View from the Hot Tub #5

When you’re silently sequestered in the hot tub, shrouded in steam, and pretty much undetectable you see things most people don’t get to see. Sometimes it’s visions into the future, other times it’s visions of uncommon, almost unimaginable natural events that occur under the disguise of dark. Like the evening the fox stopped by for a chat, or the otters slip-sliding like shadows across the ice. Or the evening my lovely wife and I were quietly contemplating the dusk when suddenly she screams, leaps (I haven’t seen her ‘leap’ in years) out of the tub and streaks (all I can see are two shapely white orbs bouncing into the night) toward the stand of red pine.

Forcing me to leap out after her not knowing if she’d seen Johnny Depp or simply lost her mind. Turns out, she explains later, she had seen a moose peeking around the corner of the cabin. Of course by the time I catch up to her there is no moose (and why, I want to know, did she not scream “moose!” if she did, indeed see one?). Unfortunately this was in the fall and so no snow in which to detect tracks and provide provenance.

Well, I chose to believe her although she looks askance whenever I tell my favorite winter viewing experience. She tells people that it’s like saying I was abducted and had an anal probe, although I think that’s rather expansive hyperbole. Mine is true…and I was not on LSD or peyote as some have suggested when they listen to the story. Believe me or not, I saw this:

Unfortunately I was alone at the cabin and, unfortunately (only because I had nobody to share the experience with, of course) alone in the hot tub. It was fading from twilight to dusk. About a hundred yards out I see a couple deer—nothing unusual as they are common visitors. Next time I look deer are seemingly melting out the dusk until there are a good 20 to 30 deer. And, they’re having a frickin party. They’re chasing each other around, up on their hind legs pawing (hoofing) at each other. A couple different ones sneak off and I swear they’re nuzzling each other and who knows what else!?

Alright, I also have no provenance, so you can choose to believe me or not…I might not if I hadn’t been privy to it myself. It makes you (me, anyway) wonder if events like this happen all the time and you (we) haven’t had the advantage of a view from the hot tub? But, I’m not shittin ya. It happened.

I’ve wondered what they might have been celebrating: Family? Old friends? Or, simply survival?