tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65897836478028427712024-02-09T00:03:27.266-08:00Vet On The EdgeLife As A Vet In The 49th State [Or: Alaska: It's Not For The Faint Of Heart, Or Anyone Lacking A Sense Of Humor And A Good Winter Coat.]AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.comBlogger145125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-15521078179489691392013-09-14T19:17:00.003-07:002013-09-14T19:31:15.921-07:00Sleep, Sweet Sister<div class="MsoNormal">
Well hey there… I’m not your usual
host, I’m her older sister stepping in to bring you up to date.</div>
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<br /></div>
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If your usual Vet were here, she'd surely say… “I’m SO sorry I’ve neglected my story telling duties, but it was
for a REALLY good reason. I’ve been busy
with changes in my job, and visiting my family, and I just needed a little
sabbatical.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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If she were here. Which, sadly, she is not. </div>
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So you have me. </div>
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<br /></div>
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My
younger sister was a wickedly smart, hugely talented, quirky, endlessly
entertaining, complex, independent, and occasionally troubled Veterinarian who
practiced her passion in the only place she could imagine living, Alaska. And she finally did take that
sabbatical. One from which we will not
see her return. In May, 2013, the Vet on
the Edge - my sister - passed away.</div>
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If you have followed along with her
tales of life in the wild, you know that a while back she had pneumonia. Although she had technically recovered, I
think it took a much greater toll than any of us but her knew. Some of those closest to her were concerned
for her health, but she chose to struggle with it alone, and in May that
struggle came to an end.</div>
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She will be sadly and sorely
missed. There are many years of tales
that should be following here that she will not get to tell you. But if you will pull up your chairs one more
time, I will tell you a tale of my own, one about your host and narrator, about
a talented and funny Veterinarian who lived in the wild land of Alaska. About
the little sister she once was.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I suppose I should tell you who I
am. I’m the older sister, the one who,
much to our mother’s dismay, took shears to my sister’s hair when she was
three… something she remembers clearly and I remember not at all. Except, of
course, from the many times it’s been told at family functions as part of our
family’s oral legacy. </div>
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I am the missing sister. Our mom thinks of me as Haley’s Comet flying
into the family’s night sky just once every 72 years. Our dad once referred to me as the
geigenshine – the trail of particles left behind as the earth travels through
space – something even astronomers rarely see.
My nieces and nephews think of me as a unicorn – an exotic creature with
mystical powers that they all know lives in the forest, but that they only barely
catch glimpses of. </div>
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What they say is true. In one sense my sister and I have not been
close since I left home at 15. Our
relationship has been one of intermittent phone calls and rarer emails, often
occasioned by my need of some veterinary advice. We did not keep up with the
details of each other’s lives. And yet,
once she’d helped me work through some veterinary conundrum, the conversation
would bounce and spring and dash in all directions like spring lambs cavorting
in the grass. My husband would shake his
head and chuckle that any two people could talk so fast and leap so quick and
never miss a beat.</div>
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In another way, and despite the
long gaps in contact, we were as close as it’s possible to be – we were sisters,
just 2 years apart, and I’ve known her all her life. I *know* her, who she is… was… how she was
made, what strange mechanisms rumbled about in the darkness of the emotional undercurrent
she hid with her ironic sense of humor and her quirky take on life. We sprang forth from the same genes, the same
tribulations. We shared talents and
intellect, quickness of mind and of words.
We shared the ability to skip lightly from idea to idea, from
observation to conclusion, like big horn sheep springing from outcrop to tiny
outcrop along the edge of a vertical rock face.</div>
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Once, I was regaling some of my
bellydance friends online with the tale of how I discovered that sheep eat
goats whole (at least goats think they do), and how I know that dairy goats
have much better brakes than draft horses.
At the end of my story, a third-connection acquaintance – someone I’d never met in person or even emailed with
directly – said I’d made her laugh until she cried. She said the only other person who ever made
her laugh like that was a blog she read, and that I reminded her of that
writer. She posted a link to this
blog. </div>
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<br /></div>
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It seems that we were so much alike
that even random folks we’d never met could identify us as sisters by our words
alone.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And yet for all we were alike, we were
as much different. I came into this world
as blunt and raw as lava struck from Haleakala by the goddess Pele. My sister arrived with a winning, graceful
charm, sailing smoothly in like Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. </div>
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I think I must have been 7 or 8
when I finally understood the power of her charm. We had been trundled off to bed and our
parents had tucked themselves in for a bit of bedtime reading. Neither she nor I were ready to sleep, no
shock to those of you who know she mostly functioned without it. I had gone to our folk’s bedroom to try to wangle
out a stay of bed-time execution. I had hit
upon a question, a science question, a clever and interesting one, no doubt – science
questions were always good for getting their attention. Perhaps one question
could be parlayed into another and yet another and maybe into half an hour or
more of that delicious space beyond the bedtime rule. Somehow, my parents detected my ploy (who
knew parents could figure out that sort of thing?) and I was sent packing back
to bed. </div>
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<br /></div>
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As I turned the corner from their
door into the hall, there was my little sister, slipping under my arm and
through their doorway. I watched as she laid her head down on mom’s knee,
turning just so, like a puppy going belly up for a tummy rub. She turned on that charming smile - if you
ever met her in person, you’d know the one - and flashed her dark eyes with the
thick velvet lashes. Then she said something that made mom laugh and it was
done. Just like that she had captured
the up-past-bedtime prize, the Stanley Cup of parental attention, won the
Superbowl of sibling rivalry. I knew I
had been aced, skunked, shut out. Well
and thoroughly trounced. Game, set,
match to the girl with the wit and the charm and the velvet lashes. </div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s funny though, I never held her
to account for it. I knew it was her
gift. And even though we were rivals, she charmed me with it too.</div>
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If you’ve been keeping score, you
know we have a plethora of parents and an even larger number of siblings – full
and half and step – not to mention friblings and others who have volunteered as
family. Four of us share the same two
parents, and of the four I think she and I were the most different. I’m fair
skinned and freckled, with gray eyes and straight blond hair that turned mouse
brown as I grew. She had olive skin,
curly chocolate hair and hazel eyes with lashes lush as pampas grass. I was a stick until my mid-twenties but she
always curved like a girl. While I’m not
tall, I break the average. And she, as you know, was always short.</div>
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When I was 10 and she was 8 we both
had 4-H lambs. They started out as they usually do - bottle babies with big
liquid eyes and soft nubby white wool and tails that waggled wildly when they
nursed. And they ended as 4-H lambs are
expected to - in white waxed paper in the freezer. My reaction to a dinner of lamb chops we knew
by name was to eat hearty and become a sheep rancher when I grew up. Hers was to cry for weeks, then grow up to be
a Vet.</div>
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We differed on what did and didn’t
matter in men, too. I said the right man had to be smart and have table
manners, she said she didn’t care if grease ran down his chin and he wiped his
fingers on his shirt, as long as he made her laugh. We differed on marriage - she never married,
and I kept marrying until I got it right.
</div>
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I brewed wine and she brewed
beer. Even in the same hobby we took
counterpoint. </div>
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We even differed on the
blessing-ness of the late-graying gene we both inherited from mom - she thought
it was a gift and I wish my hair would just finish going silver already
(something Mom assures me it will never do. Ever. Salt and pepper is the final
endpoint. Live with it.<sigh>)</sigh></div>
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Despite all that difference, I
think she needed to *tell* me that we were different. She used to call me up with one problem or
another she was having and ask for my advice.
She’d listen carefully to the best I had to offer, all very practical
and well thought out, then she’d set about telling me all the reasons it would
never-ever not-even-remotely in-a-million-years not-on-this-planet-or-any-other
work for her. At the time it used to
frustrate me no end, but now I wonder if she needed to build the contrast
because, underneath, we were in some ways so much alike.</div>
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Both of us believed that the things
we did without much effort - the talents we were born with - didn’t create
anything that anyone could really value.
That if someone said something nice about our artwork or our
intelligence or our contribution to others it was only because they were
polite. Neither of us believed they
could really mean it. Neither of us could take in people’s appreciation or
respect, their gratitude or thanks, their acknowledgement or praise. I think it created in her a sadness, an
isolation that she defended against with her charm, her wit, her ability to
entertain. Her gift gave her a way to
cope, a way to keep that sadness at bay.
Without that gift, I had to live with my demons, share space with them
all the time, and eventually I had to confront them and make peace. I think perhaps my sister never did.</div>
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Once, while I was working in Florida,
I took the glass-bottom boat tour of Wakulla Springs. We cruised over the outlet where the
underground river flows out into the greater pool. Wakulla flows more gallons per hour and at
greater speed than any other freshwater spring in the country. Looking down through the glass, you can see
the outlet like an underwater cave. And
that huge volume of water rushing out by the thousands of gallons looks like …
nothing. It’s so clear that you cannot
see it at all - just the bottom sand sparkling there beneath the boat as if the torrent of water at the outlet was as placid as the surface we were floating on. I asked the guide how far up the spring the
divers had explored and he said not far, that the current was too much for
human beings to swim against for long.</div>
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I think my sister was like
that. On the surface, she was sparkling
and light, with a humorous observation for even the darkest events. But underneath there was in her a current of
sadness that she swam against, camouflaged by her humor, transparent
and unnoticed. I think that’s why she
often didn’t sleep, because she needed to keep swimming. I think its why she always entertained us, because that humor brought her light.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I think her humor was her truest
gift, her compassion was the power in her life.
And I think the pneumonia took her stamina and finally the strength she needed
to swim against the tide. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I will just leave you with this…<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6589783647802842771" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
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Sleep, my sweet sister. Rest.
Our dreams go with you. Calm waters await, you do not need to fight. Just know that sometime in our long future I
will flow down the mountain like Pele’s lava and I will meet you again when you
return like Venus on the tide.</div>
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-----------------</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>To you who knew my sister through
her writing… she left a little gift.
There are unpublished stories.
From time to time I will post one for you here. </i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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<i>And she left a manuscript. It will take a while, but we (her siblings)
are working to bring it to print. It was
her dream, something she worked long and hard to realize and we will take it
through that final step.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-71924709904600170302011-12-21T09:53:00.000-08:002011-12-24T14:53:28.951-08:00The Rising Of The Light<em>Author's note: I actually did write this on the Solstice, but Blogger had a fight with my browser and they weren't speaking to each other. Fortunately they've made up now. Happy Solstice, everyone, and happy birthday, Dad. Stay warm out there as the year turns back toward the light.</em><br />
<br />
Solstice again.<br />
<br />
It's been a weird winter. October was warm - almost fall-like, with mild temperatures and minimal snow. November was ghastly cold - more like January than November. We had snow - plenty of it - but it remained so cold that it never packed down. It was loose and dry, squeaking under my boots, fluffing at a kick.<br />
<br />
December has been like March. It's been up and down temperatures - snowing one day, raining the next - and three Sundays in a row it has spiked up warm and poured down rain and snow both - sometimes both together, snowflakes and raindrops rattling together against my windshield and my windows. We've had thaws galore; the upside - if it thaws enough - is that if there's only a little ice on your driveway, it will soon be either so rutted that your traction is excellent, or it will be gone entirely. The down side is that if you have thick ice, or a few inches of snow, the rain and warmth will melt it into something so slick you're risking life and limb to walk or drive on it.<br />
<br />
Oh, well. It <em>is</em> Alaska, after all. But this is very weird weather for December.<br />
Last night - -well, or this morning, really - I was called in around 1 a.m. I told the client I could be at the clinic in about twenty to thirty minutes. As it turned out, this was wildly optimistic.<br />
<br />
It was snowing when I went outside: Wet, dense, heavy flakes. I had about 3 or 4 fresh inches down. <i>No big</i>, I thought as my Border collie went gamboling out into the yard.<i> It's coming down pretty hard, but fresh, damp snow should provide me reasonable traction going down my hill, and it's the wee hours so there won't be much traffic once I hit the road.</i><br />
<br />
I was right about both of those - but it wasn't much help. I hardly made it onto the main drag when I cruised in to an area where the snow was falling much more heavily than at my house.<br />
<br />
Driving into heavy snowfall like that makes me feel like I'm in the Millenium Falcon and I'm making the jump to hyperspeed. The snow comes at you in long streaks, like you're driving into a meteor shower. I was on the tailing edge of a migraine, with the attendant visual weirdness, and I found this distracting and vertiginous. In a further 50 yards this was not my biggest problem. By then the more pressing concern was that I was driving into a whiteout. The road was completely hidden in churned snow and the only indicator of whether or not I was in my designated lane was the rumble of the buzz strips bracketing the lane. The problem being, of course, that it was difficult - if not impossible - to tell which buzz strip I was driving on.<br />
<br />
I slowed down, of course; pretty soon I was going around 20 mph, peering into the dense white of the falling snow, guessing at the lane, grateful there is no one else on the road. Behind me a pair of headlights has appeared, drawing closer; at this point I was considering getting out of my truck and walking out in front of it in the hope that I might see where the lane was. But the headlights have come near, and it's a semi. I decide instead to keep going, slowly, slowly. I have a client coming in who needs me; if she is braving the roads, I have to do the same.<br />
<br />
At long last, after miles of whiteout, the snowfall diminishes to something a little more driveable. I speed up to 35 and make it in to the clinic in one piece. The client is waiting for me. I test, diagnose and treat her little colitis dog, who is wiggling happily (despite her extremely bloody diarrhea) and who spends 30% of her time trying to kiss me. (The dog, I miean, not the owner).The rest of her time is divided evenly between cuddling with her owner and trying to escape the exam room so she can explore the hospital. I release them with medication and warnings to drive carefully.<br />
<br />
Hm. Speaking of that... Now it's 2:30 and the snow is now coming down hard in town, as hard as it was on the road headed in. Maybe I'll just crash here for a bit and drive home when I've had some sleep.<br />
<br />
As it turns out, sleep isn't on the agenda either. I get a call at 3:30, a dog with a proptosed eye. it's a Boston - a short-faced breed with shallow eye sockets. It's not hard to knock the eye out of such a shallow open socket, but it still needs attention - and anesthesia, and a procedure - to put it back. The dog already has previously-existing damage to the NON-proptosed eye. I advise the owner that we're now risking the vision on the good eye. They take some time to think it over, but don't call back to bring the dog in.<br />
<br />
Around 4 a.m. I fall asleep and doze fitfully til 5:30, at which time I hear my staff coming in. I get up, shower and go upstairs to the main floor of the clinic. Ah, here we go: a Boston with a proptosed eye has come in. I have a look. It's very red and swollen, and the cornea is dull and gummy. The other eye has a cataract. I decide that maybe waiting to reduce the proptosis is a bad idea. My tech (the Divine Miss Em) is willing, so we sedate the Boston and put her on anesthesia.<br />
<br />
Reducing the proptosis is as slick and satisfying as it always is. I place some stents and suture the lids together to protect the swollen globe. I try to talk owner into vaccinating the dog - five months old and never immunized, on the grounds that it was too small. The owner - who was apparently a tech a few years ago in another state - was told that a dog could not be vaccinated if it was below six pounds.<br />
<br />
Hm. Six pounds, you say? Why six? Why not five or ten - surely rounder numbers? If we're just being arbitrary, why don't we pick one of those? Unless we're picking 6 in an attempt to appear NOT to be arbitrary. I rack my brain for the possible sounrce of this bizarre advice.<br />
<br />
Ah, yes. I have it: This is advice from the Secret Breeder Handbook - a book of fallacious "knowledge" that seems to circulate amongst a certain segment of the dog-breeding &/or dog-owning population. The information in the Secret Breeder Handbook is incorrect, but it bears such a weight of authority in the minds of those who swear by it that all my education and experience are for naught: I and my best advice - no matter how assiduously supported by objective testing, logic and evidence -will be ignored in favor of the dogma [so to speak] contained in the hallowed pages of the Secret Breeder Handbook.<br />
<br />
Sigh. I'm really too tired for this this morning. I need more coffee if I'm going to take this on.<br />
<br />
I spend a few minutes explaining the biology of vaccines and the AAHA and AVMA recommendations (and the reasoning thereof) for puppy vaccines. I do not mention that unless the owner was a tech in another Universe, not just another state, the mysterious 6-pound cutoff is something entierly made-up and unsupported by any biological reality. Luckily the owner is willing to be educated and we do in fact vaccinate her puppy - which I hope sincerely we've done soon enough that I don't see her back next week with her cataract, her sutured-shut eyelid AND a raging case of parvo.<br />
<br />
So now I am updating the blog while I wait for rush hour (and possibly the worst of the snowstorm) to be over. I can handle tired and I can handle rush hour and I can handle snow; I'd just rather not handle them all at the same time. I intend to go home, snuggle in with some dogs, and sleep. Maybe for a long time. A week, even. By then the light will be rising a little - not much, but maybe enough that I'll feel restless and wakey - instead of that drowsy, deep-winter hibernatory feeling I have right now.<br />
<br />
So how did you spend<em> your</em> Solstice?AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-9001888377967040212011-11-07T14:03:00.000-08:002011-11-07T14:21:33.564-08:00Coho Mojo<em>Author's note: This is why I've been busy... kinda. There's also getting ready for winter and all that. I think I'm done smoking fish for the season, and if I'm not ready for winter yet it's sort of too late since I have about 8 or 10 inches of snow down. I wrote this one several weeks ago but my computer had a fight with Blogger and now they aren't speaking to each other, so it's been slowing down the posting. Sorry about that.</em><br />
<br />
Here’s the thing about fishing: I grew up with the idea that it was something that was mostly done by kids and adult men. As a kid, I never heard about women who would take off early on a Sunday morning to go fishing – and certainly not by themselves or in groups of other women, the way men and children often do. I’m not entirely sure why I had this mental picture of it; after all, one of our family legends - one of those oft-told stories, too good to die – is about my mom fishing in the Sierras of California.<br />
<br />
<br />
She and my stepdad had gone camping in Yosemite. My mother was, at the time, eight months pregnant with my youngest brother. I can remember her in her camping duds: maternity pants and hiking boots, and an adorable sort of maternity hoodie that she’d made herself. My mother is a capable seamstress, and often made clothing for us when we were little, and for herself as well. She chose a dark burgundy and navy plaid for the hoodie, and equipped it with large warm-up pockets in the front, like you have on your standard sweatshirt. I can just picture her hiking happily about with her little plaid maternity hoodie and hiking boots and her absolutely enormous belly. Bear in mind that she and my stepdad were camping in a two-man pup tent. It’s not all that easy to crawl in and out of those in general, much less with an eight-month pregnancy on board. But my mother loved being pregnant, and always felt very good physically when she was, so perhaps this wasn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds.<br />
<br />
They had hiked up to a place called Ireland Lake so my stepdad could fish. He was very stern and serious about it. He scoped about the lake looking for a good spot, and brought out his fly-fishing rod and his Webb Coachman dry flies and his spare leader lines. My mom had no fishing rig, so he cut her an 18-inch branch from a tree and gave her some spare leader line, but couldn’t bear to part with one of his flies; he might, after all, want to change flies, depending on what the fish were striking. <br />
<br />
My mom took her stick and her leader line and crawled up amongst some rocks with her 8-month belly. She had a safety pin in her hoodie pocket, which she bent into a hook of sorts by opening it very far and pressing it against the rocks until she had something she thought might work. She caught one of the abundant little green grasshoppers that inhabited the lakeside and impaled it on her safety pin and then dangled her line over the edge of the rocks, jigging it experimentally in the water. It wasn’t as scientific and professional as my stepdad’s approach, but what the heck: something to do, right? And she wasn’t in the way, casting shadows in the water that might scare the fish where my stepdad was sternly fishing away.<br />
<br />
Before long, something came roaring up out of the depths and struck my mother’s line - and lo and behold, she landed a trout. <br />
<br />
Having no creel or any other receptacle – all of which was with my stepdad, who as the real fisherman, was the one who would need it – she stuffed the fish in the pocket of her hoodie, clambered back over the rocks and along the shore to where my stepdad was casting with his upscale fly rod. Clutching the fish in place over her belly, she was practically dancing in glee, asking “Can I keep it? Can I keep it?” – because she wasn’t sure it met the size limit. I gather some confusion ensued; I guess I can understand that. There’s my stepdad, all focused on his fishing rituals, and his near-term pregnant wife comes up all hopping around and incoherent with excitement and clutching her belly – which was no doubt squirming in a somewhat disconcerting manner, since there was a live fish in her hoodie pocket.<br />
<br />
That was the first fish of the day, and my mom caught another three with her stick and safety pin before my stepdad caught one with his fiberglass rod and his dry flies. Mom actually decided it might be best to stop fishing, if she wanted the marriage to last.<br />
<br />
You’d think, given this history, that I’d regard fishing as something women were really good at, maybe better than men – but mom never took us fishing when we were kids, and other kids always went out with their friends and siblings, or else their dads. No one else’s moms went fishing. That was a dad thing. It wasn’t really part of our lifestyle growing up.<br />
<br />
Still, up here in Alaska – where the quality of our salmon and halibut are world-renowned – it’s a lot more of a thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you haven’t gone fishing by the time you’ve lived here for 15 years they revoke your citizenship and chuck you out of the state. I managed to skim under that wire, having lived here for 16 years without once catching (or trying to catch) a single fish. When people find out about this they look at me with varying forms of consternation, confusion or astonishment, and say, “You’ve never gone fishing? Never?” in the tones one might use if someone confessed they’d never been outdoors. “What? You’ve never gone outside? Never?”<br />
<br />
I decided, therefore, that this year I would go fishing – in part because I want to keep my Alaskan citizenship (really! They throw you out of the state if you don’t try it! I swear!) and partly because I kept hearing on the radio that officials were downgrading escapement estimates of certain salmon runs - to numbers that were record highs. So sorry, we’re downgrading our estimate of the fish coming up that river, and our new downgraded estimate is the highest run ever recorded. We apologize for falsely raising your expectations, but you’ll just have to make do with a record-breaking abundance of fish. We feel so bad.<br />
<br />
As it happens, my friend J and her husband K (who, you may remember, I married almost two years ago), have a boat. K likes to go out into Prince William Sound, launching out of Whittier, to fish. Weather isn’t always good – the first weekend we tried to put together a trip there were 9-foot seas – but if it is, PWS is beautiful -and kinda fishtastic.<br />
<br />
Sunday we had a good weather report and everyone had a day off, so down to Whittier we went. We had snacks, drinks, fishing licenses galore, sunscreen, safety gear, bait, cigars and a dog – all the stuff you need for a fishing trip. In addition I had my hoodie with a salmon on it and I was wearing the earrings my brother Tode made me that remind me of salmon: A dark orange-red teardrop of glass with iridescent green flakes that glimmer fish-scale-like when I move.<br />
<br />
The drive to Whittier is gorgeous – well, it is Alaska, after all! – and not that long; a couple of hours. You get to drive by Potter’s Marsh, a famous and important migratory waterfowl sanctuary, and also the Portage Wildlife Reserve, where their woodland bison graze close enough to the road that you can see them as you drive by. Sometimes you see Dall sheep or mountain goats on the cliffs as you drive down. And for some reason there is one particular spot where everyone seems to stop to get water from a pipe sticking randomly out of the Cliffside. It’s good water, but seriously: You’re going to stop at a stretch of road bounded on one side by a sheer cliff and the other by a sharp drop-off into the icy waters of the bay, park your car on the verge on one side of the road or the other – on a bit of a curve, mind you – and fill up from a bit of black pipe sticking randomly out of the side of the mountain? Really? Oh, and you’re going to cross the road to do it because you’re parked on the far side? And you’re doing this at ten fifteen on an overcast night - which I will grant you is before sundown, but it is overcast, the speed limit is 55, and visibility isn’t really the greatest, nor the road the widest, at that point – and remember, it’s on a curve so you can’t see very far in either direction, since your eyeballs can’t see around the corner. Trust me on this. But you’re still going to stop and get water there? Really?<br />
<br />
Oh, well. No one was killed, anyway, so I guess that’s okay.<br />
<br />
To get to Whittier you have to cross under the mountain through a one-lane tunnel. Because it’s one lane, traffic has to go one direction for 15 minutes, then stop; there’s a fifteen minute pause to clear everything from the tunnel, and then traffic can go the other way. The tunnel also accommodates the train, so you want to be sure to obey the rules. We’d timed it to get to the tunnel on the first Whittier-bound opening, and by consequence arrived at the docks when there were only, like, 15 or 20 people in line waiting to put their boats in. <br />
<br />
It was a truly gorgeous day, and K expertly backed the trailer down to the water and J expertly helped. I inexpertly held lines when told to do so, and helped walk the boat down the pier when told to do so and got on board when told to do so. K put on the tunes, lit up a cigar and motored us sedately out of the marina and into the Sound.<br />
<br />
Once clear of the marina, we cruised out into the waters of the PWS. Many another boat was out and about. We kept an eye out for sea otters (mainly spotting the well-known PWS Mock Otter, composed of mats of seaweed and likely-looking bits of flotsam). K found a place he thought likely and we started trolling.<br />
<br />
It was sunny and hot, and the motion of the boat was soothing. J and I relaxed on the rear deck, chit-chatting and keeping an eye on the fishing rods. These were set up with down-rigging, lures and bait. After a while the starboard rod-tip bowed violently toward the water and then sprang back up.<br />
<br />
“Fish on!” J called, and K idled the boat. I pulled the rod out of its socket and began to reel. It felt like there was some resistance – but then it seemed too easy, all of a sudden. As the line came in, it was clear my fish was gone – along with the center portion of the bait, mowed away by a fish that had managed to slip the hook. We re-set the line and kept trolling. <br />
<br />
Things were slow initially - slow enough that I started to wonder if I was a fishing jinx. But J and K didn't seem to worried, and I was distracted when, for the fun of it, we went into a little bay and did some sight-seeing. We crossed paths with a harbor seal there, and plenty of birds, but no larger wildlife. After a bit we cruised back out and set up in another spot. <br />
<br />
Pretty soon J’s line bounced and jigged. “Fish on!” we both chorused, and this time the fish didn’t slip the hook. I tried to watch closely without getting in the way while J landed a nice fat Coho. Okay, now I see how it’s done: You reel the fish in close to the boat, ease it back into the net (which one of your helpful companions will be wielding), pull it on board, take the hook out and stun it with the hefty little fish bat. Then you pop a couple of gill veins to bleed the meat and stick it in the fish locker.<br />
<br />
Okay. That’s not too scary.<br />
<br />
The Coho you pull out of Prince William Sound tend to run between 8 and 12 pounds. Also known as Silvers, they’re pretty fish, and a ten-pound Coho looks pretty substantial when you pull it flipping and wriggling into the boat. It’s hard not to look at them without thinking of succulent, fragrant fish steaks on the grill… or coming out of the oven… or poaching in wine … Well. It’s nowhere near the limit, but at least we’ve gotten a nice start on future dinners.<br />
<br />
J caught another fish almost immediately. I started thinking: <em>Hmmm. I want to catch one now</em>. In fact, I was starting to feel left out. I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t catch a fish that day. So I invited my mother’s fish mojo to make an appearance.<br />
<br />
We trolled quietly along. All of a sudden my line jigged hard. J and I chorused our “fish-on”, K cut the engine and I started reeling like mad. The fish was strong and fought a little, but at K’s instructions I dropped the tip of my rod and kept the line tight and reeled it onto the net. It came out of the water sleek and fat and gleaming silver, its sides blushed with a delicate faint rose, its eyes silvery green with the mysteries of unknown seas. <br />
<br />
Well. My first fish, and it’s really kind of beautiful.<br />
<br />
