Avoiding Death 101

At the beginning of our Louisiana mission trip last week, we attended an orientation session which mainly consisted of several people telling us how we could avoid the many possible methods of dying they have to offer.

They told us about the alligators that are plentiful in the bayous. And during the week, we did see quite a few of them! If you stay in your car and thwack on the side of your door, they’ll actually swim right up to you. I tested that theory one afternoon, and it was pretty cool to sit alone in the car with a wild alligator just a few feet away. I fed him a healthy appetite of potato chips, and took some pictures.

They told us that if we were to encounter an alligator while we were outside, they would likely leave us alone, unless we looked particularly tasty. But if one runs at you, you basically have three options. You can try running in a zig-zag pattern, because they have a hard time running any direction other than straight ahead. Your second option is to have someone else with you, and hope that you can run faster than that person can. Or you can simply become lunch.

Next come the spiders. They told us about a number of spiders that could spoil our day, including the brown recluse. And sure enough, I had the pleasure of encountering one at a house we were tearing apart. I was helping the owner carry some boards from one part of a room to another when he jumped back and started whimpering a bit. And there was Mr. Happy, scurrying around below my feet.

I have to mention that I had a 14-year-old girl as part of my team while we were at that house. She has pretty much every irrational fear a person could ever dream up, including but not limited to: bridges, garbage trucks, and of course, clowns. I was reasonably tempted to hire a clown to drive a garbage truck across a bridge out of morbid curiosity to see her reaction. But anyway, I found it ironic that the spider didn’t bother her all that much.

Oh, and there were also the snakes and fire ants. Come to think of it, the only deadly thing we didn’t see during the week was the snakes, although we did see snake skins here and there. And we only saw one clown.