String Cheese - Article One

TEXAS HIGHWAYS END OF THE ROAD FOR SOME ANIMALS
By Aryn Corley

I was driving home the other day when an armadillo with a death wish haplessly wandered in front of my truck. I don’t know if it was my cat-like reflexes or many years of playing racing video games, but I managed to miss the roving speed bump.
However, a few miles down the road it seemed an opossum wasn’t so lucky. Of course, he could have been faking it.
The whole experience got me to wondering, though.
What’s going on with all the roadkill?
Anyone who drives in Texas, in any direction, doesn’t have to travel very far before they encounter a nice sloppy pile of “road pizza”. There’s a virtual menagerie of mangled Michelin meat made of the finest cuts of skunk, deer, rabbit, and the occasional feral pig.
Their littered corpses are a testament to the lack of safety programs in the animal kingdom.
Of the many wild animals in Texas, it seems armadillos and raccoons are the unluckiest of the whole bunch.
I must admit, armadillos look like the result of a lurid affair between a turtle and a rat. They’re ugly and have skin problems. Armadillos don’t look like intelligent animals. Really. How smart is the smartest Armadillo? To anyone’s knowledge, no armadillo has ever solved an equation. If it has, it’s been conspicuously quiet about it. Armadillos (There’s no “e” Mr. Quayle.) aren’t particularly ambitious, either. The only armadillo that really ever amounted to anything was the one in the video for The Clash’s song Rock the Casbah.
I think the real problem for armadillos lies in the false sense of security their armor provides them. They think by rolling up into a ball they’ll be saved from imminent peril. A predator attacks: roll into a ball. The stock market crashes: roll into a ball. Your wife says she’s pregnant: roll into a ball. What a way to cope with reality! If I roll into a ball, my kids will kick me through a goal post.
I’ve heard of armadillos standing up in the middle of the road as the halogens-‘o’-fate race toward them and while doing their best DeNiro saying, “You want a piece of me?”
Apparently, the word “’dodge” on the front of the grill guard doesn’t seem like a good suggestion. Maybe armadillos can’t read.
So what's a raccoon’s excuse?
The bandit mask on a raccoon’s face suggests that it’s a clever creature. Raccoons are notorious for their thievery and ability to manipulate objects like hasps and latches. Yet, the subtle intricacy of crossing the road escapes them. This suggests to me that raccoons are dumb. Okay, maybe dumb is too harsh of a word. Let’s say they’re idiots.
A raccoon will look both ways before wandering into an area where it hopes to purloin something. However, it won’t look twice before darting into the road with reckless abandon.
Perhaps the opposite side of the freeway is the raccoon equivalent to the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. It gets so focused on “The Prize” it forgets simple things like traffic. I don’t think animals are capable of having epiphanies. If they were, hunting and fishing would become moot. I would love to be there when the adventurous raccoon ends its harrowing odyssey across farm-to-market hell to arrive at its inevitable conclusion: “All that… for this?!” Not only is the grass not greener, but its got to make it back across to warn the others. It almost makes the return when it’s suddenly hit by karma then by truckma.
It’s no surprise to me that such an idiot would make a very fine hat.
Conspiracy theorists would argue that there is a more sinister reason for this “racco-dillo
cleansing”. Could it be that buzzards are somehow involved? How convenient is it to only dine on the deceased? All buzzards do is fly around in their cabals patiently waiting for the next serving of “pavement pie”. All the while, they are the ones that come out smelling like a rose. Very rarely will you see a buzzard feasting on a dead buzzard. I guess it’s a matter of professional courtesy. What a pack of vultures!
My wife recently had her trip to West Texas extended when a kamikaze bobcat hurled itself in front of her Chevy Malibu. Her car got messed up pretty bad and the cat ended up as “street sausage”. There was no other explanation for what that bobcat did except to say it probably had a history of mental illness.
Luckily for me, my story has a happy ending. No humans were hurt and the armadillo lumbered back to the brush from where it came. As the simple beast disappeared into my rearview mirror I remember thinking, “Thank God the dinosaurs are dead.”