Still, this isn’t catch-and-release fishing (which, when you think about it, is kind of fish torture), so we dispatched my catch as quickly and mercifully as possible, and returned to our fishing. Having found a good spot, we trolled there for a while. I caught two more (limiting out my Coho allowance for the day) and J hit her limit shortly thereafter. J took the tiller, since she and I were limited out, and K did some fishing. We had a bit of a lull, during which we watched a sea otter for a while, and also a sea lion peevishly snapping at gulls and other water birds, perhaps trying to eat them, or perhaps just snapping in annoyance at them. We cruised slowly back and forth, admiring the otter and enjoying the warmth of the early evening. We hadn’t limited the boat yet;. I had three fish, J had three and K had two. Now we were cruising in pursuit of his limit when the unexpected happened.<br />
<br />
The rod next to me jigged hard, bowing almost double and jumping in its socket hard enough that I thought it might leap out and go overboard. “Fish on!” I yelped, grabbing the rod reflexively to keep the rod from going over. I almost couldn’t lift it out of the holder. I started reeling furiously. The line jerked sideways, nearly taking the rod out of my hands.<br />
<br />
“Fight it! Fight it!” K shouted, practically hopping up and down. I started laughing with exhilaration, shades of my mom and her trout; the fish was so strong I could barely reel against it. In fact, I didn’t think I was making much progress, and the line was singing against the reel. I looked at the reel and paused for a half second in confusion. Not only wasn’t the reel bringing in any line, in fact the line seemed to be going out despite my efforts to bring it in.<br />
<br />
Um… eh? <br />
<br />
At about that second K heard the rising hum of the line as it stripped off the reel and he whipped his head around.<br />
<br />
“Give me that.” He said shortly, taking the rod from me. He braked the line hard with his thumb, snapping the rod upwards, trying to break the line. Then he reeled frantically, and tried a second time to break the line. The rods were rigged with 50# test. At first he thought we might have hooked a sea lion or a shark – but if he couldn’t break the line, whatever it was weighed less than 50 pounds, so we probably wanted it. <br />
<br />
K put his back into it and began working furiously, braking the line with his thumb, hauling the tip of the rod up and reeling in the slack at a vicious pace, using his thumb to keep the fish from stripping the reel again. The drag was set for smaller fish, and was not enough to keep whatever was on the line from taking back what line had just been reeled in. It seemed like a long time, but it was probably only a few minutes before we started to see the flash of silver scales just under the surface of the water. J snatched the net and leaned over the side of the boat , managing to scoop the net around an absolutely enormous salmon, three times the size of anything else we’d caught that day.<br />
<br />
“Holy crap! Holy crap!” I am saying, dancing from foot to foot. “That is freaking <em>HUGE</em>!” <br />
<br />
“Haul it in!” K is shouting, as the fish makes a nearly-successful bid to leap out of the net. J foils it by tilting the net to close it up against the side of the boat, but the fish is too heavy for her to pull it on board while it bounces and lunges in the net. I grab the long shaft of the net handle behind her hands and heave. Between the two of us we land it.<br />
<br />
“Shit, that’s a King!” K exclaims. We all look at each other. King salmon, also known as Chinook, are usually river-caught. Because of their size and their light-orange, buttery-rich flesh, they are a prized sport fish.<br />
<br />
“Are we allowed to keep it?” I ask. K snatches up the fishing regs. <br />
<br />
“Limit in PWS… two Kings per stamp per day,” he says. We all beam. We have a King stamp. We are golden. We stun our fish and pop its gill veins. We can’t stop staring at it. K has a scale. We weigh it. It’s 28 pounds.<br />
<br />
“Well… that’s not the biggest King salmon I’ve ever seen,“ I allow, “but that was still really exciting!”<br />
<br />
“It’s not the biggest one I’ve ever seen either,” K says, “but in all the years I’ve been fishing in the sound, I’ve never seen anyone catch a King out here. The ocean-caught ones are the best; they haven’t started to lose condition by making the spawning run. This is pretty special - so whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”<br />
<br />
We take pictures with the fish. I have to admit it’s pretty amazing. When it lays next to the other fish – which seemed so large and substantial only minutes ago – they seem almost puny beside it.<br />
<br />
Well. I’m calling today’s fishing efforts a win. Still, K is one shy of his limit, and we still have daylight. He decides we still have a little time to troll. He resets the bait. No sooner does he set the line than it pops fee of its downrigging. He goes to reset the downrigging – but to his surprise there is a fish on already. He lands it in short order, and now we’re done. The boat is limited out on Coho, so there’s no excuse to go on fishing. <br />
<br />
We pack it in and cruise back toward the marina. As we cruise along, K, puffing thoughtfully on his cigar, says, “Well, ladies, I have to thank you. That’s the first time all season we’ve limited the boat “ He takes a detour into a small inlet with calmer water where he guts, heads and fillets our catch. We divide it up and head for home. I am slightly windburned, and a little tired, but wholly content. Everyone caught their limit, plus we got a bonus King. I am not a fishing jinx. In fact, I believe I’ve inherited the mojo. <br />
<br />
Well. That’s rather satisfying. Thanks, mom. Between that and the late-graying gene, I feel pretty lucky, inheritance-wise.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-49440900879938924752011-09-12T14:13:00.000-07:002011-09-12T14:15:05.712-07:00Putting Food ByJust checking in to let you know I am NOT dead - although if you saw me first thing this morning, you might disagree (since my cat is sure I don't actually need to, you know, SLEEP at night, so long as I can restore myself by petting him constantly). It's just that I've been way busy processing the results of this summer's harvests (of various types). When I get caught up again, I'll have some stories to tell. I'm on the home stretch, more or less; so if you can find it in your hearts to be patient juuuust a wee bit longer, I will be back with a tale or two.<br />
<br />
Thanks!AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-27581206166238889852011-08-11T16:59:00.001-07:002011-08-12T09:13:01.756-07:00My Own Private Oregon Part III: The Oregon Country Fair<span xmlns=""></span><br />
My life is full of serendipitous coincidences. One of those is this.<br />
<br />
When I was making my plans for dog care, it happened that I was at Wildwood one day. They volunteered – bless them! – to keep Raven for me while I was gone. They would've taken at least one more, but they were also babysitting another dog that week, and for some reason five dogs are more manageable than six. This is really true; I'm not sure why, but I've found it to be the case. <br />
<br />
As it happens, S's mother lives in Eugene. I had planned to call her and invite her to join us for one of the cookouts. But not long after Wildwood had volunteered to sit Raven for me, Susan called.<br />
<br />
"What days are you going to be in Eugene?"she asked me.<br />
"Fifth through twelfth," I told her.<br />
"My mom is having surgery, so I'll be down there taking care of her from the 4<sup>th</sup> to the 11th," she said.<br />
"Wow, really? Then of course you must join us at our reunion. You are, after all, a fribling."<br />
<br />
Here I will pause to explain that there's a tendency in our family to invent terms for certain things when no word exists for them. A fribling is a friend who is like a sibling; someone who had become family in a real sense, not through the graces of blood or marriage, but through those of merit and affection. If nothing else, it's convenient to have some code for this, rather than explaining it over and over. Those who know us well know we have friblings, and needn't have the long-form explanation every time.<br />
<br />
At any rate, we arranged that one of the events S would join us for – between-times of taking care of her mother – was the Oregon Country fair.<br />
<br />
This, I gathered, is an Event. It takes place on only one weekend in the entire year, Friday through Sunday. My brother Mike used to work security for it – which, I gather, consists in large part of sweeping the grounds after closing each night for stragglers. The technique is to form a human chain, hands linked, and walk from one end of the grounds to the other. Any person you meet has to leave unless they are wearing a wrist-band authorizing their continued presence. Those who have wrist-bands are allowed to duck under the linked arms of the sweepers. All others are gathered together and kindly but firmly evicted.<br />
<br />
I was struck by this method of clearing the grounds. It seemed odd that a human chain was required – why would people be that difficult to get to go home? What's the incentive to try to sneak past the go-home time and try to lurk after hours? – but that was before I went to the fair.<br />
<br />
For one thing, the grounds are enchanting. It looks like Sherwood Forest – treed and grassy, with shaded and sun-dappled dirt paths wandering between and among the booths and stages. The booths themselves are wooden structures, built among the sheltering trees. Some of them have second stories built up in the trees themselves; they look like balconies and decks, bowers and Robinson Crusoe cabins, with an enchanting Disney-esque charm. These are private areas for the booth workers and fair staff to use. I envied them that, their green-shaded perches, from which they could look down and watch the fair pass by.<br />
<br />
The patronage of the fair is a trip in and of itself. Kind of like an acid trip, really. Or so I imagine, having no personal experience of that, so here I may misspeak - but to me it seemed like acid trip meets Disney meets Haight-Ashbury. People are creative about their clothing at the fair – fair-workers and patrons both. No sooner had we been ushered in (by a series of astonishingly cheerful and energetic people, each of whom seemed to take great personal delight in the fact that we'd come to the fair) than I saw every costume imaginable. There were people dressed as pirates and Vikings and various animals. One man was painted head to toe in black and orange tiger stripes, wearing only a pair of brief fuzzy shorts. Another couple strolled the fair on stilts, wearing long furry pants and short furry vests, small horns sticking up out of their hair, like very tall fauns. Other people looked as if they had been lifted out of Alice in Wonderland and set down amidst the fairgoers. An entire series of people was dressed in lime green, for the lime parade (where they all gathered together and strode through the fair, inviting people to join the lime-light and take a call on the telephone lime and so on). One man walked around with a live and apparently amiable python draped over his neck. There were belly-dance costumes (my sister amongst them, having been forewarned, and joining into the spirit of the thing), and people who looked like they belonged at a Renaissance festival. There were, of course, a majority of people dressed in everyday clothes, and there were quite a few dressed in very little at all. One man (who I did not observe, but S did) came dressed only in three socks: One on each foot, and the third where he evidently felt it would do the most good. Several women wore only a brassiere on top (pretty ones, naturally), but more had opted to forgo that in favor of body paint. I saw one woman gorgeously covered in painted peacock feathers all over her bare back (and presumably her front). Many opted for flowers (either painted, or fabric ones stuck on by means I prefer not to contemplate). I saw a few wearing little electrical-tape X's (YOW – think about removing <em>that</em> later!) and one who opted for skirt and waist-cincher and nothing else whatsoever. A few had little tufts of feathers or other decorations somehow jauntily perched over their nipples (clearly not pasted to their skin, so I'm not sure how they were attached, but it seemed rude to either stare long enough to figure it out or to inquire). I kept thinking: This would never fly at the Alaska State Fair – but at the Oregon Country version, it seemed strangely appropriate.<br />
<br />
The people working the booths were sometimes just as well-costumed. There was one booth filled with gorgeous hand-made masks of all kinds – Mardi-Gras masks, masks shaped like cat faces and other animals, Green Man (or Woman) masks, funny masks, half-masks, full masks, little eye masks with edges like flames, painted and beglittered. They were made of shaped leather, painted, decorated with feathers and fabric and ribbon and what-have-you. I wandered through this booth in admiration of the beauty of the work, and glanced up to see one of the booth workers beside me, posing for a fairgoer to photograph in front of a wall of masks. He was lithe and muscular and brown, with rich dark curly hair falling about his ears, dressed only in a pair of very brief shorts so decorated in leaves that you could only guess at there being fabric beneath. A braided leather strap diagonalled his bare chest, holding a polished drinking horn that rode at his hip. The illusion was so complete that for a moment I was surprised that the tips of his ears were not pointed where they peeked out from his curls. I had to laugh at myself. I mean, in real life, how often do you have to remind yourself: Of course his ears are not pointy, he's, you know, a HUMAN, not an elf or a faun or a wood-sprite? But the illusion was so complete, I actually <em>did</em> have to remind myself of that.<br />
<br />
The people-watching was worth the price of admission in and of itself – but the <em>art.</em> Oh, my, the art. Eugene is the glass-working mecca of the United States, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the fair. There was gorgeous work to be found, booths filled with beautiful hand-made glass tempting the hand, sating the eye. There were gorgeous ceramics works, things made lovely through the beauty of the glazes or the shape of the vessels. There were fabric works and leather works, metal works and woodworks. One shop sold nothing but horns – pairs of horns made of Fimo clay, strung on a leather cord to tie them about your forehead, in every color and design imaginable. There were rounded horns, slightly curved. There were angular horns, spiraled like ram's horns. There were delicately-twisted little unicorn horns, rising from nests of down and fabric. One of the booth workers wore a series of spirally ram horns, gilded in bronze, all about his head, like the nimbus of some pagan god. <br />
<br />
There were of course the usual souvenir t-shirt-or-tote kinds of things, or the yearly fair coffee cup – but very few of those. And of course there was fair-food, although it was a bit upscale from the usual. A drum circle played the entire time, audible all over the fair. When you neared the circle, the drumming thundered in your blood, echoing in your bones, calling up that fierce, atavistic, primitive creature that lives, thinly buried, at our core. Further away, the drumming faded to a heartbeat, the pulse of the fair, as if the event itself were a live thing, a creature of marvelous design, vital and aware.<br />
<br />
As usual at such venues, I had my eye out for <em>the</em> souvenir – the one thing that I really really wanted, enough to pack it and carry it home. Of course, many things were tempting – the glass, the leather, the charming little horns – but in the end, I decided I wanted a mug from one of the ceramics shops. These were glazed beautifully in blue and bronze, with white-glaciered mountain peaks standing beneath a white sun, and pine trees and soaring birds picked out in the glaze. They reminded me strongly of the view out my front windows, where eagles and cranes and swans fly by, and the Chugach mountains stand tall and peaky, harboring snow in their crevices all year long. But after traversing the entire fair, I could not find my way back to that booth again.<br />
<br />
No matter. My sister L was going back the next day, and my sister H had bought a mug from that booth that I used as an example to explain what I was looking for. L obligingly agreed to look for the booth and buy me the mug I described. Only when she went back the next day, all that kind had sold. But she evidently asked if there were more stashed away, because her sister from Alaska really liked them, and they reminded her of the view from her house. L returned with a business card and the promise of the artist that if I took a picture of the mountains outside my window and sent it to him, he'd make me a mug that looked like that.<br />
<br />
Wow. <em>That's</em> kind of cool.<br />
<br />
In retrospect, that sort of creative accommodation fits right in with the spirit of the fair. The Oregon Country fair was really, <em>really</em> cool, the whole thing, from start to finish. I understood the need for the human chain to clear the grounds; the Robin-Hood trees and huts and balconies made for a lot of hiding places, and the charm and warmth of the ambiance made for a lot of temptation. Mike mentioned that the after-parties were of fabled quality, and I could see why people wanted to stay – and how difficult it could be, by any means other than the human chain, to ensure that only those personnel who were authorized remained.<br />
<br />
It was a perfect experience – nothing to regret, not even being unable to find the ceramics booth again, since I had the promise of being able to get my mug after all. I have pictures galore of the view off my balcony (some of which have been posted on the blog in the past), so nothing could be easier than emailing a photo. I admit I was tempted by the horns (I have a history of wearing horns – literal and, I'm sure my family would say, figurative) – but S suggested we make our own from, you know, actual horns, which she would have available to her in the fall. I liked that idea enough to be content that I didn't buy some there – and of course, now ideas are percolating in my brain as to how exactly I want to decorate them. I took no pictures (sorry, Gus) – but because of the sort of "clothing optional" culture of the fair, photography is somewhat discouraged – or at least expected to be discreet and by-permission. It's the unique culture of the fair that permits the degree of comfort with undress that is there; in another context, those who were comfortable being half-naked in public might be dismayed to find a photographic record. Out of respect, a certain discretion is observed. And in fact, it does seem rather normal there. Certainly none of the kids – and recall, there were several teens present – seemed even slightly fazed by it… and realistically, that's the group I'd have expected to have the least comfort with it. Certainly the younger kids were more interested in chasing each other about and eating enormous cookies than in the fact that they were cavorting within feet of a woman sitting at her leisure under the trees in a skirt and a waist-cincher and not another stitch nor trace of body paint nor any concealment whatsoever over the way God made her. My nephew Mr. D is of course an old hand at the Oregon Country Fair – he's been many times, growing up as he has, just down the road from the grounds - but for the others it was all new and different.<br />
<br />
For me it is the charm of it, the complete immersion in a different world, that I recall the most. Granted that the charm of it, and the world that it is, is due in part to the sort of accepting nature of the fair; but part of it is the enchantment of the setting, the abundance of art, the happiness of the attendees – cheerful despite the very marked crowd. Somewhere in the fair there is a large raven, built out of wood, that observes the fair with a benign eye, and I think it will be a long time before I forget passing beneath its wings with the cheerful crowds, the drums in the distance calling to the blood, the pulse of a living thing, vital and sentient.<br />
<br />
When I got home, one last serendipity remained for me. I walked into Town Square Art Gallery, my favorite art store, intending to quiz the owner (a friend of mine) about how one establishes a gallery presence for art – because Michael is way too talented not to have his work out and about in the public eye, but in Eugene – remember, the glass-working mecca of the United States – you can't swing a glass rod without hitting a glass artist. So how to find a venue?<br />
<br />
My friend J, owner of Town Square, told me that you find a gallery that doesn't have anything quite like what the artist is doing, and establish a relationship there. Having a look at Mike's work, she mentioned that she didn't actually carry anything like his work. Would she be interested in carrying his work? Yes, she allowed, she would. So I put her in touch with Michael, (and his stuff is now, in fact there, so you should obviously run down and get some of it, because it's really cool). <br />
<br />
Well. That's satisfying. But serendipity wasn't done with me. Because the minute I walked into the gallery, there – right in front, where I could not miss it – was my mug. My knees locked and I stated for a moment. Really? I picked it up and carried it to the back where I asked one of the girls, "Where is this artist from?"<br />
<br />
"Oregon. Road's End Pottery."<br />
<br />
No way. My mug was waiting for me – exactly the style and size I wanted – at home. How cool is that? I didn't even have to carry it home, risking breakage and causing worry. And in its way, that little event prolonged the fair for me, brought it back here to Alaska to resonate in a little more than just memory. It's a small piece of the fair, a tangible link to it – and now it sits on my desk, along with a gorgeous handmade marble from Mike. They both give me a smile every time I see them. The mug grounds me, as mountains always do – a necessary thing, in the work I do. A handy fringe benefit, and not something I'd have expected a simple coffee mug to do – but there you are. There's a certain magic in the piece. The marble… that does something else. From the outside, it looks like a clear dome above a cobalt-dark four-petalled flower. When you turn the marble to look down through the clear dome, the dark leaves of the flower form a cup which looks as if it contains a spiraled galaxy, or maybe the core of the Universe right before the Big Bang. It makes me feel peaceful when I hold it and look into it, its solid and substantial weight a pleasing contrast to the celestial quality inside the cradle of the petals. The inside looks nothing like the outside – which is maybe a good metaphor for the Universe, come to that. Much is contained within it that you would not expect at first glance, and when you turn it to look into its heart, there will be within it an unexpected beauty that gives you peace. It is, somehow, larger on the inside than it is on the outside. The Tardis marble, I suppose.<br />
<br />
Little bits and pieces I brought back, small things with surprising power and a gravity all their own. Anchors to my own private Oregon.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-36602979741998760902011-08-04T18:41:00.001-07:002011-08-05T09:02:05.105-07:00My Own Private Oregon, Part II: Go The F*ck To Sleep, Or: Will I Need A Vacation To Recover From My Vacation?<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<em>Author's note: If you don't know, "Go The F*ck To Sleep" is a children's bedtime book by Adam Mansbach - the title of which cracks me up, and seemed appropriate to the fact that I just COULD not sleep for almost a week, between pre-vacation and vacation excitements.</em><br />
<br />
How I arrived at the family reunion alert and perky is beyond me. I didn't sleep the night before I left– I mean, <em>at all</em>, in fact didn't even try – so I can only conclude that the briefness of the plane portion of the trip was a major factor. Or maybe I was just excited. Or maybe it was my brother Michael's special magic. Or maybe it was just one of those things.<br />
<br />
The lack of sleep is mostly – though not completely - my fault. As usual before a trip there were a million things to do, of course, but between making arrangements for my cases to be cared for in my absence and making my private arrangements, it was more than I'd expected. Luckily, the 4<sup>th</sup> of July – a Monday – the clinic was closed and I was not on call, so that gave me an extra day to get everything done. <br />
<br />
One of my pre-travel tasks was a haircut – and I mean a <em>serious</em> haircut. I was anticipating it'd be hotter in OR than I was used to in AK, so I wanted to have a little less mane to contend with. This is usually something not even worthy of mention, but in this case I'd been growing my hair out for several months for the express purpose of donating it to Locks of Love – so when I got it cut I really got it <em>cut</em>. Fourteen inches, to be exact. It freaked me out a bit. I've never voluntarily had my hair that short. In fact, the only haircut I ever had that was that short was one given to me at the age of three by my older sister, then aged five. She very carefully spread out newspapers to catch the mess, and made me squat down in the middle. Then she cut my hair about six inches long on the one side - and about two inches long on the other. Strangely, my mother was not best pleased with her. Even though she put out newspapers and <em>everything</em>! I'm sure you're nearly as astonished as my sister was to learn that her thoughtful preparations somehow didn't endear her to my mother at that moment. I was perfectly happy with it, of course, but I was only three and could not have cared less what kind of frightful mess she made of it. Since then I've become a lot vainer about my hair, however, and quite a bit pickier about who cuts it. I personally don't think short hair suits me (in part because, due to its waviness, it tends to poof out and scrunch up when short, in ways that are unpredictable no matter how good the cut).<br />
<br />
Still, it's for a good cause, and for that reason I pretty much didn't care how dorky I looked. It's just hair. It grows back. And mine luckily grows fast, so I figured that no matter what kind of Bozo the Clown effect I got, it wouldn't be for very long. Besides, it's an easy charity for me, a chance to help someone with little effort on my part and only a temporary sacrifice of vanity. I can grow hair like nobody's biz. I know this will surprise you, but I can even grow it in my sleep! I know! Amazing!<br />
<br />
At any rate, between my head practically floating away from lack of hair and the usual pre-travel shenanegins (complicated by Independence Day activities) , I wasn't getting much sleep anyway for a couple of days. There was an added distraction in that I'd be going along, industriously setting things up for travel, when I'd suddenly go: <em>Aaaugh! What's that on the back of my neck?!? </em>Hmm, okay, that would be <em>your own hair</em>, you moron. I've had long hair my entire life (my sister's tonsorial debut notwithstanding). I'm just not used to feeling it move like that on the back of my neck, as if small spiders or maybe a fleet of mosquitoes are dancing around on my nape. It's not restful. <br />
<br />
As for the night before travel – for some reason I decided to watch a couple of movies. I don't know why. I just did. So by the time I got done with that, it was time to pack and drop off dogs and go. I'd already planned everything I was taking with me, so it didn't take more than 15 minutes (and probably less) to pack. I'm notoriously a light packer – I once went to Africa for 13 days with only a camera bag and a single shoulder-carry duffel, not even full – so I managed to get everything into a single standard-size student backpack. I still felt like I was over-packing – I took a rain shell, even though my brother had told me it rarely rains in Eugene in July, and none was forecast – but you know how it is. Sometimes you just can't help yourself.<br />
<br />
At any rate, I arrived at the airport in good time, kicked off my travel shoes and deconstructed my backpack for the security scan, made it to my gate with an hour to spare. I napped a little on the plane – which is never restful, but I got a lot of practice at sleeping in an upright and locked position while I had pneumonia this winter for three months, so it was actually better than it might have been. The hop to Eugene left Portland 1o minutes late but arrived on time. Since I had no luggage, Mike waltzed me out of the airport and into his house in hardly any time at all.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, my sister-in-law K had a bad cold, so she was feeling droopy. My nephew Mr. D was already in bed. Tode and K and I had some hard cider and general happy-to-see-you family chat. I went to bed, read, slept. Hmm. Still not that tired. Up early, and Tode made me eggs and really good coffee. Mr. D bounced and smiled and was generally charming. K, unfortunately, felt worse. Having just a few months ago had a kind of nagging cold that worsened the next day, and worsened more the day after, and then blew up into a big fat bacterial pneumonia, I was fretting, but I tried to confine my remarks to "Wow, when I was sick over the winter the thing that helped the most was sleep and antibiotics. So don't feel you're letting me down if you want to nap. A lot." Personally, I detest being hovered over, and I imagine most adults are the same, so I tried really hard to shut up after that, apart from volunteering to help Michael set up the rental house he'd booked for the family's accommodations, so that K could stay home and rest.<br />
<br />
On the way to the rental, Michael and I went by one of the glass-working studios in which he plies his art. One of his partners and mentors, Shag, was in the midst of making goblets, the bowls of which he blows by hand, the stems of which he makes, astonishingly, from closed, hollow tubes of hand-made glass. This is a difficult technique. As glass cools, it contracts, and if you leave an air reservoir inside (as you must if the stem is to be hollow),the air will contract when it cools, either collapsing the stem or shattering it. Yet here stand one glass after another, the bowls of them lush and round as a ripe plum, the stems elegant and whole. Graceful and voluptuous, the glass so thin it looks frail and ethereal; yet these are things forged in fire, and the glass is hard as tempered Pyrex. They're not unbreakable, of course, but they're what Michael refers to as "hard glass"; much stronger than the same thickness of "soft glass", which would be the kind you would normally find if you were to (for instance) buy your wine glasses at an ordinary store.<br />
<br />
At any rate, it was pretty interesting to see what beauties emerged, quite casually, from the cluttered confines of a small workshop. It is of necessity hot (because there's a torch and kiln involved) and there are of course large quantities of glass rod and various mysterious tools and instruments. There is also a water bath used to cool the glass abruptly (when this is called for, it's generally, if I understand it, when the artist means to break off the end piece of a rod in order to discard it; immersing the hot glass in water will put thermal stress on the glass, so that when the glass worker taps the rod smartly against the rim of a large coffee can, the glass breaks where he has asked it to, and the scrap glass – called frit – falls into the coffee can.) The space is filled with the necessary arcana of the art, and there are various bits and pieces of projects laying on the scarred worktop. To one side squats the utilitarian bulk of the kiln, graceless as a stump – but when opened, its glowing maw is filled with forged glass, all gleaming , voluptuous curves and brilliant colors, graceful as water and dense as glacier ice. It is a lovely irony that this kind of glass has properties of both ice and water – and yet it is made of earth and born in fire. There is a strange charm in that, for me.<br />
<br />
Still, there was the house to provision so after a short inspection of Shag's glassworks, we continued along to the house where we filled the fridge and freezer with staples, and left a supply of dry goods (cereal and the like) on the counter. Knowing his audience, Michael had included several kinds of local microbrew, and some good coffee for the grownups, and frozen pizzas and the like for the kids. We distributed folding cots here and there to augment the accommodations and then we were off to the airport to gather rellies by the carload, dividing them between two vans. <br />
<br />
It's amazing how many car seats you need with three families of kids. And then there is, of course, the luggage. Luckily my family is by and large disinclined (as I am) to schlep huge quantities of luggage hither and yon. I've done enough traveling, both domestic and international, that I am heartily sick of dragging big suitcases about. Unless I'm planning a 3-month stay somewhere, I'm going to try to get it all into one bag I can easily carry. If it doesn't fit, do I really need it? The answer varies, but for the most part comes down on the side of "Nope". Except for that dang rain shell in my backpack.<br />
<br />
With everyone and everything incorporated into the vans – with every seat occupied, but with a little cargo space to spare – we deposited the main mass of people at the rental house. Bedrooms were apportioned and luggage dispersed, and immediate inroads began on the food supplies. K came by a little later with Mr. D (who had been at summer day-camp during all this) and some bad news: Having felt progressively worse and more feverish as the day went on, she went in to see her doctor. Turns out she has walking pneumonia.<br />
Well, crap. THAT just sucks. Having spent most of my winter that way, I'm pretty sympathetic. We (as a big group) have planned a big giant burger cookout, but K goes home early – wisely – to sleep. My other brother (known to you as MaskedMan) mans the grill, the kids play in the fenced back yard or wrestle each other into happy exhaustion in the rumpus room, the grownups sample local microbrew and eat and weave in and out through the tides and eddies of conversation. <br />
<br />
The next day in the morning Michael leads a hike up the butte. I've been there – on my last visit to Eugene, lo these many years ago – and I'm afraid that, cold-adapted as I am, it will be too hot for me to enjoy. I stay at the house with my mother, who – at seventy-six – might still attempt such things, except that she's had a total hip replacement and it likely to need knees done before much longer. We have an enjoyable, rambling catch-up sort of conversation, and I, at least, am surprised when the rest of the crew returns home. There's lunch and an astonishing amount of romping from the kids, considering they just hiked the butte. They are like small nuclear reactors, powered by a glowing core, perpetually in motion. Mr. D is excited to see his cousins; in particular Mr. I, MaskedMan's son. They are of an age – only a few months apart – and look enough alike they might easily be mistaken for brothers. They gravitate to one another like magnets, but it seems to be a peaceful conjunction. There is, at any rate, no screaming, no tears, no broken bones or broken toys, and blood is not spurting to the walls.<br />
