Snakes Alive!

T had a close encounter with a snake yesterday on our verandah.

We woke up to an extra-noisy dawn chorus at around 4:45 a.m. on Monday. Sparrows had built a nest just outside the east window of the bedroom, under the eaves, but above the awning over the second-floor verandah.

As the sun was rising, we heard this unholy ruckus, twittering and squawking so loud that it seemed the birds were invading the room, like something out of Hitchcock.

A bleary T shuffled down to the bathroom; I stared at the clock, grabbed my lavender eye mask and tried to go back to sleep. I don’t have to be up till about 9:30, as I work evenings and don’t usually get to sleep till 2 a.m.

The birds continued to invade our consciousness.

Then our son’s first alarm clock started buzzing in the next room. It starts off softly, then works itself up to a crescendo. He shut it off and rolled over, presumably, because about 15 minutes later, his second alarm, the one with a jackhammer sound, began dancing across the wooden floor beside his futon. We heard every bounce.

Normally I sleep through it, but not this time.

So I got up and stumbled downstairs. Son was eating the night-before leftovers for breakfast: chicken legs and a veggie mix. I gave him a kiss on the head and crawled back up the stairs to bed.

I finally fell asleep, and dreamed of being chased, escaping down winding streets in a mountain town, dashing in and out between old Japanese houses—images brought on perhaps by having watched “For Whom the Bell Tolls” the night before. Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, the original screen idols, were incredibly handsome and riveting, even on the tiny, analog screen. The rest of the cast was great, too, all Spanish or other Europeans portraying the Spanish Civil War rebels. Classic Hemingway. He got the human frailty and passion down perfect. But he invaded my dreams.

A few hours later, I am up and dressed and ready for work. As I close the bedroom door, I notice a movement outside the verandah door. It looks as though a thick black rope is swinging down.

But it’s not windy today, I think. I take a second look and see it curl up on itself.

“Aaaah! There’s a snake outside!”

T trundles up the stairs, with that “I have heard you scream at nothing before” look on his face. He is carrying a fly swatter.

That will only piss it off, I think.

He looks out, and says, “It’s an ao daisho. Have to get it from outside.”

He goes to get the pincher arm tool he uses for retrieving stuff that falls under the sofa, and we head out on the balcony, using the door on the other side of our son’s room.

I stand bravely back about 4 meters, while T goes right up to the snake and tries to grab it around the middle.

After about three misses, he manages to toss it over the side, into a black bamboo tree, the small kind that is bushy.

It is only at this point that I remember about the camera, but it is out of batteries, so I go outside and use my cellphone instead.

The dark rope hanging in the bamboo leaves is the critter: an

ao daisho (Japanese rat snake), which they assure me is harmless.

It looks slightly fat in the middle—a baby sparrow?

Epilogue

This morning, outside the west window, a baby sparrow was perched on the sill, chirping its little head off. It flew up to the roofline that extends away from the window, and then off up into the trees. So at least one survived the snake attack.

train event III - good news

Well, I have just heard that the woman who was hit by my train last week is recovering from her injuries, which apparently were not bad enough for it to become a "big" news story. A friend's husband eventually found the accident written up in the smaller news briefs somewhere...
That's a relief.
Not many people can say they were hit by a train and lived to tell the tale.

train event II

After my husband picked me up at the station last night, I told him about what happened yesterday. He was interested, in that half-eeeww kind of way, about how it all occurred. But when I mentioned that I had taken a few pictures, he recoiled and said “Oh, you didn’t!” with such vehemence that I couldn’t say a word for the rest of the ride home.

I have been wondering about it ever since. Was it so callous to take pictures of the police and station staff as they went about their work, measuring and writing notes? Two of them had clipboards, on which they scribbled names and details from the witnesses. On one of those, the man had sketched in the position of the body (lengthwise along the track). It all seemed so mundane, so business-as-usual that I didn’t feel that I was doing anything very awful.

Or, perhaps not so awful. The hidden journalist in me (I don't get to do this much at my translated news rewriting job) feels an obligation to report everything as I see it, as it is happening, even when I have no place to publish that information. That is why I started this blog yesterday, I guess. A way to get all these thoughts out of my head and out into the Borg.

But as the Cate-Blanchett Dylan says in the film "I'm Not There" -- "Who cares what I think?"

train event

I got on the train to head into Tokyo for work today a few minutes before noon, and settled in for the hour and a half ride from JR Ome station.

As the train pulled in to the next station, suddenly we heard an announcement that "The Emergency Brake Has Been Applied" and the train ground to a halt.

Oh crap, I thought. Now what?

It was a jinshin jiko -- an injury accident, which is a euphemism for suicide by train. My train.

We sat for a few minutes. Several high school boys filed past me to go to the front and see what they could see. A few other high school girls chatted loudly about being late. One whined that she wanted to get off, and they attempted to pry open the doors.

As it takes time to deal with such accidents, we passengers were told to leave the train. They pulled the pantograph down from the wires and shut off the lights and air conditioning.
We all had to file up through the cars to exit from the door right behind the driver.

As I walked from car to car, I saw a compact red firetruck arrive and disgorge its EMTs in blue uniforms and helmets. They jumped quickly over the fence to get in where the train was stopped.

As I stepped up to the door, I snapped a picture of the crowd of commuters out on the platform, all staring. As I exited, I turned and walked toward the back of the train, but couldn't resist glancing down underneath, though I dreaded what I might see.

There was a woman's high-heeled pump lying on the stones between the rails. Beside it, a few inches away, was an open cellphone.

I looked away quickly. The ghoul in me wanted to snap a picture. I didn't.
Around me were more commuters, all looking grim. A few were smoking at the designated bin, as the JR Ome Line still allows people to smoke at the end of the platforms.

The victim was a woman who apparently lost her balance and fell on the tracks just as the train was coming in.

A policeman came up asking if anyone had witnessed the accident. Two people, an older man and a male college student, held up their hands. I listened as the older man explained that as the train was approaching, the woman had rushed onto the platform. Then he said something about "waving (her) hands over (her) head"--or perhaps he meant someone else, waving at her from the road that cuts across the tracks a few meters from the end of the platform. My Japanese isn't good enough to understand what he said, and I couldn't hear it all that well, either.

He kept pointing down at the road, and indicating that she had hurried onto the platform. Perhaps she lost her balance in those high heels and fell.

After the police put up their green tarps and the EMTs carried the woman's body away, things seemed less intense. I took a few snapshots of the police as they looked and compared notes. A detective in a suit showed up, and two more plainclothes police, a man and a woman, who began interviewing the witnesses again.

Finally, the engineers put the pantograph back up on the wires, and the train began slowly moving down to its proper position on the platform. The doors opened, and we all piled back on. I sat and snapped a few more pictures of the police measuring the platform, then the doors closed and we headed on toward Tachikawa, just another day. No evidence left.

Here are the pictures -- showing nothing gory, just an absence.
Hope she rests in peace.

http://tinyurl.com/oqh6he