A flight of imagination…

You beat the Himalayas. You did the tedious training. Made one boring base camp after another. You acclimatized.

Your team members got sick with lung clots and quit.

You strapped on oxygen and wrapped yourself with rope. You wore dark goggles against snow blindness.

You wore clunky, cleated boots. You look like a spaceman. You could be on Mars.

Your heart’s beating funny, your lips are bleeding. Your blood is not working right; you feel sick. It’s minus 42 Fahrenheit.

But you got to the top of Mount Everest, over 29,000 feet, highest viewpoint on the planet.

You’re king of the hill.

The sky is so blue it’s dark; you’re close to space. Climbers have died trying to reach this viewpoint. You’re nearly dead yourself.

Without oxygen, you’d keel over. But you’re here. Nobody’s higher. Wait a second….

A shadow passes over you.

Above, a flock of geese cuts in front of the sun. Geese? Above? Your goggles aren’t lying.

The geese are flapping along in V-formation, hundreds of feet higher than where you’re standing. For them, it’s another day at the office.

The wind that’s hitting you with 90 mile-per-hour gusts is at their backs. They streak over, fat and happy.

You look up, sucking oxygen, leaning on your ice pick like an old man leans on a cane.

Maybe you need to know your place. You aren’t made for this. You’re no Bar-headed Goose.

“Bar headed.” Good name. Makes you want to head for a bar, just thinking about what they do.

You might be imagining that you’re on Everest, but there’s nothing imaginary about these two-fisted birds.

Bar-headed Geese are known for high altitude migration over the Himalayas. Their blood has special hemoglobin. They laugh at anoxia as they fly in the jet plane lane.

From your viewpoint on the mountain top, they might notice you. But to them, you wouldn’t be king of the hill.

Just some clown that’s beneath them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 at 4:37 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.