Friday, July 11, 2008

Crazy Lady

Ok, so every once in a while you run across someone who is crazy. Not just a little odd, kinda wacked, marching to the beat of their own drummer crazy. But someone who is certifiable CRAZY, scary crazy, unbelievably crazy. As in their brain does not work anywhere near the way most people's brain works.
Today was one of those days. My guess would be that this lady's craziness was caused by a life of hard drinking, hard living, and hard drugs. Here's a few stories she told me:
  • In Maine, there are a number of toddlers who have gone missing recently and the fisher cats are taking them and eating them. Seriously, WTF? How do you respond to this? And her grandfather kills every fisher he sees so they'll stop taking and eating the babies. OMG - CRAZY!

  • A few years ago a drug smuggling plane crashed in Maine and all the packages of cocaine spilled onto the forest floor. A grizzly bear (no grizzly bear's in Maine-only black bears, and I have my doubts about drug smuggling crashed planes) found the cocaine, ate it, and went crazy. Local officials had to call the FBI in to find the drug-crazed bear and kill it. The lady was quite suprized that I hadn't read about this in the papers. She also said something along the lines of "Can you imagine all that cocaine the bear had? I mean, I've seen a lot of cocaine, but man that must of been a lot!" Hmm...she's seen a lot of cocaine? I would have never guessed.

  • She just her three pet flying squirrels go. She's had them for years and every fall she has to go collect acorns and scrape lichen (which she pronounced 'lick-en' - rymes with chicken) from trees so that the squirrels could eat all winter. But now since she got thrown out of her apartment, she had to let them go.
I have conversations about wild animals all the time as it is my job to connect people with natural resources in an intellectual and emotional way. This lady can't make normal connections. She was completely effed. But my co-worker and I did have quite the laughs after we told her we had a meeting to go to and then got the hell away from her!
(Pictures are by Bill Byrne at www.masswildlife.org)



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