I was driving my dog to the park around dawn a few days ago and saw a scene I am still thinking about:
A great blue heron has landed on the phone wires and is trying to balance, but they're lose and sort of swinging and this bird is Large, so it's not going well.
This is great enough on its own, but underneath the heron, there's a shirtless tattooed guy standing in the bed of his pickup truck with his arms stretched over his head toward the heron. Trying to catch it? Encourage it? Worship it? We'll never know.
Anyway, I wanted to take a picture, but it flew off and also I'm a chicken and was worried the guy would see me, so I tried to draw it instead. *
Content advisory: animal death (an armadillo), viscerally described.
I don't know what to make of the frankly bizarre-ass shit that has happened to me since I moved to this state, but I figure it's time to start writing some of it down.
This is a story about my dog and an armadillo. Not to spoil the ending, but I'm going to do exactly that: my dog is fine. The armadillo absolutely is not.
Before I get to the armadillo, we need to talk about my neighbor down the street. We'll call him Earl, not his real name. He was 89 when we moved to Florida and still walking his dog every day. We will call his dog Misty.
Misty was, at that point, 9, which is older for a German shepherd. Earl has since died (unrelated to the armadillo), but Earl's wife still walks Misty every day. She is the best girl, and she taught my feral goblin a lot about how to be a dog. Misty always eats one particular patch of grass. Tango saw her do it and, to this day, eats some grass from that patch every time we walk past it. Other grass is inferior; Misty's grass is the best.
Earl had dogs his whole life, and when I got Tango, he had a lot of advice for me, most of which turned out to be inapplicable, because I got a feral goblin instead of a dog—but it was generally still good advice.
Some of it is broad spectrum advice that could apply to almost any dog ("Don't get another dog until you've got the first one trained") and some is hyper-specific. For instance: "Don't let him chase armadillos. They got this special attack where they jump straight up, and it can break a dog's neck."
That sounded fake to me, but actually appears to be at least partly true. It's more to startle the predator than injure them, but if a dog's face is right over the armadillo when it jumps, apparently, four feet straight up into the air, it probably wouldn't be a good time for the dog.
Another thing he told me about armadillos is that they carry leprosy, and this one is definitely true. I didn't think much about it. It's not like people are out here in Florida getting leprosy right and left.
Then I met a guy with leprosy. He lived on our street. He got it from an armadillo. And yes, it is treatable, but the process isn't easy, and also, you know, I don't want leprosy.
With all this background information, you will understand the immediate horror I felt when I let Tango out to pee one evening and he went from ambling through the grass to a dead run in pursuit of an armadillo.
I ran after him, which was useless - both he and the armadillo were faster than I was. Unfortunately, Tango can achieve speeds upward of 30MPH for brief sprints, and the armadillo......could not. I think it was looking for the hole in the fence where it got in, but it did not find it fast enough. It didn't even have a chance to do its jump. Tango caught it, I heard the crunch of his teeth breaking the shell, and that was it. It was not a good sound.
I had to run into the house for a leash and stalk him as he dragged the bloody corpse of the armadillo across the yard—I'd get within a few feet, he'd pick up the body and move it. I could see the visceral horror show inside the broken shell. My hands were shaking from adrenaline, I felt like I was going to vomit, and the sun was going down.
It took probably half an hour of that—me moving toward him, him moving the body—before he finally let me leash him. And then I got to be glad we'd had a pandemic because it meant I had gloves and masks on hand. I probably should've worn eye protection too. He shook once, and I got armadillo blood across my glasses and a little bit under them.
Tango got the most thorough bath of his life outside at the hose. I removed the armadillo carcass to the wilderness on the far side of the fence and bleached the spot where it had lain. I then had the most thorough shower of my life, we both collapsed, and that was the last time I let Tango out at twilight without checking the yard first. (Neither Tango nor I got leprosy.)
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this post is also (free) on my patreon if you want to read it there
planting lettuce and kale, very late as usual (for florida). the kale will probably make it; the lettuce may bolt before it's even big enough to eat, or just expire gently from the heat.
my dog though the seeds smell very interesting. i smelled them - could detect nothing. what a world he must live in.
dead alligator below the cut. saw him floating in the canal on the way home.
no i will not add tags, tumblr. just let me post my dead gator in peace.
(This is from a few years ago, but I think about it every year as Florida rolls toward spring and the attendant thunderstorms.)
Oh boy have we had some Weather.
I was at the park with my dog, blue sky above us, clouds over to the west, start hearing thunder, some little spatters of rain as the clouds move toward us
We head for the car at the far end of the parking lot; it’s a big lot, but at most we’re a five minute walk away.
We do not make it.
The sky opens up and POUNDS us with rain, and I’m like okay so we’re gonna be wet, fine, and then the lightning starts.
And it is Close.
Halfway across the parking lot, there’s a little picnic shelter, currently occupied by all the kids who had been at their soccer lesson two minutes ago, a couple of joggers, and now me and my soaking wet dog - it’s getting crowded, and my car is Right There, maybe fifty yards away, so I count the space between lightning and thunder - six seconds - figure the storm isn’t directly over us yet, and go for it.
(As a sidenote, someone told me later that lightning can strike something like 4 miles away from the actual storm?? so this was not at all a useful calculation.)
We nearly crash into another jogger seeking shelter, and my dog gets her briefly tangled in his leash - “Sorry,” I say, “he’s freaking out.”
“I’M freaking out,” she says, eyes rolling like a frightened horse - we part ways and I do not comment although in truth I am also slightly freaking out at this point.
As we leave the shelter, the wind picks up, and by ‘picks up’ I mean it comes in horizontally from behind us like that scene in The Day After Tomorrow where a storm chases them down the street, which is not a thing that is supposed to happen in real life.
Oh btw it’s now hailing.
My dog is panicking and pulling me forward toward the car; the wind is pushing me from behind, and I go down, face in the mud, glasses off. Fortunately, I keep a grip on the leash, and Tango comes back when I call him. I find my glasses, we get up and keep going.
We make it to the car, my dog LEVITATES in as soon as I get the door open, I get inside, we are safe, and we are both just staring at each other and panting.
My mom calls, worried about me: lightning has just struck a tree in our neighbor’s yard and it’s burning like a torch.
While we’re on the phone, lightning strikes the metal flagpole about thirty yards away from the car, although I can barely see it through the flood of rain on the windshield.
As I’m sitting there trying to decide if it’s safe to drive home, a tide of SUVs and minivans pours into the park to pick up their soccer children.
The rain lets up a little. We head home.
Aftermath: oddly, my dog is now LESS scared of thunderstorms, whereas I have gone from zero fear to at least a healthy respect, and I always check the weather app before we go to the park.
This post on Patreon (free). Wet creature below the cut.
Cutting chapbook covers down to size at the printing place. These giant cutting machines are……….so good. After using my tiny cheap one at home. I love you, giant cutting machine. Come home with me.
