This is totally new to me. Not being questioned by the police. And not even being questioned over something that I was innocent of. But death, I'm not a complete stranger to death, but never before encountered it in this form. Never before, actually, outside of a mortuary.
And I wasn't even the first person to discover the victim. "Victim"? Yeah I feel pretty comfortable with that one. Laying dead in the stream, caught up against debris speaks volumes of dieing in an unnatural way. Especially in a stream that is currently slow and shallow enough to make it tough to even drown on purpose.
Walking on the edge of the roadway in a place where it passes over the stream and few people are ever at who are not driving by, the two teen age boys who were there pointed down at the water and said "is that a dead body". And I instinctually answered no because it was incomprehensible that the correct answer could be yes. And then I looked down and said "boy, I sure don't think so". And then I scrambled down to the stream bed and bounced a couple of rocks off of the thing in the water, went back up and said "I'm not sure". And I wasn't. In fact, I wondered if they were playing a joke on me, but noticed that they had no mud on them. This still didn't rule out "prank", just them as pranksters.
So I walked the remaining five minutes back to my place and called 911. When the voice on the phone answered "what is the location of the emergency" I stumbled, but the rest of the call worked itself out. And then I finished a couple of quick chores around the place, decided I was curious about the outcome, and walked back over just to assure myself that there was not actually anything wrong.
And the sheer number of emergency vehicles left no doubt that such assurance would not be forthcoming. So I introduced myself and got politely but thoroughly interrogated, including question after question that they already knew the answer to (I mean, I saw what I saw, and their response told me that they had already seen exactly the same things).
But I've never seen a dead body before, and I'm 65 years old. I'm wondering if that's as unique as I think that it might be.
And I'm hoping that with all of the other weird and emergency type shit that we've gone through in the past couple of years that things can once again be as normal as I think they used to be.