top of page

At the Road's Corner

In today’s world, everyone is in a rat race to live their lives and achieve their dreams. We walk our paths everyday looking forward towards tomorrow. But sometimes take a minute to stop and look around and there may be someone or something beautiful (and sometimes scary) just sitting at the edge of your road waiting to be noticed. Just like this scorpion on the busy roads of Quitó, Ecuador.

So what do you do when you find a scorpion blockading your road? well it depends, I, in my limited experience have found three common reactions. Type one people are the most fun to watch as they tend lead out a cry of terror and bounce several feet backwards as if they have received a high voltage shock. Type two look around them trying to find the heaviest rock, brick, bag, anything heavy really that they can lift for long enough to be able to release it vertically on top of the scorpion to smash it into a paste. And type three, who in my humble opinion are the worst of them (well worst for the scorpion at least); manage to find a long stick to poke the creature till a leg or too are detached from the main body. they then tend to follow the second type's example in finding something heavy to smash the scorpion with, or simply beat it to a paste with the stick itself.

Its quite evident from above that road blockading doesn't generally end well for scorpions. Thus they tend to avoid roads and people at all cost. its really rare to find them on well travelled human paths. But sometimes rain, human activities, running water or some other factor force them to come in contact with us travelling down a road towards our next human goal or desire. So if you ever get road blocked by a scorpion or just find one visible near one. please don't act like the three types explained above and find a soft branch or leaf and gently coax it away in to the nearest vegetation away from the road; where it will disappear from human eye into the wild corners that exist at edges of our human world.

bottom of page