Stephen Vincent wrote:
>Yes, Ken, I remember a big fat white duck - 2 feet tall - beaking and
>flapping after my 2 foot plus high 2 year old son on edge of a pond in the
>Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. Scared we was both.
>
>
I can't cite chapters & verses at the moment, but swans...there appears
a huge "webring" of mythology. Most of it is balletic or from
children's literature like Hans C. Andersen. Swan Lake, The Dying Swan,
and the available-to-plain-sight vision of swans on the water. I have
never seen an animal with more of a split between what it is in two
separate environments. You see a Siberian tiger, everything in that cat
projects danger/back off/dangerous. Swans, however, are the most
beautiful and elegant creatures on earth as long as they not on the
earth but in the water. There seems to be so much intermingling of
identity and vision that it's perfectly possible to look at a swan on a
lake and think that it moves with the grace of ballerina. This is a
bass-ackwards answer to the question of Which Came First. But a swan
out of the water is a repellent-looking, lumbering behemoth with
gigantic webbed feet and an aggressive disposition. The day we spotted
them walking down the beach--a whole family of father, mother, and
babies ("ugly ducklings")--I was entranced. I'd never seen a swan up
close and did not know they could be dangerous. I think we stood still
to see if they'd notice us. By the time we did, what I described
started: my wife (who'd grown up on Long Island) got frantic, yelled at
me to grab our kids and get off the beach, and one or both of the adult
birds snapped those powerful necks like bullwhips trying to get at our
legs. "It's OUR beach, get the hell out!" The ultimate animal bully.
I've heard wolves will only attack if they feel threatened. The swans
were doing the threatening.
Yet it's a crime to kill a swan. Endangered species and all that. I
have no sentimental feelings about them.
ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
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