An Odd Dilemma

I had never expected to be caught in a Mexican standoff with a dead moth over a few slices of pizza, yet there I was on Sunday night in the grips of an odd dilemma.  I blame my wife.  She hates when I swat flies or moths in the house, so in deference to her I withheld my righteous smiting of it when it was fluttering in front of the flat screen earlier and I had a clear shot.  Had I known it was no casual flyby but a casing of the joint I surely would have acted.

An hour after that I was ziplocking not one, not two, but three slices of my favorite pizza under the little overhead oven light when he made his move –a power dive for the closing bag.  Though I wasn’t expecting it and I’m sure lesser men would have quailed, I beat him to the punch with my finely honed catlike reflexes and got that bag zipped just as he came crashing into the seal.  Though the pizza was safe (thanks to my speed and courage under fire) the moth was right there, wiggling frantically just outside the seal.  Was he trying to burrow in?  I felt I had no choice; innocent slices were at risk and the crazed assailant was still attacking.  Invoking my right of domestic defense, I squished him.

[Before anybody protests, yes I know I very recently wrote "all god's creatures great and small... " but this moth was clearly a menace headed for a bad end.  I'm sure the mothian authorities would approve his removal from their gene pool ...if indeed there were... um... mothian authorities to ask.  Anyway...]

Moths, apparently, are made of dust and soot.  That’s what came out and spread across the outside seal of the ziplock.  So the immediate threat was gone, but the pizza was still trapped inside.  It being a standoff, I stared him down.  Stubbornly, the dead moth would not budge.  Diabolical.

Why had he done this?  Could a moth really share my love of ham and onion pizza from Stefano's?  Unlikely.  Was it a foreign moth, coming here to attack our way of life starting with our comfort foods?  No way to know, and I had a bigger problem to solve anyway.

Clearly action was needed but if I opened the bag to retrieve the trapped slices there was a high risk of mothdust contamination.  If I flushed the outer seal with water and even a drop got in the bag somehow, I would still lose the 3 souls trapped inside.  -As a firefighter one must think of rescues in this way.  And now that my mind was in this mode I ran through all the training, tools and techniques I had learned at the academy.



jaws of life



hydraulic ram





the Irons; ax and
halligan bar



   

It's not that I wasn't willing to go to the firehouse for any of that equipment, it's just that they didn't fit the job.  The risk of crushing the bag's occupants was too great.  The full gamut of rescue equipment was in this instance, nothing more than an expensive pile of false hope.  What now?  If the equipment couldn't help, would rescue theory?  I thought back, what had they said about being trapped in a room where the doors and windows could not be used, but you had to GET OUT? -Make an exit!  That's what my training said.  In a structure fire that meant using the irons to punch through an interior wall.  But in this case... my daughter's safety scissors used to cut a hole in the back of the bag and free the trapped occupants.   Success!

                                  Sometimes it's the simplest of tools that saves the day.

Moth: 0

Me:    1

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