A very, very long time ago,
I was a small child.
You can imagine how young children see the world from a different perspective and with innocence and no preconception of how new things should be. When I was three years old, as my mother reminded me much later, I was unusually shy, typically naive, and completely innocent of worldly things. I don't remember having many toys, and probably did not have more than four or five because my family was barely getting by during WWII and life was not easy for my parents. The toys I do remember were a few small animals and two that were much larger than the others: a fuzzy green bird and a brown elephant.
I think the bird may have been a parrot. Maybe. The elephant was the most realistic of them all and I loved the long trunk and used it as a handle to pull "Ellie" along.
My uncle Clyde - Mother's half-brother - gave it to me for my third birthday and I loved it! I slept with Ellie and he was my comfort toy. Through Ellie, I began to love animals of any kind.
It was embarrassing to me even at that age, but I could not pronounce the word "elephant" and my father's family of uncountable people I saw every day but was not sure who they were, all thought it was very funny how I mispronounced "elephant" in a way I won't even try to reproduce here.
"Will, say 'elephant'," someone would say, and I would give my rendition and everyone would laugh as if it were the first time they had heard it. I did not know what I was doing wrong, or even that I didn't pronounce it as a recognizable word. I don't remember anyone trying to correct whatever it was I was saying, either. That was family,
That was long ago, but I remember. I remember Ellie, too.
The Traveling Circus:
Back in those days, upon occasion, small, traveling circuses would come through our small town, and the assorted trucks and caravans would assemble on the highway outside the town limits. In no time, workers would set up their big circus tent and related smaller tents around it. They would arrive on Thursday, set up for opening Friday afternoon and have performances until Saturday late. With practiced magic, it all would be gone by the time people left for church Sunday morning.
Back in the days before television, that was a really exciting time. It did not matter to the adults that it was not the best circus in the world, or even if it was a bad one, because it was entertainment in a time when there was little else to help forget about the hard times and the war. Suddenly there were announcements on the local AM radio station, word spread and people found the money to "go see the show."
I only became aware of it when Mom told me there was an elephant with the circus and I was beside myself with excitement! I was going to get to see an actual, real, living elephant! I had never been so excited and I thought I would burst with anticipation.
I was going to see a real elephant!
butI did not know that it was going to be one of the main formative events of my life.
I remember nothing at all about the circus itself. Nothing whatever except the elephant. I have tried to forget even that, but the experience may as well have been this morning in my life.
Completely without fear and in awe, I was standing facing the immense animal, just feet away from the elephant's left front foot, staring at massive foot as if it were the only thing to be seen anywhere.
Around the large ankle was a chain connected to a metal stake embedded in the ground so close that the animal could not move.
The chain was embedded in the flesh of the elephant's ankle, and the ankle was swollen and bleeding enough for me to notice. I just stood and stared at it. I remember thinking that I would never do anything to hurt Ellie and wondered why the circus people hurt the elephant.
I began to cry without making a sound. I felt so sorry for the small, undernourished animal and did not understand why it could not walk around like elephants are supposed to do. I was confused and getting disoriented because this just was not right.
I looked at the elephant's face for the first time and I thought of Ellie. Just then, the elephant raised its trunk slowly towards my face and I could smell its warm, moist breath. I was mesmerized and excited and sad.
The trunk moved closer and the end touched me just above my left ear. It blew very softly on my ear just before a man on the other side hit the trunk really hard with a long stick and the elephant jerked away from me.
Iturned around and held onto Mother's leg and all I could think and say was, "The elephant hurts, the elephant hurts...the elephant hurts, Mommy, the elephant hurts..."
That went on and on and I could not stop crying. My parents took me home and I had cried myself into exhaustion by the time we got there. I remember not being able to catch my breath for the sobbing and imagining I could feel how badly the elephant's foot hurt and then the man hit it on its trunk and the elephant was scared and so sad. Every breath, every sob, and every thought made me cry even harder. All I could see and all I could think of was the elephant's foot.
I cried a lot. I cried for days. I did not sleep because the image of the foot and chain were burned into my brain.
I could not eat and I cried more when I regained enough energy to do more than sob.
That went on for days, but I finally stopped crying. I could not make the image of the foot and embedded chain stop so easily.
Much later:
The mental image persisted for years and years. It persisted throughout grammar school, middle school and, slightly less often, through high school. The large animal. staked to the ground, a chain of slavery embedded by neglectful and uncaring owners. A poor, malnourished, poorly treated, nomadic eater of grass herd animal had been staked to the ground to deprive it of freedom of movement; its life spent mostly in a cage on a moving truck.
Years passed. I was in the Air Force, in Alaska, and the dreams came back and were with me nightly.. Then, it was my twenty one year-old self standing and looking at the elephant's bloody, confining ankle chain.
