It is a world of green and gray outdoors this morning. In the fog everything is muted. "Blanket of fog" is an apt expression. The world really does feel muffled - sound and sight are enrobed by the fog and gently dulled. Scent, however, becomes more intense.
Our skunkish friend must have had some more run-ins with fear and defense through the night. The scent of skunk lingers everywhere, 10+ acres of damp, skunk drenched atmosphere. Hard to detect anything else - flowers or mown grass or cut pine - skunk is a pervasive aroma. You become kind of inured to it after a while, and of course none of it is as intense as the direct hit. The dogs' odor lingers on from yesterday, but it's hard to tell at this point where they leave off and the general atmosphere comes in.
The powers doled out to nature's various beasts are kind of bizarre. If you had to come up with some defense systems, would you come up with these ideas? "Okay, you get to have spikes all over your body so no one can bite you; you get to fly; you get a stinger, and if you use it, you die, but, whatever; you get to be huge and strong, or fast, or have sharp teeth; you cart a really hard shell around on your back that you can hide inside; you change colors to blend in; and you get to squirt really stinky stuff from your butt to deter your enemies." Who thinks of this stuff?
Our human defense is both the simplest and the most complicated. It is our brain. Our ability to use technology - from the club to the H-bomb - in order to "defend" ourselves. The biggest flaw in that system is our inability to defend ourselves against ourselves. We have come up with protective strategies that destroy our habitat, from the production of food and shelter to the global battle for dominance. Some day we may wreck the entire planet, at least for humans.
We might have been better off if we had just been given the ability to squirt really stinky stuff out of our butts.
What!? I thought everyone used that stinky-stuff-from-the-butt trick!
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