Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
I was walking in a field of cactus (one of many today), minding my own business, when tkatkatkatkatakatkatkatka. Five foot rattlesnake right in my path, one of the few non-spiky ways across. What do you do in this situation, you might ask? You curse loudly until your supervisor comes over, then half the field crew stands around and goes "whoa, it's big!", then you go way the hell the other way around no matter how many cacti there are.
I spent the rest of the day totally paranoid about rattlers, testing all my steps with my shovel first and looking down...except that if I looked down the whole time, I'd walk straight into the many and myriad spiders hanging from the trees. These spiders range in size all the way from "Is that a speck of dust in my eye? Hey, get off my hat brim!" to "You had better have a freaking message from a Maiden there, Shelob." and they were everywhere.
But you can't look up all the time because, as I mentioned, rattlesnakes and, much more commonly, cactus. In all shapes, sizes, and pointy-ness. Some were just like velcro that stuck to anything cloth (at one point, I had an entire shrub attached to my rear),some were very pretty bright purple thistles that had a hunger for knees, some were enormous spikes that went through the crew chief's shoe into his toe, and some were tiny little bright red filaments that you didn't even realize were cactus until well after you (I) took off my shoe and didn't realize they weren't more ant bites.
I have come to the conclusion that everything in this place wants to see humanity dead. It's like Oblivion. The plants want your soul.
[Edit: I forgot about the freaking horseflies! All damn day! Just go away, dudes! And the bees and wasps, but those were less immediately bothersome and more distantly worrying.]
I spent the rest of the day totally paranoid about rattlers, testing all my steps with my shovel first and looking down...except that if I looked down the whole time, I'd walk straight into the many and myriad spiders hanging from the trees. These spiders range in size all the way from "Is that a speck of dust in my eye? Hey, get off my hat brim!" to "You had better have a freaking message from a Maiden there, Shelob." and they were everywhere.
But you can't look up all the time because, as I mentioned, rattlesnakes and, much more commonly, cactus. In all shapes, sizes, and pointy-ness. Some were just like velcro that stuck to anything cloth (at one point, I had an entire shrub attached to my rear),some were very pretty bright purple thistles that had a hunger for knees, some were enormous spikes that went through the crew chief's shoe into his toe, and some were tiny little bright red filaments that you didn't even realize were cactus until well after you (I) took off my shoe and didn't realize they weren't more ant bites.
I have come to the conclusion that everything in this place wants to see humanity dead. It's like Oblivion. The plants want your soul.
[Edit: I forgot about the freaking horseflies! All damn day! Just go away, dudes! And the bees and wasps, but those were less immediately bothersome and more distantly worrying.]