The image has haunted me all of my life. It never goes away and has become a background image of everything I see. That one moment has changed my life. I still see the foot. I know the mistreated animal was in pain. It was lonely for others of its kind. It wanted to be able to walk and graze in deep grass.
It had breathed on my ear and that had changed who I became. I know that time and wisdom have given me reflection and time to synthesize that seminal moment in my life. The elephant spoke to the mind of a small child.
I still cannot look at an elephant without getting tears in my eyes. I cannot look at them without guilt, for a myriad of reasons. I cannot watch TV programs or movies with elephants in them. Reading statistics of their demise is upsetting to me. I grieve for them all and pray for the survival of their species.
and....
Long ago, when I was an innocent child, I had a random encounter with an elephant in a traveling circus and when it whispered its breath into my ear, it made me a different person. As I grew older, I began to understand why elephants are special. Everyone needs to know.
Mostly to avoid ridicule, I have never told that story to anyone in my entire life. It has been my most profoundly precious and secret moment and it is one of the three major impact moments on my life. I need to pass it on so it will not be lost when I cease to be and can no longer keep alive the image of The Foot.
"I am..."
the instant before the evil human hit the sensitive trunk with his long stick.
This is not intended to be fiction; at least I don't believe it is and that is all that counts.
Will
You loved Elephants since when you were a little child, this is such an incredible story. But its just so sad that you had to witness it being maltreated, how lonely 5hat Elephant must have been...
You know, it always saddens me whenever I hear about how these amazing animals are being treated. I believe they do deserve to be treated well too. Its beautiful of this experience at a really young age has had a major impact on your life.
They have a very special place in my heart. They deserve to be treated like intelligent, sensitive animals, but we don't because we are not intelligent and are not sensitive to Nature.
Yeah, we all should learn to be a bit more sensitive to nature and well, let our intelligence flow...
Find the secret to making that happen and you will save the planet from the infestation of humans.
Well, even if one finds the secret, humans can hardly keep up with it...
Hi willymac,
LEARN MORE: Join Curie on Discord chat and check the pinned notes (pushpin icon, upper right) for Curie Whitepaper, FAQ and most recent guidelines.
Congratulations @willymac! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
To support your work, I also upvoted your post!
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPIt isn't often that a story on here really hits me. This sort of things makes me emotionally distraught. No living creature should be treated in this manner. Thankfully things do seem to be slowly changing, but not fast enough
Thank you ever so much for sharing this, it was wonderful.
Thank you for reading and understanding. Your compliment helps remove some of the burden of simply knowing the story. I have always wondered what happened to the poor creature.
And,
thank you for submitting the story to @curie.
The Elephant Sanctuary, in Hohenwald, TN, gives circus and zoo elephants excellent medical care and a thousand acre natural habitat to live out their lives in. They are a bright spot for the elephants and worthy of any donations I have been able to make.
Congratulations @willymac!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade for newcomers in the following categories:
I also upvoted your post to increase its reward
If you like my work to promote newcomers and give them more visibility on Steemit, feel free to vote for my witness! You can do it here or use SteemConnect
Thank you immensely for the boost,@arcange ! It's flattering to know the story was worth sharing.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Such a great and touching story. Have you ever considered going on a safari in Africa to see elephants roaming free in their natural wild habitat? I think knowing how much this experience in your youth has influenced your entire life I could only imagine how much joy you could takeaway from a new experience like that.
This post was nominated by a @curie curator to be featured in an upcoming Author Showcase that will be posted late Friday (U.S. time) on the @curie blog.
If you agree to be featured in this way, please reply and:
You can check out our previous Author Showcase to get an idea of what we are doing with these posts.
Thanks for your time and for creating great content.
Gene (@curie curator)
Gene, It would be flattering to be included in the Author Showcase! Feel free to include anything you think appropriate, except maybe The Foot's last summary paragraphs which would be too much of a spoiler, I think.
Yes, i have thought often about making a pilgrimage to Kenya to the Serengeti but I always get cold feet and think better of it. Yes it would be wonderful to see them in the wild but, at the same time, it would be an emotional confrontation thinking of the way they are slaughtered throughout the continent and how their numbers are steadily decreasing as human population pressures grow. So, yes, maybe someday. Hopefully.
That encounter with the pachyderm so long ago has made me hypersensitive to the way I imagine an animal is feeling and I have always seen them as beings and not just animals. That also is one of the main reasons I have been a vegetarian for many decades.
As for writing, I have kept a daily journal for the past twenty two years, more to pretend I'm writing than actually being creative. My family would have made rich material for William Faulkner, so I had lots to motivate me. Plus, I have always been a photographer and documented my family life along the way, and, as ideas occurred to me, included thumbnails of the stories I planned to write "when I had the time", so somewhere over 6,500 pages journals served some purpose. I had as much fun creating the Journal covers as I did writing the text.
I have written three books, all on Amazon. Leaving Saigon, Sterling:For the Republic, and Hunter's Junes (a little over 1,700 pages, total).