<br />
My favorite Aunt (who is also my only aunt, but would probably be my favorite anyway, unless I had one who was equally cool but also gave me a million dollars and a pony) has arrived with my absolutely hilarious cousinette (who is not my only cousin, but is certainly a favorite of mine). We plan a giant take-out Chinese and Vegan feast (two restaurants are required for this feat). Eventually we assemble a vast buffet, eat and share, mix and match dishes, and drift leisurely in the conversational waters. By the time the leftovers are being packed up I am sleepy (finally! Maybe I've realized I'm on vacation at last!) Mike and Mr. D and I head home, where K has slept most of the day; she is still wan, but starting to feel better. We have a beer, chat, relax, make each other laugh. Tode gives me a popsicle before bed, and now for some reason it really feels like a vacation.<br />
<br />
This is a thing which I think plagues some people: We tend to get so busy that we forget to relax. To stop being so busy, to let go of all the frantic accoutrements of everyday life, to. leave work and similar cares behind and take fallow time and spend real attention on just <em>being</em>. I am more than guilty of taking work home – I give my unlisted number to certain clients; I carry the clinic cell on weekends when I am not on call if I have a dicey case that might need my attention; I think about cases and clients while I am on my own time. I do this a lot. And there is (it seems to me) a tendency in modern life to schedule vacations so that they are so packed with activity there is not time to relax and just <em>be</em>. My family is good about consciously scheduling no more than one event per day, and intentionally scheduling "off" days and blocks of time in which we might do no more than laze in the yard, enjoying the breeze and maybe a beer, letting the chirps and squeals of the kids wash over us like the rustling of the leaves overhead. <br />
<br />
There is a danger in vacationing with so many interesting people, especially ones you have not seen in some time: It is tempting to spend all your time interacting with them, hearing stories, telling your own, so that there is no time left for the mere enjoyment of simple company. That kind of perpetual motion and input can be exhausting, not restful at all, so that when you are done you need a vacation to recover from your vacation. But there is, sometimes, a peculiar magic that takes place internally for me. I don't know where or how I came by this; perhaps it's a result of growing up an introvert middle child, fourth of seven, surrounded by people more extroverted than myself. Perhaps it is a gift of medicine, a thing learned at some cost in the service of my art: The ability to both engage and disengage at the same time, to be clear of thought and entirely focused on whatever is at hand, and at the same time to stand in a small oasis of peace and clarity, no matter how frantic the activity around you. Maybe everyone experiences this and it is only notable to me because I came to it through effort and struggle. Whatever the case, it allows me to listen to all the stories, watch the bouncing kinetic antics of the children, savor the luxuries of having no responsibilities, no cases pending, no one who needs me, right this second, to help them with a matter of life or death – and to do so while feeling myself at rest. <br />
<br />
So, as it turns out, I do not need a vacation to recover from my vacation. The days of disruption and sleep deprivation prior to Eugene began to settle about me like the folds of a luxurious skirt, falling into place in voluptuous abundance around me. And in the end, despite the massive inputs of the day, I did in fact go the f*ck to sleep, peaceful and calm, at rest in the cradle of my own private Oregon.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-80817773837833483932011-08-03T13:08:00.001-07:002011-08-03T13:24:54.398-07:00My Own Private Oregon, Part One: You Can’t Pick Your Relatives<span xmlns=""></span><br />
Every two years or so, we have a family reunion. My mother is the driving force behind these. She had seven children, and although many of them have, through various accidents of life and circumstance, ended up within a 10-minute radius of her home (and others are but an hour or so further out) there was a time when we were scattered to the four winds. Some of us still are. Admittedly – and surely, unsurprisingly – I am the furthest afield here in Alaska. But there are two others who have somehow escaped being drawn into some mysterious maternal vortex which has caused over half of us to congregate on the Eastern seaboard. One of them – my youngest brother – lives in Eugene.<br />
<br />
When Michael moved to Eugene – with his wife, who is so excellent we'd have adopted her if he hadn't had the good sense to rope her into the fold by marriage – I thought: Well, of course. Is there any town on the entire planet more perfect for him? I think not.<br />
<br />
As a general rule, we try to trade off on coasts for the reunions. For me – thousands of miles further away than any of my siblings - the trip east is arduous and exhausting. But I yield to the temptations of communing with my family, none of whom I would see for years and years on end if not for the reunions, and I make the trip, miserable as it is. It's always worth it. Oregon, however, is a hop, a skip and a jump for me. Child's play. I'd've gone anyhow… but it was really lovely to arrive in good fettle, not on a flight that has required me to leave Alaska at one in the morning, nor travel all night only to arrive exhausted, rumpled and cranky at my destination, and thence to need two days to recover.<br />
<br />
Accordingly, I arrived in Eugene just after 9 in the evening the day before everyone else. I was not jet-lagged, cranky or exhausted, and although I might indeed have been a bit rumpled – it is, after all, air travel – and undeniably I arrived hungry (since now you have to pay as much for food and in-flight entertainment as you do for the flight itself), I was cheerful, energetic and excited to see my baby brother. Who, I will in all fairness report, is as richly accomplished as any of us and a good deal taller than some of us (who will not be mentioned, but I notice you are all staring at <em>me </em>for some reason), so the term "baby brother" really only designates his birth order. He is, undeniably, the last sibling born. <br />
<br />
Michael – also known by family nickname as Tode (and if you need to see the evolution, it went: Michael, Mackel, Mackelroni, Mike-o, Mito, Mitode, Tode) – is as cheerful and level and calm and good-hearted a brother as you could possibly ever want. He is also prodigiously talented, clear-thinking, generous, kind and a wonderful husband and father. He started his education aimed at the sciences, with thoughts of becoming a physical therapist, but switched to fine arts midway through – a move I have a great deal of sympathy for, as I was myself torn between studying art and science. In the end I decided it was easier to have art as a hobby than to have medicine as a hobby, so I went the science route. Tode went the other way. Here I'll admit that when he did so, I was a little surprised. As kids, my sisters and I were <em>always</em> drawing. Tode, not as much. My sketching sisters and I all went into science, and our much-less-frequently-sketching brother went into art. Go figure. But when he started doing art, it was clear he'd made the right choice: He's gifted. Despite all my crayoning and sketching and painting and sculpting and smithing, he's a better artist than I will ever be. <br />
<br />
His wife, K, is an exquisite match for him. Herself a talented artist, she (like Tode) has an analytical mind and is an incisive thinker. She makes her living with computers now, but I've seen her work, and it's good. She also has a gift for motherhood; she is calm, steady, patient, and firm, and rides the line between indulgent and disciplined with a deft grace and innate fairness that has paid off in the good temper and persistent cheer of my nephew, D. The two of them – K and Tode – are a united front, and while some of D's good nature is only attributable to him, it is certainly encouraged by the combined efforts of his parents. He's seven, and rather than being overwhelmed, cranky, overstimulated, grumpy, or otherwise fractious at the thought of having fifteen or so relatives descend upon him all at once, he was happy and excited, but well in hand. This was a lucky thing, since I was staying in the house with them, so I was glad not to be a disruption for him (or the rest). But there are so many of us that even if you laid us all out like cod on the floor, there wouldn't be enough space, so my brother rented a large house (complete with view) in the collegiate part of town, near the U of Oregon campus.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Tode (having picked me up from the airport in Eugene) drove me to the house, offered me a beer and made sure I had a snack. (Best. Baby. Brother. Ever.) The next day we went back to the airport and picked up twelve more of us. Sardining us all into two minivans, we trundled over to the rental house, which was capacious (by necessity) and nicely-appointed (by good luck and the diligent offices of Tode, who went to some trouble to acquire good accommodations.) Two more came in a little later, flying into Portland and driving to Eugene, and two more flew into Eugene and rented another minivan (and God knows we needed the space). There are still more of us who could not attend for various work-related reasons. If those had managed to make it, we'd have needed another house.<br />
<br />
From past experience, we've determined that the way to do things at a family reunion is to plan no more than one event per day, and preferably one that does not take up the entire day unless it is a restful sort of event. There were only two events that had to be on a particular day, one on Friday (the Oregon County Fair) and one on Saturday (pool-party barbecue day, requiring the reservation of the pool house.) Everything else was flexible, and attendance is never mandatory; if an event doesn't interest you, no one quibbles if you choose to skip it and have a nap or a read. After all, part of the point of a reunion is to, you know, reunite, so you really should have plenty of time to lounge around and chitchat, to eat and drink and catch up and tease one another and generally enjoy seeing your rellies. Even if most of them are taller than you and you have to peer up at them from a great distance. And here I'm not mentioning any names, but I'm glaring at all the offenders, which means anyone older than eight. That means <em>you</em>, you twelve-year-olds-and-up. <br />
<br />
It was an excellent reunion – some of which I will detail for you in post number next (to avoid making this one 1,000 pages). If you find these things boring, feel free to skip ahead to where I will (with any luck) be posting about fishing or medicine or animals or some such nonsense. But for a post or three, if you like, you can come to the family reunion with me, cyberversion. Of course, that might mean you have to meet my rellies, but that's pretty safe. I'm the only one who bites, and you're already used to me.<br />
<br />
They say you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives. This is, at least in our case, somewhat untrue; we have a thing called a "fribling", which is a friend who has become part of the family, so much so that they are invited to the family reunions and are included in family celebrations and events. So, demonstrably, at least in some cases you <em>can</em> pick your relatives. You are kind of stuck with the ones you were born with, though, and in that I've been lucky. I like them all – and I mean genuinely like them, would voluntarily spend time with them even if I did not have to. They are smart, kind, good-hearted and generous. They are ethical and moral, and willing to act upon what they hold true. And they <em>think</em>. Their opinions – social, political, artistic, personal and otherwise - are the result of actual thought and consideration, not of the meme of the moment or of some local hysteria or a hot sound-bite. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but I respect that they are opinions formed of reason, a personal code of ethics and due consideration. <br />
<br />
They are none of them perfect – and no more am I. But they're damned good, and I'm lucky in that.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-76725410949387982542011-07-27T18:16:00.000-07:002011-07-27T18:16:48.111-07:00Cleaver BeaverThis morning - oh, wait, it was early afternoon by then (dang endless daylight! Gets me all confused!) Where was I...? Oh, yes. This afternoon I was driving out of my driveway in search of coffee when I noticed that one of my aspen trees had fallen down. This was to my right on a steep slope above the lower arm of my drive, and while the trunk was entirely on the slope, with none of it laying in the drive itself, I made a mental note to clear it when I got home.<br />
<br />
But you know how quick thought is. As I drove past it, after a single hasty glance, a whole bunch of thoughts popped into my head. It took only a fraction of a second to think: <em>Wait a minute. That's a young tree, not likely to be rotted in the trunk, so why would it have broken? Also, there was no wind last night to knock it down. And did I mistake it, or did that one microsecond I glanced at the break-point show what look like chisel-marks...?</em><br />
<br />
So I put on the brakes, backed up 10 feet and squinted up the hill, hunched over my steering wheel to get the angle. Hmmm. Suspicious. I put it in park, told Finn to stay put and got out. The hill there is extremely steep, not conducive to climbing (or at least, not unless you're a quadruped of some description), so I only went up about 3 feet, just far enough to get a better look. Well, hm. That DOES kind of look like chisel marks. Peering closely at the dirt and leaf-litter on the slope, I thought I might be discerning a little trail of some kind - but it's pretty subtle, so I might be making that up. I ponder for a few seconds, shrug, make my way back into the drive... where I notice that the upper part of the tree has been sectioned into two or more lengths of trunk (two that I can see, anyway). There are multiple small branches that appear to have been chewed off the trunk, raggedy-edged, scattered here and there. The leaves of the aspen are just now wilting, and the exposed wood is still slightly damp. The short sections of trunk also have the scalloped appearance of chisel-marks at the ends, and there is a flattened area a foot wide in the weeds at lakeside.<br />
<br />
Well, what do you know. I have a beaver in my lake. <br />
<br />
Then I think: <em>Hm, do I really? because I haven't seen any signs of it, and the lake has no stream of running water in or out.</em> But then I think:<em> Well, streams aren't essential. I've seen beaver lodges in swampy wetlands. The main things seem to be deep enough water to sustain the beavers both summer and winter, and enough trees nearby for food. So maybe I DO have a beaver.</em><br />
<br />
I've lived in this house for 13 years, and never seen hide nor hair of a beaver anywhere near here before, which is what makes it hard to believe I have one now. On the other hand, it's quite a bit harder to believe that some human agency is responsible; what person would climb six or seven feet up that steep and slippery hill to cut down - with an axe, mind you, not a chainsaw or some more convenient device - a small, not-that-spectacular aspen tree on private property? And then chisel it into smaller sections, and drag those across the drive and toward the water? To say nothing of apparently gnawing the small branches off with their teeth. There are, after all, any number of larger, more conveniently-placed trees to vandalize. Although those aren't aspens - which I like, and am not best-pleased to have gnawed down, damn it all. But that's wildlife for you. The moose eat my birches when I'd rather they eat my willow and alder, and the beavers apparently want to eat my aspen when I'd rather they eat... well, my willow and alder. Beasts these days. No consideration for my landscaping preferences. Ah, well. What are you going to do?<br />
<br />
By now I'm pretty sure I'm not just hallucinating the potential presence of a very large semi-aquatic rodent setting up house right next door to me, because I can't put together a logical explanation that does not include a beaver. I can't picture some person doing this, particularly at night - because I'd for sure have noticed the tree down yesterday evening, around 6:30, when I was on my way to my friend Lori's house for socializing and general girlie debauchery. I did bomb in and out pretty fast - zipping home after work to feed and walk dogs and collect bratwurst and a movie, and zapping back out equally fast to go to Lori's. Moreover, as it happens, I was out late that night. This was necessary, as we grilled the brats, drank beer, talked about boys (and mutual guilty pleasures such as "True Blood" and "Spartacus Blood and Sand" and any movie that includes horses, sword fighting, or - preferably - both) and generally enjoyed ourselves. For a while we picked over agates and other interesting rocks, some rough and others polished smooth and satiny, that Lori picked up at an agate beach she knows and flies to from time to time. Lori is an excellent pilot (and in fact, if you need a flying adventure in AK, I <em>highly</em> recommend you contact her at SkyTrekking Alaska so she can fly you around for fishing or hunting or Iditarod or what have you. She'll land you safe, and she seems to know everyone and everywhere interesting in Alaska. Apart from which, she's a ton of fun to hang out with. But I digress). <br />
<br />
Anyway, we watched "Dear Frankie" (a truly charming little gem of a movie which no one seems to have seen) and by the time all was said and eaten and drunk and done, it was well past midnight. We're at that stage of summer where midnight is dusk, now - not full dark, but not exactly the full-light twilight it's been for the last few weeks. So it's possible, on the way home, that I missed seeing the downed tree when I pulled into my driveway at one in the morning.... but I don't think so. So I'm fairly certain that my little stealth tree-faller was at it between one a.m., when I got home, and 6 a.m., when I was up and about and letting dogs out. Certainly before 2 p.m. when I left the house in search of coffee. I'm 100% certain that it didn't happen earlier than 6:30 last night. Being as how beavers are largely nocturnal, the beaver theory would fit with the timing. And I'd just about guarantee that if a person was in my driveway messing with my trees, my dogs would have gone ballistic. So even if my other logic were faulty, I still can't see another theory that fits better than the Marauding Beaver theory (aka the <em>Castor canadensis</em> caper).<br />
<br />
So now I guess I'm on beaver watch. I'll have to try to protect my remaining aspens. I love them - their quivering leaves flashing green and silver in the slightest breeze, their straight white trunks, the way they change their silver-green leaves into shimmering golden coins in the fall; the way they cover my drive in gold leaf like alms before winter. So while I'm sympathetic to the needs of the local wildlife, I really hope there's something else out there they can be convinced to eat, instead of cleaving down the rest of my aspens. <br />
<br />
Years ago, a friend of mine's little boy had a sore throat. Meaning to tell his mother that he had a hot scratchy throat, he tried to say he had a fever in his mouth. But because he was learning to talk, he said instead "Mom, I have a beaver in my mouth." So despite the depredations on my aspens, I guess it could be worse. I may have a beaver, but at least I don't have a beaver in my mouth.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-73974857681123539522011-07-23T16:08:00.001-07:002011-07-23T16:20:59.489-07:00Smoking FishI know. Fish don't usually get going so fast they smoke.<br />
<br />
Recently I unexpectedly came into some salmon. This is a Good Thing, nearly as exciting as coming into money. For one thing, salmon tastes way better. For another, it actually can be used as a means of barter, nearly as good as monetary exchange, (although much more satisfying, as in: I'll trade you two pounds of Dall sheep for a King salmon fillet, or I'll trade you a jar of bear meat for a couple of silvers – you know, that kind of thing.)<br />
<br />
How did this happen, you ask? Well, my boss wants to go fishing next week, but he's on call. I volunteered to take his on-call, and he volunteered to give me a fillet. But as it turns out, he didn't give me a fillet. He gave me a good-sized Playmate cooler FULL of fillets. Have I mentioned that I like my boss? And also anyone else who gives me free salmon. Just sayin'. I also got some rockfish in with the mix, but my boss assured me it's a bland and boring fish, and needs to be prepared in a way which adds flavor to it. Okay, I'm game. I love making crap up when it comes to cooking. The victims of my culinary excesses may not love it so much, but since I'm congenitally incapable of following a recipe as written, it's probably a good thing that I am perfectly willing to try any number of weird concoctions – and if they turn out to be complete crap, it's a further good thing that my dogs are willing to try even weirder ones.<br />
<br />
So all of a sudden I've got salmon. Which is almost as good as having crab legs – which is great, except for how hard it is to wear pantyhose, since the spiny bits make it just about impossible to pull your pantyhose on without getting a run in them. That has nothing to do with smoking fish, of course –although anyone who has crab legs is, by definition, <em>smokin'</em> – but smoking fish is a whole other challenge. I tried to smoke a fish last year, actually. I got it lit, but I couldn't get it to draw.<br />
<br />
Okay, lame-ass jokes aside, this is my inaugural fish--smoking year. I've lived in Alaska for 16 years, which means I've been pushing the limit. I'm pretty sure that if you haven't smoked or canned or otherwise preserved some subsistence-type food item within 15 years, they revoke your citizenship and boot you out of the state. I've skated under the wire by consuming many such items and also freezing a few – but freezing, though it <em>is</em> a means of food preservation, hardly counts. Freezing is sort of automatic up here, if you wait a little. It doesn't take any special talent. If you wait long enough in the season, all you have to do is chuck it outside and it freezes. No special talent required.<br />
<br />
Still and all, it was only a matter of time before the fish-smoking police would have caught up with me, so – even as we speak – I'm sitting on my back deck, typing this and keeping an eye on my smoker – which is starting to smell pretty good, if you want to know the truth. I have a Border collie (yes, Finn, still feeling well) at my feet basking in the sun, and I'm being dive-bombed by dragonflies, but the mosquitoes are largely done for the year – at least at my house. And in any case, if the alder smoke wasn't enough to keep them at bay, there is always the Two-Foot Rule, to wit: Any mosquito that comes within two feet of me will be summarily killed without mercy. If they stay two or more feet away – well, live and let live. The bats and dragonflies need something to snack on, after all. I'm not greedy. Well, not about mosquitoes, anyway. On the other hand… did I mention the smoker is starting to smell pretty good? Like smoke and carmelizing brown sugar and salmony goodness.<br />
<br />
Now here's the thing about salmon: It's my second-favorite fish - second only to halibut, which (if you don't know) is food of the Gods, ambrosia, mana in aquatic form. It would be one of the "Two G's" – good, and good for you – except that to call halibut "good" is to insult it with faint praise. It's more like "exquisite and good for you".<br />
<br />
Salmon is, however, a very fine fish indeed. They're packed with antioxidants (all those lovely omega-3 fatty acids) and are an excellent source of high-quality and very tasty protein. Besides, it's pretty hard to make salmon in any way that isn't yummy. Bake it, broil it, poach it in wine, make it into chowder, smother it in herbs and grill it, cook it with sliced lemon and dill and garlic, slather it in sour cream, bury it in fish-packs or massage it with dry-rubs – practically anything goes, with salmon. It's a very robust fish, and a forgiving one as well, and the flavor allows you to pull off a myriad of gastronomic feats with aplomb. However, I confess that of the many delicious ways I've eaten salmon, it's possible that smoked salmon is my favorite. Especially the way I've had it up here. <br />
<br />
There are lots of people in AK who smoke salmon so good it will make you weep. Your knees will go weak as all your blood rushes to your tastebuds. Angel choirs will sing. You may have a religious experience. You will be reluctant to swallow, to let that flavor escape from your tongue, so you will be tempted to communicate for several hours by means of gestures and grunts so as to be able to keep that delectable flavor in your mouth juuuust a little longer.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm not saying my maiden voyage into the smoky waters of cured fish will be anything quite so special… but I will say I relentlessly quizzed several of my fish-smoking pals for tips. There are some common themes – for instance, the fish I like best is always done with a brown-sugar brine. However, techniques and spices vary. I went with a dray-pack method, in which the salt and sugar and spices are mixed together dry, and the prepared (filleted, sliced and towel-dried) fish is layered with the dry-pack and kept cold overnight. By morning, the dry-pack has sucked moisture out of the fish, which is much firmer, and is now marinating in a thick molassesy brine, heavily sludged with undissolved sugar and salt. I've elected to use alder wood for my smoke. In an hour or so I'll need to check to see if I need to put more wood in the smoker, but the "busy" part of the program is over. And now I'm hanging out, watching the squirrels and the birds, admiring my six-foot-high fireweed (flowered out only about halfway up the spike, if even that much, so according to legend, there's plenty of summer yet ahead) and generally keeping an eye on things. So far it's been relatively simple, thanks to the generously-shared knowledge of my Alaskan peeps.<br />
<br />
I've noticed, however, that there are certain things that people fail to mention about smoking fish.<br />
<ol><li>For one thing, you will get sticky. Very, very sticky. I've discovered that having a pack of Wet Ones on hand is a good idea. If not for that, I would still be trying to unglue my fingers from the paper towels.</li>
<li>On that subject, you're going to use up at least half a roll. Maybe more.</li>
<li>Your dogs will try to help you with this project. Don't let them.</li>
<li>Even if you don't let them, avoiding smoking a little Border collie hair in with the fish is a bit of a challenge.</li>
<li>Pam is your friend. I mean the cooking spray, not the vampire.</li>
<li>After you have finished cutting fish into brine-sized pieces, packing it into the brine (or the dry-pack mixture) and washing and drying your hands the approximately 27 times it will take to get rid of all the sticky, you will discover that somehow, many small circles of plastic, about the size produced by a regular three-hole paper punch, have mysteriously appeared, adhered tightly to your skin. This is not plastic. These are random leftover fish scales which have cleverly eluded the best efforts of soap and water. Despite appearances, you are not stuck with them until the end of time. You<em> can</em> eventually peel them off your skin. Don't give up. They make wire-bristle brushes for grills, you know. Just sayin'.</li>
<li>If you want to keep inquisitive insects, lint and random dog hairs off your fish while it is drying after the brine (so that it forms a useful little skin called a pellicle, which helps keep it moist during the smoking process), a few yards of ultra-cheap tulle from the local fabric store are worth the $3 investment.</li>
<li>Fish scraps will occur – bits and pieces of skin or fragments of flesh that come apart during the preparation. Another word for these scraps is "dog food". Or so I am assured by every dog in my house.</li>
</ol>Now, I've tried to make sure I followed all the rules, so that I don't end up poisoning myself or others. For instance, when the fish is drying, they say it should be kept cool – which, according to the books, means no more than 65 degrees – and that a fan may speed the drying process. Hmm. When I got up this morning, my back deck was 50 degrees, and there was a light breeze blowing. Perfect. Fans? We don't need no stinking fans. Well, not that kind of fan, anyway. This is <em>Alaska,</em> dude. Cooler than 65 degrees is kind of normal.<br />
<br />
I'll let you know how it turns out. It's really not that much work, once you figure out the little handy tricks. And if I don't actually poison myself… well, I did mention that smoked salmon is my favorite, right? I can vacuum-pack it and have smoked salmon aaaaaaall winter long. Just so long as I manage to have periodic amnesia and forget there is smoked salmon in the freezer, because otherwise I'll just eat it all in a week.<br />
<br />
In the meantime: Smoking fish. In Alaska, it's not just a good idea. It's the law.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Update:</strong> Having eaten several pieces of fish thus prepared, I have not suffered ptomaine poisoning, botulism, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, coma or death. Grimaces of disgust were completely absent, and if I didn't precisely hear angel choirs singing, there was at least definite loud humming. These observations make me think it's mostly safe to eat. There is one small problem, though, since it <em>is</em> evidently kind of addictive. I probably need to adjust my brine. Less cocaine and more Monkey-Butt powder, probably. Okay, I'm kidding. There's no cocaine in it.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-38386740225075323232011-06-25T17:41:00.000-07:002011-06-25T17:41:48.280-07:00Aflack... Aflack... AAAFFLLAAAACK!Finn's been poorly lately. <br />
<br />
One day not long ago he was lying on the bed next to me, pressed hard up against me, a fine tremor of stress shivering through his tissues and vibrating through mine, waking me. He looked at me anxiously, ears flattened in distress, wagging his tail in a nervous, tentative way, and urinated where he lay. A lot. All over the bed.<br />
<br />
This is MOST unlike Finn, so - apart from leaping to my feet and whipping the sodden blankets back before things could soak in to the mattress, I made immediate plans to pop him in and run some blood work. <br />
<br />
The last time Finn peed on my bed, he'd leaped up one day while I was folding laundry on the foot of it. He walked with deliberation to the center of it, fixed me with a glance and, once he was sure I was watching him, urinated where he stood. Right in the middle of the down comforter. My immediate thought was AAACK! BAD DOG! - but the one hard on its heels was: <em>Finn doesn't do things like that. Something's wrong</em>. If he was just being inappropriate he'd have lifted his leg on the bedpost - but he didn't. He camped his back legs out behind him, slightly crouched as if something hurt him, and just emptied his bladder right there, all at once. So: No scolding, and yes workup.<br />
<br />
I ran a urine sample the next day and sure enough: He had a bladder infection. Well, thanks for telling me, dude; it's harder to pick up in males because when they go out it's pretty much par for the course that they hike their leg about 71 times and pee a little bit on everything in creation. So unless they do something else - something abnormal - you have no way of knowing. He may not have thought of it in exactly those terms, but in his own way Finn was letting me know he was in distress and needed help.<br />
<br />
Finn is a Border collie. They have a useful ability to use their eye to control livestock. Unlike my Raven dog, Finn isn't much of a stock dog. He's what is sometimes referred to as a "loose-eyed" dog, meaning that he hasn't got a lot of the vaunted and much-esteemed Border collie Eye. But there is one thing he can do with it that Raven can't. Finn has a particular way of looking at me that compels me to really <em>look</em> at him: Closely, carefully, with observance and attention.<br />
<br />
Sometimes he uses this talent just for fun. One time I was hosing out the back of my pickup truck, which had a shell on it. Consequently I was duck-walking around under the low canopy, concentrating on flushing out a large quantity of sand and gravel from the bed. This was, unsurprisingly, taking a long time; sand and gravel sink below the water flow and tend to stay put. Finn was wandering around in the driveway with me, hopping into the truck bed every so often to inspect my progress. I'd given him a pig ear to help keep him occupied, and kept half an eye on him while I worked. <br />
<br />
At one point Finn jumped into the truck bed and gave me that Look; I could feel the weight of it resting on me, a gentle and persistent touch, quietly demanding my attention. I glanced up to see him gazing intently over his shoulder at me, pig ear clamped between his jaws, one corner of it pushing his lip up in an absurd lopsided grin. When he was sure he had my full attention he turned to face the lowered tailgate, tossed his pig ear high in the air, leaped out and caught it on the fly, and landed adroitly on the driveway. He turned around to look at me again, gently wagging, as if to say "What did you think of <em>that</em>? I invented a new game! Didja see my technique? I didn't just catch that pig ear, I threw it, too, and I don't even have hands! I should get at least 8 points for the dismount, don't you think? I should probably get a ten, though, for creativity and style."<br />
<br />
Naturally I laughed my sodden butt off, so he demonstrated the rules for me several more times. And, thus rewarded, Finn has persisted in the use of this particular Look. Which is in part how I knew, when he urinated all over me and my bed whilst fixing me with that expression, that something was Really Wrong.<br />
<br />
I took him to the clinic and drew some blood. It was a Sunday; I was there alone. I waited for the bloods to come out, expecting signs of infection or possibly kidney disease. What I got was hypercalcemia. Very marked hypercalcemia. Enough to max out the capabilities of our blood analyst unit.<br />
