Ever had a bad day? I'm sure they come up now and again. For contributors of this site, bad days probably max out at spirit crunching Pens losses, a half-cocked Indy sequel, or on that rare occasion, house parties being mistaken for meth labs (cops are idiots). However, I'm pretty sure this woman's bad day trumps most anything you or I have been through.
Ashley Swendson, a 26 year old hippie living in Colorado Springs with her hippie boyfriend, was having her typical pregnant day, taking in a little exercise with her usual stroll on a path near her house. She had gotten well into her walk, eventually passing a stream that looked the way a stream usually does, not too much out of place since her previous walk. Oh, but this time there was a 225 lb. black bear staring her right in the eyeballs (I hate it when that happens). Their eyes met, and after shitting her pants (I'm just going to assume that happened), she pulls an about face and starts to walk away from the bear. Good thinking, you don't want to run and give him something to chase, and you don't want to stand still unless you plan on making a lot of noise to scare the big bastard along. Calmly walking away, she turns and notices that the bear is following her. Though not giving chase, he's definitely taken an interest and is walking along after her.
You can't fault the bear for this either. If you're an animal, just waking up from hibernation, probably starving, you take a look at this woman (a hefty pregnant gal) and you must be thinking, "Okay, obviously big and fat, slow moving, I can just smell those milk filled jugs...If this isn't the easiest lunch I've ever hunted then I'm a retard. Imagine how all the other bears will be laughing if I can't maul this bipedal walrus." So, with his common sense, he walks after her. For about 100 yards (yes the size of a football field), he trails her, at times only a few yards behind.
Swendson doesn't put up with it much longer, and soon her fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. Obviously she goes with flight, and pretty soon starts cheesing it down the path. The bear, trodding after her at first, soon loses interest and instead goes back to being a sucky hunter somewhere nearby. But the woman is long gone by now, running as fast as the bowling ball in her stomach would allow. She's screaming for help at the top of her lungs but no one is answering or coming to aide. Finally, the walking path intersects a roadway right before a bridge. Separated by a guardrail, she thumbles over the obstruction and with no sidewalk to cling to, flees right into the middle of the road.
The bear story would be enough to make the headlines, but instead this woman goes 2 for 2 on Terrible Things To Avoid While Pregnant. A car comes flying down the road as she clears the guardrail and BAM! She topples across the hood of the car. The gall-darn-crazy-woman-driver behind the wheel, audible through a cracked window, yells "I tried to slow down!!" And as Swendson gingerly removes her fat ass from the hood with a cry of "I'm being chased by a bear!!!!!", the lady speeds away. Three other vehicles were behind this loon's car, all driving away too.
It's okay to laugh at this story (unless you've been laughing the whole time anyway because you're a dick) because both Mama and Child are fine. A few superficial injuries later and she's the spotlight of her backwoods community, even getting onto the Today Show this morning. That's not the end of it, three big points to close out the aftermath:
1. The bear, obviously mad at himself for not catching the easiest of adult human prey (I guess adult cripples would be the only thing easier), wanders into a neighboring family's backyard hunting for some juicy kiddies. After getting a description and possible location of the bear, Animal Control confronts the beast, takes it down with a heavy tranq gun, then euthanizes him. So passes Brown Bear, maybe the dumbest bear in Colorado. His passing, however, leads to....
2. The local neighborhood BLAMING Swendson for the bear's death. You heard correct, they blame the pregnant lady who saved TWO lives. The same TWO lives who were victims of a hit-and-run moments after they escaped the jaws of Baloo. The neighbor whose yard the bear frequented blamed Swendsen for what she called the unnecessary death of the bear. A local newspaper printed the story, and the hate messages directed at Swendsen started pouring into chat rooms and message boards. And finally...
3. The idiot who performed the hit and run. Apparently she turned herself in to police two days after the incident. No word yet whether or not Swendson will sue, stating “I wasn’t hurt, but at the same time, why didn’t she stop? I would have done that. What if I was a teenager or a kid? You would have just kept going? That doesn’t make sense."
Bad day or not, Swendsen and her fiancee have decided that they will honor the memory of the bear. When her baby is born, its middle name will be “Little Bear.”
Weird hippies.
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