By: Neal Wooten
There’s a saying in the South: If you don’t like the weather… wait. It can change quickly and drastically. For example, last week, in the span of 24 hours, we went from a low of 7 degrees to a high of 65. In a day’s time, I went from leaving my water running one night to running my desk fan during the day.
It reminds me of something that happened about 30 years ago. I was working at Kmart in Fort Payne and it was a beautiful, warm fall day. Without warning, the skies turned black and it began raining very hard. As several of us stood at the front windows watching, we noticed the rain was making a horrendous noise and bouncing all over the place. It dawned on us what was happening. My friend Lonnie McKelvey looked over at me and said, “Is that hail?”
It was indeed hail, hail the size of golf balls and falling so thick there was barely any visibility. As the ice began to accumulate on the ground, I suddenly thought of a lot of women I had asked out in the past. “Yes,” I said, my eyes gleaming over, “that is hail. And it’s frozen. Hail? Frozen? There are some women I need to go see.”
Granted, it wasn’t the right “hail” that these ladies were referring to when they said they would only go out with me when it froze over, but I figured that was just a technicality.
Then something caught our eyes. Out of the dark skies a huge object fell. It fell into the ditch between the parking lot and Airport Road. And it continued to move. Once the hail ceased, several of us rushed out there to see what it was. There, knocked completely out of the air during midflight, was a bird, a humongous crane of some sort.
It was gray, had a long neck, a bill about a foot long, and a wing span of over six feet. It was hurt pretty badly and couldn’t fly, so we decided to help it. It took four of us about 30 minutes to capture it. We finally got some duct tape around its bill, but not before my arms were bleeding in several places.
We called animal services and they picked up the bird. They ended up with two of them because another of these cranes had fallen elsewhere in town. They were nursed back to health and released a few weeks later.
So it worked out for the birds but not for me. I couldn’t convince any of the women that the frozen hail constituted an affirmation of our verbal date contract.