As it turned out, no one got bit during the Underground Festival. Most of the tunnels and doors leading out of the performance spaces were blocked by equipment or supplies. Some were actually closed and locked. I think it was more good luck than good planning, but still. After the festival was a different story.
Apparently, someone cleaning up on Monday morning opened an iron door under the Torensluis and uncovered five semi-dormant stinkers in a kind of canal run-off chamber. I don't know how Timo found out so fast, but he texted all three of us to come down and help them "move out". Like they were homeless guys being evicted from a flophouse.
So last week I was in the Veluwe. Relocating stinkers is not fun. They don't like it. You can really only do it at night. You need a secure van and even then we can't safely move more than two at a time. (Not that they're interested in us bodies, but you have to outnumber them to keep them under control.) And did I mention the smell? There are an infinite number of reasons why it makes absolutely no sense. That's infinity to one, the one being Timo's belief that it's the right thing to do. Teaching pigs to sing.
We released the last one just before sunrise on Thursday. It was a male in what was left of a pretty nice suit defaced with absurdly thick pinstripes. Part of the gauche neo-80's revival from London that's now shambling through the streets of Europe, so it couldn't have been locked in that canal space for too long. We dropped it off in a sandy scrub area outside a finger of forest. D figured that the sunlight would make it head straight for the trees. But it just looked back and forth between the van and the sun, like it was trying to figure out what one had to do with the other. Then it kind of vertically collapsed, like a controlled building demolition where the charges were in its knees. Sometimes the knees are the first thing to go.
We couldn't leave it out in the open, so we dragged it by its ridiculous collar into the woods. I think it was the smell of the wet pine needles on the ground that made me decide to stay behind for a few days. It smelled like my memories of family vacations camping in the Sierra Nevada. And I suddenly felt like I could use a vacation.
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