The first time I ever saw a bear I was shin-deep in snow in the Smokey mountains in February. My two hiking companions and I had rounded a corner on the edge of a ridge bringing a snow- covered meadow and a single black bear into view. Like an over-ripe raspberry threatening to stain a fresh bleached table cloth it stood there and split the instant with a pregnant suspense that preceeded recognition or response. Then and there I heard my good friend Brian say one of the truest things I've ever heard spoken when he stammered "it..it's not a gorilla", followed by Brandon's drawling "I think you're right." The word "certainty" has "aint" as its root and often the only thing honest folks are sure of is what a thing isn't. Sometimes there's just no word for a new thing and the worst thing is throw the wrong word over it some kind of bad wall paper. Two days ago I wound up ignorantly bobbing around the ocean on a surf board (flail board or hope board would have been more appropriate names for my use of the thing) when a seal poked his head up off my starboard bow or at leat the closest thing I've ever had to one. We both made noises of mutual surprise and he was gone before my brainstem and various sphincters finally agreed on the overall non-sharkiness of the encounter and lapsed into pleasant amazement.
By and large, mother nature is a wildly creative and festive prankster with seemingly infinite new ways to amaze, but she does occasionally have an off day when it comes to breathing the vital essense of
isness into a new critter. Anyone who could describe a banana slug as anything other than a turd with antennae has never snuck a look at their own offerings to the porcelain Poseidon. Ugly doesn't cut and banana-slugly is a bit contrived. Lip-curlingly hideous takes too long to say and "Ick" might just be the only appropriate thing to utter. It's not just the turdiness of the beast it's the fact that appears to be a turd that's fallen on hard times and been a bit under the weather to boot. Maybe a turd that was always sickly as a child and turned to the bottle for solace. Fortunately slow-moving and seemingly lacking any hostile intentions (other than their willingness to tar-and-feather any sense of aesthetics) banana slugs are harmless enough and rare enough that they have posed no threat to our enjoyment of the verdant splendor and opalescent flowings of the stream-cracked mountain trails east of the cascades. The swimming holes are polynesian and hedonistic in appearance but distinctly protestant and calvinistic in temperature.
The first time I ever saw a bear I was shin-deep in snow in the Smokey mountains in February. My two hiking companions and I had rounded a corner on the edge of a ridge bringing a snow- covered meadow and a single black bear into view. Like an over-ripe raspberry threatening to stain a fresh bleached table cloth it stood there and split the instant with a pregnant suspense that preceeded recognition or response. Then and there I heard my good friend Brian say one of the truest things I've ever heard spoken when he stammered "it..it's not a gorilla", followed by Brandon's drawling "I think you're right." The word "certainty" has "aint" as its root and often the only thing honest folks are sure of is what a thing isn't. Sometimes there's just no word for a new thing and the worst thing is throw the wrong word over it some kind of bad wall paper. Two days ago I wound up ignorantly bobbing around the ocean on a surf board (flail board or hope board would have been more appropriate names for my use of the thing) when a seal poked his head up off my starboard bow or at leat the closest thing I've ever had to one. We both made noises of mutual surprise and he was gone before my brainstem and various sphincters finally agreed on the overall non-sharkiness of the encounter and lapsed into pleasant amazement.
By and large, mother nature is a wildly creative and festive prankster with seemingly infinite new ways to amaze, but she does occasionally have an off day when it comes to breathing the vital essense of isness into a new critter. Anyone who could describe a banana slug as anything other than a turd with antennae has never snuck a look at their own offerings to the porcelain Poseidon. Ugly doesn't cut and banana-slugly is a bit contrived. Lip-curlingly hideous takes too long to say and "Ick" might just be the only appropriate thing to utter. It's not just the turdiness of the beast it's the fact that appears to be a turd that's fallen on hard times and been a bit under the weather to boot. Maybe a turd that was always sickly as a child and turned to the bottle for solace. Fortunately slow-moving and seemingly lacking any hostile intentions (other than their willingness to tar-and-feather any sense of aesthetics) banana slugs are harmless enough and rare enough that they have posed no threat to our enjoyment of the verdant splendor and opalescent flowings of the stream-cracked mountain trails east of the cascades. The swimming holes are polynesian and hedonistic in appearance but distinctly protestant and calvinistic in temperature.
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