An Insignificant Desert Paradox

An essay of sorts.

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AN INSIGNIFICANT DESERT PARADOX

　

　

The building was constructed in this small oasis of a desert town back in 1980 to serve as a regional state unemployment office. It closed it’s operations, for whatever reasons, in 2000 and was boarded up. Over the years it has been broken into and vandalized, re-boarded up and re-vandalized, a number of times. Recently it was sold at public auction and it’s new owner hired me to secure the structure with a new security camera and alarm system.

 

Part of my job responsibilities included surveying the conditions of the building and providing a repair cost evaluation. While inspecting the women’s lobby restroom I noticed several odd objects in the sink and focused my headlight on those surreal figures. What they were was the decomposed remains of two common desert lizards and the skeleton remains of a rather large scorpion.

 

Why they were in that ceramic wash basin is anybody’s guess, but the chances are both the desert reptilian throwbacks to the ice age and their ominous arthropod and unlikely intentional cohort were seeking a source of life sustaining water. Perhaps the original facet was still dripping until the state finally bothered to have the water main shut off? Or someone had left water in the basin that eventually evaporated? Who knows why these primal inhabitants were drawn down into the bowels of this sink? Still, that they were all trapped and their demise was pre-ordained is not a mystery to anyone who understands that not all of God’s creatures are physically equipped to ascend slick, nonporous porcelain walls.

 

Being blessed or, depending on who you talk to, cursed with an inventive writer’s mind trapped in an electrician’s vocation, I started pondering various scenarios as I continued inspecting the rest of the facilities.

 

Beginning with: The Lizard Questions

 

Did Lizard No. 1 venture down into the basin first? Was he still alive when Lizard No. 2 came along? If already dead or near death, would this not have forewarned No. 2 to avoid the same one-way slide into this porcelain purgatory? Though not gifted with the abstract thought process found in advanced primates, wouldn’t these common Squamata at least possess a fundamental instinctive warning system? Would not the same instinctive system that compels a lizard to flee from the dangers of man or beast also encompass triggering the same type of inner alarm when seeing a fellow lizard in dire straits? If No. 1 was still very much alive and yet unable to escape wouldn’t this have forewarned No. 2? And if both were healthy enough and had ascended into the bowl together could not one of them at least had the foresight to have climbed on the back of the other to reach the counter top and freedom?

　

Considering: The Scorpion Equation

 

If the Scorpion had fallen, or slid, into the bowl first and were still alive would this have not discouraged the Lizards from trying the same descent? Were they not somehow natural adversaries? Two with the abilities to eat the other, the other with the capabilities to inflict deadly pain upon the two? And if the Scorpion were dead or incapacitated would not this have activated some instinctive alarm system within the Lizards anyway?

 

Contemplating: The Group Survival Scenario

 

If both the Lizards and the Scorpion were very much alive at the time the precious water source was located, regardless of who descended into the bowl first, would some kind of mutual needs armistice, no mater how unnatural, allow each equal access to the life sustaining replenishment? And would the surreal truce, however temporary, have sustained itself long enough to allow the bowl’s captives to figure out how to escape somehow?

 

Allowing for: Humanizing The Situation

 

If both of the Lizards were trapped in the bowl first but were still alive and the Scorpion slid, or fell, into the bowl would it have instantly stung both Lizards to death because of a naturally inherent defense mechanism, either genetically vindictive or to hoard the source of water for itself? Even if it meant, in doing so, that it would negate it’s own chances of escaping from the bowl? Both of the Lizards, at least eight inches long, including their tales, might have eventually figured out how to climb out of their ceramic dungeon if given enough time. The Scorpion alone could never have done so without riding on the back of one of the Lizards.

 

Concluding with: A Vague Parable

 

Buried somewhere below these whimsical musings there might be a remote connection to the intrinsic grand design of cooperation for the sake of mutual survival, a concept far too often ignored or sabotaged by idealistic dogmas.

Reviews

[roarke]

heh, I hope you weren't charging by the hour on this job..... twisting, turning, sculpting a supposition in 360 degrees. An extended story for each scenario, and then ya'd still have to string the wire.... If we're quiet, the universe will lay it's secrets at our feet... then we'd still have to think about it afterward. Enjoyed.