My early summer walk to work today is cool, green, and bloody. Nighttime exhalation of caves in this karst region brings moist morning air at a steady fifty-two degrees fahrenheit, watering thirsty trees, shrubs, and grasses even when it hasn't rained. Cave exhaust also brings out the critters.
Aerial scavengers eye a parade of the dead - the lump of a lime-laden deer, the smashed shell and splayed limbs of a snapping turtle, the sideways stare of a permanently frozen opossum, the red splash of a crushed cardinal, the sinuosity of a flattened black snake. Vultures in red or black, small hawks, and big black birds hop from one foot to another at the tops of trees and telephone poles, impatiently awaiting my passing,
It's a gruesome display, one that is laid out every morning on millions of miles of roads. All I can say as I lay the bodies into the roadside wildflowers is what a fellow flaneur might have if he had survived into the era of the automobile:
"Ya drives yer car, ya takes yer chances." - Popeye the Sailor Man
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