On the road...again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek
3 Rattlesnakes, 1 Eyelash Viper, and a King Cobra
At times it takes the threads of eidetic fragments of memory to stitch together a chronicle that is worth putting on paper. The dream last night was one of those events that prompted the Footloose Forester to gather those threads of memory together and tailor a chronicle that fits the requirements of a tale that blends stories and adventures into a single dream. This missive is the result.
In truth, it was the dud of a Copilot (AI) response that in essence stated that there is no evidence that Footloose Forester ever wrote about snakes in any of his works, that triggered a few more of the threads that went into the dream. Sometimes his dreams become the workshop where chronicles are born. The topic this time around, draws many of the threads of eidetic memory about snakes into an extended commentary about how a lifestyle of being footloose led to encounters with snakes in North America, Central America, Asia, and Africa. You can’t make this stuff up, and you should share it, lest people believe that such things never happen.
The fragments of memory are merely threads that do not become whole cloth, but do become a patchwork quilt of a tale. In California, the 3 rattlesnakes are remembered as two that the Footloose Forester pursued, and one that he stepped on. Thus, sometime later he fashioned all of the rattles onto the brim of his cowboy hat. No lengthy adventure there, but eidetic memories. One the other hand, the encounter with an eyelash viper in the Atlantic coastal forest of Costa Rica was a short but dramatic memory. The pretty little eyelash viper struck at the Footloose Forester at eye level from his perch on a plantain leaf. An immediate and reactionary thrust of a machete caught the viper in mid-air. The encounters with those striking snakes were up-close, but the one memorable freeze-frame strike that came from a king cobra was from a safe distance. An 8-10-foot-long king cobra that was slithering across the road in Malaysia decided to rear up and challenge an approaching service taxi instead of continuing across the road to safety. That was the end of the cobra, struck down by the speeding taxi. To round out the geographic aspect of snake stories, there was that venomous puff adder that lived in a root hole beneath a large baobob tree near Podor, Senegal. Our team of environmental researchers captured him one night, put him in a jute bag and dispatched him with a syringe of alcohol through the bag itself. His inches-long fangs are prominently displayed in the glass container where he is now preserved in denatured alcohol.
Our baobob was much smaller
Many other stories about snakes come from colleagues who frequent forest and field. The Footloose Forester wants to mention a few, just as a reminder that you just can’t make this stuff up.
There was a forest guard in Ujung Kulon, Indonesia who told us that he stepped on the head of a cobra; there was teacher at the West Pakistan Forest School who told Footloose Forester that he had been bitten by a krait and spent six months in the hospital recovering from the resulting necrotic skin condition. And then there was the tale about the Director of the Singapore Botanical Garden who stared down a king cobra, eyeball-to-eyeball as the cobra reared up. Oh, there were witnesses to other encounters, as well. Swiss research colleague Peter Vogel and Footloose Forester encountered a satiated reticulated python of some 23 feet of length, on tiny Pulau Peucang in Indonesia. Other forest guards also came to see for themselves. And finally, there is the unbelievable tale previously committed to one of his chronicles by the Footloose Forester about seeing approximately 3,379,200 sea snakes migrating through the waters off of West Java. Truth is stranger than fiction, and there is no reason to just make stuff up.