Big and then there’s big!

In the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee, a mugger approaches Mick Dundee and demands his wallet. The New York Times Reporter who brought Dundee back to New York, steps back fearful and tells him to do what the mugger says.

Dundee played by Paul Hogan, gets a big smile and says “That’s not a knife.” He pulls out his own knife and says, “That’s a knife.”

Dundee slices open the would-be mugger’s leather jacket and the mugger and his friends flee the scene. And the crisis is averted. I thought of that scene recently when I was looking through some shots of Redwood and Giant Sequoias my wife and son took last year when they were in California. The trees were gigantic. The oaks and maples we have in Pennsylvania pale in comparison.

Giant Redwood and Sequoia trees in California.

One of these things

As I looked at the pictures, I found myself singing the children’s song “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.”

“One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?”

How can two things be described as the same thing when they are no where near the same size. The Redwoods and Sequoias dwarf a normal person. The trees along my local trail still dwarf us, but they’re not even in the same league. One is a tree and the other is out of this world.

It’s not just the Redwoods.

Pennsylvania’s trees just don’t compare in size.

Hanging ten

We usually spend a few days every summer near the New Jersey or Delaware beaches. However, when my wife and I traveled to Hawaii close to twenty years ago the waves looked like nothing we had never seen before. Our eyes were bulging in amazement. The waves in Oahu and Maui were larger and more powerful than the baby waves we see each summer.

In contrast, East Coast waves are smaller and less powerful because the Atlantic’s shorter fetch, the uninterrupted horizontal distance over which wind blows in a single direction across an open body of water, and the wide continental shelf offshore weaken waves before they reach the shore, resulting in lower-quality, shorter wind swells. 

Happens more than we think

There’s much in life that’s like that. Crow’s have thinner bills, shorter tails, and is smaller in size. On the other hand, Ravens have a thicker bill, a longer tail, and are bigger in size. It’s the same with other animals, kangaroos and wallabies, frogs and toads, and even butterflies and moths.

They’re in the same family, but night and day different.

Small or big

Sometimes though bigger is not better. We had a fire the other night and my wife picked up a pack of marshmallows to make smores. She went with the heavy duty kind.

When I say these marshmallows were big, let’s just say that was an understatement. These things were huge. They were bigger than my car keys. I had never seen marshmallows that big.

Like Mick Dundee might have said in the same situation. “There’s marshmallows and then there are marshmallows.” This thing most certainly came from another planet.

Maybe bigger really is better. At least when it comes to smores!