I was talking to Grendel the other day. I was doing most of the talking since he was miffed at me for giving him a bath due to his pursuit of a hapless chipmunk through a poison ivy patch.
“How dare you bathe a cat!?” he glared. “We are the cleanest creatures on earth.”
“When I see you go through the poison ivy, I’ve got to bathe you, because if I don’t, I’ll get the oil from your affected fur and break out in a rash,” I offered. The purity of my logic and self righteousness rivaled that of a born again.
“Besides, if you got some of the oil on you tongue from washing you might get a rash on your tongue.” This delivered sweetly like a heavenly benediction.
“Sounds like you needed the bath, not me.”
In fact bathing a cat is like trying to get control of a handleless full speed chain saw while tumbling in a clothes dryer, and it will draw just as much blood.
“A cat’s gotta do what a cat’s gotta do,” he purred.
You can train a cat until he plays Mozart on the piano, but show him a mouse and he reverts back to the predator in an instant. That reminded me of another predator I witnessed recently, a sparrow.
What!? A sparrow? Tweety bird?
Yep.
I saw a life and death Ariel combat recently that rivaled anything Spielberg staged in Star Wars. It lasted about thirty seconds and it involved a sparrow and a Luna moth.
This is a Luna moth.
Note the standard bricks for size reference. The moth’s tail is resting on the wide side of the brick. Put another way the palm of a man’s hand could not cover this moth.
The sparrow definitely had this shape stored in his little brain as a food item. Perhaps his depth perception was a little off, but none the less, barely bigger than the moth, he decided this was a tasty morsel and would bring it back to his nest in the first “o” of a large sign over the “Laundry Room.”
As he hopped about the moth looking for a grip upon which he could fasten his little beak, the moth woke up and began suspecting the sparrow was up to no good. Sparrow fetched up a mouthful of moth just about the time the moth decided he had enough and began to fly away with the sparrow in tow. Moth had definite designs on a westerly course, while Tweety’s “O” was east.
Moth is not equipped to render blows or bites of combat, so his only course was flight. Sparrow’s beak was too tiny to embrace this meal and clasp it to his will. Moths have a goofy navigational system anyway, but sparrow stayed with him repeatedly attempting to find some part of the moth he could hold fast to.
They finally tumbled to the ground where the combat continued, first Tweety on top then the moth, then roling along one atop th’other where you couldn’t tell what was happening.
Breaking free from the ground combat, moth ascended again with sparrow hot on his tail, but fatigue set in and sparrow fluttered back to a neutral branch thus ending this life or death struggle. Moth wobbled west and disappeared his the prize triumph being his life.
While I admire the ambition of Tweety, he was at no time at risk. Courage without consequence rings a bit hollow to me, but this point is moot, because neither was making choices, just playing programs hardwired into their brains.
We divers make choices. Properly trained, our choices are tempered with the wisdom of insight and a long trail of exemplary and deadly failures.
We are aliens underwater; we just don’t belong there. Knowing this is part of the thrill of being there. Our brains are not hard wired to survive underwater except to tell us to get the hell out.
Thus we are forced into making choices that have extraordinary consequences. We have been taught to make the right choices, but…
Have you evah…
Ø Returned with 300 or less lbs of air?
Ø Left your dive buddy behind?
Ø Penetrated a wreck without proper equipment?
Ø Gone too deep?
Ø Ignored you air supply until you had to cut decomp time?
There are many more and better examples, but the point is we are making decisions in a hostile environment where mistakes can have dire consequences. Don’t let experience make you think you are immortal and can do no wrong; death is the body’s way of telling us we really screwed up.
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