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By
Grace
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Steve Irwin - The Crocodile Hunter ~
“Even if a big old alligator is chewing me up,
I want to go down and go, 'Crikey!', just before I die.”
- Steve Irwin
The Crocodile Hunter is dead. Bummer. What does that mean? Well, it means that the last wall of defense between the unspeakable horrors of nature, and us mere mortals, has crumbled to pieces before our very eyes. It means that we are now at the ruthless mercy of a whole pissed off Animal Kingdom, ready to take revenge upon humanity for all the fin-tags, electronic bracelets and lassos they suffered at the hands of Steve Irwin and his over-enthusiastic wildlife antics. Scores of angry poison dart frogs can’t wait to jump down our throats and hundreds of sea serpents are getting ready to swim up our pipes into our bath water, for a nasty surprise. Yelling “Crikey” won’t help us. Running won’t help us. Nature is everywhere, and it will finish the job soon, now that the last bastion of human authority has disappeared from the frontlines. The Crocodile Hunter left us to fend for ourselves, like naked children in a snake pit.
But Steve Irwin was a rebel, make no bones about it. I don’t care if you’re a North Korean dictator; if you handle snakes like that you’re a fucking rebel in my book. I know, because I scream like a girl at the sight of earth worms.
It is no secret that I can’t stand animals, especially the dangerous ones (most of them), but I still have this macabre interest in observing them from afar. I used to love going to the zoo as a kid, especially the terrariums with the snakes, scorpions and spiders. I would stand there in the dark corridors of lit up glass boxes, daring myself to tap the glass to see if the big tarantula would wake up from its slumber in a flurry of hairy legs and drooling mandibles, and wondering whether I would be safely passed out before my head hit the floor as my shock would get the better of me. I have a very twisted relationship to nature. On one hand it is the most fascinating thing in the world, and on the other hand it is something that should be best observed in a controlled environment, through thick glass. I don’t mind animals in nature, as long as I am not walking among them. Well, I walk my dogs, on their leashes, through the parking lot at night. Does that count? That’s as close to nature as I want to get these days.
It wasn’t always like that.
When I was little, my dad used to take the whole family into nature for whole weekends, camping out with the bears, wolves and snakes of Swedish fauna. He was (still is?) an avid bug collector and even had an aquarium outside my room with water from the local lake, filled with all the weird animals he scooped up from there in his net bag. We had salamanders, frogs and all sorts of larvae in there. It smelled like ass.
I was a boy scout, of the wolf cub chapter. We used to go on excursions with the whole troop, out into the wilderness, searching for tracks and crap, cataloguing numbers of species and drawing pictures of birds and bugs.
I think it was the snakes that turned the tide and stopped me from becoming David Attenborough Jr.
I remember once when we were in the woods, and my dad called out, “Snake! Stand still!”, because he wanted to take a picture of the damn thing. Of course the damn thing didn’t listen to him and decided to head towards me instead, oozing right over my boot. It may have hissed like a leaking hose, or maybe I just made that up for effect.
Once, in the water, a snake swam straight for me. I didn’t realize what it was until it had passed me, but it sent cold shivers down my spine and I didn’t talk for weeks. I may have sucked my thumb.
I think the last straw was when me and my brother were trying out my dad’s bb gun in the natural kingdom that was the backyard of his cabin in the woods. We came upon a little anthill, and sticking out of it was a part of a dead snake. The ants had probably killed it somewhere and, as one, carried it like a bunch of picnic stealing Disney ants on their little ant-arms all the way back to the anthill. We were strangely fascinated by the fact that these little critters had managed to do something we had been dying to do ourselves: rid the world of one more snake. We looked at the curved part of the snake that was going both in and out of the hill, and dared each other to touch it. None of us did, of course. What were we, retarded? Instead I took aim with the bb gun and fired a round of light-weight lead into the body of the big dead viper…
… and the anthill exploded.
The snake, which was obviously alive and well and snacking on ants before we so rudely interrupted, howled like a rabid banshee (I think) and shrugged the whole anthill of its back, looking for whomever had caused it pain.
We ran like bitches.
And we never went back to my dad’s cabin again.
In fact, I never ventured back into nature ever again.
True story.
Instead I started living vicariously through nature shows on TV. Watching daring hosts man-handling venomous snakes and bloodthirsty crocodiles became like a drug. I would watch one show after another, fascinated by how the guys would stick their heads in the lion’s den, and secretly hoping the fucking lion would bite their heads off. The morbid side of me always roots for the creepy crawlers to poison the shit out of the show host, while the little girlie side of me cowers in fear. When I watch shark shows I always hope the damn shark will bite the arm off the diver, steel suit and all, while he is dangling that same old tired shredded trout in front of the beast’s nose - just to stick it up his ass that he thinks sharks are “magnificent creatures, highly misunderstood”.
I didn’t see the sting ray coming, though. I would have loved it if Steve Irwin would have been eaten by a crocodile, live on national television, as some sort of poetic justice for fucking with all these animals for so long – but a sting ray? Who gives a shit about the sting ray? Then again… Run silent, run deep, right? Steve Irwin never saw it coming either. Was the sting ray a contract killer of the sea, executing a sentence passed upon the Crocodile Hunter by the animal community? As Steve passed right over the ray, what did the fish killer say to him as it plunged its barb through the mighty hunter’s heart? “This is for all the humiliation we suffered! Old Snaggletooth says ‘Crikey, motherfucker!’”
Of course it is tragic that Steve Irwin died. He had balls of steel and he was a champion for all things that help our environment and for all endangered species. He tried to stir the soul of humanity to help the animal kingdom, by sharing his passion and enthusiasm with us, instead of preaching like some damn Sting. Unfortunately, such politics are entirely lost on the tiny animal brains that hated his guts, and in the end they got their sweet revenge.
Hide under your beds, kids... Now they are coming for the rest of us.
