Decay (part II)

 

Oh, how life can change in seconds …

The black cat was pursuing a rodent across a busy road, eyes focused intently on its prey. The cat’s ears twitched to the raucous traffic noise coming from all directions. One minute its glossy sleek body slipped silently over the tarmac, the next it was a mat, flat on its back, legs spread-eagled in every direction of the compass. Its fur embossed with the tread pattern of a large truck tyre.

… and so it was on my 2500km cycle trip from Germany to Spain.

I rode past hundreds of dead creatures, most killed by traffic along the way. A small bird caught by a car’s A-pillar would tumble silently to the ground where it would lay twitching with a broken wing or concussion. The driver and passengers most likely unaware they had even struck a bird as it may have been out of view and small birds hardy make a sound on impact. The bird would lie on the asphalt struggling for life maybe for hours but it would never fly again and instead lie helpless until starvation took its toll or another vehicle squeezed out its last breath.

Most of the road kill I passed consisted of birds, rodents and snakes. However I did also pass a large wild boar that looked almost perfect but for its guts trailing from its underside. Many creatures were unrecognizable and had virtually merged over time with the tarmac. Flatten snakes had lost their coloured patterns and become two-dimensional strips much like on a snake and ladder board.

I was not innocent either, though unlike most motorists I was very aware of my ‘victims’. From southern France through Spain, hundreds of tiny lizards sunning themselves on the warm tarmac would sprint away as I approached, occasionally running into my path. I would do my best to dodge them but one or two certainly must have felt my tyres on their backs. Worse still were the thousands of grey caterpillars roaming across Spanish roads in all directions. I was aware of the procession caterpillars with their fearful reputation but these were not crawling single file but scattered singly far and wide and impossible to avoid. On impact with my tyres the explosive pop could not be ignored. Insects also succumbed frequently, impacting me when I exceeded 30kph. Early on I swallowed many insects until I began using my neck tube to cover my mouth on fast downhill descents. My old boss used to say that you could always tell a motorbike rider by the flies stuck to their teeth. Though that was back in the days before full face helmets. I also had to extract a few insects from my eyes, a painful experience for us both.

However all this was nothing compared to the litter that greeted me along the way. The roadside drainage ditches, especially in Spain, were full of discarded plastic bottles, aluminum cans and face masks. An endless steam for hundreds of kilometers of litter thrown from vehicles without a thought for the environment. These thoughtless ignorant morons are among us even in the Black Forest, where face masks, flyers, paper tissue packaging and plastic bottles are casually dumped on the ground. Shame on you and especially those motorists who think nothing of chucking an empty plastic bottle out of their car window. Maybe one day (heaven forbid) we will all have our DNA data recorded on computer and samples will be recoverable from discarded items and traced back to the culprits. Now that would be interesting scenario!