'God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—"With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross."
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
As the owner of a Toyota Matrix, I’ve been paying attention to all of the recent recall news on Toyota’s brands. I have always praised Toyota, never had anything but good to say about my car or the company, until these latest revelations hit the fan. It’s bad enough that basically all of their top lines needed a recall fix for accelerator-sticking, and the Prius has been recalled for brake problems, but recent news about the company knowing for years of the problems, being warned by All-State insurance of issues, and the slow way they handled actually addressing the problem once it was already public, not to mention the CEO’s lack of much remorse or caring when he finally did get around to it has really gotten Toyota’s reputation a good reaming.
How bad is it? I was in the parking lot at the mall yesterday, finishing a phone conversation in the car, when another Toyota pulled in next to me. I was gobsmacked at the sight of this vehicle, and said loudly into the phone, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen to much bird poo in my life!” I was so absolutely stunned that I said it again, “That’s a lot of bird poo!” The young woman getting out of the car’s passenger side glanced at me as I yelped that. She heard me.
But I don’t think I had anything to apologize for, I was simply agog (“gobsmacked” and “agog” in one blog, hooray!) and to prove it, I took the photo below.
That is one poo-ass covered car, as they say in London’s Royal Society. And the picture doesn’t even do it justice. I mean, the darker splotches kind of vanish into the paint job in this image, in person it showed about a third more bird splatterings than appear here.
Of course, I immediately started trying to piece together what had happened here. Even nature seemed angry that Toyota had failed us, and was letting the company know, passing judgment by passing excrement. But my Toyota hadn’t been targeted, so maybe there was more to it. Was this car in a Hitchcock movie? What would make a flock of birds so angrily target one specific vehicle? Maybe it ran over a seagull named “Gotti?” How do you so utterly piss off a flock of birds?
A family curse, was my best guess and secret hope. The owner’s ancestor had been the guy who killed the last passenger pigeon in the wild 120 years ago. The passenger pigeon, that once darkened skies for hours or days, blotting out the sun from horizon to horizon – a nighttime composed of fast-flying eight-inch birds in such unbelievable numbers they at one point made up an incredible forty percent of all birds in America, with some flocks numbering in the billions. One single flock could be over a mile wide and 300 miles long! There were so many, it couldn’t be possible for man to kill them all off, ever, and we did it in only 100 years.
And they say we don’t have ambition.
We knew they were vanishing, and we knew it was our fault. But even knowing it was the last flock, people thought only of making money right now, for themselves, not thinking about a species or even themselves next year, when they’d have nothing left to catch, and in 1900 the last wild passenger pigeons were wiped out. It makes me wonder about today’s fishing industry, which seems to be doing the same exact thing to itself. My recommendation to fishermen is: start training for your new job now! Some of you are down to fishing slime eels, with nothing else left to catch, and once they’re gone, you’ll be all ready to start your new job (I suggest logging, ‘cause there’s like totally no way we could cut down every tree in the world).
We don’t know who it was that actually killed the very last wild passenger pigeon, but like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who is cursed for killing the albatross, this fellow and his offspring were smited with…smited?...smitten with…no, I like smited…smited with a hex! Henceforth, always would they be crappethed upon by the birds of the sky, and also penguins and ostriches if they managed to get beneath them. The curse had followed his descendents for 110 years and would keep following for a hundred hundred hundred more. I kinda didn’t want my car parked so close to theirs.
I made my way into Target, keeping my eyes out for the girl I’d seen, her red sweater and straight, blonde hair and remarkably, she and two other girls walked right past me. College girls, buying a pole lamp. Finally I couldn’t take it any more. “Excuse me,” I said. “I was parked next to you when you pulled in…yours is the car that’s got all the…”
Oh --I hadn’t thought this far ahead and now I was stuck. How do you say “That’s your car plastered with bird shit, isn’t it?” without sounding rude? Is there a nice way to ask someone that question and not seem snarky or judgmental? Still, the sentence was already in play. I couldn’t just say “bird stuff on it” or I’d sound like an idiot.
“…bird stuff on it, right?” Idiot.
“Yah.” The girls nodded.
“That’s amazing!” I gushed. “Do you mind if I ask how it happened?”
And they told me. And it was so boring. “Crows,” the car’s owner said. “Where I park there are a lot of crows that sit there.”
I thanked them and moved on, realizing that this was likely not one massive bird attack, but the accumulation of a couple weeks, most likely. She just hadn’t cared to get the car washed, or hadn’t driven it in some time. It was just crows, sitting in a tree over her car. That was it. I wanted more, some spectacular story of an attack, with splattering thuds raining down. Nope. Crows in a tree. Girl to cheap to have the car washed or too rich to care about the paint damage. I sighed in disappointment, but there’s hope, because if life has taught me anything, it’s this one thing: people are liars. And I know there are no more passenger pigeons and it’s her fucking fault.
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
(c) 2010 Scott Teel. All rights reserved.
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