<br />
A peal of dread rolled through my chest when I looked at it. As a general rule, hypercalcemia in dogs means cancer until proven otherwise. And of the cancers that cause it, the most common one is lymphoma - which, in dogs, is incurable. The next most common are perianal cancer and bone cancer - and Finn had no such masses present.<br />
<br />
Hell and God <em>damn</em> it. I love this dog. He's only eight. This can <em>not </em>be happening.<br />
<br />
I admit I said a lot of really bad words while I thought. I went through my rule-out list of causes of hypercalcemia - the HARDONS list: Hyperparathyroidism, Addison's disease, Renal disease, vitamin D toxicosis, Osteomyelitis, Neoplasia, Spurious. My bloods had already ruled out Addison's disease, renal disease and osteomyelitis. There was no history of vitamin D toxicity (and I'd know, as this dog is with me pretty much 24/7, and when he's not under my eye he's in a run at the clinic.) That leaves me with hyperparathyroidism, spurious (lab error, essentially) - and cancer.<br />
<br />
I drew more blood to be sent out to an outside lab to test inonized calcium levels and parathormone levels. The results would rule out lab error - confirmation or denial by an outside lab - and hyperparathyriodism. I also - while waiting for that test to come back - Xrayed Finn's chest. The commonest cause of hypercalcemia in dogs, as I said, is neoplasia - cancer. The commonest cancer to cause it is lymphoma, and the commonest form of lymphoma to cause it is a form called mediastinal lymphoma. The mediastimum is the structure in the center of the chest that contains the heart, the trachea and esophagus, the great vessels (aorta and vena cava) - and a cluster of lymph nodes just forward of the heart, at the branching of the mainstem bronchi. Lymphoma itself being a disease of the white blood cells, it forms most commonly in liver, spleen and lymph nodes, though it can go anywhere the bloodstream does.. Finn had no enlarged lymph nodes in the periphery of his body - the ones you can feel under a dog's jaw or armpits, in the junction of the shoulder, in the inguinal region or behind the knee. But the ones in the abdomen are harder to reach, and the ones in the chest, impossible. Those must be imaged.<br />
<br />
The lateral view of Finn's chest looked okay - maybe a little hazy in front of the heart, but no visible mass. But the V/D view - one taken with him lying on his back - told a different story. There, in his mediastinum, right in front of his heart, is an unmistakable mass. Unmistakable.<br />
<br />
More bad words, but I kept them to myself this time, both to avoid offending my co-workers, and as a way of whistling past the graveyard - pretending that I didn't know that death was stalking my household, its dark and roving eye fixed, for the moment, on Finn.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, there's one thing that cannot be ignored. Finn is still PU/PD - polyuric and polydipsic, which means he's peeing and drinking like a racehorse. The real problem here isn't the inconvenience; it's that, with calcium that high, you can induce kidney failure, and that, if left untreated, can potentially kill a dog faster than cancer. Something had to be done about this. There are there are choices: One is diuresis: simply running vast quantities of fluid into the dog to dilute the excess of calcium. It's a temporary fix, though, and may take days to produce the desired result. The second option is a calcium-wasting diuretic, one that excretes calcium preferenetially to other minerals. This isn't a bad option <em>per se</em>, but its capacity to drop the calcium is limited. And given the extreme numbers Finn was posting, I doubted it would help enough to make much of a dent.<br />
<br />
That left option three: Steroids. Prednisone will dump excess calcium like a bad boyfriend. It's also cheap and well-tolerated, and tends to stimulate the appetite - which would be a good thing, since Finn - normally the most food-motivated of dogs - had started refusing food. There's really only one problem with it in a case like this: Pred induces MDR proteins.<br />
<br />
MDR proteins are cell-membrane transport proteins that eject harmful substances from the cell. In the case of cancer, this is a bad thing: it means that medications that are meant to kill the bad cells are ejected before they can do the job. Normally, pred would have the additional drawback of destroying your ability to achieve a histopathological diagnosis (which means a diagnosis based on tissue samples examined by a pathoologist under a microscope)... but since I wasn't going to crack Finn's chest to biopsy lymph nodes this was not my main concern. My main concern was the MDR proteins. So there we are, Finn and I, between a rock and a hard place. If I use pred, I begin to induce MDR's, and the MDR proteins will close off any window I have for more-aggressive chemo that will earn me a longer remission. If I DON'T use pred, his kidneys will shut down and we'll lose much faster. <br />
<br />
Still, you don't induce MDR's instantly, so I started Finn on pred on Sunday to dump his calcium; sparing his kidneys was the first obstacle, and I suspected the hypercalcemia was in part responsible for his poor appetite. I knew I didn't have long to decide what I would ultimately do. I'm in no way opposed to treating cancer - and have done it (sometimes with spectacular success) with any number of patients, not to mention four of my own dogs (Finn being the fifth such candidate). In animal medicine we aim for quality of life over length of life - after all, no dog is making it to sixty, and what matters to them is not how long they live. It's how WELL they live. And there's another factor: Of the chronic diseases, Cancer it the most curable one we have. We can't cure heart failure. We can't cure kidney failure. Past a certain point we can't cure liver failure, either. Treat them, yes. Cure them - short of a transplant, no. Cancer, we can cure. Not all cancers, of course, including the profoundly accursed lymphoma, and there's a cost - but as a group, cancer is the most curable of the chronic diseases.<br />
<br />
This is all well and good, except for one big fat "however", being this: Lymphoma in dogs is a non-Hodgkin's form, and though medical science is always, always in pursuit of a means of curing it, that means has not yet come to hand. So based on the standards of medicine as they stand today, my best hope with aggressive therapy is a remission of some months' duration, and that may be hard-won... or possibly, unachievable. Not every dog will do a remission. And I have to consider the cost to the dog and the length of good time I propose to offer him in trade for the bad time I will cost him during treatment.<br />
<br />
I thought about it from the minute I saw the high calcium levels, through the second blood draw and the Xray and while I was pending my other tests. Finn would do anything I asked of him - but he's a worrier. He hates procedures, and although he submits to them and tries to do as asked, he really really <em>hates</em> them. He is anxious and afraid, wonders what he's done wrong, is sad and uncertain for hours or even days afterwards. Can I in good faith put him through weekly procedures for this?<br />
<br />
On the one hand: He's only eight (albeit, about to turn nine). On the other: It's not fair to torture them 'til they die. You have to strike a balance for the dog, do what's fair <em>for them</em> even if it's not the most time you can potentially gain for them. And ultimately, if you lose them now or lose them later, you're still going to grieve them. That won't change. All you can change is <em>when</em>. And with all that in mind - and Finn's temperament foremost - I decided that if it should be bad news, I'd stick with pred for as long as it would give me, and then, when it could give me no more, I'd do my best to help Finn die as gently and easily as it is in my power to make it.<br />
<br />
A hard decision, but when I made it I knew it was the right one. It settled into my being with a little <em>click</em>, fitting in such a way that I knew, sad and grim as it was, it was the right choice for Finn.<br />
<br />
Two days later the test came back: Hypercalcemia, and low parathyroid levels. So I've ruled out lab error, and I've ruled out hyperparathyroidism. That leaves me with one answer left: Hypercalcemia of malignancy, with a mediastinal mass telling me it's lymphoma. <br />
<br />
I really expected this to just hammer me to my knees. I <em>love</em> this dog. Love him. He is charming and funny, sweet and willing, easy and kind - and so beautiful. Mainly that's his expression. My father once remarked that when Finn looks at you, you see his whole soul in his eyes. That's really kind of true. He is an honest dog, and a generous one as well. He gives you all he has, right off the bat, unreservedly. So what I expected was devastation, and I spent the entire day tensed, braced to stave off the well of pain and despairing of my dog lasting even 'til his 9th birthday, a week hence; he was that ill. But instead, once I was home and had a chance to drop my defenses, the fear fell away and what I had... was peace.<br />
<br />
I found this confusing, and a little annoying. I <em>knew</em> what he had was bad. I'd already lost a dog - my beloved Buddy-dog - to lymphoma in the intestine. So how was this going to be okay? But I felt, somewhere unshakable, that it <em>was</em> going to be okay. And after fighting that for a while, I gave up; I didn't understand why, but it was still there - that peace. Maybe it was just acceptance; we all die, sooner or later. Maybe it was just the understanding that whenever we part, Finn and I, it will hurt - and when is immaterial to that. The pain will still have to be endured, regardless of the date of its arrival.<br />
<br />
Still: There's what must be done today. <br />
<br />
Finn did well on his pred at the start. It is a medication that often causes excessive drinking and urination, of which he had plenty to begin with. But the pred did its job faithfully; Finn's calcium dropped like a rock. Within 36 hours he was actually <em>less</em> PU/PD than he was before we started the pred. He ate well for a few days - but then I noticed an alarming amount of weight coming off him, very fast. I upped his food, but he continued to drop weight and his appetite began to fade.<br />
<br />
This is not just bad - it's <strong>really </strong>bad. Finn is very food-motivated, and in the past I've had trouble keeping weight <em>off</em> him, not keeping it <em>on </em>him. Things were moving alarmingly fast. The spines of his scapulae were like knife blades under his skin, the muscle on his shoulder blades gone. The vertical processes of his vertebrae stood up stark and clear, revealed by his atrophying back strap muscles. His arms and legs were thin and flaccid, his normal robust muscle tone gone, and his face looked hollow, the bones pressing against the skin from within, no longer clothed in normal flesh. Moreover he was weak and tired. This is a dog who had once had a leap so graceful and effortless that he seemed to float from the ground to the pickup bed, as if lifted there by magic. To see him climb laboriously, one foot at a time, into the cab of the truck - well. Not looking hopeful. I weighed him. He'd lost six pounds. That's 15% of his body weight, gone in less than 2 weeks.<br />
<br />
The one thing about being backed against a wall like that is this: You have nothing to lose by punting. If you make a gamble and it doesn't pay off - well. You were losing anyway. So punt I did. I invented a protocol using a mitochondrial modifier. That went okay for a week, and then Finn started vomiting.<br />
<br />
Well, crap. Okay, anti-emetics to control that, discontinue my invented protocol, taper the pred. Two days of that... and well, at least he has his appetite back; in nothing else, he'll at least eat well 'til I have to make the tough decision.<br />
<br />
But then I noticed something. Finn stopped losing weight. In fact, he also seemed a little more cheerful. He'd eat anything I put in front of him, but now it seemed like it was actually putting some flesh on him. <br />
<br />
Hmm.<br />
<br />
Within a few more days, Finn was energetic enough to be really rather annoying - and there was great rejoicing. Mind you, it's a bit of a shock to be driving down the road, minding your own biz, and have something wet and warmly slimy suddenly thrust through your hair, smearing unidentified goo along your neck and then rolling down the front of you to land in your lap. This would, of course, be the drool-soaked Aflack duck (kindly provided by the Aflack dude, who gave me two because I told him Finn loves Aflack ducks). He does, too - he loves to bite them and make them say "Aflack... aflack... AAAAFFLLLAAACK!" Over and over and over again. Until your brain explodes. At any rate, the Aflack truck-duck is now mute, having been Aflack'd to death. Still, Finn keeps poking it over my shoulder so I can throw it into the back seat of the cab for him, because evidently driving is no longer interesting enough. We also have to have GAMES while we're on the road. (The Aflack house-duck has, unfortunately, kept its voice... which I know because I hear it every so often at FIVE IN THE MORNING, thank you very much, since Finn likes to get up and play with it while I'm trying to sleep. This can be ignored only so long. And "so long" is also a lot shorter if the spit-slimed duck is poked invitingly against your cheek several times, in repeating intervals of approximately 2 minutes, or else possibly dropped directly onto your forehead. Just sayin'.)<br />
<br />
So: Hmm twice. <br />
<br />
I'm inclined to be skeptical by nature, so I wasn't prepared to go all hog-wild about this. I took a "let's just wait a little and see" attitude, but I did feel that Finn was sturdy enough to go someplace with his sister Raven in the truck with us (something I'd stopped doing when he got sick, figuring he didn't need the stressor.) The first time I did this there was a clash of renewed sibling rivalry; even this was encouraging, since Finn had been so extremely passive when he first got sick. He'd defer to the back seat without even token resistance, leaving Raven the run of the front. But this time I had to banish him to the back, a correction he took with seemingly good grace. <br />
<br />
Ahh. Peace. All is quiet on the western front. Until the Aflack truck-duck shoots forward and thumps against the dash hard enough to bounce back into my lap. So two things: one, Finn is maybe not as happy about the back seat as I thought, and two, maybe he should be pitching for the Yankees. Although I'm fairly certain he'd rather catch for them.<br />
<br />
The upshot at this point is that Finn is, for the moment at least, well. It's unclear to me if this is a long-term remission - perhaps even a spontaneous remission, which does happen independent of treatment - or if it's just a lull, a temporary respite. It's too soon to tell. But in the short run I'm grateful for all I can get with him; he's very dear to me, and I'm not eager for a parting of the ways. And even if it means he's obnoxious and annoying and drops his spitty duck down my neck umpteen times a day, I'll take it. And I'll kick the soccer ball for him, and throw his Ceasar Milan designer squirrel frisbee until my arm falls off. I'm glad he feels well enough to be a pain in my behind, day and night. And i even admit that I don't really mind <em>that </em>much hearing "Aflack... Aflack AAAFFLLAAACK!" approximately one hundred and seventy-one times. In a row. Every few hours. Until my eyes bleed. The main thing is: the dog feels good.<br />
<br />
But I am kind of considering some kind of de-voicing surgery on the Aflack house-duck.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-82893877724374073202011-06-20T13:50:00.000-07:002011-06-20T13:50:42.091-07:00Farewell Sunny KnikThis is why I love Alaska.<br />
<br />
I have some friends who (for privacy reasons) I will pseudonym here as the Resk family (which stands for "really excellent super-keen", just so you know.) The Resks are everything you could want in friends: They're smart, funny, generous, warm, good-hearted, hospitable people, and <em>man </em>can they cook. Which, if you're friends with them, is vastly to your advantage, since there's every chance they'll feed you at some point along the way. I say this in complete confidence, since every time I show up at their house, food magically appears. And it's GOOD food. And if they offer you a drink? Try it. You'll like it.<br />
<br />
When I first met them, it was as clients. Mr. Resk (who will henceforth be called Mac, which stands for "manly and capable") mostly came in with the dogs at first, since his lovely wife Tara ("talented and really adorable"), a nurse, was working a 3-on, 3-off schedule far far away in Bethel. I can't really remember what it was that got us started, but Mac and I made each other laugh really a lot. Somehow we'd always manage to get a physical exam and treatment lined out, even so, but it was a near thing sometimes.<br />
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It turns out that Tara was making beaver mitts as a fund-raiser for Iditarod one year. I thought: <strong><em>I </em></strong>want some beaver mitts! So (following instructions) I traced my hand twice on a piece of paper: Once with fingers together, once with fingers apart. My rings made odd little bumps appear on my tracings, so I carefully labelled these, with arrows pointing to them: "This is not a deformity. This is my ring." The thumbs ended up looking a little weird, so I labelled them, too: "This actually IS a deformity. Oh, wait, it's my thumb."<br />
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Evidently Tara thought that was pretty funny, but despite my deformity - er, my thumbs - she made me an absolutely gorgeous pair of beaver mitts. It's not possible for your hands to get cold in them. Trust me, I've tried. Ain't gonna happen. <br />
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At any rate, I've enjoyed a friendship with the Resk family for many years. Lately it's been even more interesting, what with the addition of their children, Extremely Adorable #1 and Extremely Adorable #2. These are charming boys, sturdy and bright and SO cute that no one alive can look at them and not go: "Awww!" I tried it once. I almost had a seizure trying to hold it in. It's better to just give in right away. Trust me on this.<br />
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One day, a few months ago, I happened to hear that the Resks were planning to sell their house. I must digress here for a moment and tell you: I <strong>love</strong> their house. It's cozy and snug, sitting up on a hill amongst big old aspen trees. It's a log home with a fieldstone fireplace in the living room and a long deck across the front of the building. There are outbuildings and a couple of nice, level areas for dogs, a fenced yard for kids and a wide, flat space where barbecues can be held. Plenty of space for horseshoes or a volleyball net or a game of giant-inflatable-soccer ball soccer. A congenial space, in the Knik Historic District, with access to the trail system. It's not far from the Musher's Hall of Fame, the Kink Bar (where Hobo Jim has put on many a rollicking pre-race concert) and Kink lake. There's access to the Iditarod trail right off the property. <br />
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Iditarod trail access.... Hmmm. My tech Julie should hear about this. She runs dogs. She likes log homes. This would be PERFECT.<br />
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So, quick like a little bunny, the minute I returned to work I told Julie she should call the Resks. She did. They're all like "Wha...? We told ONE person we were planning to list our house and already we have a potential buyer? Before it's even been listed? We don't even have a real estate agent! Um... eh?"<br />
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Alaska. It's a big state, but it's a small town. Word gets around.<br />
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So, fast forward a few weeks, and: Ta-da! Julie and her husband bought the the Resk house. What do you know. It <strong>is</strong> perfect. Or, at any rate, perfect enough. Me, I'm pretty happy that it's going to someone I know and like. It's a lovely space, and if <em>I</em> can't have it, well then, someone dang good <strong>should</strong>.<br />
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The upshot, naturally, is that I went to yet another perfectly fabulous barbecue at the house. It's not a housewarming party; that's when you move in, and this was thrown by the Resks the day before they moved out. So what do you call that? It's kind of the opposite of a housewarming. But somehow "house-cooling party" doesn't sound right. House-switching party? Tag-team house-handoff party? Hm. Well, anyway: A party. <br />
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I did mention the Resks know how to cook, right...?<br />
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Halibut, onion and pepper shishkebabs. Reindeer bratwurst. Scallops wrapped in bacon. Tenderized pork on a skewer, basted in something yummy. Marinated prawns. And of course, for the <strike>faint of heart</strike> traditionalists, hamburgers and hot dogs. Luckily for me, the ranks of the Resk friends can, by and large, cook as well: Smoked salmon. Potato salad. Home-made salsa. Spring rolls. Mmmm. <br />
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I might also mention that there was Sangria, Sunny Knik Margaritas, and Alaskan Summer Ale on tap. Hm. I have to try ALL of those.<br />
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Jeez. Where to begin? So many choices, so little space in the average human stomach.<br />
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Well, it was a gorgeous (and I mean <em>gorgeous</em>) day, and the fire was crackling cheerfully, basting the air with the scent of fire. Clearly where I must start is with a nice cold ale, whilst standing near enough the fire to get the smell of smoke thoroughly permeating my hair. Oh, and as a by the way, that's where the good conversations got started, so obviously I picked the perfect spot to begin. So there I am, basking in the warmth of a sunny Alaskan day, chit-chatting with friends while the rich, warm taste of my cold ale limbers my tongue, and watching a bald eagle fly low to check us out. And hmm... the grill is starting to smell mighty good, perhaps I should get a plate...? But first a hunk of this smoked salmon and - <em>damn</em> that's good, nice work, man! What, there's plenty? Don't mind if I do, then... nothing like a nice hunk of smoked salmon with a bacon-and-scallop chaser.... <em>(pause to enjoy random dog cuteness)</em> What? You're right, my plate is empty! How did that happen...? Oh, another couple of shrimp and some pig-on-a-stick? Sure, why not? Nobody minds if I eat like three of these spring rolls in a row, do they? <em>(short intermission for more random dog cuteness)</em> Oh, look, Extremely Adorable #2 is doing something extremely adorable! And Extremely adorable #1 is passing out bubbles to the other kids - who, strangely (not!), are also extremely adorable. Wow, better move back, here comes Mac with an entire sled full of wood to throw on the fire all at once. I think I'll just stand back here for a few minutes.... Oooh, another Margarita? Sure! What, giant marshmallows for roasting? Wow, dudette, that is a <em>champion</em> s'more you just made there! <em>(and, yet more random dog cuteness).</em><br />
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Well, it went on like this for several hours. Five and a half, to be exact. If not for the fact that I had dogs waiting to be fed, I'd probably still be there. Fortunately I'd not eaten lunch - it being a busy day at the clinic, as usual for a Saturday - so I felt more than justified in eating two days' worth of calories in one afternoon. Why not? We're celebrating here, man! It's the house-hand-off.. er.. whatchamacallithousewhateveritis party!<br />
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Overall it's a bittersweet occasion - sad to see the last of the Resk BBQs, happy for their new adventures; Happy for my friends Julie and her husband, sad Julie could not make it to the party. Still, there's no denying the pleasure of the day, the enjoyment of good friends and good food and good weather. The Resk family isn't leaving the state, or I might have been too sad to go to the party. As it is, there will be other parties, and maybe they'll come to Wildwood for one event or another. Maybe Julie will throw her own BBQs, and we'll all meet there. The possibilities are endless.<br />
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One thing is for sure though: There's something about standing under the wide open sky, the heat of the sun on my head and the heat of the fire on my legs, the scent of wood smoke and grilling meat pierced by the happy squeals of children and the murmur of conversation.<br />
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It feels like summer now.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-20571194579453914802011-05-27T21:15:00.000-07:002011-05-27T22:16:41.574-07:00Dogs Driving CarsOne day, a few years ago, my (now-ex) boyfriend Oz and I decided to go to Talkeetna. Now, if you haven't been there, Talkeetna is a fascinating little town. I do mean<em> little</em>; you can walk from one end of it to the other in about 10 minutes. But Talkeetna has an interesting and varied culture, despite its small size. It's the jumping-off point for those who want to climb The Mountain (Denali, which up here is often referred to as simply The Mountain, capitals implied). As a result of that, there is a summertime culture of outdoor enthusiasts, guides and pilots and various seasonal businesses that spring up in - well, the <em>spring</em>time, and persist all summer. Naturally, the tourist activities go up significantly as well: flightseeing, riverboating, fishing, what have you. <br />
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Still, despite all that human traffic, there is little in the way of car traffic, and little need for it, given the size of the town. Cars drive in and park at a convenient little parking area and then you get out and walk. You can have a nice browse around the shops, eat at one of the tasty little eateries, walk to the Talkeetna River before it dumps into the Susitna or cross the bridge and explore the opposite bank. At any rate, the main spur enters town and then takes a left-hand turn, after which it dead-ends a few hundred feet later. At the bend in the "L" is the parking area where nearly everyone gets out and walks.<br />
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The town has a decidedly counter-culture feel to it, with a wide variety of people - tough old Alaskans, hard-core mountaineers, pilots of many a stripe (professional, recreational, bush), tourists of all descriptions both from Alaska and Outside, seasonal workers, State wilderness employees, local Talkeetnans (is that a word?) - the variety is astonishing for such a small town. I don't know if it's this variety of disparate folks, or if it's some special magic of the town itself, but Talkeetna is quirky, unusual, offbeat and deeply charming in a way that takes me off guard. The most bizarre and unusual combinations seem somehow just right, when viewed from the perspective of the town's particular point of view.<br />
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I can't recall on this given day if we'd flown up and walked into town from the Talkeetna airport, or if we'd driven. In either case, we were wandering through the shops, stopping for lunch (excellent pizza), chit-chatting with various people beknownst and unbeknownst to us. I was doing some early Christmas shopping of the niece-and-nephew variety, and Oz was either browsing along with me or waiting patiently outside for me to finish my scouting. <br />
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We'd been all the way down to the end of the L and back on our wanderings, and I was checking two last shops for a raven-shaped hand-puppet. My targets were on the incoming Talkeetna Spur, right hand side of the road. A small two-door hatchback type of car pulled over on the far left shoulder, the driver jumping out to talk to a friend she'd spotted walking alongside the road. There was a sort of general squealing of delight and mutual hugging. It really wasn't a traffic hazard, there being so little traffic, even though she'd parked on the wrong side of the street and had left her car idling with its driver's-side door wide open. I glanced over at the sound of happy reunions, smiling a little, the way you do when you see people you don't even know being all bubbly and excited. <br />
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What made me smile even more was that I noticed that there was the most adorable Jack Russell in the front seat of the car. He had semi-pricked ears and a wiry, scruffily-bearded muzzle, and his little tail was straight in the air, wagging madly. He craned his little neck to look out the windows, but kept to the vehicle. <br />
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<em>Good little dog</em>, I thought. <em>I would never trust MY dogs to stay in the car with me standing 15 feet away, door wide open, and the inducements of a warm summer day and lots of people all strolling back and forth, some carrying (and dropping, perforce) food of various descriptions. My dogs would probably all leap out to romp around my feet, or mug toddlers for their ice cream cones</em>.<br />
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But this little JRT did neither, evidently taking his car-guarding duties seriously. Spying a large black Labrador ambling along the L on a leash - crossing impudently in front of the car, without so much as a by-your-leave - the Jack Russell immediately launched a challenge at the intruder. Barking furiously, he leaped to his feet, putting his forepaws on the dash for a better view and hopping up and down on his hind legs, making abortive attempts to scrabble up the curved shoulder of the dashboard. For some reason this tightened my focus on the dog. Suddenly I realized he was taller than before, and a microsecond later I saw why. He'd planted his hind feet on the automatic's on-floor gearshift.<br />
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"Um -" I said, to no one in particular. Oz looked at me. I started to point across the road, just about the same moment that the Jack's bouncy little barks produced the results that evidently my subconscious mind was anticipating. He shoved off hard with his hind feet, attempting to launch himself up onto the dash - but succeeding instead in shoving the gearshift into "drive".<br />
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It was one of those moments where you can see the impending events unfolding as if in slow motion in your mind, mere fractions of a second before they occur in real life - but you are powerless to stop them, by virtue of distance. The car began to roll forward at a stately pace. The driver, caught up in the excitement of her friends, did not, of course, hear the tires moving over the sandy verge of the road. The wide open door bumped gently against a telephone pole and slammed shut. <br />
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The Jack Russell, thrilled to be approaching his quarry, barked excitedly on.<br />
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<em>"HEY!"</em> I said, loudly, trying to attract attention as the car proceeded, slowly gathering speed. (I'll grant you this wasn't the most articulate thing I might have said, but somehow screaming "Dog driving car! Dog driving car!" didn't seem quite right, either.) One part of my mind is observing this all with some bemusement; it seems peculiarly fitting, in a way. It's Talkeetna. Of course there is a dog driving a car down the street. Why not?<br />
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Several strapping young men stood in the middle of the road at the L-turn, mock-punching and shoulder-bumping each other animatedly in an exuberance of testosterone and youth. One of them either heard my exclamation or noticed that the car, proceeding at a regal pace, was being piloted by none other than a small white terrier, yapping with glee as he bore slowly but inexorably down on his sworn enemy the Labrador, now passing from starboard to port across his bows. The young man leaped into action, diving at the front of the car, bracing his hands against the hood and digging in with his considerable thigh muscles to slow the car's progress. Two of his buddies and at least one random passer-by threw themselves into the fray as well, bracing their brawny chests against the hood and their feet against the silty hard-pack of the road, all the while being pushed slowly back cross it like the Spartans at Thermopylae - unfortunately without benefit of either leather loincloths or Gerry Butler.<br />
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Meanwhile, the JRT, having seen his nemesis escaping off his port bow, had moved so that he was standing behind the steering wheel. His efforts to climb the wheel for a better view levered down against the spokes of the steering wheel (whatever those are called), swinging the car into a wide left-handed arc. The Jack Russel - no doubt delighted with this turn of events, as he was now following his prey through the L of the road - celebrated by making several bank-and-turn leaps off the steering wheel. Muffled by the closed window, he none the less sounded completely demented with elation at his success.<br />
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Meanwhile, the now five young men pitting their strength against the car's forward momentum are being pushed inexorably back, their cross-trainers skidding against the road. The car is slowing, but not completely stopped, and people are towing their children briskly out of its path. The driver of the car, her attention brought at last to this scene, gives a shriek. The left front of the car is now clear of the roadside obstructions, however, and one of the car-matadors dives toward the door, yanking it open, deftly inserting himself behind the wheel and stepping hard on the brake. He manages this maneuver without allowing the JRT to escape, puts the car in "park" and shuts down the ignition.<br />
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There is general applause for the car-matadors (who aw-shucks it and shove each other around a little in bashful fashion, fugitive grins on their faces.) The driver rescues and scolds her JRT. And the Labrador escapes into the crowd, foiling the JRT's attempt at world domination via automotive mastery.<br />
