By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Those who remember the early days of the internet will remember the phenomenon that was World of Warcraft, and possibly a series of video ads, spoofing Apple ads, that touted the glories of playing as a shaman and throwing down “totems!” for your teammates before, “casting frost shock!”
These totems, specific wooden designs driven into the earth, could heal teammates, renew their mana, or grant them other buffs and benefits.
It was a corruption of what a real totem is – an emblem adopted by a tribe or group as having specific spiritual significance – but it stuck in my head. Since then I’ve referred to various inanimate objects as a form of totem. For instance, my umbrella is a totem for warding off the rain. As long as I have it with me, there’s no chance of the sky opening up. If I forget it, it’s going to pour. Or at least that’s how it seems.
My camera is a totem for warding off the interesting. If I forget it, I’m going to run into a six-car pile up or a Bigfoot crossing SR 174. (Or a six-car pile up caused by a Bigfoot crossing SR 174.)
It obviously isn’t true, as I’ve used my umbrella to keep myself dry on more than one occasion. And I’ve forgotten it and stayed dry often enough too. But you notice more that you’ve forgotten it when you end up soaked to the bone. And you notice it in your hand more when you’re carrying it around as an extra burden on a clear day.
I also run into plenty of photo-worthy content when I have a camera (though, sadly, no Bigfoot yet). But I was thinking specifically of this the other day when I grabbed my camera and took off to Olive Hill council, and how bringing my camera for a meeting where I didn’t need it would guarantee I had a nice, boring drive to the meeting.
And I did have a fairly uneventful drive to the meeting, even after realizing just a few miles down the road that though I brought the camera, I’d failed to reinsert the SD card after pulling images.
As I climbed into the car after the meeting to head home, the sun just beginning to nestle between the hills, I thought to myself, “if I ever see a UFO or a black panther, it’ll be tonight, when I have a camera with no card.”
Now, I’m not going to tell you I saw a UFO on Porter Creek. Nothing quite that out of this world.
But I saw a bald eagle. There, sitting in the upper branches of a bare tree, across the road from Tygart Creek on 174, just a mile or so back toward Olive Hill from where it intersects with 955.
I looked back over my shoulder to make sure I was seeing what I thought I saw, and it was. The head was bright white, and the rest of the body and wings a dark brown. He didn’t move, and there was no traffic. If I’d had a card, I could have stopped, backed up, and with my telephoto lens could have gotten some fantastic photos. However, that obviously wasn’t an option.
Head still reeling from the missed opportunity, I turned onto 955 to head on toward home and, just a few miles up the road, had a mature red fox run across the road in front of me. He loped at a quick, but unhurried, pace across a pristine, green lawn – his bottlebrush tail a deep orange-red with black guards and a bright, white tip.
I know fox aren’t that uncommon. I see them regularly enough dead along the side of the road. But this was probably one of the largest I’ve ever seen. And the colors were deep and gorgeous, set against those hues of glowing green you only get with the setting sun.
It was also the first living fox I’ve seen, in the wild, in probably 20 years or more. The last one I saw jumped a log and ran right between my legs while I was walkig to my deer stand. It was small, hardly bigger than a house cat, and being chased by a pair of beagle mixes that had raised enough of a ruckus that I decided I wasn’t hunting that stretch of woods that evening after all. Still, the memory is so vivid, to this day, it was worth a lost evening of hunting.
I didn’t have a camera with me then either. Maybe there’s something to this totem thing after all.
Jeremy D. Wells can be reached at editor@cartercountytimes.com
