Halfway out Arbuckle Lane my internal review of the day's teaching was already underway when I tripped over a lump in the road beside an old cattle gate.
A young life of running away from guys trying to knock me down has it's advantages in middle life, and I was able to keep my legs and continue along the greening grassland of the karst sinkholes and ridges of spring in the Greenbrier Valley. At the top of the Lost World Caverns rise, I about-faced and headed back the way I had come, stopping to drag the lump into the brush by it's naked pink tail.
A week later I was hit by a stench of rot as I ran past the cattle gate, swerving to the other side of the road until it passed. On the way back, I toed over a little mound of gray fur and out spilled squirming white larvae from each of the holes. It was a fast sprint back to town.
Two weeks on I was puzzling out how to teach the complex topic of sacroiliac dysfunction when I ran past a little pile of white bones. Squatting beside them, I saw that the sacroiliac joint was straight, shaped like the letter I, while ours is bent like an L. We walk, they don't, end of story...
... until a trip to the Smithsonian mammalian skeleton collection revealed a gradation of sacroiliac angles, from minimal in marsupials and grazers, near 45 degrees in dogs and cats, and closer to 90 in monkeys and primates. Now there was a puzzle!
The next run out Arbuckle Lane found me squatting over those opossum bones. If quadrupeds that don't sit have straight SI joints, canines and felines that sit with or without command have more of an angle, and monkeys and apes that squat to eat, groom, and everything else except locomotion have the most acute sacroiliac angles, why too do we?
I stood up from my squatting revelation and flew home to write it up.
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