Dispatches From The Front Yard – Day 598

            “Honey, what’s that under your car?”

 

            In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten interested in the notion of the dramatic climax and how it’s become misunderstood in popular culture.  If I recall correctly from 8^th grade English class, the dramatic climax is that tipping point where the action is irrevocably committed to a particular direction by the resolution of some crisis moment.  The example given was the third scene of the second act of Romeo & Juliet, when Romeo is driven by Mercutio’s death to pursue and kill Tybalt.  The death of Tybalt leads to Romeo’s banishment, which leads in turn to Juliet’s faked death, which leads to the misunderstanding that causes Romeo and Juliet to each die by their own hands over the other’s death. 

Of course, in the popular culture, the climax of Romeo & Juliet is the moment of their deaths.  In that instance, the climax would have to be defined as the moment when you have to end the script because you don’t have any more characters worth killing.  This would also be known as the “Yippie Kie Yay, Motherfucker” moment. 

But the classic definition can lead to some curious results of its own.  In the movie “Crank”, the hero/hitman Chev wakes up in the opening scene to discover that he has been poisoned.  The rest of the movie is a headlong rush to deal with that:  figuring how to delay the effects, looking for a cure, and exacting revenge.  The closest thing to a dramatic climax is a mid-movie flashback, where the audience learns that Chev had let his target live after an abrupt decision to quit the business, which then affects how he deals with people later.  So, technically, the dramatic climax took place the day before the movie actually started.    

I bring this up because the pivotal moment of some episode in life will sometimes occur before we even realize that an episode has started.  And so it was when, standing in our driveway as we were en route to lunch and a movie, Amy turned to me and said, “Honey, what’s that under your car?” 

It was a bright sunny late morning, so I could only see the silhouette under my car.  At first I assumed it was the fat Siamese cat that hangs around the neighborhood, but the shape didn’t quite fit. 

“Uh . . . it looks like . . . is that a rabbit?”  

Clearly, I haven’t seen enough horror films, because I immediately chose to further investigate.  Sure enough, it was a rabbit.  A cute little lop-eared rabbit, dark brown with black points, was taking advantage of the shade under my car.  It was very odd.  And quick, too.  It took off like a shot toward the end of the street.  A small, furry, lop-eared shot.  Amy and I immediately snapped into action:  we watched it. 

We live on a dead-end street.  On our side, there’s a rental house on the corner, there’s our place, and then there’s one house next to us.  The next lot after that is a ravine of overgrowth.  We knew that if it got into the overgrowth, we’d never catch it, so we eventually lumbered into motion after it.  Lucky enough, it headed straight up the neighbor’s driveway and disappeared around the side of their house.  We pursued.  We didn’t see it immediately, so we started searching through the shrubs around the driveway. 

After a few minutes of searching, the neighbor emerged to ask us what the hell we were doing. 

She’s actually a pretty nice lady, a widow with two small daughters.  We explained what happened, adding that this was obviously a domestic rabbit and we didn’t want to abandon it to die in the woods.  She was nice enough to find a small net and help us.  We discovered which particular shrubs it was hiding behind, at which point it ran past us to find a new hiding place.  And so we pursued it to the front of the house, and back to the side, and then back to the street, and then back to our yard, and so forth.  It was a merry little twenty-five minute chase under the blazing July sun, and I’m sure we all looked quite silly by the time we cornered it under the neighbor’s air conditioning unit.  I had my hand on it from one side, pushing forward, while Amy had it by the scruff and was pulling it into the net.  It was as worn out as we were from all the running. 

I will pause to note that during the chase, I had paused to go find our pet carrier, in the unlikely event that we did catch it.  As I was returning with the carrier, the weekend renters on our other side had come out.  Seeing the carrier, the renters asked if we were trying to catch the rabbits.  Rabbit (s)?  “Yeah, we saw a tan one and a dark one hanging around the backyard all yesterday,” they said.  I thought, “Wow, and you motherfuckers didn’t even bother trying . . . you suck beyond belief.”  But I didn’t say it.  Amy later told me she had the same thought, albeit slightly less profane. 

So after getting the rabbit into the net, we managed to get it into the pet carrier.  At this point, our neighbor cunningly observed, “Thank goodness my daughters aren’t home, or they’d insist on adopting it.”  Which I took to mean that we were stuck with it. 

We took the carrier inside and set it in the least-used bedroom, which is usually storage space for bikes, unopened moving boxes, dead bodies, what have you.  This seemed the best way to keep our cats away from the rabbit.  Amy set about getting a water dish, then looking up rabbit information on the web, while I busied myself surveying the area for another loose rabbit.  After an hour, I gave up and came back.  The rabbit, meanwhile, had settled down in the carrier and seemed reasonably comfortable for the moment. 

According to Amy’s research, rabbits are most active in the morning and in the early evening, so we figured we could put off our search efforts for a few hours.  We figured we’d do another search when sunset approached.  In the meantime, we drove around to look for ‘missing pet’ signs.  After covering a dozen blocks in every direction, we gave up and went to find some rabbit food. 

Just before sunset, we put our shoes on and went back outside.  After an exhaustive search of less than a minute, we saw a tan rabbit in the backyard of the rental house.  The renters, of course, were long gone by now, so we turned to the neighbor lady for assistance.  She came with her net and we carefully approached it from all sides, ready for another lengthy chase.  The tan rabbit looked at us, wrinkled its nose a bit, and then hopped directly to Amy. 

Rather an anticlimax, but we weren’t complaining.  We loaded it into our other carrier, brought it inside, and put it in with the first one.  They got along immediately.  By now, we’d come to the conclusion that these two had been abandoned by their owner, who should rot on a spit in hell.  What bastard would abandon a domesticated animal into the wild?  I suppose if you intend to inflict a slow, lingering death by starvation and exposure, then that’s one way to do it, but it certainly doesn’t saying anything positive about you as a human being. 

            Of course, we adopted them, adding two rabbits to the growing menagerie of our household. 

            Amy thought I’d be upset about taking them in.  After all, I’ve spent no small effort holding back her various attempts to add more animals to the household, not entirely with success.  She thought I’d be resentful at this turn of events.  She was quite surprised that I was not.  I wasn’t bothered by this because, in my view, the choice was made before the situation presented itself and no other humane option was available. 

The neighbor lady wasn’t going to adopt them.  We didn’t know anyone else who could adopt them.  Nobody would own up to abandoning them.  Shelters are geared towards dogs and cats.  The only other possibility might have been giving them to PetSmart, but we knew that PetSmart’s care was characterized by indifference and neglect, so that wasn’t really any choice at all.  Being decent people who care about animals, then, we didn’t have any choice but to adopt them. 

So the dramatic climax of the situation was not the end of the story, when we decided to adopt them.  It’s actually at the beginning, when Amy spotted the rabbit in the first place.  After that, all the other choices had already been made.   

 

And, yes, the rabbits have names.  But that’s another story.