Cyclone Fencing Quotes

There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish. It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.

One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds. Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day. Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all.

In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I wouldn't even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fence and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that most people get no help at all. I sure didn't, oh, no: it was just me and Castle, charging, desperate, through the country darkness, and that's how it is for most people who dare to run - no help from no Airlines, no help from no one. They just go, man, after years of planning or in the heat of a sudden moment they go, hurl their skinny bodies over a cyclone fence or purge themselves into a moat, break free of a chain line or a guard's hard grip and run, brother, run, sister, run along back roads and through forests. No planes and no cars or trucks, either. Just brave souls darting across open fields and wading in and out of rivers and stumbling along deer paths through dark woods. Find the star and follow it, as runners have done all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.

I needed to build a four-hundred-square-foot enclosure, with a curbed concrete-slab floor six inches thick. The fence needed to be five-gauge cyclone fencing. I contacted several building companies and discovered that no manufacturer had made five-gauge cyclone fencing since World War II.

Since the [Golden Gate Bridge] opened in 1937, it has been the site of over 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period. What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping or a net was installed to catch them before they fell.... So when did the municipality that run the Golden Gate Bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, more than 80 years after the bridge opened. In the intermediating period the bridge authority spent millions of dollars building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate Bridge. It spent millions building a median to separate North and South bound traffic on the grounds of public safety. On the southern end of the bridge, the authority put up an 8 foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Fort Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protected net was even installed on the initial construction of the bridge at enormous cost to prevent workers from falling from their deaths. The net saved 19 lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more than 80 years...

Your Fingerprint and The Cyclone Fence Stand at the baseline. Raise your index and with your finger print about 8 to 12 inches from your face. Focus until you can see your fingerprint perfectly. Everything beyond your finger will be out of focus and most likely appear as double vision. From your fingerprint, shift your focus to the far fence, pick a small object on the fence on which to focus, preferably at the same height which you would be looking at the toss. Did you feel your focus shifting away? Take your focus back and forth from your fingerprint to the back fence until you experience your focus traveling back and forth in between these two objects you are taking turns to focus. Shift your focus as smoothly and quickly as possible between the two objects. This will exercise your eyes to smoothly shift focus. Once you begin to feel very comfortable, then experiment with focusing on the far fence all the way to your fingerprint and have your focus shift as fast as possible, as though you were following a ball in flight. Now do this faster and faster. The focus of your eyes, can shift at well over 100 MPH, but the exact number, or if any limit exists is not known by me. Now go and rally some tennis balls and try to maintain focus on the ball during an entire rally.  Of course, when you are tracking you can work to keep the ball fairly close to the center of your vision. Action Items: * Exercise above for up to 5 minutes each day for one week. * After one week, use as 30 second to 1 minute warm up. * Also use when you have been overpowered by speed of shot.

Steve didn’t fear death. Maybe that was part of his secret for being so gifted with wildlife. He had such perfect love for every animal, and especially crocodiles, that there didn’t seem to be any room left over for fear. But this didn’t mean that Steve didn’t have his share of close calls. One day I was feeding Cookie, Wes was feeding Mary, and our crew member Jan was backing up Wes. Steve talked to the zoo visitors about our big male, Agro, partially submerged in the water near Steve. Steve was so intent on getting his message across about crocodiles that he might have been a bit distracted. It had poured rain that day, leaving the grass wet and slippery. Agro took full advantage when Steve’s back was to the water. He powered forward like a missile, out of the water and halfway up the bank. As he came out, Wes yelled. Agro had Steve backed against the fence. Steve couldn’t move. I looked across the enclosure and saw the look on Steve’s face--it wasn’t fear, it was resolve. A big male saltwater croc was about to grab him. But for some unknown reason, Agro hesitated for a split second. Maybe he just couldn’t believe his luck. Or he was distracted by Wes, running over to save his best friend. Steve darted sideways and ran down the fence line. He was safe. The audience erupted in excited chatter. “Nothing short of a miracle,” a crowd member said about Steve’s escape. Was it? Was it his sixth sense? Was it his mate, Wes? That night we lay in bed and I stroked his face, tracing the lines that were starting to form around the corners of his eyes, waiting for his breathing to become more regular as he fell asleep. “I thought for a minute there he had me,” Steve said softly in the dark. Steve was never one to panic, and that kind of levelheaded thinking allowed him to return the favor to Wes in a much closer call during cyclone season in March 2001.