Feelin' Squirrelly - A Fable . . .

 

. . . or You Don't Have to be Paranoid to Have Enemies

            The squirrel said, "Nice day, huh?"

            Terry looked around. Nobody.

“My apologies," said the squirrel. "I’m being rude, interrupting your solitude."

            Terry looked up and saw a gray squirrel, perched on a pine branch not six feet above his head. Not knowing quite why, Terry said "What do you want?"

            "You humans fascinate me.”

            Terry imagined telling this one to Dr. Fischer, the shrink to whom he paid $150 an hour regularly on Tuesdays at three pm. "Take some time off," advised his brain doctor. "Go into the mountains, sit by a stream, don't even take a book."

            Okay. Overnight, no longer. Maybe enough time to temporarily turn off the police scanner that was his prefrontal cortex, the row of blue and red lights that flashed and chased each other back and forth along a black bandwidth of his mind. The job, the wife, kids, politics, the truck making a strange noise, his weight. The nameless dreads every morning. The walking worried, said the doc.

            Nothing Terry tried had worked -- self-help books, classes, yoga, meditation, all quickly abandoned. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was play-acting a centuries-old mystical tradition.

            So now, sitting on a camp table next to his backpack, in a clearing that let the sun shine in through dark green trees, Terry was having a conversation with a squirrel.

            He stared at the critter. "Fascinate?" The faraway drone of a small plane came and went.

            "Yep," said the squirrel. "Tell me, is this a beautiful spot or what? The weather's glorious. That burbly creek over there has been washing those river boulders -- singing its song -- longer even than you’ve had your job!”

            "What in the world do you know about having a job!" snapped Terry. "Your job is to forage for nuts. Yummy!"

            The furry-tailed beastie jumped down to a stump close by. It sat up on its hind legs and flicked its tail like squirrels do.

            "Do you know how much DNA is shared between you and me? We're not that far apart on the family tree."

            Being condescended to by a squirrel!

            “Okay, smart guy,” Terry said. “What’s the square root of minus one? Explain the space-time continuum. Brownian movement?"

            The squirrel smirked. "I’m not the one sitting out here jonesing, uncomfortable in my own skin. And it’s Brownian motion by the way."

            If squirrels can chuckle, this one did at the dig. Or maybe it was the snick-snick-snick they do anyway. The clever rodent went on. "Admit it, you humans with your massive brains have the illusion you can control things."

            "Illusion! And you’re under the illusion that that owl up there isn’t thinking of you as lunch.”

            "That owl is an illusion."

            "Oh great, now we're into Zen," said Terry. "Please don’t go all `lilies of the field’ on me."

            The squirrel seemed to think for a second, then hopped down and headed for the nearest tree.

            “Wait!” called Terry. “Hey, I’m sorry. Come back.”

            The squirrel scampered into the understory. It reappeared. “Up here,” it said. It dropped a pine cone onto the picnic table and returned. It demonstrated how to extract the caramel-colored pine seeds lodged tight in the brittle crevasses.

            "You ever eaten pine nuts?"

            "Not raw." Terry broke off the hard nubbins with his teeth and sampled a few. The blue and red lights were flickering, but only dimly. "Utterly ridiculous. I am losing my mind."

            “Not prime rib, I’m assuming,” said the squirrel, “but you’re being a good sport.”

            Suddenly tired, Terry started to relax -- but only for a second. Neither he nor the squirrel saw it coming. Like a guided missile, with outstretched claws and terrible hooked beak and blazing yellow eyes, a huge owl rocketed down out of the sky, then leveled off for an instant in a parabolic swoop before grabbing the stunned squirrel in its talons.

            Or it would have, except at the last instant Terry grabbed his backpack and swung it with all his might. The blow sent the bird, head over feathered tail, into a stand of manzanita -- from which it struggled, extracted itself, fluttered its wings once, and glaring eyes wide as saucers, escaped high into the distance and vanished.

            Terry's whole body shook. His head and heart were pounding. The squirrel had disappeared. He listened. No scratching or rustling in the underbrush, just the winsome sigh of an afternoon breeze in the canopy of evergreens.

            Clearly, he'd imagined the whole thing. Dreamt it. But he noticed that his mind was clear for the first time in days. No kaleidoscope of thoughts racing through his head. The scanner was off.

            Terry looked around. There was some pine-like debris on the table, but the wind must have sent it down.

            I was not talking to a squirrel, he thought. Squirrels cannot talk. I fell asleep.

            He stood up and tucked in his shirt. He stretched and walked stiff-legged to his truck to get a soda. Then he stopped cold and stared at the top of the utility box in the truck bed. There were three individual ponderosa pine cones, not stacked actually but placed together, and caramel-colored seeds arranged just so around them.

            Terry retrieved his smart phone and double-checked. Yep, next Tuesday at three, Dr. Fischer.