Every day my husband asks, “Is it ever going to stop raining?” It just keeps on raining, day after day, with thunder and lightning and torrential rains. This is the type of weather that causes lakes and rivers to flood, and I was looking out the window at the rain, which was pouring down in buckets full. Suddenly, Noah’s Ark popped into my head. Is this what it was like for Noah once he built the ark? Was he sitting on the boat as the rain came down, watching the water slowly rise up around him until the boat could float?
Then I got thinking about the whole concept of trying to save the animals, trees, plants, and insects, on a ship. If someone plunked an already built ship in my back yard, told me that the world was going to flood and I had thirty days to populate that boat, what would I do? What if they told me to put two of every animal, and plant, and vegetable, and fruit, and insects to pollinate the fruit trees, on board my Noah’s Ark?
The first thing I’d want to save would be dogs, and just that one species would be difficult. Think about it. There are countless breeds of dogs: german shepherds, huskies, beagles, catahoula leopard dogs, golden retrievers… you get the idea. Now I’m supposed to save them, but how? In thirty days time, how the heck am I supposed to round up a breeding pair of every species of dog? Our local pet stores only carry a handful of breeds, and always the smaller breeds. No Lassie dogs, or labrador retrievers there.
And what about fruit trees? We’ve got a self-pollinating peach tree, apple tree, and pear tree in the back yard. If I drove to the local nursery, I might find a cherry tree and a plum tree. But no way would I find lemons, oranges, coconuts, bananas, or grapefruits, because they don’t grow in my region. This whole two-fer plan to stock the ship is starting to get really complicated.
Now I’ve got to figure out vegetables and ground fruits. That’s a little easier. I can go buy packets of seeds and hope that my gardening skills are up to snuff. But oh wait, now I need to pack implements to plant and care for the seedlings because if they die, it’s not like I can go to the store, buy more seeds, and try again. This is do or die.
So what’s next on the list? Oh yeah, more animals. Lots more animals. Well you can forget giraffes, lions, tigers, and bears, because unless the zoo believes my wild story that The Big Man upstairs gave me a boat for the end of the world, I won’t be able to get my hands on a breeding pair of exotic or wild animals.
The next thing on the list is to grab a phone book and see if there are any horse farms selling horses, or farmers selling cows or pigs or goats. We live out in the boonies, so I might get lucky there.
Now we need frogs, lizards, snakes and turtles. Well, the pet store might have about three species, but they probably wouldn’t have breeding pairs. In all the years we’ve lived in this house, I’ve only caught one lizard, two turtles, and a few frogs, so stocking up on reptiles is not going to go well. It’s easier to catch spiders than reptiles, but only in the fall and that’s several months away.
Even if I had enough money to fly in plants, animals, and insects from around the world, they’d be delayed by customs and quarantine laws and all that, and they might not arrive by the deadline.
So Noah was supposed to stock the entire ark without phones, airplanes, trucking lines, pet stores, the internet, and all that. I mean seriously, how the heck did he do it? Saving every species on earth would be such a logistical nightmare. Even saving 10% of all the species would be darn near impossible. We’d better hope that somebody, somewhere, has a fully stocked lab full of clone cells, or we’re sunk!