I came home Friday before last and went to the dentist on Monday. All the little rooms in the dentist’s office have screens, and in dentist visits past those screens have shown the exploits of various aquatic creatures. This time I was presented not with ocean adventures but Seasonal Forests.
I read the title on the screen and expected some relatively dull panoramic and overhead shots of rocks and trees. There would be peace and tranquility in the wonderful land of nature, and I would be utterly bored without the usual funny-looking fishies.
OH, HOW WRONG I WAS.
The video started with a snowy forest and a small dark furry thing trudging across the landscape. I’m pretty zoologically savvy, but I couldn’t quite identify it. (I’ve since done a little research and believe it to have been a wolverine.) It made its way up to a lighter-colored furry thing and began pawing at it until I could see that it was bloody and dead. Then the dark furry thing quite simply made off with a limb.
I did not sign up for this, I thought to myself, staring at the screen with a wide-open mouth while the hygienist picked at my teeth.
It is a truth acknowledged by most anyone over the age of maybe four or so that fish eat other fish. But for some reason, there’s nothing unsettling about watching a bloodless gulp. There’s a fish, just minding his own—whoops, there he goes—wrong place at the wrong time, bro. Not so in the Seasonal Forest with the carrion-eating wolverine!
Next were large turkey-like birds with large bodies close to the ground and magnificent plumage blooming from their behinds. Again I wished for narration to tell me what they were. I expected a slow peacock strut, but these guys ran like ninjas. I remember a moose whose solitary journey was captured by a stunning helicopter shot, which was awesome.
My favorite featured creatures were the baby ducks because only soulless people are immune to the charm of baby ducks. At first I was mildly surprised to see a mama duck in a tree. To my delight, the camera showed several ducklings also inside the tree. To my alarm, the ducklings waddled out to the edge of the hole and literally fell out of the tree and onto the ground after their mother. A camera on the forest floor showed how they bounced when they hit bottom.
There were only four ducklings wandering off after their mama in the end, but I probably watched each of them fall twice if not three times. The crash landings had been shown from different angles at different speeds, reminding me of a bizarre video game. Catch the baby ducks! Guide the baby ducks to a target on the ground! See how high you can make the baby ducks bounce!
There were of course blossoming flowers to accompany the baby animal segment. I watched way too many time-lapsed explosions of pistils and stamens. Not going to lie, it was a little unsettling. Weirder still was the fact that I was subjected to the whole thing in reverse as well. At one point, the camera focused on a plot of pansy-like flowers in yellow and violet. The video moved faster and slower, faster and slower, and the development of the flowers progressed and regressed, progressed and regressed.
Is this what being on drugs is like? I wondered, lying sedately in the chair, waiting for the x-ray results.
Not long after came some…lovely…insect footage. With additional research I’ve determined that these were the seventeen-year cicadas that swarmed the East Coast when I was in fourth grade. They’re supposed to be coming back this year, which is distressing. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with them until I was twenty-five, but apparently there are different broods with cycles set a few years apart. The video was only slightly short of terrifying. Brought back some enchanting memories. Can’t wait for the return of the devil spawn!
I was at the dentist for a pretty long time. The doctor had been out at a meeting and came a little late, and there was a problem with my x-ray results showing up on the computer screen. All this meant that I was still in the chair when the video ended. The screen went black and the credits rolled.
Narration by Sigourney Weaver? Music by the BBC Concert Orchestra? What is this? I thought.
I had started off thinking that the video was supposed to be the visual equivalent of elevator music. Turned out to be the tenth episode of Planet Earth. The horrors of the food chain, the careening ducklings, the psychedelic plant remix, and the horde of demon bugs all suddenly made sense.
This is a documentary television series meant
to show nature in all of its cruel and disturbing glory, I said to myself
wisely. Not meant for the serenity of
bored or anxious dental patients. But then why on earth were they playing
it at the dentist? I would have loved the educational aspect of it if there had
been some way of knowing what the heck was going on, but I’m not sure how
universal that feeling is.
I guess I feel the same way about nature as some people feel about the dentist. I’m not afraid of the dentist. It’s a bit unpleasant, but nothing about it scares me. Nature, on the other hand… nature is frightening! Nature is weird and gross and will surprise you just when you think you’ve got it figured out.
With nature
and dentistry both, you think that everything is reasonable and then you
discover something horrifying.
Brush your teeth and never go to Australia.
--Bridget
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