Eagle #23 and the elusive Uni-squatch

the Further Adventures of Trashy Drifter

Chapter 41

Eagle #23 and the elusive Uni-squatch!

 

I wish that someone could explain to me why there is an eagle in the estuary that has big bold red arm patches on its wings that are clearly marked with the number 23? I also wish I knew why bears are sometimes taciturn and sometimes playful. I wish I knew what the ravens were croaking and cooing about. I wish I knew where the seals go when they disappear below the surface. I wish I knew what the otters keep looking for in the kayaks. There are many mysteries that I skirt each day and strange doings that go on in the mist,. The natives who lived here for thousands of years left no trace of their existence but a few paintings on the rocks and mysterious legends. The loggers and fishermen are gone too, leaving only broken whiskey bottles and rusty tin cans in the stream bed. I too will soon be swallowed up by the untold history of this remote and rugged cove. My whole experience here has been surreal and dreamlike, each day being an exact repetition of the one before ( but different). Each morning I wake up to the sound of laughter, roll off my mattress in the attic, put on the same clothes if not too stinky, descend the rope ladder and eat a bowl of yogurt with fruit and granola and then scour the wilderness in search of charismatic megafauna.

I spend the days with people that are the same (but different) from the ones yesterday, and answer the same questions as I did yesterday, while hoping to find the same bears that I found yesterday. Today, we found lots of bears, watched six of them fishing and interacting at the spawning channel and crept up upon them in the woods, but yesterday, one winked at me.

The question that I have most fun answering is, “What will you do when this work is finished?” But now that I have only a month’s employment ahead of me, that question is becoming less hypothetical and more impendingly ominous. Here are some of my responses to that question:

• Be a substitute teacher

• Clean gutters and windows for oldsters

• Open a gay cowboy gear store and call it Brokeback Mountain Equipment Co-op

• Put my wife to work and lay on the couch and drink beer

• Open a dinner theatre in Cumberland and sing and dance with a couple of scantily clad showgirls

The last option is actually my favourite, but how it will actually come together is a matter I dwell upon at great length as I stand about for hours on end in an inverted zoo exhibit surrounded by bears and leaping fish. Sometimes I fantasize about how much fun it would be to have a zombie watching lodge. You could do it in a post-apocalyptic warehouse with sketchy lighting and brain eating zombies lurching about. Or maybe I should start a tour company called Toga tours, where you have to leave your clothes behind, wear a toga and be driven around to waterfalls and forest groves to drink wine and be fed grapes by scantily clad dancing girls. There’s that theme again, basically anything goes better with scantily clad dancing girls, am I right?

You might wrongly assume that I am perversely obsessed with SCDG’s but that is not so. I just think that the world is a better place with them brightening things up with their grace and beauty, how sad ‘tis to see SCDG’s stoop to such lowly professions as law and medicine, when they should be kicking up their heels in a cabaret, but I digress.

Sometimes I pretend that I am only pretending to be a grizzly guide and that I am really on the trail of an animal much more elusive and unique, so unique in fact that only I am aware of its existence. The Uni-squatch! It has the body of a unicorn and the torso of a Sasquatch, with a big horn coming out of the middle of its forehead that shoots laser beams. It only can be seen out of the corner of your eye, if looked at fully, it magically transforms into a rock or a stump.

So, basically, I think I’m going insane. Not that that’s a bad thing, I may have been crazy all along, you’d have to ask my lovely wife for the details.

Now, I’ve just spent the last few days touring around a very interesting American family. One is a biology prof at Harvard and his father who is on the board at National Geographic and the World Wildlife fund. They had been everywhere, seen everything and were very knowledgeable and interested. It’s not everyone who comes here who can carry on a coherent conversation about Teleology in Palaeo-Herpetology and how it relates to Ballistic Panspermia and the creation of Israel. The professor’s sister runs the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica, where all sorts of graduate research is done in the jungle canopy. I asked him if they did video conferencing from there, and he said not yet but they want to go in that direction. So, I’m sending them a proposal to help them get that started. Who knows? Might as well try right? I’ll be cleaning gutters soon enough.

And loving it.