Armadillo lessons
The armadillos are evolving. It’s the only answer.
Armadillos, you may ask? Yes, you may. Armadillos are those weird tank-like critters that have been invading the United States for decades, working their way up from Mexico and Florida. Haven’t seen one around the Chicago area? Wait a few years. You will. They look sort of like armored dog-sized anteaters. Which is a pretty accurate description of what they are.
Thinking about armadillos reminds me, fondly, of Pope John Paul II.
I first encountered an armadillo in Florida 35 years ago when we were moving to the Sunshine State. Looking out the back door of a home we were considering buying, I spied this strange creature ambling slowly across the tree-line. It was grayish and roundish, kind of pointed at both ends, with bands of leathery flesh around the middle.
The real estate agent dismissed my curiosity with a wave of her hand. “Just an ’dillo,” she said. “Get used to them; they’re here to stay.”
We did get used to them … mostly, though, as squashed and deceased lumps on the highway. They were a more common roadkill than anything else.
And, it turned out, there was a story behind that reality.
That story goes like this:
Armadillos, with their armor-like exterior, are safe from most predators (hence their swift spread across the southern U.S. and now into the Midwest). They just roll up into a leather-like ball and outwait the danger.
While armor may work against dogs and other toothy creatures, it isn’t particularly effective against chrome and steel and tires.
Even so, the animals are low-slung enough that big 18-wheel trucks can pass over them safely … unless the tires don’t miss. Still, there’s one other quality—or rather, failing—that seems to doom ’dillos on the roads. When they do become frightened and disoriented—like when a big rig is rumbling over them—they apparently have the disconcerting habit of leaping straight up.
Into the bottom of the truck. With predictable results.
Which is why, when we lived in Florida, squashed armadillos along the roadside were a common sight. Fear, for armadillos—as it is for us humans—is too often a fatal reaction.
The week following Pope John Paul II’s death I had to fulfill a commitment made to one of our sons to drive their rental truck from Chicago to Florida. He and his wife had to ferry their cars and my wife and I would follow with the big truck carrying their belongings.
Obviously, since we had just completed the special section in the April 10 edition of The Catholic New World announcing the pope’s death, the man was on my mind as we left and headed south down Interstate 65.
Recalling armadillos and knowing Pope John Paul’s appreciation for the Scripture passage, “Be not afraid, I go before you always,” I kept my eyes peeled for the critters I knew were too often killed by their fear.
Therein lies a connection, I suppose, between funny-looking ’dillos and the rest of us. I like to think that connection is what Pope John Paul might have had in mind when he included the Scripture in his 1993 encyclical, “The Splendor of Truth.” And why those were among the first words he uttered as he began the papacy in 1978. While he could not, at the end, utter them, he surely lived them: be not afraid to change the world, be not afraid to try, be not afraid to struggle, be not afraid to fail, be not afraid to believe, to challenge, to love.
As I said at the beginning of this column: the armadillos must have evolved. We didn’t see a single one, dead or alive.
If ’dillos can conquer their fear, why not us?
Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager
