Stray Thoughts: Lizard Luggage

The night was cool, the moon was a brass coin flung into the sky, and an anole’s tail whipped in the wind as it clung to my side-view mirror.

Crazy as it sounds, this is a reasonable anole dispersal strategy. After all, if a human parked a car close enough to greenery for an anole to jump on in the first place, they’ll probably park near a different patch of greenery later. Windshields tend to attract bugs, so there may be in-flight dining provided. And if windspeed combined with the wrong head angle catches the wind enough to blow the lizard off mid-trip? They’re small enough to hit terminal velocity well before it’d do them serious harm, and so long as they skitter the right way off asphalt, they will, again, usually end up in greenspace.

So yes. Either by accident or design, anoles end up dispersing across the Gulf Coast by way of motor vehicles. Thus is truth stranger than fiction.

(Tree frogs also disperse this way, but less successfully. There’s no guarantee a vehicle will head to a place with enough moisture for frog skin. That, and their propensity to search out crevices like they use in tree bark does not sort well with car doors. I avoid parking under trees. I know someone who doesn’t, and they keep a stick in their truck bed to hopefully prod frogs out of the door edges before they can go squish.)

When you travel you take things with you. Sometimes things you’d never expect. Living creatures. Ideas. Attitudes. Or just physical artifacts like a pen and specific kind of notebook, that are uncommon or don’t even exist where you take them. Because if they were common, why would you have to bring them?

How much or how little you travel with is only partly up to you. Traveling light is a fine thing to aspire to, but anyone who tries to cross the Sahara without water or Alaska without cold-weather gear does so only at great risk. And anyone who thinks they can travel to another country, culture, or even another town in their own nation without bringing along ideas of how things are supposed to work, is ignoring human nature.

There is no blank slate. There will always be some kind of baggage dragged from our pasts, for good or ill.

Hopefully, it’s just a lizard.