On Saturday afternoon, my friend Harriet and I headed to see a 4pm concert at the Iota Club in Virginia (Eleanor McEvoy, for the curious). We drove down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which is a lovely, scenic drive parallelling the Potomac on the Virginia side of the river.
As I exited the Parkway, I made a mistake and took the wrong exit (south, instead of north). As I was realising my mistake, turning around the off-ramp, I spied a squirrel dashing across the road in front of me, from my right to the left.
I slammed on my brakes and the little guy barely made it across in time (he seemed to panic when he noticed me). If I hadn’t hit the brakes I would’ve flattened the squirrel.
A few minutes later, as I calmed back down from the instant adrenaline burst and tried to meander my way through northern Virginia to get to the club, Harriet mentioned to me that it was good that I missed the exit, since it allowed me to save the life of the squirrel, whereas the car behind me on the exit would’ve possibly hit the squirrel. (I had slowed down more than normal on the exit when I noticed that I took the wrong one. At a normal speed, the car behind me probably would’ve hit the squirrel at the time I almost did.)
So, if you care what I did this weekend, I saw a concert with my friend, had a great dinner with her afterwards, rebuilt my computer, watched some football on TV, and most importantly, I saved a life.
Thanks, Montfort, for screwing up the whole natural selection thing. That squirrel was supposed to die to make it’s race’s genetic intelligence pool stronger. Now we have a few more years before the squirrels take over the world. So, in essence, you may have saved millions of lives that would’ve been taken in the first decades of the struggle between the Squirrel and Human forces.
Well, Democritus, that day can’t come soon enough.
I guess I shouldn’t mention my ex, with whom I became smitten with upon discovering that she carried acorns in her coat pocket in the autumn to feed to squirrels.
Democritus - starve a vulture, feed a hawk. It is still part of the food chain, just in a different form.
Then again, that little squirrel may have been the Einstein or von Braun of its species. Now its little brain is still around to develop little bitty weapons of mass destruction. (Acorn launchers and flying squirrel areosquads - no wonder they hoard acorns, filling them with tiny contact explosives, just waiting for the day when all squirrel-hell will break loose…brrrrrrrr…I can’t even bear to think about it. It’s bad enough when they drop acorns on my car.
Or maybe the squirrel is the Jim Varney of its species, in which case Democritus is correct. They’ll be watching bad squirrel movies for years with no chance of increasing in intelligence.
We have a 50/50 chance of human survival.
Thanks Montfort. I can’t wait to find out whether you saved or doomed humankind.
Good save, but, you should know, I ate that squirrel for lunch not five minutes after some loony tune slammed on the brakes while it was crossing the road. I had to kill it with my OWN car.
It was a standard brown/grey squirrel that’s very common here in the mid-Atlantic.
After I saw that it made it to the other side of the road, I noticed it glance at me. So, it will remember me on that day when the rest of you are caught and put into horrible concentration camps. I’ll be sure to use my special Friend of Squirrel powers to get a few exemptions, for Anniz, my brother, Nicole Kidman, etc.
