Oh, Beebe. (One more town that’s permanently off my bucket list.)

I actually don’t have much of a bucket list.  Other than get our will rewritten, but that’s no fun.

Given that I’m at the age where, if the end is not exactly in sight, I should no longer be all that surprised if it’s around some corner or another, smirking at me.

So, yes, I should get a bucket list going.

I do have a couple of must-see places on it. First on the list is Venice. I’d also like to hit New Zealand, Alaska, and Pittsburgh. (No kidding, by the way. For whatever reason I’ve had a number of dreams that took place at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. Not that dreams have to always be telling me something, but this one seems to be. So at some point, it’ll be a weekend in Pittsburgh. See Pittsburgh and die…)

But I do have one place that’s permanently off.

Sure, there were lots of countries, cities, and towns in the same category of places I’m unlikely to go to, so Beebe, Arkansas by no means stood alone. (Somalia? Paraguay? Baluchistan?) In fact, a lot of the places I’m unlikely to go to happen to be in Arkansas (think Bentonville) and adjoining states. Plenty of these are places which, like Beebe, I’ve never even heard of.

But Beebe’s made the news big time, and in a way that caws loud and clear ‘include me out’ of any travel plans that factor this town in.

What happened in Beebe was not the Biblical raining of frogs, nor the Weather Girls raining of men (alleluia).  On New Years Eve, it started raining red-winged blackbirds. And this was no 4 and 20 blackbirds, baked in a pie. There were about 5,000 of them, which works out to about one per capita per Beebe-an.  And per capita was just about what happened, as some citizens reported near misses of dead bird on their heads. (Source: NY Times.)

The current theory is that the birds were traumatized by fireworks, or a hailstorm, and died of some form of avian PTSD.

Boy, it’s one thing to get crapped on by a bird. It’s another thing to come upon an occasional dead bird just laying about. (One time, in Boston Common, I witnessed a street person talking to a live pigeon, standing next to a dead pigeon. “Was that the missus?” he asked. There was no reply.)

But 5,000 dead birds, coming down over a square mile. That’s an awful lot of dead birds to cope with when all you want to do is usher out the old year, and ring in the new.  Having a lawn covered with dead blackbirds greet you on January 1st just doesn’t seem to portend much positive about the coming year. Although it certainly will make the holiday memorable.

I’d like to quoth the raven, ‘nevermore’, but there’s no guarantee that this won’t happen again. Naturally, I do hope that the good folks of Beebe don’t end up with a repeat performance of this unnatural act. And I do hope that the not so good folks of Beebe don’t start conjuring up some repeat performance to put Beebe on the map.  (“Hey, anyone can go to Times Square and watch the ball drop, or walk around Boston looking at ice sculpture, but if you really want to see something pretty durned unique, just head for Beebe….”)

Poor Beebe! Who wants dead bird rain to be their signature event? It’s one thing to celebrate Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, or the swallows coming back to Capistrano.

I bet if I were a resident of Beebe, I’d be thinking ‘end of days.’

Time to get the bucket list going.

And I’m afraid that Beebe is not now, and never will be, on mine. But I will be adding Machu Pichu in.