FromSwamptoSummit

At some point I’ll finish the last of the sabbatical posts – which will require a return to November 2023 and our stay in Rome. And I still haven’t recounted our ill-fated adventure up the highest peak in North Africa, Mount Toubkal, back in May 2024. Much less our recent backpacking trip on the Lost Coast of California.

But regardless, today’s digression is a brief journey to the wonderful world of drones. Not the male bees who lounge all day outside (or inside?) of the hive, but these small, buzzing mechanical creatures that whir overhead, seemingly spying on all below.

I’ve always found them somewhat horrifying, so I was not overly thrilled to arrive home a couple of weeks ago and find that J had taken advantage of Amazon Prime days to purchase just such a creature. His ostensible justification was that we could use it to take photos at Five Oaks, the property we are restoring up in North Carolina. Ah well. Maybe.

The next day, I returned home to find J with a woebegone look on his face. Apparently he had experimented with the creature inside our house – this was even more horrifying because the possibilities of a drone-domestic object crash seemed quite high. In any event, he’d avoided such calamities and was emboldened to take the creature outside on what seemed a perfectly still day. However, that was not true about 30 or 40 feet up – where the wind had whisked the creature off, outside the range of the controls, and it was carried off to parts unknown.

J drove around the neighborhood in a vain search for the thing, but it was nowhere to be found. Whew, I thought.

That is, until about five or so days later. Following one of the particularly heavy rainstorms that have been the hallmark of this summer in Orlando, J went out to look at our very small pond – only to find the creature sitting at the bottom (only about five inches down) – cheerily smiling up at him.

He carefully extracted it from the water, and dried it with care, blow drying it and gently wiping off the pond scum, providing it with all the creature comforts a drone could want. Oh well, I thought, the likelihood it could still work were slim.

But a couple of nights ago, just before I left for an out of town weekend, I was lying in bed and heard a whirring, buzzing noise, like the pitch of a mosquito but a bit lower in range. This was followed by the sound of several crashes, a yowling cat, but fortunately no breaking glass.

Like a phoenix, the drone had resurrected itself and was happily flying around the house, wreaking havoc and presumably recording all it was seeing. I head back to Orlando tomorrow. We’ll see what damage the creature has wrought.

Or maybe it will have decided to fly away again.