What odd, unusual, out-of-the-way experiences have you had?
My favorite in my own life is: I held the portable light for my vet when he gelded a colt belonging to a friend. I got to watch the operation up close, and Bob explained what he was doing as he went along.
Now, for a vet, or a vet tech, or a horse breeder, that’s nothing big. But for me, and I dare say most people, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
So, what’s your special experience?
I sat on a cliff once and watched a grizzer bear chase a moose and her calf for about 3/4 of a mile along a braided stream and finally into a thick stand of river brush along the Colville. Didn’t see anything for about a minute and figured the bear had dragged the calf down but then all of a sudden a bull moose came out with the bear on it’s heels, it had pulled a switch, and led the griz away from the cow and calf.
The whole thing took about 30 minutes to play out and just myself and a crew member sat there drop jawed and watched, miles and miles from nowhere.
Kind of a long story.
I went to high school in a rural NC town, and met a girl there. We’ll call her Emily. Before our senior year was out, Emily moved somewhere else. A year and a half or so after graduating, I joined the military.
Several months and several thousand miles later, at a military training base, I met a girl who had lived in the same town I had lived in, though she moved out years before I moved in. She’d gone to grade school with Emily. They’d kept in touch.
She had pictures of me (well, so I was told - I never saw them. But lots of pictures were taken…).
Talk about it being a small world.
The FoxyLady and I were canoeing on a lazy, shallow river. A rubber penis floated by. We looked at each other, then we watched the little rubber penis drift on down the river.
There was a dam a few miles downstream. Poor little penis. I hope it survived.
:eek: 
FoxPaws, this thread was worth opening just for that. Let alone the grizzly bear and Earthworm stories. 
Rubber penis waits for no one.
And you didn’t even try to save it. Shame on you. :eek: :o
Well, working for the power company gave me so many stories I really wouldn’t know where to begin, but I think I’ll start with driving down a windy corridor, one of those tiny roads with not too much traffic, with a cliff on one side and a hill on the other, suddenly smelling burnt brakes like nobody’s business, and coming around a curve to find a smashed double-car big-rig, the kind used to haul loads of grapes during harvest season. A few cars were just then stopping, so I was there about twenty seconds after the crash actually happened. The guy’s cab had separated from the beds, which was lucky because they smashed into the hill so hard that the front bed was almost completely flattened and pushed into the dirt of the hill a few feet! The cab had caught it’s axle on the railing and was leaning forward above a good hundred-foot cliff, and the driver was literally being held in the cab by his seat belt. He was literally dangling by a bent piece of railing. There was no way to reach the cab itself. I ran up and slowed traffic above, someone else manned the curve below, someone else went for the cops, and a couple guys parked a truck with a winch across the street and actually wrapped the winch line around the axle, securing the truck until the tow company and the cops got there to pull him back up and over. It was an instant congregation of strangers making every effort to save this man’s life. And we did. Hell of a day.
I once witnessed a pair of gigantic tortoises having gigantic tortoise sex. You wouldn’t believe how loud they were. I could hear the male at least three quarters of a mile away.
Maybe they’d found and were using the little rubber floating penis?
You know, it’s weird to think about but that might have been a couple of 125 year olds.
OK if this is a double post, sorry. My first attempt was ejected into the ether.
This is something my parents saw in England. They were coming out of the hotel and saw a woman in a wheelchair. When I say wheelchair, someone had taken a chair from the dinner table and nail a little wheel to each leg. The woman moved around (sideways) by using her feet.
That’s not the weird part.
The weird part was that as she was navigating, with difficulty down the cobblestone street, she was being pursued by a three-legged dachsund. My dad figured that the dog had somewhat realistic expectations.
I was staying at a friend’s house. I was in the spare room. At the time I was terrified of the dark, and this was an old old house. I was looking at my hand. I covered it with the quilt, and it was still there, in ghost form.
On Holiday in Wales, with the same friend. We are in a caravan and it’s night. Out of the corner of my eye I spot the reflection of a large fire in the window. I get up and open the window. No sign of a fire anywhere outside.