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Well, after that, of course, anything else would be anticlimactic, so that pretty well put paid to my shopping for the day. I never did find the raven hand-puppet I was looking for, but on the whole, in terms of entertainment, I have to say it was a good day. I mean, how often do you get to see a Jack Russell terrier driving a hatchback down the street and steering it around a turn? For sheer offbeat charm, it's hard to improve on that. <br />
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Well... maybe if you added Gerry Butler in a leather loincloth...AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-36547362091695111032011-05-09T14:24:00.000-07:002011-05-09T14:28:08.084-07:00Trying New ThingsI'm a great believer in trying new things. For one thing, one of my great fears is the idea of losing my mental faculties. This is in part because lives depend on my brain being in good working order; my patients, if no one else, need me to be firing on all cylinders. But it's partly because so much of my enjoyment of life depends on my way of thinking about it. So I'm all for anything that keeps my brain flexible. To that end I take up new projects every so often. I took a painting class last summer (watercolor, and produced a reasonable likeness of my dog Finn) and took up Swedish and Norwegian - in part because they're free on LiveMocha. (Who knew that learning to roll my R's would turn out to be so useful?) I took them up together because they're similar languages, and I figured it would be just as easy to learn them together as separately, but I soon discovered a pitfall: Occasionally, when I mean to say the Swedish word, I unexpectedly veer off and go all Norwegian for a second - and perhaps vice versa, but since one of the docs in the clinic speaks Swedish and none of them speak Norwegian, I only get caught when I mess up the Svenska portion of the program. <br />
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<strong>Important Program Note:</strong> Before you all start sending me missives in Swedish (or Norwegian, for that matter), please bear in mind that when I got sick I lost all energy of every description and have done nothing - and here I mean literally NOTHING - with either language since. So naturally I've forgotten everything except "Jag ar kort" and stuff like that. Hardly the raw materials for a scintillating conversation, since stating that I'm short - well, 5'4" - is pointing out the painfully obvious and leaves little room for sensible replies.)<br />
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I've heard that one of the best ways of keeping the brain flexible and active is to take up a new language. I figured that it might not be such a bad idea to brush up the old ones, too, so in the interests of keeping the old noggin (and I do mean OLD noggin, since I'm so ancient I am practically fossilized) in good working order, I decided to brush up on my French and Spanish. In pursuit of this, I had an excellent idea (which I shamelessly stole from S at the farm, who I believe may have gotten it from the Penzeys catalogue): To wit, read Harry Potter (or some other familiar story, preferably one geared toward simpler vocabulary) in a foreign language. I soon discovered, however, that my high school French and Spanish classes were woefully lacking, since words like "owl" and "cauldron" and "wand" were for some inexplicable reason not included in the vocabulary. I know! Amazing!<br />
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However, evidently there still is not enough sleep in the world for me. The up-side of this is: Mmm, sleep! The down-side is: Falling asleep randomly in the middle of Things That Should Be Quite Interesting, But Somehow Are Not Enough To Keep Me Awake. Therefore, I must put my linguistic ambitions on hold until such time as there IS enough sleep in the world for me, which by my calculations will be sometime after 2017.<br />
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For that reason I've been trying OTHER new things, things which do not require much concentration. For instance, this weekend I took Finn to meet a bunch of bitches.<br />
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Now here I should point out that these are the "girl-dog" sort of bitch, and none of them is in fact very bitchy. They belong to my friend LK and are actually a rather charming gang. However, LK (who has both a generous heart and a sense of adventure) requested the pleasure of Finn's company for my vacation, and (in order to ensure a smooth transition) invited Finn and I over for a play date ahead of time. Finn was introduced one at a time to his new harem of girlfriends. One of them charmed him immediately by throwing herself in complete abandon onto her back, inviting him to inspect her tummy. Another charmed him by being willing to run and play wildly with him. His other girlfriends are a little more demure, but I think he'll succumb to their charms in the long run - or vice versa.<br />
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Meanwhile, Finn - who likes men - was delighted to be going to a guy hangout. Particularly one with many interesting animals and things to sniff and pee on. Mind you, he was perfectly happy to follow LK to the kitchen (there to help with meal preparation). LK asked me if there's anything Finn shouldn't have.<br />
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"Well, he's been known to eat plushy toys now and again," I said. We turn to look at Finn, who has, as usual, located every toy in the house by means of some mysterious Border collie radar and has been pestering us to throw them for him. At the moment we turn to look at him, he has a stuffed rabbit between his front feet. He is industriously chewing the stuffed carrot off of it and manages to gulp it down before I can collar him and steal his prize.<br />
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"Okay," LK says, with the air of someone crossing an item off a list. "No stuffed toys."<br />
"That might be best," I agree, glaring at Finn (who gives me a happy grin. He loves carrots.)<br />
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Meanwhile, it has become time for lunch. LK has made us two different kinds of chili from Dall sheep. It's good. And here what I really mean is it's <em>goooooood.</em> It's tender and tasty and blends beautifully with the spices. This leaves me with (I think) only two species of game mammals native to Alaska that I've not tried: mountain goat and musk ox. So now it's my turn to tick something off my list. Dall sheep: Tried it, loved it, would try it again any time.<br />
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We sit in the Man Cave part of the house (which is populated with animal mounts of various descriptions, since LK and her husband are both hunters and, in fact, run a hunting camp in the summer for a varied clientele), and which has some beautiful woodwork in it. It's currently under construction, but there's a comfy couch and some coffee-table-height tables to eat off of, and the door is open to the sunny deck. The dogs race back and forth, in and out the door. We mostly keep the dogs from begging and trying to lick things off the table.<br />
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LK, bless her, sends me home with leftover chili (both kinds) and Finn with a leftover garlic biscuit (which he cleverly laid claim to by means of licking the side of it.) At that point I had to digress and tell a story about having once gone to a housewarming potluck at Meryl's place. Someone had brought a loaf of homemade bread which had thoughtfully been sliced. The end slice was leaning temptingly toward the edge of the plate. Too well-behaved to actually steal off the table, Meryl's dog Dancer none the less succumbed to temptation sufficiently to lick the end piece - just once, mind you, before she restrained her gluttonous instincts.<br />
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"Meryl," I said, "Dancer just licked the bread."<br />
"That's okay," Meryl said. "We're all dog people here."<br />
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My gut reaction to which was: <em>You know, I'd eat something MY dog licked, but I wouldn't eat something SOMEONE ELSE'S dog licked.</em> After which mental commentary I started laughing at myself, because really: <strong>WTH?</strong> Am I insane, or just stupid? <br />
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Personally, since this whole thing is about me being afraid my brain will turn to paper mache` the instant I turn 50, I'm going with "insane".<br />
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So there I am, trundling home with two (TWO!) tubs of Dall chili, one slightly-used garlic biscuit, and a tired (but very happy) Border collie. I motor on back to the clinic to release my emergency surgery (who has cooperatively woken up and stopped bleeding from its bitten and formerly-lacerated-but-now-sutured ear). Then I just have time to make dinner at the farm, where we have lamb (yum) roasted in home-made Worcestershire sauce, salad, rice and Cape Cods made with home-made highbush cranberry juice and cranberry vodka.<br />
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Ahhh. I <em>like</em> trying new stuff! New stuff is very very tasty.<br />
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At this time, Raven is commandeered to come live at the farm and entertain S&R's Border collie, Tessla, while I am on vacation. I see that I have returned to the stage of life where my dogs are more popular than I am, and my job is to drive them places so that people can socialize with them. I really can't mind this, actually; I think anyone who esteems my dogs has excellent taste, so I'm content to play chauffeur and second fiddle.<br />
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So now I'm sitting here thinking about doing more new stuff and eating leftover Dall chili (which is, if anything, even tastier after a night in the frige). I am all happy because I made my brain try some new things and that clearly must mean I've staved off senility for at least another week. Maybe longer, given the antioxidant content of highbush cranberries (greater even than blueberries).<br />
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And have I mentioned...? Dall chili: <em>Goooooood.</em>AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-90515426909435466682011-05-04T12:04:00.000-07:002011-05-04T13:08:02.790-07:00The Great Snake EscapeSo, while I'm thinking about snakes...<br /><br />I grew up in the same town as I went to vet school in, and my <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">step-dad</span> was a professor at the University. Some of his research involved him doing fieldwork in the summers, in the caves and deserts of the southwestern U.S and in Mexico. Sometimes he (plus or minus a sibling or my mother, who would <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">sometimes</span> accompany him) <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">would</span> return with the unexpected: Handwoven woolen blankets form Mexico, beads and T-shirts from <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Oaxaca</span>, a pillowcase full of bats brought back to establish a research colony. The bats were my favorite - all <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">except</span> the time when I opened the refrigerator to discover that several of them were wandering around loose inside. But that's another story.<br /><br />One of the things my <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">step-dad</span> brought back from the field was a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">Sonoran</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">bull snake</span>. She was a beautiful patterned creamy gold and chocolate, spotted along her back and sides. Less wedge-shaped of head than a rattler, she could none the less, when threatened, flatten her head til it looked remarkably like that of a pit viper. Combined with a rattling hiss, an S-shaped striking posture and the rapid vibration of her tail, she could strengthen her rattler impersonation impressively - and did, until she became used to us. She was around three or so feet long when she first came to us. I'm not sure why my step-dad decided to bring her back, but she arrived cozily tucked up in a pillowcase knotted shut to keep her in. We were not allowed to handle her at first, in order not to stress her too much. My <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">step-dad</span> told us she wasn't a dangerous species - she could certainly strike and bite, if pressed, but had no venom - but she was to be allowed time to adjust before we handled her. A subgroup of the gopher snakes, she was of a robust breed, a constrictor that in the wild subsisted on mice, rats, gophers and other small rodents - although birds and eggs might also be eaten. The observation that bull snakes and rattlers rarely live in close proximity gave rise to the speculation that they might also eat baby rattlesnakes for breakfast (and let me tell yuo, this is not a job for wimps.) However, whether or not that is true, it <em>is</em> (apparently) true that where bullsnakes prosper, rattlers are rare.<br /><br />We set her up in a large aquarium with a heat lamp, some rocks and coarse sand for landscaping, and a water dish made from the deep lid of a canning jar (which she frequently knocked over as she moved from basking spot to resting spot.) I will say she seemed to accept this change in circumstance with a minimum of fuss, being by and large a placid, easy-going sort of snake. If you put your hand into the cage to stroke her, she might merely flick her forked tongue at you, or she might lift her head and begin to twine about your arm. Certainly if you took her out, she'd wrap herself around you in a leisurely sort of fashion, looping around your arm or slipping her head between the buttons of your shirt to try to wrap about your waist. It's hard to say if she enjoyed being stroked along the sinuous line of her body, but she at least seemed to like it; she didn't shy from it, at any rate, and sometimes appeared to seek it by bringing her head near <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-error">someone's</span> hand. But perhaps she was just tasting our scents with her quick black tongue.<br /><br />She was pleasant to touch, at any rate. Her scales were sleek and smooth as lacquered wood, and the incised overlapping pattern of them had a pleasing texture under our fingertips. She had a leisurely way of crawling along one's arm, and her muscular embrace was surprisingly <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">satisfying</span> in some visceral way. I find that one hard to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">explain</span>, but it falls into the same category as the pleasure of feeling the strong, curved muscle along the crest of a horse or the rounded weight of my Finn-dog's thigh pressed against my toes when he lays at my bare feet. There's a pleasure in feeling the thoughtless vitality of other creatures, expressed even in stillness. Perhaps it reminds us of our own energies, rooted in every microscopic cell, inescapable no matter how banked they may be under the layers of civilization. We are, at the core of it, animals. All the sophistication in the world cannot erase the knowledge, echoing in our bones, that however unlike us they may be, these creatures are our brothers.<br /><br />And so it was - for me, at least - with <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span>. As scaleless and warmblooded and hair-bearing as I am, I felt some kinship with her, and marvelled at her differences even as I felt our similarities. Hers was not the same sort of <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">interaction</span> as you'd get with a dog or a cat, but it had its own distinct pleasures none the less. Sometimes we took her for "walks" inside the house. It wasn't really a walk, since snakes have no legs (I know! Amazing!), but we'd hold onto the end of her tail and let her crawl around exploring the floors with us scooting along in her wake, bent double to let her use as much of her body as possible, gripping only the last inches of her tail. She was surprisingly fast on a level surface, so holding onto her tail was a necessity, lest she escape and find her way into some heating duct from which she could not be rescued.<br /><br />She was fed a diet <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">consisting</span> mainly of mice. Since she wasn't doing her own hunting and was fed regularly, it wasn't that long before <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> (a thoroughly unsuitable name, I thought, but it wasn't up to me) was approaching 5 feet in length. About the time she <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">passed</span> the 4.5 foot mark she became noticeably stronger, presumably in consequence of both increased girth and the increased length to leverage it. We'd wake up in the morning to find that the lid of her aquarium - which was constructed fairly heavily of pine firring strips and hardware cloth - had been shifted in the night.<br /><br />My room was on the same floor as hers, very near where her aquarium rested, so often enough it was me who woke in the morning to discover that she'd shifted the lid sometime in the night. We tried weighting it with various items - a rock, a brick, a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica -but <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> (shudder, that <em>name</em>) was both long enough and strong enough now that the inevitable happened. One night she managed to push aside the lid of her cage, volume XIV (W through Z) of the Encyclopedia <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Britannica</span> notwithstanding. I woke up to see the lid askew and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_19" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> absent and unaccounted for.<br /><br />Naturally I alerted the troops (parents and assorted siblings) and we searched the house. The house being three stories and 19 rooms, not counting closets, crawl space, attic, garage and various storage bins and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_20" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubbies</span>, built-in and otherwise), this took some time - but we were, in the event, unsuccessful. We found not hide nor hair - nor scale nor <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_21" class="blsp-spelling-error">scute</span> - of her.<br /><br />There was of course the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_22" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">possibility</span> that she'd made it out of the house and gone walkabout (<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_23" class="blsp-spelling-error">crawlabout</span>? <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_24" class="blsp-spelling-error">Slitherabout</span>?) out in the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_25" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">countryside</span> of Northern Colorado all on her lonesome. I'd have been sad about that; she was a nice snake, the name notwithstanding (and that was hardly her fault, after all), and I would have worried about her. (I know this is foolish - she came from the wild in the first place, and managed fine without us - but you know how it is. You take care of something, pet it and admire it, stroke its smooth <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_26" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">lacquered</span> scales and feel its sinuous muscularity hugging your arm, you get <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_27" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">attached</span>.)<br /><br />On the other hand, the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_28" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">bull snake</span> is the natural enemy of the rattler, so maybe if she'd escaped she might have saved me a certain amount of near-cardiac arrest later in life.<br /><br />Still and all, we wanted to find her, so Steps Were In Order. My mother, who I will point out is no dummy, had a little think on the subject. First order of <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_29" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">business</span>, she figured, was to determine whether or not <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_30" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> was still in the house. Accordingly she set up a handy Snake Motion Detection scheme. Bear in mind that this was back in the 1970's (Yes! I <strong>AM</strong> so old I'm almost mummified, why do you ask?) and the idea of using nanny cams and so on was not yet even a twinkle in some engineer's eyes. We were low-tech in those days - but creative, for all that, and my mom (having had to devise means of surviving the chaos of having more or less <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_31" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">accidentally</span> produced a large number of offspring <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_32" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">possessed</span> of varying amounts of abundant and unrestrained energy, not to mention a certain slant for the nefarious -and here I'm not mentioning any names, but I'm looking at <em>you</em>, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_33" class="blsp-spelling-error">MaskedMan</span>!)... where was I? Oh, yes. My mom, as a matter of self-preservation, had had plenty of practice in the use of her creative talents. Being a logical sort, she figured that (being as how she was a snake and all) <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_34" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> could not move from one room to the next without dragging her length along the floor. Hence the Snake Detection System: a line of flour sprinkled across the threshold of every room in the house. In the morning, every flour line was inspected for telltale drag marks. Every evening, it was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_35" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">repaired</span> from the scuffs and disturbances of having five children, a dog and a cat traipsing about the house.<br /><br />It was soon apparent, from a smear of flour between the family room and the utility room, that <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_36" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> was indeed still in the house. Based on the direction of flour drag, the utility room -with its built-in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_37" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubbies</span> and laundry bins and boot box and closet - was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_38" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">thoroughly</span> inspected, without good result. Flashlights were shined into and under every likely and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_39" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">unlikely</span> spot, but no luck: <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_40" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> seemed to have been taking lessons from Mata <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_42" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Harri</span>, and was nowhere to be found.<br /><br />This state of affairs continued for several days. Then, at last, a break in the case: My mother, alone at home after the rest of the inmates were off variously at school or work, happened into the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_43" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">utility</span> room, intent on doing some laundry, and chanced to look at the washing machine just in time to see the end of <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_44" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake's</span> tail disappearing under the edge.<br /><br />Too late to grab her, my mom got down on the floor and pressed her eye to the space under the machine, just in time to see the shadow of the long, muscular body working its way up along the barrel of the washer. Concluding that <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_45" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> had found a handy perch up near the top of the barrel, Mom got to her feet and inspected the top of the washer. Clearly the solution was to take the top off the washing machine, but how?<br /><br />Well, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_46" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">the</span> obvious first move was to call Sears (it was a Kenmore washer) and talk to their service department. Accordingly, Mom dialed them up and was soon on the line with one of the service technicians.<br /><br />"Hi. I have a Kenmore washing machine," my mom began, relaying the make and model to the tech. "I need to know how to take <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_47" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">the</span> top off of it."<br /><br />There is a pause. "Why do you want to know, lady?" asks the technician (or words to that effect, presumably wondering what kind of crackpot he has on the phone. Someone who wants to use their machine for making illegal hooch, perhaps? Or maybe someone newly arrived from living in a cave, who <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_48" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">doesn't</span> understand how to operate a washing machine? Or perhaps some foolish do-it-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_49" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">yourselfer</span>, who is unaware that Sears would happily send someone to the house to service the machine?)<br /><br />"Because our five-foot-long <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_50" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">bull snake</span> just went up inside the machine and is currently wrapped around the barrel, and I'd like to get her out," my mom says, with some <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_51" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">asperity</span>.<br /><br />"Oh," says the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_52" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">technician</span>, his demeanor shifting abruptly away from suspicious and skeptical and towards direct and businesslike. "Well, you'll need a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_53" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Phillip's</span> head screwdriver. The first thing you'll want to do..." and he proceeded to give clear instructions in an orderly fashion.<br /><br />Strangely, he did not offer to drive right out, take the machine apart and extract the snake himself. I can't think why not.<br /><br />However, my mom was more than equal to this task, and we all arrived home from school that day to see <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_54" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> resting comfortably under her heat lamp, with four volumes of Encyclopedia <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_55" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Britannica</span> and a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_56" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">cinder block stacked </span>atop the lid of her aquarium. Mom regaled us with her adventures of the day, we all pressed our grubby little noses to the glass of the aquarium and welcomed <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_58" class="blsp-spelling-error">Missnake</span> back (offering her a celebratory mouse as a welcome home present), and harmony reigned. Until I had a thought.<br /><br />"But what if she gets loose again?" I said.<br /><br />"Don't worry. Your <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_59" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">step-dad</span> is going to make a better lid for the aquarium this weekend. <em>Aren't you, dear</em>?" she said, with emphasis. My <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_60" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">step-dad</span> agreed that yes, indeed, he would <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_61" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">absolutely</span> <em>love</em> to do that, giving the impression that he had in fact been longing for such an <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_62" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">opportunity</span> and was only too thrilled to be provided with an excuse to engineer something of the sort.<br /><br />I don't recall exactly what modifications were made, but I do recall that the lid to the aquarium was a lot bulkier after that.<br /><br />That was Missnake's last Walkabout in the house. After a couple of years, when she was as large and robust a snake as a steady diet of mice could make her, my step-dad was again going back to her neck of the woods for another field season. It was decided that it was time for Missnake's tenure in our household to come to an end. Her aquarium was getting to be too small to accomodate her powerful length, and she seemed increasingly interested in escaping to go exploring. Accordingly, she was tenderly cuddled up again and carefully transported back to the desert of the southwest, where she was returned to her old stomping (or slithering) grounds, robust and healthy and ready to terrorize the diamondbacks of Arizona.<br /><br />I imagine she's long gone to dust, but I remember her fondly. I was never afraid of snakes, but she taught me to appreciate them in more immediate and personal terms, and for that I thank her even now. She left behind her other lessons, as well: how to walk a snake, build a snake detection system, and get the top off a Kenmore washing machine, amongst them. Not to mention that if you should wish to contain a determined reptile, it will take at least four volumes of the Encylopedia Britannica to do so.<br /><br />They do say knowledge is power, and I guess that's proof, of a sort. But it might also be proof that the stubborn vitality of life will continue to rise up when least expected and push aside any number of layers of knowledge and sophistication to have its way. There's a certain loveliness to that, a reassurance that settles in the pit of my being, an anchor against the more disheartening tides of the modern world. No matter what we do, life will have its way - and keep on having its way, no matter how we try to keep a lid on it.<br /><br />Not a bad legacy for one little snake.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-71158709933348348022011-04-30T20:38:00.000-07:002011-04-30T20:55:30.449-07:00Post-DatingHi, gang. As you can tell from the previous post's date, I started that story about 1,000 years (or at least several weeks) ago. But, what with one thing and another, I haven't had time to finish it 'til today. What is wrong with me? I have no idea, but I have the feeling that we're going to need to make a list.<br /><br />One way or the other, when you start a draft and then publish it later, Blogger attatches to the post the date the draft was <strong>started</strong>, rather than the date you got off your lazy hiney and actually got around to <strong>posting</strong> it, already, sheesh! I am some kind of posting deadbeat. I clearly need a beating. Or maybe a doughnut. I can't tell which. Those are almost the same, right? Beating, doughnut. What difference?<br /><br />(Strangely, this reasoning does not help me when the techs want doughnuts. If you offer to substitute a nice beating, they glare at you. What gives?)<br /><br />At any rate, I have discovered that it is best just to give the techs doughnuts and skip the beating, but the jury is still out on me. I'll try to stay caught up better. This plan may meet with varying degrees of success, some of which may fall under "good" and some of which may fall under "You suck, AKDD!" And, there may be levels in between. Just sayin'.<br /><br />Meanwhile, I have nearly ceased to cough (just an occasional bout for old times' sake) and have for the most part subsided to a more reasonable temperature. Oh, and I also no longer have to sleep propped up in a sitting position. I would claim to be back to normal, but there are way too many people who know that isn't where I started, so we'll just have to go with "better". :)AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-33367327028413675012011-03-18T17:54:00.001-07:002011-04-30T21:04:56.094-07:00Snakes In The GrassSo the other day all the CSU grads are sitting in the office chitchatting about reptiles. The reason we're doing this is that one of us (not me) has a bearded dragon that's supposed to come in to be seen for lethargy.<br /><br />"<em>Supposedly</em> going to come in," said that doc darkly.<br />"What; they usually don't?" I said.<br />"No. Usually they waited too long and it dies before they get here," he said.<br /><br />Hmm. Bummer, man. But I guess I can see it might be harder to determine if your lizard (which spends 80% of its time basking or lying still) is lethargic, as compared to, say, your Border collie, which spends 80% of its time trying to force you (or anyone with an opposable thumb) to play ball, drive to the stock pens, or throw a frisbee. The other 20% of its time is, of course, spent trying to force the cat to lie absolutely still by force of liberal application of the BC Eye.<br /><br />Now, this is a little embarrassing to admit, but I didn't actually know off the top of my head what a bearded dragon looks like. Turns out they look lind of a lot like horned toad lizards, one of which we used to have when I was little. Not identical, by any means, but there is a sort of general resemblance in a spiky sort of way. So then we got to talking about Lizards We Have Known And Loved, (some of which were unfortunately suffocated by having a 13# cat sit on them when they escaped from their cages). This led naturally to a discussion of various Snakes We Have Known And Loved Or Possibly Just Been Really Really Scared Of.<br /><br />On the "scared of" side, we have the rattlesnake. Or at least, <em>I</em> have the rattlesnake. I grew up in an area where it was not at all unreasonable to find Western diamondbacks. When I was in vet school, for instance, I used to love to hike a trail that skirted the foothills for miles. There were numerous places where the trail climbed up into the hog-back ridges that formed the leading edge of the Rockies. There were others where the trail ran along the base of the first ridge, or in the cleft between that ridge and the next, or up along the second ridge. You could choose any of the three - or all, since the trails intersected frequently as they serpentined along miles of Front Range.