October 2011 Issue

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

So I turned on the local news the other night to see when it would stop raining. I wasn’t really paying close attention; I actually had my back to the TV and was writing something. After a few minutes, however, it percolated into my frontal cortex that the people on the tee-vee were very excited about something, so I turned around and noticed that emblazoned across the screen in flashing orange was FEROCIOUS WILD ANIMALS ON THE LOOSE — RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! or words to that effect. Turns out that some … jerk, to put it mildly … had been keeping fifty or so lions, tigers, mountain lions, cheetahs, wolves, grizzly bears, black bears and monkeys, plus a giraffe, in tiny cages on his “wildlife preserve” west of Zanesville. And now, for whatever reason, he had chosen a dark, rainy evening to turn them all loose and then shoot himself. You saw all this as the top story on CNN, the BBC, et al., I’m sure.

The particular problem for us at that moment was that the “preserve” was just about 25 miles due east of us. That sounds like a long way away, but it’s all open, mostly flat country around here, and the authorities seemed a bit unclear as to exactly how long these animals had been loose — at least five or six hours at that point. Still, it seemed unlikely that they would make it this far, or it did until the news helpfully reported that there had been credible sightings in southern Licking County, about seven miles away.

So it’s a dark and stormy night, and we’re sitting in the proverbial isolated farmhouse, with lots of big windows and flimsy doors, surrounded by cornfields and our own woods backing up on a few hundred more acres of cornfields. I have already learned to be careful when I take the dogs out at night because the coyotes around here are numerous and aggressive. And there have been consistent and credible reports in recent years of large cats, probably escapees from just such private zoos, being spotted (and in one case photographed) in our area.

And now we apparently had a wave of ticked-off tigers, grizzlies and lions headed our way. What I wanted at that moment was a bunch of floodlights and an AK-47. What we had were two arthritic dogs, both largely deaf, and a whole lot of useless but no doubt tasty cats. Around 2 am it occurred to me that for any large and hungry carnivore downwind of us, our house would smell like a big box of food. And these critters were accustomed to being around (and fed by) people, so the natural shyness that keeps coyotes (mostly) at bay would be, as HR Haldeman would say, inoperable.

After a nearly sleepless night, we awoke to learn that almost all the animals, sadly, had been shot by law enforcement agents. Under the circumstances there really was no other choice, but the pictures of dead lions and tigers were heartbreaking. Ohio really needs to make private ownership of such animals illegal for the sake of everyone, especially the animals.

Onward. I realized the other day that this month marks the five-year anniversary of my diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Part of the diagnostic process (apart from MRIs and lumbar punctures and other fun stuff) involves trying to remember any earlier, undiagnosed symptoms, and I realized that I had actually been having the symptoms of relapsing-remitting ms since about 1990; difficulty walking, pain in my eyes and blurred vision, etc. I had gone to various doctors over the years and no one ever suggested ms, even though the symptoms I was reporting were absolutely classic. And as late as early 2006, when I went to see one of the “best neurologists in Columbus” (according to Columbus Monthly) because I couldn’t feel or lift my left leg at all and was periodically partially blind, he told me it must have been due to sleep deprivation.

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