They never heard it coming
Klonie JORDAN

Whoever said walking is good for you never got hit by a motor vehicle.

I would certainly not wish this on anyone. I'm just saying it could happen.

And it could more likely happen if you don't take the appropriate precautions.

This occurred to me the other day when I was walking down a city street, you know, for exercise, and I spoke to four different people who passed me walking in the opposite direction - and none of them responded.

NONE OF THEM. I checked my armpits and while it wasn't exactly the kind of odor you would want to bottle and sell at a designer perfume shop (I had been perspiring, after all), it was by no means overly offensive.

Then a fifth walker approached and when I spoke to her, she smiled slightly but never offered a verbal response. That's when I noticed the wires hanging from the sides of her head connected to the teeny-tiny earphones she was wearing.

So that's why I was being ignored.

We are in an age of micro-electronics. Nowadays they make cell phones the size of Chiclets and headphones they call "earbuds" that fit snugly inside one's ears and are difficult to see unless you are looking for them.

I was thinking about this techno-phenomenon later and came to the conclusion that it is probably not a very wise decision to traverse city highways and byways on foot with diminished or voided audio capabilities.

I know it's probably considered cool to wear microlistening devices and get pumped while listening to your favorite artists while exercising. And that might be safe inside a gym or weight room, but when you're outside, well, it's a jungle out there.

And don't even ask me to try to discuss the kinds of music young-uns (and by young-uns, I mean anybody younger than 29) listen to these days. I asked a collegeage guy the other day what he was listening to as he adjusted his iPod.

"Corn," he said.

Seriously, he said he was listening to corn.

That's news to me because I didn't even know corn made noise. I thought that maybe he had discovered some sort of "vege-music" to which he alone, or some secret society of plant-listeners, was privy.

So I went home and tried it. When my wife came in and caught me with a couple of ears of corn pressed against both sides of my face, she asked me what I was doing. Then she checked to make sure there weren't any sharp objects within my reach just in case I had finally gone off the deep end (she's thinking to herself, "so this is how it ends - with this corn nut getting hauled off for shock treatments because he's trying to tune in to raw produce").

Well, I explained to her how some kid down at the college had figured out how to listen to raw vegetables and then I told her I had been listening for well over an hour and my corn hadn't made a sound. Then I asked her to get a flashlight and look in my left ear because it felt like a weevil or bug, which had probably been hiding inside the husk, had crawled down in there.

Well, it turns out "corn" is spelled "Korn" and it's a musical group. Go figure.

Anyway, back to this thing about walking around city streets while not being able to hear what's going on around you.

It seems to me that you would be missing out on part of the beauty of all the natural wonder around you, like the sounds of birds warbling in the trees or squirrels chattering as they scamper from overhead power line to overhead power line.

And that's not even figuring in the safety factor.

Say, for example, you're walking down the street with your earbuds firmly implanted and Korn tunes reverberating off the inside of your skull when all of a sudden a runaway ice cream truck rounds a curve and the driver lays on the horn to warn you that his brakes are out but you don't hear him because you're wrapped up in your own little musical world and then it's all over for you - KA-SQUISH!

The next thing you know the coroner is kneeling there over your lifeless body wearing rubber gloves and using a pair of pliers to extract a couple of ice cream cones from your eye sockets. That's going to look less than flattering on a death certificate - "victim died of forcible waffle-cone ocular entry."

And that's just one of many potential deadly scenarios.

What if, heaven forbid, you are merrily hoofing it along on College Drive near where that big halfclamshell water fountain is when there's a sudden water pressure buildup under the street that causes said fountain to erupt like Old Faithful. You're walking along enjoying your music while a 20 foot-high wall of water is bearing down on you from behind and you don't hear it coming. OK, granted it would be difficult to escape a 20 foot-high wall of water EVEN IF YOU COULD HEAR IT COMING. But at least you would know what it was that killed you instead of being dry and happy and musically entertained one second and wet and dead the next with no clue what happened.

So, if you insist on listening to your portable audio device through your micro-electronic ear gizmo while walking, jogging or otherwise moving about on foot, for Pete's sake, be careful out there.

It might also be wise to maybe invest in a waffle cone-proof face shield.

Just in case.

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com)

is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.