This morning, I experienced/witnessed something that has had my mind in knots all day...
As I was heading to my mom's house/ my shop, I came upon a few cars stopped at the railroad tracks...a couple heading as I was, south and a couple of others trying to go north. As I pulled up behind the southbound vehicles, I was thinking to myself... "What are these idiots doing NOW?" (and No, I wasn't in a really good mood at the time) As one of the northbound cars slowly eased across the tracks...I saw what was holding things up: A Duck. He (or she) was walking around in circles in the middle of the road. How cute, I thought, as my mood lightened a bit. The other northbound car proceeded across the tracks and then the car in front of me pulled around the lead car in our little group. The duck was too close to the lead car for those folks to really move anywhere, and besides it was right in the middle of the road, almost as if it was looking for a handout or a treat. As I eased past the duck, I noticed something about him/her... ruffled head and neck feathers. Then I noticed something else way more meaningful to the duck; a very large Hawk standing in the grass on the side of the road, watching the duck.
What started out as a cute, albeit unwanted interuption to my morning, all the sudden turned to a wild animal's worse nightmare come true. I am throughly convinced that that duck was searching for help from the passing vehicles: pleading for his life to strangers. Wow...Wild Kingdom right in front of me.
What's got me all bumfuzzled, is my reaction to all this... I mean, as a kid and then a young adult, I used to hunt all the time. I was of the opinion that...If it flies it dies, if it crawls it falls. Ocassionally, I would level my sights on something just for the hell of it...an unfortunate bat flying around my parent's pond one evening comes to mind. He didn't stand a chance. Now all of the sudden, I am seeing things from a different perspective. As a former fisherman, suddenly I am looking at things from the worm's point of view (sorta)... Wow...talk about having your whole life and being thrown into an upside down tailspin... I really don't know what to think about my emotional reaction to all this...and also, I'd like to offer my apologies to y'all for rambling... I just needed to vent