It was with great sadness I learned of the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s death in a freakish encounter with a sting ray on the Great Barrier Reef. Although I had seen the man less and less over the years, I still recall with fondness scrambling by his side over sand dunes in search of scorpions, poking sticks under rocks to agitate rattlesnakes, and scuba diving in the South China Sea (in his khaki-every-zoologist/safari guide uniform he always wore) to swim with sea turtles. Being the consummate showman he was, he played footsie with the rider of the pale water buffalo-camel-ostrich-whatever, always understanding the value of an ounce of peril mixed with a pint of knowledge.
I fear for men like the Crocodile Hunter and Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man. They make a career telling a cold, unresponsive camera lens to be careful of fangs, and teeth, and claws and spitting venom. Take one . . . let’s do it again . . . take two . . . no, that doesn’t sound right . . . take three . . . okay, with a little editing we’ll clean it up Steve . . . Tim . . . Bucky . . .
That’s right . . . Bucky. Bucky Mularcky, the Shark Wrestler. He’s actually the guy who started it all, the original. He was the man upon whom Peter Benchley based the character of Quint in his famous novel and film about lurking death in the depths, Jaws. He may be more myth than man now. I only heard one story of the Shark Wrestler, told to be by the man who everybody thinks Quint is actually based on.
“Quint’s not me,” he said. “It’s him. Buck Mularcky, a retired jockey with one arthritic knee who made a second career out of taking rich, fat Boston blue bloods out on a good ol’ shark hunt. Instead Buck dived in and wrestled with them. Made those wall street types piss right there on deck with his antics.”
Buck Mularcky bit off more than he could chew on that last charter when two great whites bit him in half like he was a bloody chum ball. He had grown too comfortable with danger, fallen in love with the hero, The Shark Wrestler, he had become in the eyes of those city cats. He was Narcissus, only he had the whole Atlantic gray to look down into and see his beauty smiling back at him with several rows of sharpened teeth.
Okay, Bucky didn’t have a camera. Both the Croc Hunter and the Grizzly Man did. I wonder if they saw their own reflections in the camera lens?
Who’s next for the death of scale-shell-fur-claw? I met a man who raises redworms, Eisenia fetida. He dived into a vat three feet high of worms when I stopped by his warehouse on business I will not discuss here. He had an audience of one. Think if he had a whole nation? I was more than a bit shocked at his behavior, but later I learned that worm husbandry was a second career for him. He had been a competitive skier and had lived in the French Alps the last twenty-five years. It all came together. Hunt McLish is an adrenaline junky that, if I am to call myself human, I must save from his own foolishness.
You see there’s a reason to fear. There’s a purpose to not forgetting the fear. We are here today because our ancestors feared that which could kill them. They didn’t go walking up to bears, wrestling sharks or jumping on top of mature crocodiles. Respect and fear of that which has the potential to kill is a survival trait passed down through thousands of generations. To try to turn off that fear, disregard it, embrace that which can kill and thus turn off the wisdom of the species, the generations, is mortal folly, though yes indeed, damn good entertainment!