Who doesn’t love a great nap?
I do and I take one most afternoons. Nothing takes the place of half an hour stretched out on a couch with eyes closed and mind calmed. When I had a day job, our office was just a block or two away and most lunches taken there included a good nap.
You know who else enjoys a good map? The Earth. I can tell by the way it’s waking up these days that she must have had a good one. The crocus and daffodils already have shown the effects of a winter’s rest. Like the early riser that shows way too much early morning pizzazz, these early bloomers are always the first to get up and defy the frost.
Our neighborhood is surrounded by cherry orchards. You can tell when those trees are about to wake up and get going because of the new color they adopt. As billions of little cherry buds swell from nothing into reddish buds, the entire orchard takes on the colorful tint. They’ll wake up, scrub the sleep out of their eyes, and begin blooming just in time for Mother’s Day.
Another remnant of this waking up from a great nap process becomes evident in the miles and miles of local ditches. As the snow banks recede each year, the inventory of trash reveals itself. I’ve always been proud of Michigan and our “Adopt-a-Highway” participants who do their best to keep this trash in check. During the pandemic my wife and some of our neighbors scoured the ditch filled miles near us, filling bags and bags of roadside residual refuse. Among the most common things they found were those ubiquitous white plastic grocery bags. They’re pretty non prejudicial, those things. Like waking from a bad dream, you can drive to the ends if the world and find them snagged on brush, submerged in swamps, and just everywhere you wouldn’t want to see them. I lump them in with the countless little bottles of a certain cinnamon flavored brand of whiskey known as Fireball. The difference between the two being that the bags can be seen from the seat of a driven car but the sheer volume of discarded whiskey bottles, when walked amongst, would be enough to become part of any conservationist’s fever dream.
Grocery bag and whiskey bottle statistics always seem to be measured the same way; countless. One item that that very accurate statistics are kept on appears in ditches as the snow banks disappear are the carcasses of white tailed deer.
In the year 2023, there were 28,000 car-deer crashes in the State of Michigan, according to the state’s website. In Grand Traverse County alone between 500 and 1,000 occurred. That statistic I question because the five mile stretch of Elk Lake Road in Whitewater Township where I take my sample has at least a dozen dead deer in its ditches. Exposed rib cages and skeletal remains displayed like the discovered ruins of shipwrecks. “Shipwreck” being the apt description since each site represents an event that probably ruined someone’s day, automobile front end, or worse, if you’re looking at it from the deer’s perspective. The Adopt-a-Highway won’t mess with the grizzled remains of those accidents but before long Mother Nature will use the opportunity for another example of the circle of life. That carcass will feed other critters which in turn fertilize that small space and before long, the crash scene is little more than an insurance claim that haunts the unfortunate driver’s latest dream-filled nap …
Some naps are better than others.