Venezuelan Tapir

On our fabulous, mind boggling power boat trips on several tributaries of the Orinoco River in the Amazon region of Venezuela, Muriel and I were often within yards of more wild life than we could count. We photographed the world’s largest (and grumpiest) otters, pairs and quads of dolphins who played like otters, eagle sized parrots, caymans and crocs, cormies, piranha, tiger fish, and way up in the sky tipping trees howler monkeys, plus weird creatures our powerboat guide named in his own incomprehensible language. Except for some pushy parrots, we rarely encountered even mosquitoes around the dining area.  Creatures kept their distance....well, mostly.

When even jungle widgets can only see a few feet into the green webbing, not seeing them doesn't mean they aren't there. They just hide better than we do. And there are some significant exceptions. We needed to tolerate the bats that swooshed over the pool evenings and jungle things that screamed, either in terrible pain, or simply to drown out other things that screamed. There's lots of screaming in the jungle, especially as dusk sets in. Roaring and burping and even just grumbling signals the dimming of the day.

Breakfasts under the outdoor shelter were quiet (well, compared with dusk).  The camp staff had managed to keep most creatures outside some sort of unmarked, but definite boundary of the dining and tenderfoot  area.

Most jungle creatures appear to have been created  by Quasimodo. Yes, some are indescribably, delicately beautiful but most seem sort of extruded.

One early evening we were seated in the outdoor dining area waiting for the salad to begin our dinner. We were looking over our day's notes when Muriel  said, “Hey!” turning toward an intruder at her shoulder. I mean she TRIED  to turn.

Pushing its over-ample nose against her was a huge head.  Connected to the head was the world's largest pig, or something.... definitely a Quasimodo invention.  Its nose had a flap sticking out that looked like a child's impression of an elephant.

Muriel placed both hands on the beast's  head and shoved. The animal totally ignored her shove. SHE was the one who moved backward.

We heard laughter over by the camp director’s  table. They were all chuckling and pointing.

 “Don’t feed her,” one of them cautioned.

 “FEED her!” Muriel exclaimed.  “Feed her what?”

Beyond the creature’s Brobdignagian head was what looked like six hundred pounds of pig, if a pig could have an elephant's nose and deer hooves and ears.

“She’s docile,” we were told.  “She comes to the kitchen to beg for greens and searches in the trash can for her babies.  We don’t dare let her have anything, or she’d be here all day, maybe all night, too.”

       

After a bit, the hippo-pig-horse-deer gave up. She wandered over to the pool, where she began to look more like a gray hippo. The bats charged her but she was as good at ignoring them as she had been us.

“Can’t you chase her away?” Muriel asked.

“How?” somebody asked.

 “Yes, how?” another offered.  With a bulldozer, maybe?”

The director finally reassured us that Miss Super Piggy wouldn’t be around much longer.  Soon her two little ones -- each a two hundred pound blob “little” -- would be stomping through the jungle, making crocodiles and snakes nervous. The young pair would keep mama much too busy for her to be shoving her massive head and wiggly nose against  Muriel at our dinner time.

Somebody called her Minnie the Moocher.  Maxie the Moocher seemed more like it.

Fatima

Everyone takes a fall some time. Some are career ending, or teach a lesson, and like that. This one brought the house down.

Our neighborhood church youth group was flourishing.  As I recall, there were over twenty of us in regular attendance.  We had a pretty good supply of participants (notice that I did not say "talent") for a particular a Friday night money maker, which was a production. We had a hall-filling crowd.  There were several acts and kinds of entertainment, including a skit entitled "Fatima and the Nine Camels.” (One must have been left at an oasis.)

I don't remember much about the skit, other than that I was Fatima, and the finale would have put the “Hamlet” closer to shame. The curtain was to come down on almost too many carcasses to count.  As the skit progressed, more and more victims hit the deck, including the camels. Eventually, I had to die, too.  When there was a pyramid of bodies stage center, the music crescendoed, a metal sheet rattled, and Fatima surrendered her life, falling toward the pyramid.

She staggered, pirouetted oh-so-gracefully, finally fainting away oh-so-gracefully

Except that as she collapsed the pyramid split like startle spiders, scattering over the stage.

I hit the deck with an echoing thump, as a small child cried out, “Mama, is he hurt?”

The jolt jarred out one of my bra fillers, which one of the “corpses” gallantly recovered and politely pushed back in.

The Big Swing

Being the tag-a-long can have its up side.

Growing up by the Golden Gate Park, with its miles of trees, lawns, lakes, secret gardens, playgrounds -- even a polo field accessed through a tunnel -- a de facto city boy becomes a country kid. Country kids don't have to dodge auto traffic to play games.  People don't yell out windows at them.  You have fields and trees. Especially trees.

One day a group of older boys passed by my house carrying a long, large rope. When I inquired, the one who was clearly the leader said simply, "Come along.”

So I  trailed along intoThe Park (the one mile by four mile chunk of raw dunes turned into "the eleventh Wonder of the World" by John McClaren).

The eastern half of The Park is carefully nurtured, mowed, paved, invested in myriad niceties: courts, museums, playground equipment, exotic flowers, a casting pool, and benches -- lots of benches.  But my end was basically au naturale.  Stuff just grew.

