Highly Specific Things I Dread

[camwyn]

- Taxiing or turning on an airport runway and hearing the air traffic control tower radio me with "Helicopter 3217 X-ray, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

- Turning down a portion of highway that is reduced to a single lane by physical barriers due to construction and repair, only to encounter the one and only person in the entire municipality who is drunk enough to be driving the wrong way in that single lane

- Walking the beach to hunt sea glass and pick up trash but picking up what I think is a sand-filled sneaker only to find that it's got somebody's foot still in it

- Or just finding a whole body (in my defense, that happened a few miles down the shore from me in 2015)




... I do not currently have many highly specific dreads, but they come to mind sometimes.

Comments

[renshai]

the number of biologists I know who have found bodies in the woods while doing fieldwork is high enough to make me Very Definite about never doing fieldwork alone.

like, bears, moose, whatever. those i can handle. dead humans not so much.

[camwyn]

Yeah, I can understand that.

The dead human in 2015 was a little girl, and her case was in the news for quite some time- first as 'do you know this child?' billboards, then once she was identified, as a prosecution and eventual conviction. There's a memorial to her next to the bike path where they found her, a bronze statue of a fawn curled up in the grass. As for the feet thing, that's... never actually happened around here so far as I know, but once you've become familiar with the Salish Sea Feet thing, all it takes is the sight of a soggy but not collapsed sneaker washed up on the sand ahead of you to provoke a moment of absolute certainty that you do not want to pick up that shoe.

(It was full of sand. I had to check.)

I've found bones on that beach once or twice, but judging by their size, condition, and time of year, I figured they were almost certainly from barbecues and left it at that.