The Arabian Woodpecker

The Ark stinks to high heav­en. Two ele­phants. Two lions. Two zebras. Two of every kind of mon­key, horse, cow — boy, could those crea­tures put out poop prod­ucts. So it was smelly. How could it not be — par­tic­u­lar­ly since there were hun­dreds of small crea­tures includ­ing worms, and mos­qui­toes, and flies, and nat­u­ral­ly, dung bee­tles. I had to get out. Get out and explore the world.

We were on the Ark because God had told Noah he was going to flood the earth. So Noah built an ark, a giant boat the size of a large leviathan, or maybe just Moby Dick. So the rain came and it washed the uni­corns away because they were too busy play­ing in the rain as their biog­ra­ph­er Shel Silverstein has not­ed. After six weeks of rain clear skies came. But it took a very long time for the land to dry up and the ark to come to rest.

Meanwhile, the lit­tle woman and I were get­ting bored. So in moments when the ele­phants were roar­ing and lions and hors­es and zebras, mon­keys and oth­er ani­mals were mak­ing enough noise that it was sure to dis­turb God’s sleep high above, Beanie and I rat-a-tat-tat­ted holes above the water line so that we could escape the chaos and cacoph­o­ny of the Ark. Which we man­aged. And we got away with­out being noticed; I mean, we were not the only birds aboard. Two of every crea­ture that walked or flew or crawled cre­at­ed a con­fined cacoph­o­nous cof­fin of a space, even if it was more than 500 feet long and half that width.

So we slipped out our holes unno­ticed. Unfortunately, there were no trees or moun­tains or even build­ings to land on. Back to the ark we went. A few days, maybe it was weeks lat­er, I don’t know — I was smok­ing a lot of weed to fight the ever-grow­ing stench. Anyway, we left again on anoth­er explorato­ry trip.

This time we were suc­cess­ful — we found some trees stand­ing free of the water and a bug or two, maybe a few that had bur­rowed deep into the wood and had avoid­ed drown­ing (only to be eat­en by hun­gry birds off the ark).

In any event, after eat­ing well and rest­ing long, I sug­gest­ed we go vis­it rel­a­tives in Yemen—maybe 1,000 miles to the south. Beanie would have none of that. “Alright, but first we have to take a sprig of mint, maybe . . .”

I inter­rupt­ed to sug­gest, hope­ful­ly, “poi­son ivy?”

Ignoring my inter­rup­tion she fin­ished, “Back to the Ark, Cecil,” said Beanie. “After all, Noah needs to know that the world is now dry and safe.”

So Beanie and I returned to the Ark. In fact, she took an olive branch (that we found float­ing in water) to the win­dow at Noah’s state­room while I flew about over­head try­ing to drop a load on the old man’s head. Unfortunately, all of my attempts failed.

Afterwards, as Noah and his fam­i­ly dis­em­barked from their float­ing home, now ground­ed, the wife and I flew south to vis­it fam­i­ly and friends.