<br /><br />One time, I took my little Merrik dog along the trail between the ridges, hiking with a girlfriend of mine. Back in the day, that was an off-leash area, an outside-city-limits trail that had no leash law. I always took a leash for just-in-case, but I'd never needed one.<br /><br />We'd gone 3 miles out and one back, returning to our start-point. The trail ran through a fairly large prairie dog town near the our start-point, and a small one about two miles later. Merrik was a prairie dog fan in a big way, but so long as we were moving, she could not be bothered to go into the towns, so we'd passed the big town once and were passing the little town for the second time without her showing the slightest interest.<br /><br />Suddenly Merrik veered toward the nearest prairie dog mound. I frowned; not her usual move. Squinting, I could see she was staring intently at something on the ground, her nose stretched out and sniffing, but I could not see what had so caught her attention.<br /><br />And then I heard the rattle.<br /><br />It's an unmistakable sound, and chilling. All the more so when you see the muscular dust-brown body beginning to gather and coil, and your little 20# dog mere inches from the arrowhead wedge of the snake's face.<br /><br />"Merrik!" I called, my heart taking a leap and beginning to race. She twitched an ear back at me, but withdrew her questing snout not one inch. "Merrik, come!" I yelled sternly. I was afraid to move, lest I upset the delicate balance between dog and snake and encourage a strike, but the pitch and intensity of the rattle was rising, and my anxiety along with it. "Merrik! You get over here <em>right now</em>!" I screamed, heart in my throat. Fear had drawn my vocal cords tight as a bow-string, and my voice hit some peculiar register I'd never heard before. Even to my own ears I sounded strange, tense and pitchy, throttled by terror.<br /><br />My mind is darting ahead, shuffling through options. <em>If Merrik gets snake-bitten, how long can I run, carrying her, along the trail? Some of it is rocky, some is level; can I run two miles in hiking boots with a 20# dog in my arms?</em> But while my mind is leaping forward, my feet are rooted to the ground, my knees locked against the urge to either run forward to help my dog, or buckle entirely. I try to calm my voice, which right now is so strange and anxious that Merrik is uncertain if she should come to me - or move away, which would take her closer to the meancing coils of the snake.<br /><br />"Merrik," I say, trying for steady, trying for calm, "you come here, now. Right now. Come."<br /><br />Merrik glances at me, her head cocked; she knows something is very wrong, and the strangled tension in my voice is not reassuring her. The snake is rattling fast, an ominous buzz. I can see it still coiled, thick and muscular, on the prairie dog mound. A rattler can strike about a third of its length, and Merrik is no more than six inches away, well inside the fatal strike zone; based on its girth I estimate the snake to be at least 4 feet long. I can see its head weaving slightly, as if in indecision; perhaps it's making testing feints, to see which way its target will leap. I force myself to stand absolutely still, vibrating with tension but afraid to move.<br /><br />"<em>Merrik</em>!" I call sharply, aiming for command, and thank you God, she backs off a step, two steps. "Good girl! Come!" I say, my voice starting to shake, but dropping into a more normal register. Merrik hears the relief in it. She gives me a tentative wag and turns tail on the snake, trotting to my feet.<br /><br />"Good girl, good little dog," I praise her, kneeling in the dirt of the trail and scooping her to my chest, corralling her while I grope through her fur for her collar. "Shit. Shit. That was <em>way</em> too close," I say breathlessly as I fumble with her leash, my fingers clumsy with reaction. Finally I snap it onto her collar and get shakily to my feet.<br /><br />"Wow," my friend says. "That could have sucked."<br />"Yeah," I agree, snuggling my dog and petting her, praising her, rewarding her with voice and hand for coming when I asked her to, despite the fascination of the snake. "I don't ever want to get that close again. I like snakes okay, but I like diamondbacks best from a distance. Like a mile."<br /><br />A year or two later I was hiking with Merrik along a different stretch of the same trail, about 3 miles north of that spot. It was early, shortly after six. The day smelled glorious, sweet pine and sage and fresh air; the scent of the morning before it is sullied by the dust of the day. The air was cool and soft on my skin. I was hiking switchbacks, climbing the flank of the foothills. I was on a northbound stretch, the early sun lighting the right side of me, casting sharp shadows on the slope to my left. I'd hit my stride and was going along steadily, but of course nowhere near as fast as agile little Merrik. She'd trot along ahead of me, turning to look back every thirty of forty feet; if she lost me around a switchback, she'd back-trail until she saw me, pause 'til I caught up a little, and then trot on.<br /><br /><br />By then my legs were starting to feel warm and limber, and I was starting to breathe harder with the effort of the slope. The back of my neck was just starting to feel damp under the hank of my ponytail, but in the cool of the day that was delicious, soothing, entirely lovely. It was a clear morning; I could look up the front range for miles, until the hog-back ridges faded into the blue haze of distance. Every twig and blade of grass was outlined with razor-edged clarity. By then it was just on a quarter to seven and I had the trail to myself.<br /><br /><br />Ahead of me Merrik trotted, her tail waving jauntily above her back. I saw her look down to her right, the down-slope side, for a few steps. Whatever it was didn't hold her interest; she didn't even break stride. But I wondered what she was looking at, so when I caught up to that part of the trail, I looked too.<br /><br /><br />Below me, laid out straight alongside the trail and less than a foot off it, was a dusty brown column as thick as my arm. A microsecond later I saw the diamond pattern decorating its length, saw the scales shift as the rattler drew a breath. Too cold yet to coil, it hissed, a long sinister sound of warning.<br /><br /><br />Suddenly I am flying up the trail, taking long bounding leaps with no effort at all. My leg muscles are abruptly full of power, driving me up the slope like I'm Carl Lewis getting ready to do a world-record long-jump. I round the switch-back, leaping up a ragged stairway of exposed rock, fully aware that the next arm of the switchback is only yards from the snake - and that the snake is getting warmer with each passing second. Merrik is runing ahead of me, surprised at my pace, but perfectly happy to gallop up the trail.<br /><br /><br />When I feel I've put enough distance between myself and the diamondback I slow to a shaky walk. Merrik and I are both panting - but she is grinning happily, and I'm feeling a bit white around the lips. I scan the trail ahead carefully; the snake had been laying at the sedgey verge of the trail, in vegetation no more than 8 inches tall. Ahead I have pinyon pine, ponderosas, wild rose, sage and prairie grasses; the trail is shadier and the vegetation higher. I might be wrong, but it's been my expereince that rattlers prefer rocky or open areas, and certainly they'll warm up faster in the sun than in the shade. My racing heart starts to slow. I draw in a deeper breath, feeling the jangle of adrenaline start to smooth out.<br /><br />Ahead is an open benchy rock with no good snake hidey-holes, shaded by a large ponderosa. I call Merrik to me, check carefully for lurking rattlers, and sit. I pour water into a baggie for her and hold it open so she can drink. I sit in shade, letting the cool of the stone seep through my Levi's and into my flesh, and I take out my journal and my camera. The town is spread below me. The trail is still deserted. Merrik perches at watch beside me, her little raspberry pink tongue hanging out as she pants happily. She surveys the landscape with her one remaining eye bright and shining through the silky silver waves of her bangs. I scribble in my journal, drink, try (and fail) to catch a photo of a red-tailed hawk gliding overhead.<br /><br /><br />Call me crazy, but I decide to find an alternative route back down to my car. I decide I'll hike along the trail that runs just below the ridge, hike south past the parking area, then descend and pick up the lower trail and loop back north to the parking area. There. That won't take me anywhere near the giant rattler.<br /><br />It will, however, take us right on past his younger, smaller and much more lively cousin. Which unfortunate fact I discover right about the time I walk abeam of him as he suns himself on a ledge about level with my shoulder. Oh, goodie. I'm nearly face-to-face with a pissed-off diamondback. Thank God I didn't use that handy ledge to set my camera on whilst doffing my pullover.<br /><br />After discovering that I can, indeed, do the Carl Lewis impersonation on a downhill slope - and without crashing face-first amongst the rocks or ripping out both my cruciate ligaments, much to my surprise - I am starting to feel a little demoralized. I mean, how is this fair? I've gone to all the trouble of getting up at the thin edge of the day so I can have a nice, peaceful hike, maybe an all-morning ramble through the foothills with my little dog. And here it's been only two hours and I've encountered two rattlesnakes. What's up with that? And since this seems my day to be a diamondback magnet, how many more do I feel like meeting up close and personal?<br /><br />I park my rump on a carefully-inspected rock standing at a trail fork to ponder this question. Maybe there aren't aany more up here. Maybe I've just been unlucky. Maybe it's becuase I was the first one out and about, rousting snakes. Maybe there <em>is</em> a benefit to going later in the day; the trails are more populated, but (no doubt as a consequence) have fewer snakes. I glance up. Case in point: here come some hikers now. They nod cheerfully at me, a young woman and two young men.<br /><br />"How's it going?" one of them says. Before I can reply he waves at his back-trail. "We just saw a rattler that way, so you might want to go another way."<br />Crap. "I just saw one up there on that rock ledge," I say, pointing.<br />"Daaaaaang," says the girl, drawing it out. "We were going to hike over the ridge to the reservoir." She sounds disappointed. I shrug.<br />"Might be gone by now," I say.<br />"Do you think so?" she asks hopefully. I make a face.<br />"Not really," I say.<br /><br />They look at each other. Without another word they take the only remaining trail option, leading down the ridge. I give them a few minutes out of politeness and then follow. They intersect with another trail and veer back up, taking the longer (but hopefully less snakey) way around. I decide I've had enough of the adrenaline squeezes for the day and continue on down the trail and back to my car. We can hike another day, a day when I am not such a magnet for pit vipers.<br /><br />Apart from the venomous aspect, I actually find snakes rather appealing. The smoothly laquered feel of their scales is rather pleasant, as is their intricate overlap, a pattern similar to that of bird feathers. Some of them come in absolutely gorgeous colors or snappy-looking patterns. I have a particular fondness for the whip-slender, vividly green insect-eating snakes you can find in northern Colorado - partly because they eat insects (cool by me) and partly because they are so vibrantly, brilliantly <em>green</em>. Parakeet green. New-leaf green.<br /><br />I happened to see one of these one morning on a hike (with a different girlfriend this time). It was relatively early ans still cool. I was hiking in point and saw the slender drape of the snake ribboned gracefully over the branches of a shrub by the trail.<br /><br />"Oooh, look! Pretty!" I said, pointing it out to my friend, who promptly screamed and jumped off the trail. I turned to look at her in bemusement. She's a level-headed, competent, cheerful sort, and this was most unexpected.<br /><br />"Sorry," I say, rather contritely. "I didn't realize you were afraid of snakes."<br />"I'm not," she says, shaking her head and laughing a little at herself as she climbs back onto the trail. "I just wasn't expecting it, that's all."<br /><br />"Oh, okay" I say. "I won't make you look next time." We pass the snake - still drowsing in the cool morning, waiting for the sun to warm him for another day of hunting crickets and grasshoppers. We resume our hike, chatting sometimes and others not. It's a pretty morning, warm and peaceful, and I'm enjoying myself, the hike, the morning, the companionship. It's twenty minutes later that I see another green snake, this one laying in a bare patch a few feet from trailside.<br /><br /><em>I won't say anything this time</em>, I resolve, not wanting to startle my hiking buddy. I stride right on by - and she screams and jumps off the trail.<br /><br />I turn to look at her, trying hard to keep from grinning, but my eyebrows can't be stopped from climbing my forehead in inquiry. <em>Well?</em> I am asking her. <em>I didn't say a thing this time, and you still screamed. What's the right move here? Point them out, or don't point them out?</em> I am pressing my lips together to keep from laughing, but it's a wasted effort. She's laughing at herself.<br /><br />"Okay, I know," she says, shaking her head. "Just point 'em out, I guess, and I'll deal with it."<br /><br />It may - or may not - be worthy of note that Merrik barely even glanced at the green snakes. Evidently snakes are only interesting if they might actually, you know, <em>kill </em>you.<br /><br />I don't know. It's no doubt cowardly - and perhaps embarrasing, that I am less bold that a 12-year-old, one-eyed, twenty-pound poodle cross - but I'm going to have to say that when it comes to face-to-face encounters with reptiles on the trail... I think I'll go with the boring ones, thanks.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-60641362113864129712011-03-04T14:23:00.000-08:002011-03-04T16:45:52.505-08:00Crashing And BurningWell, hello there, boys and girls. It's me, your vet on the edge.<br /><br />This post is just a little update, not a story, because lately, I've been toeing a different edge entirely than my usual ones. I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to get a bad case of the flu. Maybe I was getting bored, or I just didn't have enough to do for a week or so. Possibly I was in danger of not spending more money than I make this month. Or it could be that I needed a new hobby, and vomiting into a shopping bag while at the same time having cardiac arrythmias seemed like just the challenge I was looking for? It's hard to say. However, regardless of the incentive, I did in fact end up with an extra bill, a change of routine (tracking my ever-rising body temp, aching, and getting up every one minute to go to the bathroom), and a new appreciation for why people actually die of the flu. (Did I get my flu shot this year? Why no; no, I didn't. Why do you ask?)<br /><br />At the hospital they always ask you at check-in how you're feeling. They show you the little pain faces and ask you to pick one to describe your level of pain. I picked 5: not so hot, but not like you're having one of your limbs gnawed off by a rabid coyote. But then I had a disturbing thought: This is pain reporting from the self-same person who showed up at the hospital after having raging appendicitis for three days. That pretty much felt like someone had stabbed a 10-inch long, white-hot knife into my lower right abdomen and started stirring my guts around. But did I go to the hospital? No. Instead I thought: <em>I'll be better tomorrow</em>, and then went to the bathroom bent over at a 90-degree angle, projectile vomited some more, and shuffled back to bed bent over in the same 90-degree angle.<br /><br />For three days.<br /><br />The PA I saw for that (once I finally DID turn up at the hospital) said to me, "No one moseys in to the hospital after three days of appendicitis. <em>NO ONE</em>. You're what we like to call 'stoic'." He said this in tones that made it sound like the worst insult imaginable.<br /><br />In view of this recollection, I thought:<em> maybe my pain perception isn't quite standard. I'd better be more descriptive next time. </em>So when the nurse asked me how I was feeling, I told her, "My spine is a steel chain heated to incandescence." The nurse started lauging.<br /><br />Hm. Maybe that was a little <em>too</em> desciptive.<br /><br />"I'm sorry," she gasped after a minute. "I know it's not funny that you feel that miserable. It's just a really good description."<br /><br />Well, okay. At least they know that for me "five" isn't the same level of pain as (for instance) finding out that you've already seen this movie you just rented and now you're kind of bored, plus a little annoyed you paid $3.00 for the rental.<br /><em></em><br />It's all been rather exciting, what with the trips to the hospital and the collapsing at the release desk and the wheelchairs and IV fluids and all that. I will mention that Tamiflu is worth its weight in gold (and evidently that's what it's made of, based on the cost.) IV fluids are also my friend, but for some reason it is the apple juice which finally made me feel like I was catching up on the hydration. Go figure. (Okay, who else now has an annoying apple juice jingle bouncing through their head? Anyone? Show of hands.)<br /><br />The really really most excellent thing about this, however, has been having it borne in on me, yet again, how lucky, lucky, <em><strong>lucky</strong></em> I am in my friends. They are the coolest people EVER. I don't have help on a day-to-day basis, but that's generally just fine. Typically I can manage without any extra hands. Not this time. But all I had to do was ask, and they jumped right up and stepped in to take care of me. And as it turns out, there were others - quite a few others, actually - who volunteered to do the same.<br /><br />So, thanks, guys, for bailling me out (or being willing to) when I crashed. You know who you are. I won't forget it.<br /><br />Meanwhile I can stand up for a really long time now - <em>minutes</em> on end, I tell you! - And I no longer have a fever.<br /><br />Funniest commentary on that:<br />Me: My temp went up to 102.3.<br />Friend: SELL!<br />Me: hee hee hee hee hee!<br /><br />Moreover, I am nearly 100% capable of walking without falling down, and my equilibrium trouble has downgraded from Tilt-a-Whirl to just Tilt. Having just had pneumonia in January, you'd think all the practice I got coughing would have produced something more impressive on this go-round, but you'd be wrong. It's not a bad cough, really, but nothing like as spectacular as the January version. But alas, we can't have everything.<br /><br />So, thanks to my friends who came and rescued me, and thanks to the others who would have done the same. Oh, and thanks to apple juice and graham crackers and the wonders of modern medicine and tamiflu and IV fluids, and that nurse who hit my roly little dehydrated vein on the first stick: I feel better now.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-52388982982243598722011-02-20T13:12:00.000-08:002011-02-21T14:18:08.647-08:00Buffaloed By BisonA while back, a friend of mine was walking her dogs on her farm, minding her own biz, when all of a sudden she came upon some bison in the woods.<br /><br /><br />Eh? She lives in the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">Carolinas</span>. You know: East <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">coastal</span> USA. Farms, roads, well-settled rural countryside. What's the likelihood of running into random bison in the woods <em>there</em>? But there they were, big as life. She posted the pictures to prove it.<br /><br /><br />Myself, I'm fond of bison. They're beautiful in my eyes, creatures of contrast and power. I love the way they combine opposites. The coat over their back half is smooth and can look sleek as a horse's flank in the sun, but over their humps they are <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">woolly</span> and coarse. They are huge and powerfully built, but surprisingly agile - and despite their ponderous appearance, they can <em>run</em> - and keep at it. Their shoulders are so huge that they seem to be <em>all</em> shoulder, with nothing much behind it - but as any horseman knows, impulsion comes from the rear, and no animal can run at sustained speed without drive from the hindquarters. Granted that because of their enormous power, Bison rarely have to jump fences - generally they can just take them down and go on through - but jump, they undeniably can. Because of their woolly faces, it's hard at times even to see their eyes, let alone assess any sense of expression or intelligence - but if you're lucky enough to get close to a bison (without actually dying in the attempt), there is an undeniable intelligence in their dark, bright eyes.<br /><br /><br />Mostly - because bison do not suffer fools gladly - you see them from a distance. They are much faster than we are, and if you annoy them, they are easily capable of killing you. But every so often you get lucky, and can see one up close and personal.<br /><br /><br />You know I'm going to tell you I got lucky that way, right?<br /><br /><br />One day, during one or another of my rotations at vet school, I got sent down to the barns. I forget why, now; I was on an errand of some kind for one of my instructors. I inquired in the barns and was told the professor with whom I needed to speak was out by the bull stocks, anesthetizing something.<br /><br /><br />Okay, then. I wandered out to where the bull stocks were set up. There was a huge stock trailer out there, pulled up and parked by a maze of chutes that had been set up to funnel bulls toward the bull stocks. I made my way along the chutes - movable panels, heavily constructed, which can be arranged and rearranged into suitable configurations. Here and there are metal-collared holes in the asphalt into which the legs of some panels can be slotted for stability. I s<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">troll</span> alongside the panels, following my nose until I could see a knot of people gathered around the bull stocks.<br /><br /><br />The bull stocks, I should tell you, are designed to hold massive <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Charolais</span> and Simmental bulls, animals that might be almost three thousand pounds of lean, muscular, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">pissy</span> male animal, and one who may not be all that interested in being poked and prodded by the likes of us. The stocks do a fine job of restraint without injury. Made of heavy tubular steel - in our case, painted a jaunty red - they feature an adjustable head-catch. The bull is funnelled into the stocks, and the sides of the head-catch are moved inwards behind the head and secured so that they fit comfortably alongside the width of the neck, but are too narrow to allow the animal to back his head past them and escape back the way he came in. The sides and top of the stocks are constructed to allow plenty of clearance so that the bull is unlikely to injure himself should he kick, lunge or rear up in the stocks (in an attempt to leap forward and escape). They're also constructed sturdily enough to withstand such attempts, which are not uncommon. The floor is plate steel, easily hosed off and robust enough to endure any amount of stomping by one-plus-ton animals in a bad mood.<br /><br /><br />The stocks happen to be set up in a sort of bay alongside the chutes; there is a large door which can be opened or closed, depending on weather, and the stocks themselves are under the cover of the roof. So there I am, walking toward the knot of students and clinicians, squinting against the sunny day. At first all I see in the dimness of the stock bay is the gleam of light on the shiny red paint of the stocks and the cluster of blue jackets: Clinicians and students milling around. Behind them I see a dark coffee-colored animal in the stocks, but with the sun in my eyes that's all I can tell.<br /><br /><br />As I get closer, I hear one of the clinicians say, "Well, he's not going down; give him another dose." A student opens a syringe and draws up drugs, hands them to the clinician. As the students shift about to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">accommodate</span> the doctor, I step into the shade of the building, close enough now to see what they're up to.<br /><br /><br />That dull gleam of espresso hide is no Simmental. It's a bison bull.<br /><br /><br /><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">Hmm</span>. This just got a lot more interesting.<br /><br /><br />I come to a stop just our of range of the milling students; this is, after all, <em>their</em> rotation, not mine, and I don't want to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">interfere</span> with what they're learning. Moreover, if I don't draw attention to myself, no one will ask me what I'm doing there, so I won't be able to complete my errand and be sent off to return to my own rotation - which right now isn't half as riveting as this one.<br /><br /><br />One of the doctors injects the medication into the bison. The bison ignores this move; he seems uninterested in the puny sting of the needle, and stands stoically, his eye relaxed, his posture almost casual. My eyes travel over his massive shape. His hump touches to top of the stocks. I can see the woolly coat rubbing against the painted steel. His tail swishes lazily over the gate at the rear of the stocks; they are barely long enough to contain him.<br /><br /><br />"Wow," I say quietly to one of the students. "He's <em>big</em>."<br /><br /><br />"Yeah," the student says, grinning at me. "We almost couldn't get his head through the catch. It's on the widest setting, and it barely fits."<br /><br /><br />"What's going on?" I ask.<br /><br /><br />"He has a tooth root abscess. We're going to culture it."<br /><br /><br />I nod. This is a painful condition, and when infection gets into the bone, it can be extremely difficult to eliminate. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to control it, not cure it - but good antibiotic selection is key, if you're to have a hope of cure. Getting an accurate culture is your first step - but it requires that you don't have any contaminants. You have to get a sample that is from the abscess alone, which in turn means you have to clip and clean the surrounding area, and insert a swab into the abscess - which, I will remind you, is likely to be painful. Ultimately a tooth root abscess can be a fatal condition, because it interferes with the willingness to eat, not to mention the ability to chew - and in a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">ruminant</span>, the ability to ruminate. Ruminants have to chew their cuds; it's an essential part of their digestive process. Not being able to do so <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">long term</span> would be a serious problem. And of course there is always the risk of the infection escaping its primary site and taking over the body, and the drain on the animal caused by the constant, unrelenting battle to keep the infection from doing just that.<br /><br /><br />We stand, we wait. The bison blinks sleepily. A fly lights on his ear and he flicks it off. The clinician crouches, squinting at the abscess site, and parts the coarse bearding under the bison's jaw. The fly lights near the bull's eye. The bison shakes his head - lazily, and just once. The fly is undisturbed, but the stocks rattle and groan, shifting a few inches across the concrete with a scraping <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">shriek</span>.<br /><br /><br />Everyone takes a step back. One of the clinicians darts a glance over the students, making sure no one is in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">immediate</span> danger. Another eyes the top of the stocks, where the bison's hump is rubbing, then travels to the head-catch. He eyes it hard, as if glaring at it will increase its strength; so far, it's holding.<br /><br /><br />After a long moment - during which the bison does nothing alarming - one clinician says, "How much has he had?"<br /><br /><br />"Three times as much as it would take to drop a bull this weight," says another. They exchange a glance, then look at the patient again. The patient, slightly roused by the noise of the stocks, looks right back. His gaze is calm, but its intelligence is undiminished by the drugs, and he has a contemplative air, as if considering just how much crap he's willing to tolerate from us.<br /><br /><br />"Better give him a little more," says one, and the other nods, picking up the drug vial.<br /><br /><br />"Anything happens, bail over the chutes right away," advises the client, standing slightly off to the side and observing the proceedings with interest. "He's only a youngster, but if he gets mad, he won't be kidding around."<br /><br /><br />Everyone nods. The clinician gives another injection. As before, the bison ignores it. He makes a couple of chewing motions, licking his lips with his long black tongue.<br /><br />I sidle off to the side near the owner, keeping out of the way. I can't take my eyes off the patient; there is something compelling about him. Even still and quiet, dampened by the calm of the drugs, he radiates power and vitality. He has a mild, pleasant animal smell to him - not bovine, not equine - something else. Despite the fact that he is under the cover of the building, caged in the gleaming red of the stocks, there is a wildness to him; he has been reared in captivity, but the hand of civilization has not domesticated him in the slightest degree. Habituated, he may be. Tame, he is not. He may be so used to us that he is unimpressed by our proximity - but I can't imagine it would be possible to ever be unimpressed by him. <br /><br />The owner glances at me, sees my gaze riveted to his bison, smiles a little.<br /><br />"<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Handsome</span>, ain't he?" he says.<br /><br />"Yeah," I say quietly, trying not to disturb the tableau. "What are they like to live with?"<br /><br />"Pretty disrespectful of fences, but otherwise they're easier to rear than cattle. They gain weight faster on less feed, for one thing. The cows are real sturdy, never have trouble calving, and once they start breeding, they'll breed their entire lives without trouble - way longer reproductive lifespan than domestics have. They hardly ever get sick. You have to cull the bulls, of course, or you have fighting, but they generally won't challenge a dominant male 'til they're three or more."<br /><br /><br />"How old is he?" I ask.<br /><br /><br />"Two," he says. "But he's a good-sized youngster, so if we can get this thing cleared up, I'll breed him."<br /><br /><br />I glance up at the bison's hump. He's got to be six feet at the shoulder, maybe more. Good-sized. Yeah.<br /><br /><br />A few more minutes pass. The bull's eyelid begins to droop.<br /><br /><br />"Finally," mutters one of the clinicians, and motions to the students. I hear the buzz of clippers. Everyone waits for a long, assessing moment, eyeing the bison, but he seems uninterested in the noise. The students swarm stealthily into action, sidling quietly up to clip and scrub the abscess. A sterile swab is inserted into the abscess site; the bison lifts his head an inch or two, and the stocks creak alarmingly. But the student is quick, and the stocks hold. The bison goes back to his lazy, ruminative chewing motion for a moment, then relaxes.<br /><br /><br />The students begin sweeping up the long curls of bison beard. I bend down and snag one.<br /><br /><br />One of the clinicians spots me at last. "What's up?" he asks, noticing that I don't belong on this rotation. I tuck the bison hair into my pocket.<br /><br /><br />"Oh, I had a question from Dr. Gray," I say, and complete my errand. I dawdle a little, but I can't justify hanging around any longer; after all, I do have my own rotation to attend to, and I imagine that Large Animal is backed up a bit, given that it took way longer to sedate the bison than they probably expected. I trail along with the student taking the culture sample to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-error">Clin</span> Path, asking him the question that has lurked in my brain since I saw the stocks start shifting across the floor.<br /><br /><br />"So <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-error">how'd</span> you get him through the chutes and into the stocks in the first place?"<br /><br /><br />"Luck," says the student darkly. I snort a little "Don't laugh," he says. "He took down one row of chutes just by leaning his shoulder on them a little. Luckily the client knows his biz - he warned us, so we had backups in place. We pretty much only got him in the stocks because he felt like going. And that's after we tagged some drugs on board with a pole syringe."<br /><br />Yikes. I think back to that one casual little head shake - and I mean <em>little</em> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">head shake</span>, not even enough to displace a fly from his eyelid. The rattle and groan of the stocks replays itself in my head. I can't even come close to imagining how much power that bison would have if he meant business.<br /><br />"What if he was full-grown?" I wonder. I try to picture it. I can't.<br /><br />"Well, he wouldn't fit in the stocks, I'll tell you that much," says the student.<br /><br />"How do you think that guy got him <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">into</span> the stock trailer in the first place?" I ask.<br /><br />"Beats me, but I'm glad <em>I'm</em> not his farm hand," says my cohort, peeling off to take his samples to the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18" class="blsp-spelling-error">clin</span> path lab.<br /><br />I return to my own rotation, smiling a little, my mind back on the deep liquid shine of a bison eye. It's rejuvenated me a bit, this little encounter with something so full of thoughtless vitality, power, wildness. There's something deeply reassuring about the awareness that no matter what we've changed and domesticated and tamed in this world, we haven't taken the wildness out of everything.<br /><br />Not even ourselves.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-16970141635273663222011-02-18T16:08:00.001-08:002011-02-19T18:12:40.638-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp: Shutting It DownMaggie's physical therapy was progressing. She could flap her hand through about a third of her <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">normal</span> range of motion, and it didn't point so far to the side any more. She got a new splint - less <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error"><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">angulated</span></span> laterally - and more <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">exercises</span> from the physiotherapists.