It’s a wonder any kids ever manage to survive and become adults, I said to my friend, Glenn, in an email just a few moments ago, recalling a time when the granddaughter of one of my brothers, when she was about two, picked up a set of dropped car keys, rushed directly to an electrical outlet, and stuck them in. Fortunately, she was wearing rubber-soled shoes.
I had just learned from Glenn, who lives in Maine, that his six-year-old granddaughter shattered quite badly a bone in one arm a day or two ago. She and her family had recently moved to a piece of land in Louisiana and she fell, there, into a 25-foot ravine.
In Louisiana, you might ask? A 25-foot ravine? Glenn anticipated the question, saying, “If they lived five miles farther south, there would be no ravines – just Louisiana as Louisiana is, safely flat and several feet about the rising sea level.”
Always philosophical, Glenn wrote, “Well, they won’t drown in the future.”
Global warming is never far from the minds of lots of parents and grandparents in Australia and the rest of the world, these days. And here, with the drought continuing despite some rain in Brisbane and other coastal areas, summer is arriving and bringing with it a new worry: snakes.
Australians, some of them, seem almost proud of the fact that this continent has 18 of the 20 most poisonous varieties in the world. Newspapers have been warning us to be alert because hot weather brings out the creepy crawlies.
Sunday, on the Gold Coast, an hour or so south of us, a woman working in her garden was confronted by one of the worst, a snake with a deceptive name, an Eastern Brown Snake. (Just to add insult to potential injury, you can’t just watch out for “brown;” they come in solid black, in stripes, and sometimes in other colors during their unfortunately long life cycle.)
A nature center web site I checked said Eastern Brown Snakes are aggressive, especially dangerous, and can get to be two meters long. Yikes! Six feet long.
Fay Palethorpe of Ipswich, quoted in “The Age” newspaper today, said the one she found among her flowers or veggies was at least that long. It lifted its head two feet off the ground and struck at her two or three times. Wisely, she ran away, screaming, but it chased her.
She has three Kelpie dogs. They came to her aid. One, named Tess, attacked the snake and began tossing it into the air. Eventually, she was able to call Tess away from the invader, which slinked off. Tess seemed, at first, to be unhurt.
Soon, though, the heroic pet became ill and was rushed to an emergency clinic where she got an anti-venom shot for a bite inside her ear. Now in the care of a vet, Tess is in a coma and has been given a 50-50 chance of living. This morning, she was showing signs of recovery.
“My vet said if it (the snake) had got me … I wouldn’t have reached my back stairs, he said it was so deadly,” Ms Palethorpe told a reporter.
In our small yard, we’ve seen only lizards, including one about 10 inches long, fat, colorful, and slow moving because he or she has useless-looking, tiny legs. I prefer such creatures. Colorful, fat, slow moving.
And, anyway, life can be dangerous anywhere, right? Even in normally flat places without aggressive six-foot vipers. I think, though, that I may avoid some of the riskier activities for a while.
Gardening, for example. Or looking after kids. — Bob
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