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Health & Fitness

Wacky NH Behavior Continues

Before Christmas, the high spirits of the season caused an ersatz Santa in Hollis to knock on elementary school windows and a postal employee in Hampton to pretend for awestruck children’s benefit that Santa was working behind the scenes at the local post office.

We might expect that a fresh start in the New Year would bring an end to the eccentric behavior of Granite Staters. Not so.

David Campbell, a member of the state legislature, ran over a family of ducks in his 5-series BMW. Campbell seemed rather unperturbed and unrepentant about the incident. According to The Atlantic, Campbell said, “I hit some ducks. Some people were feeding ducks in the driveway in front of the Crowne Plaza at 10 o’clock last night . . . and they didn’t move, and I hit some ducks.”

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Now that’s pretty unfeeling. Even callous New Yorkers show more compassion than that. My wife and I were driving along the Cross-Island Expressway on Long Island when traffic came to a halt. As we inched forward, we discovered that the cause of slowdown was a swan who was waddling down the center lane of the highway. All those otherwise aggressive New York drivers were doing their utmost to avoid hitting the swan.

David Graham, the reporter for The Atlantic, writes that even though Campbell might be accused of a “fowl deed” that “making way for ducklings” may not be a safe driving practice. Thousands of car accidents are caused each year by drivers swerving to avoid animals in the road. According to a Washington state trooper quoted by Graham, “Best practice, when an animal enters the roadway, don’t swerve to avoid it. If you can straight line brake, then do so. If not, strike the animal.”

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Graham also notes that since these birds are residents of New Hampshire, they are libertarians, want to make up their own minds and don’t like government or others in authority telling where they can waddle. “Live free or die,” as it were.

Most of you probably remember the part of the movie A Christmas Story where on a freezing wintry day, in response to a dare, Flick licks a metal pole, and his tongue sticks to the pole. Who would do such a thing? In real life that would never happen.

Wrong. Maddie Gilmartin, 12, of East Kingston was helping her dad clean up after a snowstorm. She wondered what would happen if she licked a metal pole. Impulse control has never been a strong suit for 12 year olds. According to WCVB (1/4/14), it didn’t take a “triple dog dare” to get Maddie to lick the pole. Life imitates art. Like Flick in “A Christmas Story,” Maddie’s tongue stuck to the pole.

Maddie reflected on her sticky situation. “I was just like, did I really do that to myself, like did I really just do that?” It took some warm water and the help of EMTs to separate Maddie from the pole.

So things aren’t quite back to normal in the Granite State. Nor really do I expect them to become so given the high number of rugged individualists, non-conformists, and eccentrics who live here. Given that, we can expect to be astonished and entertained by the antics of our fellow citizens in the coming year.

If you would like to read more about the colorful characters who live in New Hampshire, may I suggest my new book Outtastatahs: Newcomers’ Adventures in New Hampshire.

Outtastatahs can be purchased for $13.99 at River Run Books in Portsmouth; at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter; at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord; or on-line at amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com.

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