When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,69
but that, to me, is why they’re so addictive. Take Growing Up Camel, a program my friend Ronnie and I watched one evening. It was set in a small privately owned zoo somewhere in Massachusetts. The camel in question was named Patsy, and the narrator reminded us several times over the next fifty minutes that she had been born on Super Bowl Sunday. While still an infant — the football stadium probably not even cleared yet — she was taken from her mother. Now she was practically grown, and as the commercials neared, the narrator announced a reunion. “Coming up, the camels reconcile after their long separation.”
In the next segment, the two were reintroduced, and the grumpy old mother chased her daughter around the pen. When the opportunity arose, she bit Patsy on the backside, and pretty hard, it seemed to me. This was the camels not getting along, and it wasn’t too terribly different from the way they acted when they did get along.
When the next break approached, the narrator hooked us with “Coming up, a tragedy that changes Patsy’s life forever.”
I’d have put my money on an amputated leg, but it turned out to be nothing that dramatic. What happened was that the mother got bone cancer and died. The veterinarian took it hard, but Patsy didn’t seem to care one way or the other. And why would she, really? All her mom ever did was hassle her and steal her food, so wasn’t she better off on her own?
The zookeepers worried that if left all alone, Patsy would forget how to be a camel, and so they imported some company, a male named Josh, and his girlfriend, Josie, who were shipped in from Texas. The final shot was of the three of them, standing in the sunshine and serenely ignoring one another. “So that’s what became of the little camel who was born on Super Bowl Sunday,” Ronnie said.
She turned on the light and looked me in the face. “Are you crying?” she asked, and I told her I had an ash in my eye.
Growing Up Camel had its merits, but I think I prefer the more serious type of nature show, the kind that follows its subject through the wild. This could be a forest, a puddle, or a human intestinal tract, it makes no difference. Show me a tiger or a tapeworm, and I’ll watch with equal intensity. In these sorts of programs we see the creature’s world reduced to its basic components: food, safety, and reproduction. It’s a constant chain of desperation and heartache, the gist being that life is hard, and then it ends violently. I know I should watch these things with an air of detachment, but time and again I forget myself. The show will run its course, and afterward I’ll lie on the sofa, shattered by the death of a doda or a guib, one of those four-letter antelope-type things that’s forever turning up in my crossword puzzles.
Apart from leaving me spent and depressed, such programs remind me that I am rarely, if ever, alone. If there’s not an insect killing time on the ceiling, there’s surely a mite staring out from the bath towel, or a parasite resting on the banks of my bloodstream. I’m reminded too that, however repellent, each of these creatures is fascinating, and worthy of a nature show.
This was a lesson I learned a few summers back in Normandy. I was at my desk one afternoon, writing a letter, when I heard a faint buzzing sound, like a tiny car switching into a higher gear. Curious, I went to the window, and there, in a web, I saw what looked like an angry raisin. It was a trapped fly, and as I bent forward to get a closer look, a spider rushed forth and carried it screaming to a little woven encampment situated between the wall and the window casing. It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.
It’s hard to recall having no working knowledge of the Tegenaria duellica, but that’s what I was back then — a greenhorn with a third-rate field guide. All I knew was that this was a spider, a big one, the shape of an unshelled peanut. In color it ranged from russet to dark brown, the shades alternating to form a mottled pattern on the abdomen. I’d later learn that the