A walk in the park convinced me.
It's a few hundred square km and evidently quite old, but as things work here, it's been updated and renamed and rededicated (I almost said rechristened but that just doesn't work here) at a number of significant points of local history, so its current incarnation is not that old at all.
Regardless, it serves mainly as a swamp behind the school. It would be fascinating to see from the air, as there are a number of canal/channel/finger lakes that fester and stagnate under a bizarre series of ever-silent water pumps hooked to half-metre pipes that run from one channel to the next. I have no idea if there's a natural flow connecting the channels or if they're subsequent layers of backups, but for all practical purposes, they are now breeding grounds for stench, waterplants, mosquitoes, stench, Thai giant catfish, stench, more mosquitoes, and a species of carp that looks like a drunken accident between a giant catfish and a sturgeon. (Which happens to be on the lunch table a number of times every week, and I do not think about the slogging fishermen casting nets in the slop.) And maybe one day they'll have pumps to alleviate some of the runoff issues that flood the city for a few months every year.
However it plays out, the park has levies topped with trails and connected with rusted-through bridges. I was on one of the bridges, looking at the water and trying to figure out its consistency--I'm tempted to reference school canteen pea soup as both the swamp water and cafeteria offering look just slightly too watery to support a spoon but with the underlying risk of your spoon disappearing either to corrosive or exuberantly predatory forces as soon as it's perceivable by the surface, but the water is too brown and there are too many textures swirling like the stench wake of a bear walking outside your tent.
And then I was looking at a fish.
Not the usual shadow of a trout or koi pond type apparition, but one of the local giant catfish. Its head was as wide as my hips and tapered at the same rate as my legs if I stand with my feet together. Its mass disappeared into the murk, and I was especially happy about that given that I was standing on a rusted-through bridge.
It looked at me for a couple seconds until I got nervous and waved. With what would've been a flip of a smaller tail turned into a slow-motion almost-breech as the thing disappeared. And I promised myself to never willingly slip a finger or toe into the water.
Not long after, while on an island in a pond large enough to accommodate paddleboat rentals, something ran across the path. Something very low-slung and fast and longer than my leg. It took an extra click to register that I was seeing a real, live, wild version of zoo piece or plastic lizards that had terri/fascinated my childhood.
It was longer than my leg, long enough for its forelegs to be on the grass before its hind legs were on pavement, and had dark bands around its tail. It lumbered--as with the catfish, it was too big to be called scampering--across the path, through some brush, and straight out a tree leaning over the water. I could hear it clambering around the branches toward the "top" of the horizontal tree.
Of pressing interest was the sonic similarity between the sounds regularly heard from the brush and trees around the trail and the sounds the lizard made as it ran across the trail and out the tree, and the simple fact that a giant lizard ran out over the water--I would not expect a lizard to corner itself like that. And how many of the innumerable rustles alongside the trail had been similar critters I would comfortably associate with only from the far side of glass or nightmares.
(Let me reiterate that I am a mountain kid accustomed to grouse exploding from under my feet, bears on the trail, cougar tracks, the occasional close encounter with a frog or night mouse. Lizards are little horny toads or blue-stripers, and nearly sitting on one is as heart-fluttering as almost stepping on a grouse. Seeing a coiled up rattler as big around as my arm has been one of my most traumatic hiking stories for two decades. All of which is to say, I would really rather avoid reptiles.)
Welcome to Thailand--it was a Thai water dragon.
What relief to come across a herd of goats, even if one of the bike-mounted goatherds had a frantic chase to keep the billygoat's horns from my backside.
But that, of course, wasn't it. There had to be snakes.
It was just a skin, thank goodness. A dark green/brown skin with a smily face on the back of the neck--one of our local cobras. And when I held it out, it came up to my chin.
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| The cobra skin draped over my tuba case |
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