<br /><br /><br />I, in contrast, was getting stronger leg muscles, but my knees were starting to be a problem. In the main they don't trouble me much, but the constant up-and-down of hiking the Mesa - and the hard, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">shaley</span> surface - was beginning to tell. The downhills were the worst, with the constant pounding, and I went down any number of steep grades on my rump, sacrificing the seat of my Levi's to spare my joints. This worked well enough, although it was a dusty option; however, even the mighty Maggie resorted to it sometimes. It made for some interesting pictures; there was one, taken with the camera timer, of Maggie and I leaning against a fence rail, both our seats completely crusted in dirt. Oh, well; it was expedient, if undignified.<br /><br /><br />One day when Maggie was busy with the doctors, I farmed out to another researcher, one out of Rifle district that was doing stream-flow analysis. This seemed like an interesting enough diversion; something I hadn't done before, at any rate. We drove out to a high mountain meadow that was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">hammocked</span> between two saddle-back ridges. It was a lovely spot. The ridges were crested with the rough red rock of the area, the ridge-flanks were clothed in deep green <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-error">pinyon</span> and the silver-green shimmer of aspen. We swished through thigh-high grasses scattered with wildflowers. Hummingbirds and butterflies darted across our path, and the sky was a deep, rich turquoise overhead.<br /><br /><br />Our stream wound down a rocky bed, heavily <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">thicketed</span> with aspen and cottonwood and the dense, springy canes of willow and Russian olive - <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">invasives</span> to that part of the world. We bushwhacked through the tough, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">resilient</span> undergrowth to the stream-bed - which was completely dry.<br /><br /><br />"Well, this ought to be easy," I muttered. No water equals zero flow rate. Never the less, my fearless leader handed me the tape measure and took the end of it, tromping upstream the required 50 feet, and marked her spot. Normally she would drop a marker and I'd count off the time it took to reach me, thus determining the flow rate of the stream. In this case, there was nothing to measure - except the distance between the two researchers. We bouldered up the stream bed a little way, marked off our 50 feet again, observed the zero flow rate, and recorded it. I gathered that normally there would be three <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">observations</span> made and those three averaged to get the overall rate of the stream, but strangely, we called it good after two. Go figure.<br /><br /><br />Oh, well. It was a pretty walk on a lovely sunny day in the Rockies. What could be better than that?<br /><br /><br />Well, one thing: I could have had hiking boots that did not feel like they were made expressly for me by Torquemada as a torture device. The footwear, I will admit, was my fault. I'd noticed, in all my hiking on the Mesa, my lightweight hikers were not really equal to the terrain. They lacked any sort of shank in the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">foot-bed</span>, which is great for light trail hiking: Such hikers are lightweight, comfortable, and cool. However, in the steep, loose-shale terrain of the Mesa, they offered too little in the way of ankle and sole support, could not be kicked toe-in to the shale for better footing, and did not provide any sort of platform to step up on, should you get an adequate toe-hold.<br /><br /><br />Consequently, I'd phoned my mother and asked her to ship me my heavy duty, steel-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-error">shanked</span> hiking boots. Dutifully, she'd sent them, and I'd donned them that very morning for our foray into stream-flow analysis. It turns out, however, that somewhere between the ages of 18 and 28 my feet had made a few changes of which they had not bothered to inform me. As a result, my perfectly-broken-in, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error">uber</span>-comfy heavy hikers were now keeping company with items like the iron maiden and thumb-screws, in terms of their physical comfort.<br /><br /><br />Ah, well. It was easy hiking, and ultimately not that big a deal. I'd just have to get another pair of heavy hiking boots and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">break</span> them in, that's all.<br /><br /><br />We bushwhacked back out of the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">stream bed</span> thickets and into the hot sunny day, swishing through the tall grasses on our way to the rig, thence to drive to another stream. I was watching brilliant blue darning needles darting over the grasses when a sudden breath of wind lifted the hair away from my neck. I glanced up; the breeze was cool and soft-edged, sweet with the scent of rain. As often happens in the mountains, there was an abrupt darkening of the sky as a sudden storm materialized over the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-error">saddlebacks</span>.<br /><br /><br />No worries. I like rain just fine, and I dearly love the smell of it on the wind.<br /><br /><br />A flash of lightning flickered inside the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-error">slatey</span> belly of the clouds. Automatically, I counted: eight seconds, then the sullen roll of thunder. I made that as being a bit over a mile away. I glanced at my fearless leader, currently crouched at half-height, waiting tensely for the rumbling to die.<br /><br /><br /><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-error">Hmm</span>. We are in the lowest part of the saddle, with high, treed ridges on either side, and occasional large <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-error">ponderosas</span> and cottonwoods scattered here and there about our meadow, even the smallest of which is easily twice our height. I'll grant you it's not impossible that we might be hit by lightning, but given that the storm is a good mile distant and we are only about 300 yards from the rig - and also far the shortest things in the meadow, except for the wildflowers - I kind of think we're reasonably safe. None the less, I dutifully pause behind my companion twice more as she crouches with each dull flash from within the clouds. These aren't ground strikes, and I can see the clouds being borne left to right before us; the storm is no closer to us, and we're a lot closer to the truck. I'd be more concerned if there were ground strikes - the electricity of a grounds strike <em>can</em> travel through the earth and up into your body - but my feet are insulated by my rubber soles, and as yet not a drop of rain has fallen on us. About round three my companion looks at me like I must be crazy. I smile at her. This does not seem to reassure her.<br /><br /><br />Unsurprisingly we make it to the truck without <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">incident</span>. I glance over; my companion does seem sincerely relived, blowing out a tense breath when she slams the door of the rig. She glances at me; she looks slightly rattled. I keep a poker face; I'm not sure if she's excessively nervous, or if I'm excessively foolhardy. Either way, I figure neither of us is going to convince the other to her point of view.<br /><br /><br />"We're going to bail on the other stream today," she says. "I'm not going to hike around in a lightning storm."<br /><br /><br />"Okay," I agree with equanimity, settling into the bench seat and gazing out at the day, now sharp with contrast in the changed light. Everything seems razor-edged, vivid, somehow more three-dimensional than it was an hour ago. I love that; I wish I knew how it is that a simple change of light can make it so.<br /><br /><br />We trundle along the dirt road, throwing up plumes of dust in our wake, despite the dampening humidity that is beginning to settle the air. After a few minutes scattered drops of rain begin to strike our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">windshield</span>. The scent of rain on the dusty road is rich and intoxicating. I crank my <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_19" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">window</span> open a few inches, inhale deeply, and relax with a sigh.<br /><br />"Sorry to waste your day," apologizes my companion.<br /><br />"Not a waste," I smile, letting the beauty of the day fill my senses, buoy my spirits, saturate me to my soul.<br /><br />I had one last adventure waiting for me out in Western Colorado. There was a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_20" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">mountain</span> goat census scheduled while I was on Maggie's project. This involved driving to the site, some way distant, and then up the mountain to ten thousand feet. From there we hiked up a little higher, then struck out into the craggy granite fields along the steep sides of the mountain. We went in pairs, with binoculars and field notebooks, our only goal to spot and count goats. I paired up with a slightly grizzled DOW veteran, a sturdy, calm-tempered fellow who looked like he could reasonably scale a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_21" class="blsp-spelling-error">fourteener</span> before lunch every day. His easy temper was restful, and I hiked out in his wake in a cheerful frame of mind.<br /><br />It was cold up on the mountain; a faint drizzle fell intermittently, and a low chill haze hung over us, only twenty or thirty feet over our heads: The belly of a cloud settled on the flank of the mountain. Every so often a thin veil of fog would shred off the bottom of the foggy grey ceiling hanging above us, drifting by above our heads, hinting at invisible air currents. The terrain was composed partly of narrow game trails winding between sharp granite outcrops and mats of small, tenacious alpine plants; these were luxurious compared to what I was used to on the Mesa, in part <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_22" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">because</span> stepping on them did not cause them to shift downhill. Less luxurious were the long stretches where the trails disappeared entirely, and we found ourselves traversing large rocky seas of broken granite, lichened and sharp-edged tumbles of stone stacked haphazardly wherever gravity dictated. The footing <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_23" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">wasn't</span> really all that bad - the stone was rough, so traction was good - but sometimes a rock would shift unexpectedly underfoot. Furthermore, my leader was longer-legged than I, and the size of the boulders was challenging for my shorter stride and sore knees. Still, I would catch up when he paused to glass, and would spend a few minutes glassing as well, covering slopes he wasn't.<br /><br />That strategy worked pretty well until I stepped on a bit of rock that tilted abruptly under my boot, twisting my right knee. I caught myself with one hand, and the granite rocked back into place with a sharp, echoing <em>clack</em> that made my leader pause and look back.<br /><br />"You okay?" he asked.<br /><br />"Yes," I said automatically, taking a step. Shit. "No," I amended, leaning down to rub at my knee. I tried another step. My knee sent a sharp, lancing pain up my leg and I winced, grimacing.<br /><br />"There's a great glassing spot just around the side of the mountain. What do you think?" asked my companion.<br /><br />I looked ahead at the terrain ahead, trying to judge it with my eyes. I might make it around the bend... but then I'd have to make it back again. I looked back the way we'd come.<br /><br />"Doubtful," I said at last, meeting his eyes. He nodded <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_24" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">philosophically</span>.<br /><br />"Think you can make it back on your own from here?" he asked.<br /><br />"Sure," I nodded. "I'll just go slow. You okay on your own?"<br /><br />"No problem," he said.<br /><br />"Sorry," I told him. He shrugged, smiled.<br /><br />"Happens," he said, and watched as I turned gingerly around, sorting out my balance on the tumbled stone and taking baby steps. "You'll do," he <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_25" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">said</span>, and I heard the muffled clicks of the rocks as he began making his surefooted way over them.<br /><br />It was impossible to get lost; far below me I could see the gravelly stripe of the road, the matchbox shapes of the vehicles parked along the side of it. I had only to traverse back across the rocks, pick up the serpentine of the game trail again, and follow it to the main trail. From there I could walk back down to where the vehicles were parked a half mile or so below.<br /><br />By the time I made it to the main trail, it was raining in earnest. I had my DOW <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_26" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">ball cap</span> fending the rain off my face, the hood of my Gore-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_27" class="blsp-spelling-error">tex</span> jacket pulled up over the top of it to keep the rain off my neck. Under my jacket I had a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_28" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">polar fleece</span> pullover, and I'd zipped my Gore-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_29" class="blsp-spelling-error">tex</span> up when it started to rain, so I wasn't really cold; still, I could feel the chill pressing down against my shoulders, nibbling experimentally at my skin, seeing if it could get a deeper bite. My hair spilled out from under my hood, hanging in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_30" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">spiralled</span> rat-tails over the zipper of my coat. My nose was cold and my knee ached, sending me small sharp stabs of irritation at every step, but my main problem was that I felt bad about bailing off the mountain. I hate letting people down. On the other hand, I was pretty sure that <em>not</em> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_31" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">bailing</span> would have meant that the other researcher would have had to babysit me, and maybe help rescue me off the mountain. Of the two, that was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_33" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">the</span> worse option, so I'd just have to live with the guilt.<br /><br />By the time I made it back to the vehicles, most of the other goat scouts were arriving as well, driven off the mountain by worsening visibility. Several - including my companion - had spotted goats. This he informed me of when he caught up to me.<br /><br />"There were four of them, two nannies and two kids, right around the bend," he said.<br /><br />"Dang it!" I exclaimed. He smiled.<br /><br />"<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_34" class="blsp-spelling-error">There'll</span> be other goats," he said. "No sense pushing it and breaking your neck trying to be a hero."<br /><br />Well, no. But still: It would've been <em>really really cool</em> to see them in the wild.<br /><br />On the other hand: I <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_35" class="blsp-spelling-error">could've</span> been shades of Maggie falling off a cliff, big concussion, broken bones, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_36" class="blsp-spelling-error">luxations</span>, lacerations, death, destruction, war, devastation and horror. Or something like that.<br /><br />It wasn't long after that that I needed to go back to the U and pick up the reins of my own project. Maggie still needed some help in the field for another three weeks or so, but she tag-teamed out a few more volunteers to bridge the transition. My own <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_37" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">transition</span> back to civilization took nearly that long; I had the <em>worst</em> time adjusting to sleeping indoors after that. It seemed dreadfully confined and claustrophobic. On my way back to the Front Range I stopped for two nights at a friend's place in Denver.<br /><br />Me: <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_38" class="blsp-spelling-error">D'you</span> think it'd be okay for me to roll out my sleeping bag and sleep in your back yard?<br /><br />Him: It's central Denver. The fence is only four feet high. There was a major drug bust two blocks over last night. What do <em>you</em> think?<br /><br />Me: <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_39" class="blsp-spelling-error">Ummm</span>... maybe?<br /><br />Him: You're an idiot.<br /><br />Okay, I guess <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_40" class="blsp-spelling-error">that'd</span> be a "no".<br /><br />Oh, well. I did eventually regain my ability to sleep indoors - a lucky thing, considering the weather in Alaska. I'll never lose the pleasure in sleeping out, though - that's something that either lodges deep in your being, or else exists there already - and once awakened, never really goes completely back to sleep. An unexpected discovery, but not an unwelcome one. There were a lot of little <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_41" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">discoveries</span> like that: Little atavistic reminders that for all our civilization we are at the heart of it not completely tame. It may take a few days, but our brains are all too willing to shift from navigation by street sigh to navigation by terrain, from schedules on clocks to ones on daylight, from searching for what we expect to <em>seeing</em> what is really there, right in front of our eyes, undetected because we have not yet learned the search image for it. Because we have not yet learned to relax our gaze and let our brains make sense of it for us without us forcing it, controlling it, leading it into being.<br /><br />I wonder, now, thinking about this, if that is not where I learned some of the skills that stand me in such good stead as a vet: The willingness to see what the animal is telling me, rather than forcing it to conform to what I expect the diagnosis to be; the willingness to subordinate my expectations to the truth, to follow where the case leads me instead of letting my intellect try to lead it where I think it's going to go. Maybe I had those skills before, in some form, and I just noticed them on the Mesa.<br /><br />Either way, I owe Maggie some thanks for letting me join her in her adventures at sheep camp.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-59039652795963604352011-02-09T13:40:00.000-08:002011-02-10T13:36:17.530-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp: Learning Lessons<em>When last we saw our heroines, they were spotting Bighorns on an arid, sunny ridge atop the Mesa</em>.<br /><br />We only stayed up on the Mesa for a few days on that particular trip. After buttoning down our base camp, we hiked back down to the rig, drove back to town and retrieved our dogs. At that time I had a little dog named Merrik, a little poodle-terrier mix. She resembled Toto on stilts: she had a loosely-curled silver-grey outer coat, a dense, velvety and inky black undercoat, shiny dark eyes, big pointy bat ears and enormous charm. She was deep-chested and wasp-waisted, and had a surprisingly graceful, gazelle-like neck (only visible when she'd been clipped, since in her long-haired state she had an enormous ruff of grizzled coat around her neck). Maggie had an English setter, silky-eared and sweet, a restful dog.<br /><br />Back at the bunkhouse we showered and changed into clothes that weren't grimy with Mesa dirt and sweat and insect repellent. We were in town for a couple of days, and then we collected the first of our volunteers: A a married couple, locals. I forget now how they ended up on Maggie's radar to volunteer, but they were capable, pleasant, useful sorts, practical and down to earth. They stayed with us for two days, plus the hiking-up day. The husband, an experienced hunter and camper, put his back into our latrine site, excavating a large rock that had been foiling me, and the wife cobbled together something a little tastier than we'd managed for dinner: I don't know what it was called, but there was broccoli, and cheese, and some kind of sausage. It cooked up in one pan, and it was perhaps the only time we cooked up on the Mesa (at least so far as I recall.) They took turns leading our spotting forays, reading the topo map and scoping out good glassing sites. We spent one afternoon perched in a row in the shade of a big pine only yards from a 300-foot drop-off, passing the scope between us: taking turns peering between the needled branches at a small group of sheep, basking on the sun-struck shoulder of the ridge opposite. The air was hot and still, and small trails of sweat rolled slowly down my neck. Every so often a faint, hesitant breath of a breeze stirred the oppressive air, prompting Maggie and I to shed out hats and push our hair up off our sticky napes. Small butterflies drifted by from time to time, and the ever-present gnats managed to find us, biting and stinging - but even so, it was a pleasant way to spend a day, breathing in the heat, the resinous scent of evergreens, the smell of sage and dust.<br /><br />The sheep weren't the only thing to see on the Mesa. There were elk and deer, cougars and bears (of which we only ever saw scat), and birds of all descriptions, including a surprising number of hummingbirds. And of course there were plants - aspen and evergreens, shrubs and flowers. When bored, Maggie would regale me with species names of the local plants, or pick some bit of vegetation and make me identify it. As an undergrad, I'd majored in biology, with a concentration in immunology. She'd majored in forestry. Consequently, I knew more about T-cells (a fairly useless subject, up on the Mesa) and she knew more about the local flora (much more germane). I was pretty good on the genus and species names of the fauna, but I could not tell a grass from a sedge when we started, and while I knew which were pines and which were spruces, I couldn't say <em>why</em> this one was spruce and that one pine.<br /><br />It was an enjoyable adjunct to the hiking, but one thing about Maggie: You knew there was going to be a quiz later, so you'd better be paying attention. At any time she might pluck a strand of some grass-like thing at your feet and demand that you tell her if it's a grass or a sedge, or insist that you shake hands with the evergreen to your left and tell her if it's a fir or a spruce. (In case you should ever need to know this, just remember: Sedges have edges, and while firs are friendly, spruce are spiny. Oh, and if you should have to identify a Doug fir, the scientific name is <em>Pseudotsuga menziesii</em>. I know this is likely to come up at your very next cocktail party, so take note.)<br /><br />After the married couple left us, we had a volunteer from Germany who we called Pooh-Bear. We also called him TimberBeast, because things that Maggie and I would go around, he would just hike right over: Rocky outcrops, downed trees that were level with the button-flies of our Levi's, what have you. Maggie and I: trudge around the obstacle. TimberBeast: Plant one foot on top and step up on it like it's no more than 6 inches off the ground.<br /><br />Pooh-Bear had other skills. His first evening on the Mesa he took our spotting scope and tripod, fiddled around for approximately 90 seconds, and then invited us to look. We did. He had Saturn perfectly lined up in our sights. Through the spotting scope, the colors were washed to ivory, but despite that, it was in some way like looking at the Bighorns through the scope: Somehow much more immediate and real than seeing it on TV or in even the most detailed photographs. It's as if seeing it in person, even through the remove of the scope, somehow imparts the emotional reality of the thing, not just the intellectual reality. We already knew there was such a thing as Saturn; we'd seen close-up pictures, learned its name in grade school. But now we have the emotional knowledge of it; seen it hanging in the sky, seen its rings tilted to catch the light... and somehow, it's different. More.<br /><br />Pooh-Bear, apart from being amazingly strong, was endlessly cheerful and even-tempered. We discovered quickly that humor is sufficiently cultural that a great deal of what was funny to us made no sense to him, and vice versa, but he was easy-going about it, and tolerated our attempts to explain <em>why</em> something was funny with good grace, even if it still made no sense to him. His English was good, both intelligible and pretty comprehensive, and our German non-existent - but he and I both spoke French, so sometimes we conversed in French to level the field a little. That way neither of us was using our native language, so the disadvantage was equal. Or at least somewhat equal, because if one of us didn't know the right word in French, we still had to revert to English to go around it.<br /><br />With Pooh-Bear on the Mesa, we were able to split up a little. He and Maggie - both stronger hikers than I - would go out on long point-hikes, and I'd go on shorter hikes, seeking the small bunches of sheep nearer to hand. About this time I noticed an interesting thing. When I'd first come onto the Mesa, I knew which way was north, but I was otherwise entirely dependant on the topo maps to navigate. But after even a few days out in the middle of nowhere, the terrain starts to fit itself into the mapping function in your head. What used to tell you "Go down to the Starbuck's and then take the stairs to the second floor and the office is third on the right", now tells you "Aim to to left of that shrub and then when you see that one rock, take a 90% left turn and that'll take you to the trail." Somehow I wasn't expecting that. Don't ask me why.<br /><br />I also noticed that I really preferred sleeping outside to sleeping in the tent. I don't know why this is, but it's the same as it was when we were rafting the San Juan: I just couldn't see the point of the tent. It wasn't raining, it wasn't cold. Why sleep inside? Accordingly I unfurled my sleeping bag at the foot of a scrubby little bush, taking advantage of the slight rise at the root of it to use as a pillow. One morning when Maggie woke before me she was sitting in the doorway of the tent and looked up to see a young bull elk peering over the bush at me, inspecting my sleep. He watched me for several minutes, blinking his large, dark eyes at me, turning his ears to catch my breathing, his nostril sifting my dreams from the air. At last he sighed, relaxed, wandered off.<br /><br />Like a dope, I slept through the whole thing.<br /><br />We stayed on the Mesa for eight days with Pooh-Bear, and our last day was a nine-hour hike out. By the time we got to town it was early dusk, and we were hungry, tired and filthy. Neither Maggie nor I paused to collect our dogs; we'd shower and eat first, and round them up after dinner. Ravenous, we decided we'd go to the bar for pizza. Trading hiking boots for tennis shoes and grubby field-wear for clean clothes, we walked to the bar. It was early; only three or four of the Northern Geo guys had yet showed up, but they had the jukebox blasting, and they'd engaged several boisterous locals in a game of 8-ball. They gave us waves and grins as we came in. We took a table at the back of the bar - furthest from the door, but closest to the bar (and hence our food). Someone else had a pizza in the oven ahead of us, so we ordered a pitcher to occupy us while we waited.<br /><br />I happened to be sitting with my back to the bar, facing the door. I saw it open, and suddenly there's my little dog loping into the bar, her head turning side to side to search. She sees me and her ears flatten with delight and she races over, leaping into my lap.<br /><br />"Merrik! What are <em>you</em> doing here?" I asked her, quite dumbfounded. Maggie and Pooh-Bear stared at us with identical expressions of open-mouthed surprise - doubtless the same expression I wore. Merrik squirmed happily , tail wagging madly, and offered me a bright-eyed grin, panting with cheerful excitement.<br /><br />The couple who'd opened the door sauntered up. "I take it that's your dog," the man observed, amused.<br /><br />"Yes - but where'd you find her?" I asked, completely bemused. She'd been at the babysitter's, confined in their yard or inside their house, to the best of my knowledge.<br /><br />"She was sitting outside the door, staring at it. When we opened it, she darted in between our feet. We almost stepped on her," the woman said.<br /><br />"Whoa," said Maggie, raising her eyebrows. She had to be thinking the same thing I was: How did Merrik know which day to escape, and why would she come looking for me at the bar? We'd never brought her there. Why wasn't she waiting for me at the babysitter's, or failing that, at the bunkhouse? Those, she'd been to. We'd never even walked her past the bar, all of our main-street business being at the other end of the street.<br /><br />"You're going to have to take her out of here," the bartender said, wandering up to the table. "Health codes."<br /><br />"Yeah," I agreed vaguely, still wondering.<br /><br />"That's almost too bad; she went to all the trouble of finding you," Maggie observed.<br /><br />"Yeah," I agreed again. I set Merrik on the floor and stood up. She looked up at me, wagging her tail madly, and danced out at my side. Leashless, she could be relied upon to stick close to my side, and I walked her back to the bunkhouse and let her in to sleep on my bed. She hopped up and circled a few times, treading herself a spot on my bed, and then curled up with a contented sigh. I cuddled her for a few minutes, praising her and laughing softly to myself in lingering bemusement.<br /><br />By the time I got back to the bar, the pizza was arriving at our table. We fell upon it like ravening beasts, dispatching it in record time.<br /><br />"So do you think she went to the bunkhouse first, and then tracked you here?" Maggie asked me.<br /><br />"Maybe," I said doubtfully. "She's kind of nose-blind," I added, and it was true: Merrik wasn't good at finding food on the floor by scent, and often had to be showed where a dropped item was.<br /><br />"Plus we showered and changed before we came; you even changed your shoes," she agreed. "Plus we've never brought her here, and it's pretty noisy with the jukebox. You don't think she could have heard us talking, do you?"<br /><br />"Not over the jukebox and the pool game," I said. "And how did she know when we'd be back in town?" I asked. We shook our heads.<br /><br />Well. One of life's mysteries, perhaps.<br /><br /> The next day we drove Pooh-Bear back to Rifle. The dogs went back to the babysitters because we'd be there overnight. I felt a bit odd about taking Merrik back to the babysitter's - after all, she'd made her preferences clear - but there wasn't any option; the bunkhouse at Rifle was closely overseen, and dogs were not allowed. The babysitters - a very nice local woman and her 10-year-old son - told me they had no idea Merrik would dig her way out of the fence, and they'd repaired the fence line and laid cinder blocks over the dig spot. They promised to keep a close eye on her. Merrik liked the little boy well enough - and he was mad for her - but to be safe they took her inside.<br /><br />At Rifle district we took care of various business and hobnobbed with the other students working DOW projects. Several of us went out dancing that night, Maggie and I among them, but we made an early night of it; we planned an early departure in the morning. It was about 10:30 by the time we made it to Plateau Creek, a lovely sunny Saturday morning. We cut through an alleyway that spilled out onto Main Street, heading for the post office. I was looking at Maggie, saying something, when suddenly her expression melted.<br /><br />"Oh," she said, the way you do when you see something sweet and sad, and a microsecond later Merrik's feet slammed into the back of my leg. I turned and she leaped for my arms.<br /><br />"Merrik! What are <em>you</em> doing here?" I asked her stupidly, for the second time in two days. She was squirming and whining in my arms, licking my neck and wagging her tail frantically. Some people walking down the street paused beside us.<br /><br />"She was sitting out in front of the bar all night. She kept trying to go in," they said.<br /><br />Well. She'd found me there once, so I guess it was worth a second try - and as it happens, it worked again, although not quite the same way.<br /><br />"God, I'm so glad no one took her!" I said fervently. I'd licenced her in Plateau Creek, stitching the tag onto her harness with dental floss, but still - I would not have known where to start looking for her if someone had taken her home.<br /><br />"I think some people thought about it - she's a nice little dog - but it was clear she was looking for someone, and she wasn't getting in any trouble, so we waited. She'd let people come up to her and she'd sniff them and wag her tail, but she wouldn't let anyone touch her. But as long as she wasn't in trouble, we thought we'd just watch and see. The people at the grocery across the street have been keeping an eye out," they added. "We all have."<br /><br />Small towns. You gotta love that.<br /><br />We had shopping to do that day and I made a point of thanking the grocers for thier kindness in watching out for my dog. The proprietors - a sixtyish couple - smiled benignly at me.<br /><br />"We're getting used to her now," the husband said with a wink. "We know who she belongs with. Don't you worry none."<br /><br />I was approaching the end of the time I had available to help out on Maggie's project, but I wasn't done yet, so I admit that it eased my worry some to know that little Merrik would be looked out for in case she escaped again. Naturally I'd prefer she stayed put inside the safety of the fence, but it was nice to know she had friends should she need any. But as it turned out, she never escaped again. Maybe it was better fenec repair, maybe it she felt she'd made her point... but to this day I still wonder: How did she know what day to make her first escape, and how did she find me at the bar?<br /><br />I guess I'll never know.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-44038595461911194572011-02-06T10:41:00.000-08:002011-02-06T12:37:38.876-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp: Sheep Spotting<em>Last time, our Mesa Babes were snuggled up in their newly-erected wall tent, getting some well-earned sleep and anticipating the first day out in the field.