaper, surfing the web and refilling my coffee mug. Important stuff that keeps our business humming, relevant and ahead of the tides of doom.

Not like the turgid, bulb-nosed Mr. Call Me-When-Something-Important-Is-Happening toadster. Perhaps he was resigned to the inevitable, knowing that as soon as he felt the sharp stab of those incisor needles all resistance was futile. Better to relax and let the serpent venom run its course, watch the colors fade, enjoy the dull wooziness and accept that his existence was being transformed into nourishment for a fellow earth dweller. All part of the big sloppy oval of life. One gulper gulping another.

Sort of like the recent, turbulent presidential election year. The aloof, benighted power brokers sitting by idly as they watched hopeful nominees sucked down one by one by a slithery predator who’s primary weapons are a set of deadly fangs, a bottomless pit of a mouth, and an instinct for knowing when the moment is right to strike.

Wang! Just like that, you’re someone else’s apéritif.

A couple of years ago a fox recognize that our yard offered an abundant, and presumably, delectable selection of small creatures to dine on. It’s a collection of incessant chewers, scratchers, and feces spewing rodents that were, like the ever encroaching brambles and poison ivy, omnipresent and relentless in their assault into every nook and cranny afforded by our domicile. Field mice, red squirrels, gray squirrels, chipmunks, a twitching, ultra-hyper active lot continuously gnawing, eating, or breeding, which also provided a fury railway for invasion by another other woodsy menace – poisonous ectoparasites, those tiny blood-sucking entomological vampires better known as ticks.

Disease laden little bombshells, some the size of pinheads, whose toxic pathogens can render humans into a bed-ridden, wasted mass of throbbing uselessness. Admittedly, it is a state not unlike or my typical screen-addled lethargy, which is precisely what makes it so nefarious! My Viking bride might not notice the deadly change in my well being until it is too late, perhaps only alerted by a telltale off-putting odor emanating from my workspace.

The fox, however, quickly set about balancing the local bio-ecology in the same manner the wise guys do when the street urchins start getting a bit too brassy. They begin to disappear, one nuisance at a time. The pickings were apparently so good, maybe of such a particularly flavorful variety, she simply camped out beneath our back deck and dug a cozy resting spot into the gravel by a protected corner of foundation walls – like an assassin seated at the back of the restaurant, no approach possible from behind and a full view of the goings-on splayed out in front.

And did she ever get going, utterly unfazed at my occasional presence around the yard, even when I had fired up the chainsaw. She had my species down pat and probably utilized my infernal eardrum shattering rackets to her predatory advantage. She’d glide by, dismissively uninterested in my endeavors, regardless of the implement I had in hand, most of which, you’d think, would have made me a towering, formidable alpha threat – ten to the something squared over her. She’d likely howl at the notion of course, having sized me up as a soft, plodding dope-ivore easily out witted, outrun, and, should it come down to it, uneager to ruthlessly pursue things to the bitter, bloody end. A fatal weakness in the writ of jungle statutes. I had noticed, however, she would dash off quickly whenever my wife was around and armed with her trusty pruning shears…

Once, I witnessed the fox prancing casually along the rough edge of the back yard where the tidy grass collides with the ragged underbrush. She suddenly switched gears from a care-free trot and bounded upwards in a graceful arc that enabled her to pounce snout-first into a jumble of decaying foliage and bramble. A split-second later her head emerged, tossing a flailing little wee rodent into the air, snatching it with gaping jaws as it descended, then gulping it down like the mid-morning snack it was. I thought of that ubiquitous warning about eating raw or undercooked food.

Looking down on the glossy-eyed toad in the process of similarly becoming an uncooked feast for the serpent, I wasn’t sure who to root for – hopeless prey or hungry foe? Ms. Fox was actually providing a service I was quite appreciative of and, as you’d suspect, she was a feast for the eyes. The snake and toad however had neither looks or utility going for them on the scale the bushy tailed, she-babe hunter did.

The snake began to yank its prospective meal backwards with powerful tugs of its coiled vertebrae, into a dense, twisted pile of dead tree branches and thorny vines. Once beneath its snarled, barbed mass any chance of escape for the toad would be lost. Perhaps those dulled eyes, widely set on its broad head caught sight of the tangled prison he was being dragged towards, or the snake’s opiates were wearing off, but he finally put those large muscles in his hind legs to work, thrusting mightily to wrench free.

He pushed and lunged, wiggled and squirmed, though to look at his blank, ho-hum expression you’d think it was just another dullsville moment in critter town. No anguished croak of agony or rebellious groan about the rigged system. No raised fist of defiance to smash the stranglehold of the serpent class over the amphibian proletariat. The exact opposite of those cranky human youngsters perpetually screeching about unfairness, micro-aggressions, and the pittance of silver platters delivering their every want and desire.

I’m sure the youngsters would feel my inaction warranted a public shaming, hefty fines and spending the remainder of my scant years undergoing sensitivity training for not intervening in the brutality unwinding below me. I was enabling the continuance of repugnant serpent violence, intolerant to the needs of the Amphibia Anura, and most importantly, a disgusting, undeserving, member of the land-owning cretin class responsible for every ill and travesty in all parts of the universe known and unknown.

On the other hand, should I intervene and manage to separate the snake from it’s prey, I’d be branded, of course, as a toady of the multi-limbed society of crawlers, walkers, and hoppers. Voices rising in defense of the slithering minority would charge me with malicious obstruction of the Natural Order and denying a member of the limbless class equal opportunity of sustenance.

Ultimately, my opinion made no difference to the outcome. Nor was their anyone to witness my deliberate inaction, except my Viking mate. The snake’s fangs were too deeply set, and the power of its coiled body no match for the bloodied toad, who we watched slip down beneath the pile of brush and into the eerie darkness. I pondered the significance – perhaps a chilling sign of impending doom? Foreboding of a continued downward spiral of our fortunes and potential?

It took my noble bride to point out the obvious alternate view – that of a large, bountiful quarry snared. No doubt the foxy Ms. Fox would agree.