“I was greeted with a bunch of googly eyes staring back at me.”
Sounds like the title of a Sherlock Holmes story, doesn’t it? But this incident was real, and I happened to have a role in it, so let me tell the tale.
JUST AN ORDINARY WALK…
I still do a fair amount of walking, maybe not as much as I did in the past, but at least 2-3 miles every other day. Most of my walks are outside the gates of our Ocean Hills community, where the main drag, Cannon Road, ends a quarter-mile down at a fence separating Oceanside from a wilderness area called Carlsbad Highlands Ecological Reserve. I often walk down that way and occasionally hike out on the Reserve.
One day, I was about two-thirds of the way down the hill when I noticed a horrific smell. That was a first. I continued on to the fence, then paralleled it toward the opposite side of the road. Whoa, did it stink even worse! Why? About halfway along I peered over the low fence and was greeted with a bunch of googly eyes staring back at me. They belonged to a school of very large, very dead fish! WTF!?!? Rather unnerving, don’t you know?
A portion of the Carlsbad Highlands Ecological Reserve.
Living about eight miles from the coast, I’ve seen my share of dead fish washed up on the beach. But inland? The nearest water to where these dead fish appeared is a small lake out on the Reserve, but even that is a couple of miles away. Clearly, they must have been dumped there. But…why?
Subsequently, if I walked down the hill at all over the next few days, I immediately turned around as soon as I caught a whiff of the decomposing critters. After about a week the smell grew more faint, and when I finally dared approach the fence again, I saw that the piscine patrol had been given a decent burial under a large mound of earth, probably the work of whoever maintained the Ecological Reserve.
Maybe Sherlock would have fared better, because I never did solve the strange case of the dead fish.