Millipede

Posted on March 30, 2005 in Creatures Neighborhood

I must write this before this is lost: I went for a walk in the park, Concourse Park overlooking the badlands of Whiting Ranch Wilderness. I went for a walk because I needed to burn off the lethargy, turn the glucose in my blood to a helium balloon instead of a deep sea fishing weight. I went for a walk to breathe the outer darkness instead of the light from indoor lamps and fixtures.

I was having a mood sink. Not a swing — there was no movement in it. A funk hung around my head. A funk of the burning orange kind, metaphorically incorrect but true to the sensation. I’d had a tough day. There was the daily struggle to be on my own, extended in this case by the fact that my wife wasn’t going to be home until after ten because of her class. I don’t like it so well on my own, but I don’t have many local friends so I have to do better than some. Then there was the worrisome news that one of my few local friends was in the hospital to have polyps removed from her uterus: I left a message on her answering machine and received no word on how she was doing. I assumed, for my own sanity, that she was just sick. Finally, there was the clumsy matter of someone who wanted to help me without understanding me. (You can read about that here.) All heavy loads on a pair of shoulders held up by a pogo-stick of a back.

So that is why I walked. From my truck. As soon as I came home from the video store with a copy of Ray tucked under my arm. I walked over to Concourse Park and started around the big circle.

There was a boy playing in the park, a shadow among the towers, slides, and swings. His mother walked a black and white hound. She made her way around the wide circle, by the split rail fence separating Concourse’s civilization from Whiting’s wildness. Then I heard her call his name. Randy. “Come over here,” she said. “I’ve got something special to show you.”

I figured that it was the usual suburban mom paranoia. Get her son away from the big man with the part down the middle of his head, alone at night. Probable child molester. I’ve been told that some of my pictures make me look like a serial killer and maybe that is how I come off in life. Someone else told me that many people are afraid of me because of my height. I’m sick of hearing that, but resigned that many of the human race are just plain stupid when it comes to me. I figure that they will protect their kids from me only to hand them over to a real child molester and that serves them right.

But it wasn’t a ploy. When I got to where the mother and the boy squatted under an orange park light, she had found something special. Three inches of special. On my way there, I’d seen plenty of young black bombadier beetles and a couple of grasshoppers, but this was unique. Three inches of special like I said. Brown and shaped like a cigar, but segmented. The mother invited me into the mystery. “Is that a centipede?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “it’s a millipede.” And it was damned special. “A centipede’s legs spread out to the sides and it’s flat,” I continued. I did not bother to describe a millipede because with one there, the matter was evident. The creature crawled while the boy, the woman, and the dog watched. “I’ve never seen one before,” the woman said. “Me neither,” I said. “Not here.”

The need to move still possessed me, so I excused myself and left them to watch. The sidewalk ringed the park and every fifty feet or so a lamp stood. I watched my shadow appear from my left, rush in front of me, and then disappear in the brightness of the next lamp. One after another. I chased the trace of my self back around the circle to the spot where the woman and her son had left the millipede.

It continued to walk walk walk, hundreds of legs at a time, across the sidewalk. Why had it chosen to leave the lawn and make way towards the chaparral? Was this some escapee out of Africa? I had never seen a Californian millipede this long. I watched it until it fell off the concrete into the broken bark ground cover on the far fringe, the Whiting edge of the park.

If this were a short story, I might end it here with my foot senselessly coming down on the creature or the boy being stupid and squashing it. That is not what happened. The boy, his mother, and I all treated that millipede with reverance. It disappeared into the bark and for all I know is now crawling down the hill towards the lush grasses of the bottomland and the great, shattered oaks.