The small cluster of boys I'd been invited to trail after had their own schtick.  I certainly wanted to learn what prompted several high school age boys to tote a marine hawse half a mile into The Park.

Eventually they stopped at the edge of a large depression, one about twenty feet deep and smoothly bowl shaped. The leader turned to one of the others who, I suddenly realized, had been carrying a coiled clothesline. The clothesline was being attached to the hawse. The free end of the clothesline was then wound over a softball sized stone.

We had stopped here because a great oak tree grew on the far lip of the depression, its largest  branch extending directly above the bowl's deepest spot. The group was about to enjoy some giant swinging a la Tarzan.

To my delight, after each of the older boys had had at least one turn "Tarzaning" over the depression, I was invited to join.

       

Suddenly the swing looked scary. The drop was immense. I'd become very small.

But, of course, fear of embarrassment outweighed fear of harm.  I accepted. And I had the time of my life. I'd been inducted. They even let me help recoil the hawse.

And that wasn't even the best part.
    

Instead of merely walking out of the park, they stopped behind the hedge wall at the street where the trolley car parallels the park on its roll  to the beach.

Using a trick knot, the leader tossed the clothes line over a trolley stay wire.  Hiding in the shrubbery, they tugged rhythmically on the rope. The trolley wire began dancing. When the street car approached....  OOOPS, no power!

The oldest boy yanked the clothesline free and we all fled. I was the youngest, but I led them all into the artificial forest.

         

At home that evening, my father asked what I'd done that Saturday. Casually, I said I'd gone to The Park, which was true. I'd done that hundreds of times. 

Dad didn't need to know everything.

Track Meet

Dick Fosbury of Oregon State U. not only won the Mexico City Olympics high jump, he reinvented the event.

Okay, so he lifted himself fifteen inches higher than I ever did. When that bar got to eye level, it began to glare at me. And when a college locker room sign advertised an all-comers intramural track meet, I laughed. Me? Run? I did trot a quarter mile once to catch a bus.

But the next day when a fellow who was quitting college gave me his ultra-light, sponge-soled shoes, I remembered the intramural meet and began to wonder if I might try an event. Not a sprint. I was quick, but I sure wasn’t fast. I’d learned that in grade school, when I couldn't beat Bill Harris even after he loaned me his spikes. I’d done 19 feet in the long jump in basketball shoes. But the coach wanted twenty before he'd even let one try out for track.

I was about to skip the whole idea when a fellow in my history class saw the shoes. He said, “You’re entering in the intramural?"

I said I wasn’t sure.  He said he was going to enter the shot put.  The shot put!!! He weighed maybe 150 pounds and was about five six.

I guess he read my face, because he smiled and said, “I’ll never get another chance to even pick a shot put up.  I'll spend a whole Saturday standing around with real athletes.”

So I signed up for the only non-running event the high jump.  It started after lunch.  Then I looked for a morning event. I might as well blow the whole day, I thought.  The only one with no heats, just a final, was the hurdles.  Maybe with these neat new shoes I could run 120 yards.  I'd run a string of two hurdles in high school.   So......

 In those days a hurdle was a menace, constructed NOT to tip over.  I’d never tried to clear three, let alone ten. I decided I’d do best not to look at them, just the sky, or my fingernails, not those impediments.  I thought about scratching.  But a girl asked to borrow my algebra notes, and I forgot.

Saturday morning there were plenty of fake track men and a few real ones lounging around. And the day was nice, especially for San Francisco.  The hurdle event was scheduled for the middle of the morning.  Not too soon, not too late.

When it was called, we four went to the blocks.  Next to me was a tall, blonde, slender fellow wearing classy trunks and shiny new spiked running shoes. Just his shoes were obviously faster than I was.  He also looked very competent.

To my right were two others in ordinary gym clothes, one wearing sneakers, the other spikes, but unlike the tall fellow's shoes, his didn't fit too well. Neither looked like a runner any more than I must have.

 

At the gun, I got a good start, taking off even with the blonde and well ahead of the others. Over the first hurdle the blonde and I were even.  I cleared the second hurdle, too.  But the blonde was smoother, and he had those spikes.  Also, he could RUN!!!

Then the third hurdle caught my trailing foot, and I tumbled into a somersault.     Having sense enough not to sprawl, I tucked, spun over,  and came up facing hurdle #4.  It was there, so I simply went over it. The blonde was clearing #5, but I figured I might as well keep running.  I was half way, so why not?

At the end of the 120 yards, the track coach had run out and shook my hand. He offered to put me on the track team.  Clearly, he hadn’t noticed how slow I was.

Somehow, I’d become something of a celebrity. Later, when the high jump started, upper classmen, some who had already made the track team, began “coaching” me.  One loaned me his “jumping” shoes.  When I missed at five eight, two of them took me aside to give me tips. The effect was enough for me to make five nine, and got a lot of cheers.  So I invited them to Monday lunch on me at the college cafeteria. They accepted, and I found that I could help them with Contemporary European history. (This was 1939 when Adolph, Benito, Broz, and Francisco were strutting this way and that.)

As we sat around a table, one of the fellows said, “You don’t run; but you’re some kind of athlete.  What do you do?”

'Water polo,” I told him.

“That’s great!” he said. “What is it?”