Not meant to be
Every now and again my inspiration runs dry. The ideas in my head are endless but the right frame of mind to sit down and put it down in that word document in my computer has been put aside briefly mainly due to physical exhaustion.
I complain, but can I really?
After telling everyone about my scorpion incident and recalling that my relationship with them has never meant much to me, I couldn’t help but remember the first time I was faced one-on-one with their kind.
The first time I seriously looked for scorpions, I was just trying to find something cool to talk about on my interview drive. My interview drive was potentially the scariest drive I have ever taken in my life, preparing for it was nerve wrecking. As girl, and as a foreigner, I have always had to prove my worth more than some of my friends and colleagues had to do. In order to try and impress my potential employers, Allan suggested that I stop at the rocks on Puzamanzi and started flipping them to find a cool critter to talk about. The idea behind it was to get guests off the vehicle and involve them in that dam holistic experience lodges preach about.
“I don’t know” – was my answer to Allan’s suggestion.
If you’ve ever met the Ronch, you will know he doesn’t take well to ever hearing the word no in any context. So after he threw his toys , I started flipping rocks to look for scorpions. With him, I learned to chose my battles.
Should have stuck with what I knew best
“Fine we can try, show me how to catch one”.
With these last famous words we started flipping all the rocks with Ash and Sly to try and find any scorpions. Normally it’s not that hard but thanks to Murphy when you looking for one, there are none.
Finally it was Sly who found one.
“Go Ali, grab it”.
Ajá.
“How?”
“By the tail you ninny”.
Right. This multilegged things are not my strong.
Awesome. Got it. I’m queen of the world.
Got it by the tail. Big pincers, small tail – nothing to worry about here.
“It’s so cool. I mean look at it. Wow I didn’t know that they were actually this flexible. I wonder if humans could bends their backs this way like a u”
Ey.. it’s getting really close to my fingers.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH LET ME GOOOO!!!”
Was the title of the song that came out of my mouth when the little disgraceful creature used its pincers to pinch the skin between my finger and my fingernail. How did it even manage?! He was so intent in showing me who was in charge that even when I let go of its tail, he was still pinching my fingers like its life dependent on it.
When he finally released me and bungee jumped to the ground again, Allan, Ash and Sly were having a laughing fit that was borderline hysteric. When I calmed down between the shock, the pain and how absolutely ridiculous the whole situation was that I also started crying of laughter.
When Allan told everyone (of course) this story back at the lodge, he took some creative freedom and slightly changed the ending of the story: “Ali froze like she does when she panicks and instead of putting it on her hand this thing pinched her. Her lip started shaking and she was crying. Hahahaha. Oh Allie, you’re worth your weight, this is gonna make me laugh for days”.
They did laugh for days much to my mortified self.
Thanks Ash Carney for immortalising round 2
What Allan forgot to share about catching a scorpions is that once you grab it by the tail you have to put on your other hand and cover it so that it doesn’t stress out.
Thanks Al – it would have been useful to know this prior to the event!
Two days later I decided to face my demons again. No cockroach with pincers is going to beat me. We spent a good 15minutes looking for and we finally found a tiny little one. This time I had pincers so I decided to use it. Upon further inspection we realised that this little one actually belonged to the Buthidae family – tiny little pincers, thick tails full of angry venom.
After these events I retired from a stellar scorpion catching future – little did I know that the universal board wouldn’t have been settled until one of them got me back.
