The wild life of suburbia
When the weekend rolls around, I like to spend my Saturday or Sunday mornings sipping coffee and catching up on my magazine subscriptions. As I was enjoying that little bit of relaxation this morning on the couch in the living room, I kept hearing a strange sound coming through the window that I had left open for some fresh air. It sounded like a large animal. At first I heard some low-pitched grunts. Then I heard the kind of sound a horse or a brass player makes when blowing air through his lips. It sounded like it could be coming from the front yard, and so I called my girlfriend over to listen for it as well. Was it a deer? Was it a bear? Was the poor thing in some kind of distress?
Now, at this point you may guess that I know very little about the habits of the woodland creatures inhabiting the Northeast. But I know this much: not a single one of them is a pack-a-day smoker. So, when I heard the labored and extended coughing fit coming from the tree line between our house and the house next door, I knew it wasn’t anything that walks on four legs.
I imagined our guest was a passed out drunk. Even so, we have a prison that’s close enough for anyone sufficiently motivated to make his way from there to here on foot. With that in mind, I took what I considered the appropriate precautions — which I will not make a matter of public record by putting in writing — and ventured out the back door to see from a safe distance just who the derelict was that had ended his Friday night revelry by collapsing face first into our bushes. I crouched down about 25 feet away from where he was lying, where I could get a good look at him, and called out, “Hey, fella, are you okay?”
More coughing and groans.
My girlfriend was standing on the back deck. I called up to her that the guy was most likely passed out from drink, as we had guessed, and was unresponsive. Since I had my cell phone on me, I called 911.
A sheriff’s deputy arrived about 5 minutes later, followed soon after by an ambulance and someone in a Jeep from the fire department. I ran out onto the front lawn to meet the deputy and direct him to our guest, taking my camera with me. I snapped a shot of the ambulance and the police car, an SUV. I have to confess that I was terribly excited at the thought that I was going to get a picture of a vagrant being carted out on a stretcher, or better yet carried off in handcuffs. I parked myself in an unobtrusive spot and listened to the exchange between the cop and the drunk, as the deputy tried to get the guy’s story.
Where are you from? The guy named our town, and the cop charitably confirmed that he was, indeed, in that town. Where? The guy named the street we were on. Good! You’re close to home. The cop then asked him for the house number, for which the guy gave as his answer the town’s Zip Code. (Allowing for the condition the guy was in, that answer is still good for partial credit.) Repeating the question, the guy this time answered with his house number.
Surprise! Turns out, he was our neighbor from across the street.
The people across the street are nice people and good neighbors, but their house sort of gives off a vibe that keeps trick o’ treaters away, come Halloween. The gentleman passed out in our yard was the adult son who moved back home some years ago. He’s only a little younger than I am, though lying passed out in the trees at 7 AM on a Saturday morning added at least 10 years to his appearance. (There’s something to be said for relatively clean living.)
The deputy stood aside to allow the two people from the ambulance to strap the guy into a stretcher. I overheard the deputy tell the guy that he had obviously fallen down and hit his head sometime during the night.
“Yeah, maybe,” slurred the man of the hour.
“No, not maybe,” the deputy assured him. “You hit your head.”
While the ambulance people did their job, I met the guy from the fire department out front in the street. He confirmed that I had heard correctly that it was in fact my neighbor. At that point it occurred to me that it didn’t seem very neighborly to be photographing the fellow from across the street being carried off in a stretcher, after being rescued from his inebriated self; so I took my camera and went back inside, and left the professionals alone to wrap up the situation.
I think it’s best I let the professionals deal with informing the family, too.