Got rang up by a man, who told me he was wanking.
Riding my bike on top of a hill late in the evening. A guy spots me and asks the time. I tell him. Then he says “I’m Gay. Are you?” at the time I was homophobic. I felt like I was being ‘picked up’ Rode down that hill faster than ever before.
Those are the ones I can recall without having to think about it.
Mine’s kinda like yours, EddyTeddyFreddy – while working (doing grunt work, cleaning, mind you, not technical stuff) at a vet’s office on a Sunday afternoon, an emergency came in. Someone had hit a bald eagle with their Jeep, and carried it in wrapped in their jean jacket. The vet was also the local Raptor Rescue go-to guy at the time, and he whipped into action to save this huge, amazing bird. I was pulled from the back room where I was stacking bags of cat litter and given the job of squeezing the rubber bag that moved oxygen into the bird’s lungs while it was sedated.
I “breathed” for that Bald Eagle for half an hour. It died despite the vet’s best effort. I still get a chill thinking about it.
#1) Strolling one evening with a girl along side the pond behind our dormitory, at CU-Boulder. We sat on the grass by the pond to smoke a doob, and out of nowhere, from the bank of the pond, this little chipmunk or rat or something runs up, bites me on the thigh, right on the seam going down the outside of my jeans, and then runs back to the bank and disappears.
#2) Shrooming our brains out one night at a friend’s 5th-floor apartment, again in college, but several years later. Out the window we see my ex-roommate from the dorms, one of the starting running backs on the football team. And a big time pothead. And he’s got two girls with him, one under each arm. So we holler at him and invite him up. One of the girls is just plain old run of the mill ugly. The other has something wrong with her face. In my altered state, I can’t tell precisely what, but whenever I look at her face, it starts to melt. No one else’s face is melting, just hers. I can’t look at her face, and the entire scene is making me uncomfortable. The rational part of my mind, what’s left of it, is telling me that the poor girl probably has burn scars or something, but my reptilian brain is screaming ah! ahhhh! Melting face! Demon in disguise! Don’t look! Run away! Flee for your life!. Man it was hard not to be rude.
#3) Driving home, in the fast lane on I-5 from Seattle to Los Angeles about 10 years ago, in the fast lane. I take my attention off the road to change CDs, and while I’m doing that, I’m unaware that I’m slowing down. When I look up, I notice another car zooming up and passing me on the right. The passenger in the rear seat, a female, waves a 16" dildo with a hilt like a bastard sword at me. I wave back and smile.
Over the summer, I got to go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian to the Department of Fishes. They have thousands and thousands of jars full of alcohol with dead fish in them, but the best thing was the coelacanth. It was in a big metal tank full of alcohol, and I got to put on a shoulder high rubber glove and pull it up out of the alcohol. It was amazing. A coelacanth is a BIG fish. It was probably longer than I am tall, and it had huge eyes like shooter marbles.
I got married.
Similar story to Earthworm Jim’s:
When I was 16, I went out with this guy, Ryan*, who was 4 years older than me. After a few dates, I started to be a little creeped out by him, and I dumped him in a pretty crappy way. (Gave him his class ring back and told him “bye” with no explaination.)
I avoided him even though we lived in the same relatively small town…until 4 years later. I was in Navy boot camp in Orlando, Florida. I walk into the galley for lunch and hear someone say, “Tamarin?” (Which is pretty strange considering you’re not supposed to talk in the galley when you’re in boot camp). I look over, and there’s Ryan. :eek:
He was actually pretty nice considering the way I’d dumped him not to mention much less creepy to me by then. He ended up being pen pals with a girl in my company. I haven’t heard from him since.
*not his real name
I went to a small Florida zoo very early one morning.
The person at the gate was new, & let me in 30 minutes before opening.
I got to see all the animals being fed, & I got to pet a Serval.
When I was in college and doing the backpacking through Europe thing and was visiting Stonehenge I ran into the woman from the coffee stand that I went to every morning back in Burlington, VT.
