No - wait, wait! Before you get disgusted and dismiss this idea out of
hand, before you flip the page to read this week’s recipes or to check up on
the syndicated adventures of Flash Gordon or Henry, give this a chance.
This is a surprisingly emotional story, once you think about it - a story of
deep emotional loss and tragedy of Homeric proportions - a little gross,
admittedly, but one that deserves your attention.
On a small, little-traveled dirt road in Bellows Falls, tucked up in a
corner of Oak Hill Cemetery, there is a really fascinating piece of road
kill. It’s not very striking initially - not the sort of thing to leap
immediately to your attention. You might easily walk right by it without
noticing it at all. It is just a small, flattened, paper-thing wafer of an
object that used to be a frog.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that you are taking your morning
constitutional through the cemetery, happen to notice this frog on the road,
almost under your feet and decide to take a closer look at it. (All right -
that’s not very likely, but just suppose...) As you bend over and really
LOOK at Brer Frog, you notice that he is not alone. Wrapped around, over
and even partially surrounding him is a small grass snake - a very small
grass snake, who was in the process of eating the frog at the moment when he
was overtaken by tragedy.
The more you look at this mess, the more clearly you can see the chain of
events that led to it. This is a very small snake - so small that he had no
business in trying to take down a frog of this size. And yet, he obviously
had - the frog was half-way down his throat when they met their mutual end.
This is a situation of enormous drama.
Think of this from the frog’s point of view - there he is, hopping around -
probably at night - taking care of business, running his little froggy
errands, when out of nowhere, he is attacked by this tiny snake. He is
probably stunned at first - surprised to be attacked at all. He leaps
around and kicks, trying to rid himself of his attacker, but to no avail.
The snake wraps itself more and more tightly around him. Every time he
exhales, the snake tightens his grip and won’t let him breath in again. It
has to be humiliating, being taken down by such a small snake - much like a
grown man being savaged by a dachshund. After a few minutes though, he
loses his tragic/comic life and death struggle and sinks into his final
sleep.
Now think of this from the snake's point of view. This is the achievement
of a life-time! He has no business taking on a frog of this size - it
outweighs him by at least 50 percent. And yet, he sees his chance for glory
and seizes it. He leaps on the frog (or leaps as well as he can without
legs) and struggles with his giant prey. He is kicked and pummeled and it
has to flash through his little snaky mind that this frog is big enough to
make a meal of him if things go badly. Finally though, through luck,
tenacity and the grace of Heaven, he does the frog in. This is a momentous
achievement - if there was such a thing as a Snake Olympics, he could sweep
his weight class in Frog Wrestling. He basks in his glory for a moment,
then unhooks his jaws and starts the laborious process of working the
monstrosity down his throat.
It is at this moment that he is smashed into oblivion by a truck.
See - Homeric Tragedy at its most basic, snaky level.
Sue Aldridge agrees. “Wow!” she says, shaking her head as she closes her
sketch-book. “That is really something!” Aldridge, an artist living in
Westminster, has a series of projects - paintings, sketches and multi-media
pieces - based on road-kill.
“I would have to guess that I’ve done 25 or more pieces in a variety of
sizes on this theme,” Aldridge says. “I’ve done studies of a variety of
animals (all dead) - skunks, squirrels, raccoons, turtles, foxes, coyotes
and once, an owl. The series has gotten a really varied reception. Most
people look at one of these pieces and don’t really understand what they’re
seeing at first. Then there is a lot of discussion about my ‘Dark Side’. I
don’t see it as a dark side though I take my cue from Georgia O’Keefe, who
taught us to really look at flowers, not take them for granted. In this
series, my intent is to force people to really look at animals - to see
their beauty, even in death. I try to challenge the viewer to remember
their beauty, rather than their own aversion to mortality.” Plus, she adds,
it is a very cool subject for a series. “I stopped for a while, because I
felt that I had really explored this theme enough,” she says, but it’s like
weaving a tapestry that will resurface again at some point on further down
the road.” She pauses for a second and shakes her head as she tries to
untangle that mixed metaphor, then laughs and tells a story:
I was sitting around, watching MTV with my 14 year-old daughter who has been
begging to get a tattoo. I turned to her and said, “I’ve come to a decision
- you can get a tattoo if I can design it.” She turned to me in disgust and
said, “Oh, Mom! Not Road Kill ”
