It's the kind of news that makes you decide that venturing into nature only through watching Marlin Perkins of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom -- or the celebrated host of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau -- wasn't because you grew up and stayed broke. It was because you grew up and stayed smart.
Seems a young man has been bitten by a shark, mauled by a bear and bitten by a snake ... all within four years.
Dylan McWilliams of Colorado, a 20-year-old adventurer, was whooping it up on his bodyboard in Hawaii last month when he was bitten by what he believed was a tiger shark, somewhere between six and eight feet long.
Luckily, McWilliams was able to swim back to shore and benefit from an observer's calling for emergency help. He went to the hospital and received seven stitches ... which doesn't sound as bad as the nine staples McWilliams had to have last year when he was mauled in the head by a black bear. He was asleep outside at a Colorado summer camp when the bear came up and began biting him. So much for playing dead: McWilliams got the bear to loosen its grip on his head by punching it and poking it in the eye.
"I guess I was just in the wrong spot at the wrong time," he was quoted in a story posted April 23 on Sky News, based in the United Kingdom. He seems to have made a habit of that wrong-place, wrong-time stuff, because a few years earlier, a rattlesnake bit him as he was hiking in Utah. He was sick "only" two days.
Dude, who claims to have worked as a survival training instructor, noted in the Sky News story that "his parents are grateful he is still alive."
I, too, am glad he's still alive. I also suddenly find myself grateful that I never had any urge to surf, sleep under the stars or hike the Appalachian (or any other major) trail.
I've had my "what if" moments having to do with being an outdoor adventurer, but then remind myself of my own harrowing encounters with the Animal Kingdom ... encounters for which, seeing as summer is on its way, I'd best start bracing myself.
Whilst McWilliams may have found himself on the wrong end of the mouths of a shark, bear and snake, I've been:
• Attacked by a spider. Well, maybe not attacked exactly. Just scared out of my wits when I realized I was within, oh, 50 feet of one. In my book, all spiders whose names are not Charlotte and are friends with pigs named Wilbur are ferocious and menacing ... even the tiny ones. Tarantulas and Goliath birdeaters and huntsman spiders? Hand me that flamethrower!
• Asked to pay rent by water bugs, aka roaches that look like something that should have gone extinct a fafillion years ago but which appear to be more than plentiful during downtown Little Rock summers. I wrote a column years ago about how bad these bugs were in our apartment at the time ... so bad that we may as well have been paying them the rent. We probably pinched off our supposed-to-be rent money to pay for various futile attempts to drive them off. At subsequent apartments, the water bugs hid out and let us get comfortable before gradually showing up in bigger numbers each summer. I would be willing to bribe them to go away.
• "Lit up" by a fire ant. Anyone bitten by one or more of these would probably agree that it's a week or so in which you want desperately to scratch the bite marks, but they're just as sore as they are itchy so you'd better not. Or you want to rub the soreness away, but you'd better not because then you'll want to start scratching. Again, fire ants seem to love the city. A recent walk near downtown revealed that the ants are so far beating the heck out of the downtown developers in building multifamily dwellings.
• Apparently voted Lady of the Flies. No matter how ritzy the restaurant, no matter how pest-unfriendly that restaurant may seem, no matter what time of day, no matter what type of food is being served ... there will be at least one fly in the place, and that one fly is going to harass Yours Truly. I can only wonder if the doggone thing is hoping I'll hear it screaming "Helllllp meeeee" a la that bad 1958 horror movie.
• And there are those Arkansas mosquitoes, that would probably beat our snakes hands down in motivating our Colorado lad to run back to the safety of the sharks and bears.
I'm a survivor/not gon' give up email:
Style on 05/06/2018