We All Could Learn Something from Balboa the Squirrel

As I lazed the days away in my hammock during my vacation last week, I found that I got the most entertainment out of watching a little Douglas Squirrel go about his daily work of preparing for winter. As cold as it was at night at 10,000 feet in the Rockies, winter seemed to be just about there and this little guy was hard at it.
I didn’t really pay much attention to him the first day until he (or she, I don’t know, I didn’t look that close) jumped up on to our picnic table with something large in its mouth. I later was to learn that the little critter was gathering mushrooms, of all things.
From then on, he had my attention and that of my darling wife (who remains unidentified for her reputation’s protection). From well before I rolled out of our tent, until the last rays of sun dropped behind the ridgeline, Balboa was a blur of activity.
I decided to call him Balboa because Rocky was too cliché, and all I could hear in my head as he ran full-tilt from the mushroom patch that seemed to constantly have a new cap bursting through the pine straw to one of the nearby trees was the Rocky theme, so I called him Balboa. He didn’t seem to mind.
The more we watched, the more we learned about the critter and the more I thought how things might be better all around if people were more like Balboa the Squirrel. Here was a little rodent, and he was rather small, that had figured out how to make the most of the available food source. While I’m sure he was harvesting pinecone seeds and berries too, he was actually processing the mushrooms. He would cut it down, carry it onto a high branch and tuck it away to dry in the sun before taking it to his food cache. Or at least that’s how it looked.
All day long, back and forth, with only one thing on his mind: survival. That, after all, is his job; stay alive and reproduce. Balboa was a tireless laborer.
As I said, I thought about how I wish that people were more like Balboa the Squirrel and not because I want them to eat a lot of mushrooms. I wish they had his drive, his perseverance and his vision.
He knows what is coming even though he has no weatherman and he understands that if he wants to live, he has to build up his supplies. He has to invest the time to survive.
Too many people today, from politicians to day laborers, don’t want to invest the time to survive. They want everything handed to them. They want a job, but not one that involves too much work. They want the government to come and save them from their own mistakes, to provide them with free healthcare and guarantee their cars will be sold. They want people who disagree with them to just go away and they want it all, now and for free.
Balboa knows that nothing is free, he knows that every minute that passes by is a minute he must take to get one more piece of food stored away for those long, cold winter days that are coming. He doesn’t realize that he could be working for naught and that his life could end in a flash of eagle’s talons or the blast of a hunter’s shotgun. He just knows that survival depends on getting the job done so he does it, day-in and day-out.
Things come too easy to most of us, even those of us who struggle from payday to payday. Even if you don’t have a job, chances are you aren’t as poor as the poor in other countries and you can get some aide from the government through one program or another. That’s good for those who really need it, but it’s only a temporary fix, and some use it as a crutch and just get dependent on it.
So maybe we should all make an effort to try to learn a little something from Balboa the Squirrel. We, as citizens and neighbors, could learn to be more industrious in our labors. (Like me with my much neglected garden) and our government could learn to be a bit more industrious in how they run things and stop giving away the store. There is, after all, always a winter coming sooner or later and we have to have something left to eat.
Maybe we should all be working to survive the long cold winter of our worsening economy and employment numbers, so that when spring comes we will emerge strong and full of mushrooms. So to speak.