Striped Skunks are important too
June 15, 2001
Their beady little eyes glistened in the summer light and their tiny
noses twitched searchingly as they tried with the senses they were given
to make sense of a 24-hour super store parking lot entrance road that's
been built across a natural pathway their genes tell them has existed at
least 10,000 years in what is now Northwest Arkansas.
They each halted; peered over the curb's edge; sniffed repeatedly; and
blinked and listened uncomprehendingly to the din of "prosperity" that's
come to a gentle prairie meadow where their species has lived since
before man arrived in this land.
The pair finally backed away from the noise, pollution, stench and
confusion of rush hour on Hudson Road in Bentonville, Arkansas, sensing
by whatever process an immature Striped Skunk (Mephitis, mephitis)
assesses its world, that the impostor in their meadow was not one to be
explored further on the afternoon in question.
The twosome turned and ambled back into the grassy meadow that may see
another season or two at best before it too succumbs to some greedy
corporation's manufacturing or sales facility.
Their noses were still to the ground and their little white tails
skunkishly aplume as they waddled back into the grass, hopefully to the
temporary comfort of a burrow and a mother's love for the night, at least.
But the morrow would bring new threats from the juggernaut of human
"progress" that's encroaching on their meadow from every direction.
There would be new temptations to step onto the roadway and explore the
beyond with their kitten-like naivete.
There would be poisonous pesticides and herbicides in the water they'd
find to drink and they'd have to be careful.
And the air they'd breathe would smell of exhaust fumes and coal-fired
power plant flues and terrible slaughter facilities and of a million
other foul human exhalations that would put a skunk's scent glands to shame.
As the traffic signal changed, eager Northwest Arkansas businessmen in
$45,000 SUV's waited impatiently in their air-conditioned cockpits for
the skunk admirer to get his venerable old vehicle the hell out of the
way so they could rush home for a frantic Friday night of the good life.
For his part, the driver of the stickered junker--an unenthusiastic
member of the species that is destroying the world of those two little
Benton County Striped Skunks, at best--offered a prayer and a
benediction as he drove away from the encroached and compromised
universe of two wild creatures that had graced his life briefly on a
tired Friday afternoon.
He hoped the beautiful and harmless little entities he had seen would
make it through their first summer in the Northwest Arkansas world they
have inherited--one that is no longer theirs and in which they are
suddenly unwelcome aliens.
He prayed too that his kind--the human species--would see the folly of
its ways and redefine that which is important before there are no more
summers and no more meadows and no more Striped Skunks.
By D. Grant Haynes
