BEATING THE HEAT
CLINGING TO THE WILD SNAPPER
CASTOR CANADENSIS 
RELAXING POOLSIDE
ANACONDA! How many retired doctors does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one but you have to wait at least a month for an appointment.
This is no joke - it is literally true. But that as they say is another story.
Daktari has been on permanent recess for two months now and loving every minute of it.
After entertaining Grandma Gerry and completing a road-trip with Rena to Maine and Cape Cod, I’ve settled down at home to enjoy my best summer ever.
New England summers vary tremendously but this one is spectacular -- early, hot, and a helluva lot of sun with hardly any rain. The yard is browned up nicely so I haven’t had to clamber aboard The Snapper - my adolescent (17 year old) ride-on (or should I say hang-on) lawn decimator - very often. The swimming pool is percolating cheerfully at 34.3 degrees C this morning. (Normal body temp being a mere 2.7 degrees higher!) I water my veggie garden daily and it surprises me with pods and pods of, can you believe this? Okra! It’s so hot that I’m even starting to talk with a Southern accent - y’all.
This week I have a new visitor in my back yard - a.k.a. Lake Gardener. I’m out early one morning doing Qi Gong exercises wearing only my pirate boxers when a large-headed water mammal comes swimming up to the dock. I stare silently at his/her head and she stares back. She calmly munches a yellow water lily. I slowly and quietly gong some more Qi. She/he seems to enjoy just watching me as I gather up balls of Qi and pass them through my belly button. I’m moving sooo slowly but a sudden creak of the wood under my feet raises the alarm and whap -- a large beaver-ly tail slaps the water at least 3 feet behind the submerging head of my backyard visitor. This causes me to jump back about 3 feet myself - an equal and opposite reaction. The darned thing is big. Beavers are BIG rodents!
I may have to paddle upstream sometime and try to locate Beaver’s lodge. It may take a little longer than changing a light bulb. But so what? I have all the time in the world. My neighbor Bruce is an amateur naturalist, too. Maybe we’ll go together. (You may remember Bruce from our Christmas Coyote hunt and a more recent stargazing experience during a fly-over by alien spacecraft.
Bruce has enlisted me in a new scientific endeavor - sampling Lake Gardner for nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen content, pathogenic bacteria and pollutants. It’s another mad-scientist adventure funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Lots of plastic containers, thermometers, pH meters, weights, calibrated poles, ropes and trekking through the swamps looking for storm drains. I surely do enjoy mucking around in the name of science! It reminds me of my hail-chasing days at NCAR. Plus it gives me something legit to tell those skeptics who believe my post-retirement schedule is composed of: a.) absolutely nothing, b.) whatever I feel like c.) some variation of ‘up to no good’ or d.) all of the above.
Here is yet another weird science encounter of the too close kind:
Lucky for me, it turned out to be a false alarm.
On Tuesday, my friend Kat and I are walking toward Lake Gardner dam for a Mono-fin practice session. Suddenly I spy what looks to be a very large serpent between the forest edge and the footpath to the town beach. There, on the very brink of the town swimming-hole, is what appears to be a 40-foot orange and black striped python. And young Kat is an ophidiophobe of the first water!
“Don’t look now,” I exclaim, whipping off my cheap Walmart sunglasses to get a closer look. “Do you see what I see?”
This time, we both give a Newtonian leap backward of at least three feet!
However, after the initial startle response, it turns out that Amesbury’s answer to Anaconda is merely a cleverly disguised straw barrier to protect the local lagoon from runoff from a recently constructed walkway. But boy, did it give Kat and me a start! If we had beaver tails instead of Mono-fins the other beach-goers would have been treated to two very large Whaps of alarm.
Which all goes to prove that you don’t have to go far to have unusual adventures and/or mad science experiences, at least on this planet. Be it ever so humble there’s no place like Earth.
“What is the good of having a nice home without a decent planet to put it on?” - Henry David Thoreau. I say, Amen to that.
DAKTARI
(P.S. Any readers with a good gumbo recipe using homegrown okra please forward to Daktari!)
(P.S. Any readers with a good gumbo recipe using homegrown okra please forward to Daktari!)
