Phil Pollard: An Earth Day Odyssey (pt.3): Fish - the other roadkill
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You know, I made these mountains and these valleys. Well, not so much me myself personally, but me myself as a totem. By flying low over the still hot, molten earth in the beginning, my wings made the valleys and the hills, and the mountains. My wings made this valley, and the river and the lakes. Alright, maybe not all the lakes; the dams did most of that. But still, I've been around for a while, and I know what I've seen.
I'm sort of the busboy of the earth; I clean up the left overs. Something dies, I come by and clean it up; something's killed and some is left behind, I'm the guy to clean it up. For most of my history, it's been just that; some animal kills someone else, eats a lot of it, leaves, and leaves the rest for me. Thousands of years, I've lived like that.
Lately though, it's different. Most of what I eat is laid out on the road. I don't even know what some of it is till I'm already eating it. "Oh, that's rabbit," I'll say with half a mouthful. Or, "I recognize this, it's possum, I knew his aunt," I might murmur. Anyway, it's tricky trying to find the stuff by scent through the smog, then avoiding cars and trucks to try to get down close. We've had a couple of feasts that started including some of us, because everyone kept getting hit! Whatever. It's crazy.
I'll tell you one thing they're doing: they're killing the fish. Maybe it's the oil and gas they leave behind, or maybe it's the motors hitting the fish - talk about not recognizing something before you eat it - try figuring out if somebody already was eating on a fish or if it just got hit by a prop! It's disgusting, and believe me, I know disgusting.
It'd probably be better if I could just stand along the shore and scoop up a dead fish here and there, but even that's becoming more and more difficult. There's less and less shore left; those motor boats stir up the water so bad, it's all washing away.
I feel real bad for Heron and Crane; they got less places to live, what with all the luxury, riverside houses going up (tacky if you ask me), less fish for all the pollutions and boats, and less shore to even stand on to catch them.
I guess, at least, I'll be the last of them all. When everyone's hit by a car or boat, when they've wore out all the homes of everyone, and when y'all people kill yourselves with your stress and wars, I'll be around on that last day, cleaning up the last of it.
I was here in the beginning, and I'll be here at the end.
Comments
Ah, yes. My friend. And when the buzzard can find nothing to eat, who then will he come for?
Posted by: Jawaharlal O'Riley | May 18, 2007 01:01 PM