The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: Nature

  • Killer Instinct

    I have a confession to make. I’m a killer. And I don’t feel the least bit of shame. I’ll do it again, I guarantee you. If a cockroach or a brown recluse spider stupidly breeches my line of chemical defense and enters my house, there to potentially bite me and rot my flesh or ruin…

  • I Don’t Want a Jetpack

    When I was little, my favorite cartoon was the Jetsons. This fascinating story of a family living way in the future, amongst efficient and complicated gadgets and jet cars always excited my imagination. I was convinced, as were many of my contemporaries, that by the year 2000 we’d all be flying around using jetpacks in…

  • Have we Overstayed our Welcome?

    Aw, jeez, I need to stop surfing the internet. I just came across a website called Recent Natural Disasters, and it gives you all the reported disasters all over the world, 24 hours a day. I have a hard enough time avoiding my tendency to anthropomorphize nature, especially when it seems as though the planet…

  • My Favorite Place in Florida

    I shouldn’t write this blog entry, because right now only Floridians seem to know about this beautiful place, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way. Tourists don’t flood it. It’s not surrounded by restaurants and food vendors and tourist attractions and hotels. Much of the year, in fact, it’s deserted. I think…

  • Strange Natural Encounters

    Yesterday I saw something that nearly made me drive off the road. A rainbow that was shaped like a backward letter N instead of being in an arch. A really bad picture of it is below. I wish it came out sharper. The only thing that I can think of is that it was a…

  • Signs and Portents

    One day a friend of mine was doing some gardening and a foot long mullet fell out of the sky with a thud, missing him by mere feet. Apparently the neighborhood osprey had butter fingers. You don’t expect fish to fall out of the sky. It sort of challenges your sense of reality. Coyotes have…

  • Contemplating Trees

    Today is Arbor Day. I bet a distressingly small number of people are even aware of that. It is a day to plant trees and appreciate those trees that already exist. Today I’m thinking about the forest and our relationship to it. Many rears ago, I used to vacation in Pisgah National Forest in North…

  • Happy Earth Day!

    It’s Earth Day, and that has me thinking about the intimate encounters I’ve had with nature in my lifetime. I have swum with manatee, dolphins and stingrays. I briefly dated a guy who could imitate a barn owl so accurately that every owl in the region would respond to his call. He also taught me…

  • Mother Nature Trumps the River Goddess Every Time

    It can be a heady experience being a bridgetender. After all, you are operating a piece of equipment that can weigh several million pounds if you work on one of the larger bridges. You also control the flow of marine, vehicular and pedestrian traffic. You can make people very late for work. If a boater…

  • A Rare Gift from a Dolphin

    I am a bridgetender at a bridge that spans the intracoastal waterway in Florida. This job gives me a front row seat to observe nature. The other night at around midnight, I was walking on the bridge to check if all the navigation lights were functioning properly. As often happens, I startled a blue heron,…