Cold Wonders, #1

This is one of a few things that I’ve written down, about my run-ins with nature. I remember back when things that moved on their own were so fascinating that we chased them, and asked questions later. But the candor of actual nature was rare, fleeting. My prototypical concept of what a bear looks like will forever be a combination of Yogi and Paddington. A creature that couldn’t lie, or sell a soft drink, was like a lost legend that could only be retraced by chance.

At 10, my schooling had become truly tedious and I was further than ever from any dream of mine. Days were filled with insufferable reams of decimal worksheets and papier-mâché. At home, my dad had installed Windows 2000, which kept crashing in the middle of my conquests in Age of Empires II. I found myself staring into the backed up sewer drain at the far end of the playground. It had rained a day or two back; a puddle of muddy green sludge remained and deterred the usual sock-hockey games. As my head bowed with the routine grade school woe, I thought I saw something small but surely moving beneath the surface of the puddle, something living. But what dares to live in a sewer puddle? I thought it could have been merely a branch of dead pine needles dancing in the wake of the breeze. I knelt down and I saw a roster of tiny oil droplets with tails. They wiggled around like tadpoles on a smaller scale. I rubbed my eyes and they were still there. There were more than I had thought— flailing, swimming, each one indistinguishable to the resolving power of my eye. They were too small to be tadpoles, and too large and brown to be sperm. After a brief search through the little that I knew about biology, I decided that it was a miracle—spontaneous generation from sewage matter. A noxious miracle that may have had nothing to offer to this world but its ability to flabbergast. But the world would never see this; it was a miracle known to no one else but me.

It’s funny how knowledge eventually ruins all the things that we grew up loving.