I have been a licensed Amateur Radio operator for over 50 years, Served in the US Air Force, have a couple of college degrees, and count dogs among my best friends; all making me perfectly normal.
gracias por compartir.
Thank you, Geraldine!
Hi @willymac ,
The new Curie Author Showcase featuring this post is now posted.
Thanks for being a part of it.
Gene (@curie Curator)
Beautifully written, very touching. You still had all of your humanity. You were yet to be handed over to the state education system. The experience obviously changed how you see animals. I wonder did it change how you see humans?
Thank you, @steemonkey.
That is an interesting question about how I perceive humans. That incident plus many confirming instances throughout my life of people stating very firmly that animals do not have feelings has convinced me that people are capable of thoughtless, uncaring, and purely evil things to animals. I have seen it first hand and each time I lose more faith in humanity. .
Even without the early event, I probably would be as I am now, except for the soft spot for elephants. I am convinced that people who do not believe animals have feelings are themselves not capable of rational thought and that places all their other capabilities under suspicion also. They are missing empathy and that is a regulator for human actions we cannot do without.
Some things cannot be overlooked; things such as a child watching neighbors slaughter pigs and hearing them laugh at the futile efforts to escape and the screams of being slowly having their throats cut. Anyone who thinks that is funny is not human.
Overall, I would chose a random pig or elephant over a random human male.
Wow, what a strong story! Thank you for sharing! I had a similar experience when I was invited to go bathe with the elephants in the jungle in Southern Nepal. I was really excited to get so close and share experience with the elephants, but it was again an experience of the man hitting and pushing the elephant and telling it what to do, and I felt so sad for it and will never participate in any form of "entertainment" with tamed elephants again.
Thank you, Freja. Before the intervention of the humans, that must have been a powerfully awesome feeling. I envy you for having had at least that much closeness with them....even if they did know what was probably to come.
I like your Homes on the Road stories, too!
Thanks for the reply....it seems to me that the long term consumption of animals requires a level of mindlessness. A mind switched on to the sentience of animals suffers in the knowledge that in consuming meat they are responsible for animal cruelty and murder hence the need to switch off the mind. This mass self hypnosis required by carnism is a major factor in the greater general apathy that seems to pervade. An apathy that allows the creation of many of the worlds ills IMO.
I agree completely. People have gone to extremes in renaming animal parts to remove connection with the source. That way, children are easier to be indoctrinated as meat consumers and the names allow everone to forget the source. Consuming meat is a disgusting and uncivilized habit that is also a massive misallocation of resources.
Absolutely. If the connection between humans and animals can be revived it would change the world for the better. It would ignite the spirit flame in many, helping us to choose the right path for all animals including humans. You raise a good point with resources. This of course feeds into the overpopulation agenda.
Thank you for the "ignite the spirit flame", Ian. You are correct that we have lost that connection with Mother Earth's other inhabitants. It also reminded me of a photo I have in my archives...I'll pull it out and post it. It was one of those true 'connecting' moments for me.
It's strange that you have to become enlightened before you can understand that you were not before that moment.
Looking back it seems to me that the education (indoctrination) system is designed to un-enlighten us. It de-humanises us, homogenises us. It prepares us for a world run by dark forces which most will never understand for they have been trained to keep themselves distracted from the truth by using all of the tools which they were trained to spend their time accumulating. The world is a simple place when one has regained one's vision and discovered the box of shades in the garage like Roddy Piper in the film (They Live). Part of my mission is to hand out the shades and draw attention to the masquerade that is happening all around us. Thank you for your work. And thanks for having the strength to be you.
and to you, my new friend. Two members of The Human League.
Congratulations on the curie @willymac! I've been out of the loop for a few days and totally missed this. What an awesome post ;)
Thank you, m'lady! That was one of a few things in my past I needed to get written down. One of my "private keys", I think.
It was well worth putting pen to paper then!
very soulfully written. clearly it is something that has deeply affected you. sometimes when we empathize with suffering, we become one with it. it is a very touching tribute to an experience that has shaped your life
Thank you for seeing that, @adarshh. We all have a kinship with any creature who suffers emotional or physical pain and we have to remember that to keep our humanity.
Will, this is a profound story. I hope you've never regretted opening your soul about this formative experience of yours. I hope, and fully expect, that it has made many others who have read it thoughtful and contemplative.
I know you are a man with great respect for dogs and other animals, and I am pretty sure I've shared this compilation of scripture about animals with you before. And I think I may still owe you an article about my theological views of animals and the after life... <sigh>
In any case, your account of your encounter with the elephant brought one particular scripture strongly to mind, and I want to share that with you here:
The hope is that God will one day redress all the pain and grievances, even of the animal creation, even of your mistreated elephant, and that all will one day be made right. That is a significant part of the hope of my faith in Jesus/God.
Thanks for this very profound bit of history.
😄😇😄
