I have a startle response that won’t quit. If I could pair my startle response with actual athletic ability, there’s not a tiger in this world that could catch me. Unfortunately for my sense of pride, the things that startle me are rarely dangerous. Some of them aren’t even animate. That famous fight-or-flight reaction is evolutionarily helpful, but I have shrieked at furniture I wasn’t expecting.
Or a three-pound bird. In most circumstances, I think I could hold my own against a three-pound bird, but not a sudden three-pound bird. It was my brother David’s fault. He was introducing me to birding and it had been a fine day—the day I saw my first western tanager. I had absolutely no idea they even made birds like that. But David had binoculars and he showed it to me. All these years, for lack of binoculars, I had been thinking birds were brown and indistinct.
So I was already plenty juiced up when David spotted a blue grouse in full courtship mode. At that distance I couldn’t tell it from an eye floater. We were sitting on the ground and he got the bird in focus and handed me the binoculars, and there he by-God was, Mr. Fancy Pants Grousemeister, strutting his impressive stuff! He fanned out his tail and waggled his golden Groucho eyebrows and inflated his bright red sex pontoons and the boy was cooking. This was amazing. He turned one way, he turned the other way, and then he turned right at me and charged, whereupon I executed a complete backwards somersault and paddled away in the dirt while my brother laughed till he choked.
I suppose, given that my three-pound bird was still a couple hundred feet away, it might have looked like a comical overreaction, but in good binoculars that sucker looked like a tyrannosaur. For Christmas that year I made my brother a full-scale papier-mâché sculpture of a charging malevolent grouse to remind him of the basic soundness of my reaction. That bird was so terrifying they had to change its name to Dusky Grouse just so people could lose their negative associations. I’d show you a picture of my sculpture but a dog ate it.
No, really. A dog ate it.
In my defense, I submit that if we hadn’t evolved to run away from tyrannosaurs, we wouldn’t even be here toda
y. Strictly speaking, we didn’t, but my inner Purgatorius begs to differ. Purgatorius is our first primate and coexisted with the dinosaurs, and I feel certain, on a molecular level, that it had a grade-A startle response.
Anyway, my own is alive and well, and I can only hope it’s keeping my heart muscle in shape. Already I’m leery of driving at night because of all the phantoms out there that seem to require sudden evasive action that nobody else on the road appreciates. I have to think it serves me well. Or I did, until last week.
That would be the week I decided to investigate the huge squash vine that volunteered in my flower garden. By the time it edged into my radar, it was twenty feet long and had leaves the size of vinyl records. The blossoms alone could have subbed for the “His Master’s Voice” gramophone on the RCA Victor label. Any of the squashes I’d grown or eaten might have contributed a stray seed. For some reason I concluded this was one of those squashes, likely a butternut or an acorn, and it had lucked onto a particularly rich patch of soil. I started at the beginning of the vine and carefully swept aside leaf after leaf looking for the end product, but it appeared most of the flowers had shriveled shy of
their destiny. Until I got to the very end and lifted one last leaf and there, right there, was a gigantic freaking pumpkin and I screamed like a little girl.
Sure, I’m familiar with pumpkins, but I’d never seen one on the hoof like that. In my defense, those things can get really large. And unexpected. And don’t think you couldn’t be sliced out of the gene pool by a thousand-pound pumpkin. If it landed on you, say. Or if you ate it. The requisite whipped cream alone would do you in.
I’m continually amazed by the the things people are afraid of. Like Canada geese. Sure, they’re big, but they weigh five to ten pounds and they have no teeth, no pointy beak and no spurs. I’ve killed them with my bare hands.
For some reason flocks of greylag geese make better guard dogs than real guard dogs. Okay, they’re great at announcing intruders and I suppose a flock of them pinching at your nethers would encourage you to be elsewhere, but in the end they’re just feathery soccer balls with a long handle.
There’s a flock of wild turkeys that live in the park and woods that border one of the roads on my commute route. There’s one big male, several smaller males and some females. I see them regularly on the side of the road, the hens pecking away at things and the big male inflated and inflamed, marching around in circles. They occasionally stray out into the road. Sometimes they’re just very leisurely crossing the road and sometimes they’re occupying one lane of the road for some nebulous turkey purpose.
This would be amusing if it was just me on the road. But this usually happens during the morning commute and usually the other drivers are either mesmerized by the wonderful turkey display or terrified into statues at the thought of what those big birds could do to their fancy new cars. I’ve seen lines of cars backed up for a quarter mile because some idiot won’t pull around into the other lane, the shoulder or onto the grass to get around them. Or just get out of the car and shoo them off.
Okay, they are big birds with pointy beaks, claws and wicked spurs. Also they can fly. But I think if I had a broom or a shovel I could clear the road damn quick.
The other morning I was confronted by a car heading towards me in my lane. It took a moment to figure out that it was going around the turkeys. It was still pretty dark and the turkeys were in the shadows with headlights around them.
There was a line of cars behind the turkeys. I stopped three car lengths away to give the next car a chance to get around the turkeys and flashed my lights to give the all clear. Instead the driver laid on her horn and was waving at me to back up!
So I proceeded forward, pulled onto the shoulder and drove around all that mess, while the other driver honked her horn and waved one finger at me.
I don’t know what to say about being startled by a pumpkin. I’d like to think that I’d have a thrill of discovery, but I think any vocalization would be limited to oohs and ahs.
Also I had to look up Purgatorius. My knowledge of Mesozoic mammals is pretty much limited to knowing they existed.
Fun fact; John Bell Hatcher who is best known for collecting huge numbers of Triceratops skulls (possibly as many as thirty) was commissioned by Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale to collect Mesozoic mammal fossils. These are mostly known from tiny isolated teeth that don’t look much different than the rest of the gravel spread over Montana.
Hatcher found that harvester ants liked to pile pebbles around the entrances to their hives and often these piles contained the elusive mammal teeth. He relocated hives to areas that were producing teeth and then returned to them to harvest the teeth that the ants had collected.
I couldn’t understand, at first, why someone would leave a big piece of a bicycle tire in the garden.
Then, you know, it started moving. As did I. In the other direction.
There could be a sequel to the movie “Attack of the killer tomatoes” called “Pumpkinator: attack of the killer squash.” The opening scene is Murr discovering her volunteer pumpkin. But then it just keeps growing and growing until it devours Portland, or dare I say squashes it. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his demolition team is called in to blow it up like a beached whale, but this only spreads its seeds as far away as Canada. Chaos ensues.
Murr! Are you okay? I just saw in my news feed that Trump is going to send troops next to “war-ravaged Portland.” 😨 You are SO brave to actually walk out in the streets! When I saw that, my jaw dropped. Portland? 🙄 Now your startle reflex has something to REALLY be upset about.
On a lighter note, I have a healthy startle reflex, too. So much so that my parrot, Petey, has learned to gasp loudly. When he first started doing that, I wondered aloud to Paul where he learned that. Paul gave me “that look” and said, “He learned it from YOU.” I denied it. Until the next time that I was startled. I of course gasped… and said Damn! He DID learn it from me!