</em><br /><br />The next morning we woke up in the delicious cool of morning on the Mesa. The air is sweet and still. Overnight the scents of pine and sage have pooled and gathered, and they hang delectably in the crystalline air.<br /><br />Ahhh. Wilderness. Gotta love that.<br /><br />After we eat and stretch and wash and dress, we fill our canteens and pop a few snacks into the day packs, along with the spotting scope and its tripod. Maggie consults the topo map and we strike out for the part of the mesa where the chopper pilot located the sheep the other day.<br /><br />It's not long before the heat starts to rise. There are gnats a-plenty on the Mesa, and when we pause to drink, I take my bandanna out of my back pocket, shake it out and tuck it under my hat so that it drapes foreign-legion-style down my neck. It does help keep the gnats off my neck, although they still fly invisibly under the bill and inflict small, stinging bites on my forehead. Maggie swears by Avon Skin-So-Soft as a repellent, but I don't think it works that well for me - different body chemistry, perhaps. I also find the smell of it overwhelming, so after the first day or two I leave off and make do either without, or with the old stand-by Cutter's.<br /><br />There are long fingers of rock that project out from the sides of the Mesa. The advantage to walking along the top of these is that there isn't a lot of vegetation in your way - a few shrubs, the occasional pinon pine. The disadvantage is that they undulate up and down, so if you ridge-run you have a lot more hill to hike. The alternative is to walk along the deer and sheep trails that traverse the sloped sides of these formations. The advantage there is that there's less up and down. The disadvantage is that you're on loose, sandy soil and scree, and there's a tendency for it to collapse and slide away under your feet. It doesn't collapse enough to spill you down the steep slope to the 300-foot cliff-drop - or so I hope - but it's a bit disconcerting. The act of walking on these narrow trails cases them to shift just an inch or two down the side of the mesa. It kind of weirds me out - perhaps more so in view of the fact that, not so long ago, Maggie came to grief on the uncertainties of the terrain on the Mesa.<br /><br />Here I should perhaps pause to tell the rest of that tale. If anyone should ever doubt that Maggie is one tough, determined babe, this will in my estimation remove all doubt.<br /><br />One day, Maggie was hiking on the mesa in pursuit of her research. She was climbing up a sandstone cliff - not a particularly technical one, she told me, but a cliff none the less. She'd made it up several such cliffs before - one time, by following a set of cougar tracks. She'd been stymied about how to get to the top, but the cat tracks took her right up.<br /><br />On this particular occasion, however, she made the mistake of reaching to grab a knob of sandstone to help her on her way up. Sandstone is fragile; it fractures easily, and when she put too much of her weight on her handhold, the sandstone broke away and let her fall.<br /><br />She doesn't remember anything after the sandstone breaking, until she woke up. It was the brush of a raven feather across her forehead that woke her. She came to lying on the shaley pan below the cliff, with ravens standing around her, examining her with their bright, dark eyes. Luckily, as she was still alive, they hadn't started on Maggie's own bright, dark eyes; they were merely inspecting her. It's a good thing, though; the bird woke her before it got dark and the temperature started to drop.<br /><br />I have no doubt she was in incredible pain; she'd crushed the radius of her left arm and dislocated her right elbow, was shocky and had lacerations on her head and her knee, and doubtless numerous other scrapes and bruises, dings an boo-boos - not to mention a hell of a concussion. Still, if you're still alive you get up and get going, and that's what she did. After she sat for a little bit, gathering herself, she made it to her feet and walked back to where she'd parked the rig. Somehow she managed to get the keys out of her front pocket - with both hands incapacitated, don't even ask me how - and managed to insert the key into the lock. (No, I have no idea why she locked the truck miles and miles from an human, but there you are.) She turned the key with her teeth, unlocking the truck, and managed both to get the door open and to get up into the cab. About the time she got the key into the ignition, she realized: <em>I can't drive. Both hands are incapacitated. How am I going to steer, let alone shift a one-ton 4x4 stick?</em><br /><em></em><br />Hmm. On to plan B.<br /><br />Maggie gets back out of the truck and shrugs off her pack (an operation whose discomfort I hesitate to even contemplate). Inside it is a two-way radio, a precaution taken for just such occasions. She manages to unzip her pack and extract the two-way. Miraculously, it has survived the fall and is in working order. But of course, we're back to problem one: Both hands are incapacitated.<br /><br /><em>No problem,</em> thinks our intrepid lass. <em>I'll just kneel on the talk button to call for help</em>. This she somehow does, manoevering the radio into position on the rocky ground and getting to her lacerated knees so she can operate the call button.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this places her mouth too far from the speaker to be of any use. Hmm. What to do now? How else to push the button?<br /><br />Ah. A stick held in the mouth will do for that. She finds one and uses it to push the button. This works fine except for one thing: Now she has a stick in her mouth and can't talk.<br /><br />Drat.<br /><br />Well, nothing for it but to walk out, then.<br /><br />Accordingly, Maggie gets to her feet and begins the hike back to civilization. She sings songs to herself to keep focused. She promises herself over and over that when she gets put of this she's going to have mint chocolate chip ice cream and lemonade. She shambles along, heavily concussed, broken and dislocated and bleeding... and singing.<br /><br />One foot goes in front of the other, and after some long and dreadfully painful (but hopefully hazy) time she is walking along Sunnyside Plateau. By now it is late afternoon - she fell off the cliff before noon - and the light has gone deep and red, casting sharp black shadows eastward. Maggie scuffs along in the burnt-orange dust of the road. Ahead of her a jeep is coming, flinging up giant plumes of dirt from the arid surface of Sunnyside Road. They wave at her. She waves back.<br /><br />About the time they pass her, she thinks: <em>Oh, wait a minute. Maybe I should have flagged them down and asked for help.</em><br /><br />This is no doubt a measure of how thoroughly concussed she is. For the same reason she couldn't reason ahead to spare herself the efforts at getting into the then-undriveable truck and messing about with the then-unusable radio, she can't currently process the logic trail fast enough to anticipate consequences. Maggie is a smart girl, but her brain isn't at its best right now.<br /><br />However, by and large the people of Colorado are some of the good ones, and the ones in the jeep have noticed that something is wrong with Maggie. One side of her face is washed in blood, but in the stark red-and-black light, that might not have been immediately apparent. However, her clothes are torn and dirty, and her gait is significantly abnormal. Rather than thinking "some stinking drunk", the jeepers turn around to see if she's okay. They pull up beside her.<br /><br />"Um... do you need help?" they ask her.<br /><br />"Yes, please," she says, and they help her into the vehicle and drive her to Plateau Creek. Because of the head injury, the medical staff there won't give her any painkillers. They clean her up some and stabilize her, then insert her into an ambulance and drive her to Grand Junction, which has a trauma center. Grand Junction takes care of her pain, reduces her elbow dislocation, rehydrates her and stitches her up. They devise the seal-flipper cast to address her shattered wrist, and keep her for a couple of days. Her boyfriend - another grad student - comes to visit her in the hospital. He brings her mint-chocolate chip ice cream and lemonade.<br /><br />Well. I think she's earned it, don't you?<br /><br />At any rate, this story should illustrate a few things, such as:<br />1. Why I think Maggie is one tough and determined babe.<br /><br />2. Why I found it slightly alarming when the PT people told Maggie that in order to regain her wrist mobility she needed to brace her hand on a table and lean on the wrist to bend it until it made her cry. How hard do you have to push to make this girl cry? I don't even want to think about it.<br /><br />3. Why I was wary about walking on six-inch-wide paths that shift downslope at every step.<br /><br />Maggie did assure me that these were perfectly safe, but still: Keeping a weather eye out. Just sayin'.<br /><br />At any rate, by late morning, we were parked on one finger of ridge, looking across at the cliffs on the one opposite. Maggie made sounds of satisfaction - quietly, as sound carries in the clear desert air - and hunkered down to set up the spotting scope. She got her tripod where she wanted it, clipped in the scope, and glassed the cliff. Securing the scope so it wouldn't wiggle, she gave me a grin.<br /><br />"Want to see?" she asked. Well, duh, who wouldn't want to? I set my eye to the scope and scanned.<br /><br />"I don't see a thing," I admitted to her after a few moments.<br /><br />"Keep looking," she said, supremely confident.<br /><br />Shrugging, I return my eye to the scope and stare aimlessly through it. I sit patiently for a minute. Suddenly, though nothing moves, they spring out of the rock at me: Seven ewes and five lambs. I am astonished. How could I have <em>not</em> seen them before? They're right there, sharp and clear as day.<br /><br />"Whoa," I say, low, my eye glued to the scope. Maggie laughs softly.<br /><br />"Told you," she says, content.<br /><br />This was my first consciously-remembered experience with search images. I did nothing to resolve the images of the sheep, and they did nothing to draw my gaze. My brain, allowed to stare without distraction, simply resolved the shapes for me and made sense of them. Once that happened, it was hard to fathom how anyone could miss them.<br /><br />Years later, my mother gave me a photo of a shaley cliff. She'd taken it from inside an observation deck at some park or other.<br /><br />"I know there's a bighorn sheep in there somewhere, because it was walking across in front of my when I took the picture, but I can't find it," she admitted.<br /><br />"It's right there," I said, pointing.<br /><br />"Where?"<br /><br />"Here; see, there are the legs, the eye, the ear?" I said, pointing at them. In the way of search images, the shape of the sheep had practically leapt off the photo paper at me, so obvious that it was the first thing I saw when I looked at the picture. But not long ago I came across the photo and saw nothing but shale. I've lost the search image now; but I know I can get it back anytime I want it, and it'll take no more than a minute or two of patient staring.<br /><br />The brain is an amazing thing, isn't it?<br /><br />At any rate, we sat and scoped the sheep for a while; Maggie recited data and I marked it in her field notebook. We listened to the deep, throaty voices of the ewes and the higher, softer bleating of the lambs. We watched the babies pronk and bounce on the steep slope, leaping agilely back and forth, shaking their silly ears at one another. We watched the ewes bed down against the cliff, ruminating, flicking an occasional ear to chase the gnats, or else get up and browse on the scrubby growth on the steep rocky slopes of the Mesa. We watched the lambs play king of the mountain, jumping up on their mothers' recumbent backs, skittering off their sides to lay down next to them, delicate heads propped on the warm dun flanks of their dams.<br /><br />We weren't right next to them; in fact, you might see them much closer up on a National Geographic special. But in spite of that, there is an immediacy to seeing them in person, even through the long remove of a spotting scope, that a television closeup can never even approximate. It is somehow a hundred times more intimate, a thousand times more exciting, to see them in the wild, first-hand, than it can ever be to see them on film or in captivity. I can't begin to explain why, but it's true. Maybe it can't be understood, ever, unless you do it yourself.<br /><br />I highly recommend it.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-25092289720593266522011-02-03T14:03:00.000-08:002011-02-04T14:25:24.707-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp: Battlement Base Camp<em>When last we saw our intrepid heroines, they had just conned the Northern Geophysical crew <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">chief</span> into dispersing <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">their</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span> all over Battlement Mesa - or at least, one of them had. The other one pretty much just distracted the remaining crew so that the first one could get down to business.</em><br /><br />The next day we hiked up the mesa to establish our base camp.<br /><br />This entailed getting up early and settling our dogs in with their respective babysitters, stashing our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">day pack</span> gear in the truck and then and driving our rig as close as we could go to the mesa. There were some cow pastures to walk through on the skirts of the mesa, where a pretty little stream trickled through, irrigating the meadow and providing a mud hazard where we had to negotiate. After that we entered the trees and began winding our way up the flank of the mesa. It was a pretty summer's morning, and small blue and white butterflies flitted over the wildflowers, disappearing when we entered the relative cool of the trees.<br /><br />Most of the climb - and climb it was - was mercifully shaded by spruce and aspen. Sometimes we found ourselves out in the sun on hot, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">shaley</span> scree. Every so often we'd pause for a minute or two, mainly so I could catch my breath; Maggie, having worked this project for some months before her accident, was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">unfazed</span> by the hike, and continues on up the slope like a pretty little machine.<br /><br /><br />A few hours later we were on the plateau atop the mesa. And there, lo and behold, is our equipment, all neatly mounded together by the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">NG</span> guys who had dropped it off for us - minus five of our eight <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span>, of course, since they'd already been scooped up and swooped off to their designated drop points.<br /><br />First order of business was to have lunch, of course, and a little sit-down while we surveyed the terrain, scoping out the best place to put up our wall tent. The mesa top is generally flat, but not completely level; it undulates gently in the area of our base camp, and rises to a ridge to the southwest of it. Still, there is a broad, flat short-grass meadow stretching around us, dotted here and there with vigorous, wiry shrubs. Maggie and I mow down some cheese and tortillas with <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-error">picante</span> sauce, deciding on the direction we intend to orient our tent. That done, we begin scouting for tent poles: four saplings sturdy enough and long enough to form <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">crosspoles</span> at either end of the tent, and a fifth to act as the ridgepole down the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">center line</span> of our soon-to-be home away from home. Luckily for us, there are suitable <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-error">deadfalls</span> for all positions, and only a moderate amount of hunting and poking about is required before we have dragged our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">lodge poles</span> to the camp.<br /><br />Now, I've never put up a wall tent before, but Maggie is an old pro. I have two good hands and Maggie doesn't, but she's not the type to stand there shouting directions while someone else does all the work - and realistically, putting up the tent poles is really a two-person job. From time to time Maggie stops to take pictures of our progress - or has me do so - because at some point she will have to present progress reports at meetings, and photos are always a welcome adjunct.<br /><br />Once we have the tent hung from the ridgepole, we need to put in tent stakes. We have a supply of those, and don't need to scavenge them from the woods. The first hints of evening are coming on; the shadows are lengthening now, and the the heavy weight of the afternoon heat is lifting, softening its touch to a caress. I take the sledge and pound the first stakes in.<br /><br />"Here, let me do some,"Maggie says.<br /><br />"Are you sure about that?" I ask doubtfully, eyeing her splint. While the day has proven unequivocally that Maggie can hike circles around me any day of the week, she knows my upper body is stronger than hers; I'd wowed her on my second night in town by pulling the cork out of a bottle of wine (which, in my view, didn't require much effort, but was evidently something of a feat from her point of view.) "I don't mind doing them all," I say, trying to look sturdy and muscular.<br /><br />"No, I want to," she says, so I hand her the sledge. Frowning with concentration, she positions her stake just so; this is something of a challenge with the splint, but she manages it after two tries. Using her <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-error">unsplinted</span> right arm, she taps the stake to seat it and then gives it a bigger swing to drive it. So far, so good. The second swing glances off the tent stake and bounces off her shin with a thump that sets my teeth on edge.<br /><br />"Give me that," I tell her, snatching it out of her hand while she giggles. It's only a five-pound hammer, but still: that had to hurt. We are, admittedly, punchy after our long hike and the heat of the day (and maybe not as much sleep and a bit more alcohol the night before than would have been wise), but the whole reason I'm here is to help Maggie get out into the field again, which help she only needs in the first place because of her injury. Somehow I have an idea that letting her fracture her shin with a sledgehammer might be more or less the opposite of what I'm there to do. Call me crazy.<br /><br />I pound the rest of the tent stakes in while Maggie scouts a latrine site for us. I go dig it deeper with the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">folding</span> shovel while she starts organizing our gear. We have a stove for the tent - which, in this weather, is needed more as a food-safe than it is as a source of heat, but it's handy for that. When I come back over the rise to base camp, it looks secure and homey: Maggie has the tent flaps tied back and most of the gear neatly stowed inside.<br /><br />The shadows are deepening now, indigo and violet, and the evening is cooling off. A brilliant scatter of stars is appearing overhead. We inflate our therma-rest pads and shake out our sleeping bags, laying them out on the roomy canvas floor of our wall tent. I don't know about Maggie, but I'm beat. Tomorrow will be our first day of scoping sheep; it's that that is on my mind as I fall asleep in the cozy gloom of our home away from home.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-51940581480377472022011-01-31T14:09:00.000-08:002011-02-03T11:09:56.034-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp Part II: On the Eve Of The Battlement<em>Resuming our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">story</span>: When last we saw our dauntless heroines, they were flying back from Battlement Mesa in a helicopter. At least one of them really had a good time in the air.</em><br /><br /><br /><br />When we returned to earth, we watched the pilot lift his bird back up into the deep turquoise of the fathomless Colorado sky. Turning to more mundane tasks, we drove the rig back through the arid, dusty heat of the afternoon; there were a few more things to attend to that day. The sun was starting to slant across <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">Sunnyside</span> Plateau, the broad bench from which the Mesa arises. The dirt is sandy and red, and the sloping light burns everything a rich and brilliant red-orange. The beauty of this eases the transition from airborne to earthbound, and I feel myself settling peacefully back onto my foundations - but not completely, because the sky has taken root somewhere inside me. I do not know it then, but it will never completely let go. I'll love small-aircraft flying forever.<br /><br /><br />But that day, we finished up some errands that had to be done, in preparation for us to go to Rifle District in the morning. Maggie had some confabulation set up with one of her mentors in the DOW, so accordingly the next day I drove us to Rifle. I cooled my heels while Maggie took care of project business, and then we turned tail back to Plateau Creek.<br /><br /><br />The town of Plateau Creek has one main street upon which stand maybe 20 or so storefronts. There is one grocery store, a post office, two diners, a bar. The only pizza to be found in town is at the bar, and that night we opt to go in for a pie and a beer; for the next several days we'll be on the mountain, and our diet will be limited to more durable (but less enjoyable) camp fare.<br /><br /><br />Unsurprisingly, the Northern Geo crew have located the one and only bar in town, and have descended upon it like a plague of locusts. Also unsurprising is their delight at seeing Maggie and I turn up in the bar. There are, after all, at least a dozen men in the bar, and only two women - and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">that'd</span> be us. That fact alone was enough to guarantee us a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">certain</span> amount of courtliness and interest, but here I must mention that Maggie is absolutely beautiful. Black Irish, her hair is lush and glossy as sable and her eyes are the rich deep color of coffee beans. She has perfect white teeth, a beautiful profile, and actress-worthy looks. She smiles readily, is pleasant and upbeat, and is always willing to laugh at a joke. Even when she is not one of only two women in a roomful of men, they still cluster around her admiringly.<br /><br /><br />Accordingly, we have no sooner placed our pizza order and had the bartender draw us a couple of drafts than we are surrounded by lonesome <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">NG</span> crewmen. I am not the man-magnet that Maggie is -and I'm more introverted, to boot - so she takes this better in her stride than I do, chit-chatting and introducing us around. I'm no more than halfway through my beer when another round magically appears in front of us. Um. Okay, then. Thanks. Oh, and there's another round, fancy that.<br /><br /><br />By the time I'm on my second slice of pizza, I have three beers sitting in front of me, courtesy of the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">NG</span> crew, who are all WAY better drinkers than I am - and very attentive lest Maggie and I perish of thirst. Hm. No demur seems effective; all the Northern Geo guys wave off my observation that I have more beer in front of me than I can manage to drink before next Friday. It's rather dear, really, their generosity, and I can't bring myself to step on their generous and attentive toes. Accordingly I get up every so often with my beer in hand, go up the the bartender for a quick chat, and allow him to discreetly pour it down the channel. Then I go back to the table, pick up the next mug for a sip, and repeat until done.<br /><br /><br />Before long our pack of admirers is either bored or getting bolder with the beer lubricating them. They invite me to play pool - at which I suck, by the way - and they look so hopeful and forlorn that I agree. They helpfully coach me - often two or three of them offering conflicting advice at the same time - and though I don't improve my billiards skills, I do rather enjoy their <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">puppyishness</span>.<br /><br /><br />Several of them try to recruit me to join their crew. I point out that I'm much smaller than any of them, and unlikely to be able to hump chain and cable up a mountain all day long.<br /><br /><br />"You look strong," one of them tells me, eyeing my deltoids.<br /><br /><br />"Thanks," I tell him, "but I'd bet money any one of you can hike me into the dirt in no time."<br /><br /><br />"We'd help you," says another hopefully. While I am reflecting that this might defeat the purpose of hiring me in the first <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">place</span>, another one pipes up.<br /><br /><br />"It's really good money," he says, in coaxing tones. I can't help it. I smile at them. They all smile back, brightening like a gang of 10-year-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-error">olds</span> offered ice cream.<br /><br /><br />"I really can't," I tell them. "Maggie can't get back into the field without me. She can't drive the rig til the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">splint</span> comes off."<br /><br /><br />They all look over at Maggie, who has graduated from her hot-pink cast into a flesh-colored splint - but who still has the seal-flipper effect going on. They look slightly crestfallen, but nod judiciously. This they understand. They don't believe that, even recently off the track, with my mini-linebacker shoulders, I am not half as strong as them; and they don't get it that I can't keep up with the slowest of them on the trail, especially hauling heavy lines uphill over my shoulders - but they understand helping a friend.<br /><br /><br />One of them - called Skip by his pals - wants to dance. Our Skip is a little tipsy - by which I mean fairly drunk - and is so lovelorn (no so much for me, but for any female companionship) that I can't refuse him. It would be like swatting a puppy. So he trots over and feeds the jukebox, and I try to swing dance with him. I say "try" because Skip's balance has gone the way of the buffalo (along about his 6<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error">th</span> beer, I'd guess) and I'm having to help him keep his feet. Skip is the smallest of the crew, but he's wiry-tough, and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">surprisingly</span> heavy when he steps back and his weight tugs at my grip. His arms may be <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-error">leanly</span> knotted with muscle, but they are limp as <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-error">linguini</span>, and after one particularly enthusiastic move Skip's fingers jerk right out of my grasp and down he goes. Oops.<br /><br /><br />His buddies gather around him and ask if he's okay, helping him to his feet. He went down like a plank and I'm pretty sure I heard his head hit the floor, but he assures us manfully that he's just fine. He wobbles over to take my hands again, but <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">yields</span> to one of his buddies at the next song, and seems content to sit with a beer and smile sleepily at me thereafter.<br /><br /><br />Meanwhile Maggie is deep in conversation with the crew boss. I glance over and see the topographical map spread out on the table in front of them, their heads bent close together over it. I wonder what she is up to, but I am still surrounded by <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-error">NG</span> crew, so there's no chance to go look.<br /><br /><br />It goes on like this, in a pleasantly exasperating sort of way, until I am ready to curl up under a table and sleep. Maggie folds up her <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-error">topo</span> map with a satisfied air. I remind her it's after 11:00 and we have to hit the mesa in the morning, and we bail out of the bar, our admirers calling <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17" class="blsp-spelling-error">goodnights</span> as we make our escape.<br /><br /><br />"What were you up to with the crew boss?" I ask her.<br /><br /><br />"He said they could move our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span> for us," she says. "I marked where I want them to put them. That way we can hike out to water instead of carrying a whole day of it with us."<br /><br /><br /><p><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_19" class="blsp-spelling-error">Hmm</span>. Well, that's nice. Water is necessary, especially up on the arid mesa, but it's heavy. Being able to hike for an hour or two, refill water, hike out to the spotting point, and then reverse the process after sheep scoping, is a happy thought. The <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_20" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span> are five-gallon bladders of water, enclosed in a heavy cardboard cube, and having them placed strategically in our main hiking paths is a dandy idea. I'm not sure how much of the crew chief's cooperation is based on general make-nice PR, and how much is due to the influence of Maggie's thick shiny hair and pert sun-kissed nose, but either way, it's a nice offer. And they do a nice job if it, too, those Northern Geo guys; they place the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_21" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span> exactly where marked, always under the shade of a tree and flagged on two sides to make finding them a snap. In the end we lose two of them: One was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_22" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">placed</span> on the ridge where designated, but Maggie didn't notice that her X marked a spot on the far side of a deep, narrow ravine. The other fell prey to a thirsty bear. Based on the claw marks scored deep into the heavy cardboard sides, it appears that the bear tore off the screw-top lid and then simply grabbed the 5-gallon box and tilted it up to drink the contents. Still, the remaining <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_23" class="blsp-spelling-error">cubies</span> bailed us out of carrying many a quart along the way, and for that we were grateful.</p><p><em>Next up: Battlement Base Camp.<br /></em></p>AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-54092793016474185142011-01-27T16:51:00.000-08:002011-01-27T18:20:29.845-08:00Adventures At Sheep Camp: Going To The BattlementFor unknown reasons I was thinking today about my stint in Battlement Mesa. I was going to write you all a story about bison, but I think I'm going to slip this in ahead of it . (Sorry, Rock Ridge! I'll get to it, I swear.)<br /><br />Back before Vet School, I was in graduate school getting a master's degree in Wildlife Biology. One day I was sitting in my office, minding my own biz (okay, I admit it: I was doing the crossword in the campus rag.) In comes one of my fellow grad students (who we shall euphamistically call Maggie). She has been out in the field - in her case, Battlement Mesa, an arid, rocky mesa in Western Colorado, not far from the better-known Grand Mesa. But she's back visiting at the U because she can't do her fieldwork for the moment: She'd fallen off a cliff not so long ago, and her left arm is in a cast. We'd all heard she'd had an accident, but not the extent of it; I eye her cast in some bemusement. It's made so that her wrist is tilted laterally, and her left hand by consequence sticks out to the side like a seal flipper.<br /><br />"Jeez, what'd you <em>do?"</em> I ask her.<br /><br />She explains: when she fell, she shattered her radius (the larger of the two bones in the lower arm) and the pieces were too small to pin, wire or plate back together. The solution was to tilt her wrist to the side, putting tension on the soft tissues overlying the bone. This compressed the fragments enough to get them more or less lined up and close enough together that they could knit.<br /><br />The down side of this ingenious arrangement is that Maggie can't drive her Forest Service rig: It's a one-ton four-wheel-drive pickup, for starters. You need both hands to manage the wheel, especially in rough terrain. If the cast angulation didn't prevent Maggie from being able to grasp the wheel, the fact that her entire plam is covered with hard, slick fiberglass would have done the trick. Moreover, her rig is a stick, and the 4-wheel is old-school: Two gear shifts, and you have to get out to lock the hubs. Locking the hubs would be the least of her problems; that, she could manage with her right hand. But you can't really steer a one-ton truck with one knee whilst simultaneously putting in the clutch with the other leg and taking your only good hand off the wheel to shift.<br /><br />Hence Maggie's visit to the U: She's trolling for volunteers. Time is a-wasting, the summer is winding along, and nothing is getting done on her project while she's laid up.<br /><br />Well. I have a hiatus in my own project, as it turns out. I have 5 weeks I can spare her. This could be fun. Or maybe not, but at least I'd be able to help her get back out into the field.<br /><br />So, we cobbled together various arrangements (some things easily, others fraught with very tedious details, which I'll skip) and two weeks later I found myself living in the Forest Service bunkhouse in Plateau Creek, Colorado.*<br /><br />Maggie's project was a desert bighorn study, jointly funded by the Forest Service and the Division of Wildlife. Accordingly I drove our rig hither and yon, being introduced around as Maggie's fill-in help. There were a few days of errands to run before we went into the field: re-check doctor appointments in Grnad Junction for Maggie, groceries to buy, field-camp equipment to assemble. As it turns out, Northern Geophysical was surveying in the area, and the company - eager to make nice with the locals and keep relations with the regional government agencies cordial - vonlunteered to fly one of their choppers up and drop our entire field camp at the designated base camp site.<br /><br />I had mixed feelings about this; we'd been planning to haul our camp up on horseback, and one of the things Maggie'd been looking for in her volunteer was someone who could ride. I'm competent enough on horseback, I suppose, and I'd never had a chance to do horse-packing like that, so I'd been looking forward to it.<br /><br />On the other hand, there was the small but significantly tempting detail that Northern Geo would need us to fly up with them in the chopper and scout the field site so they'd know where to drop our camp.<br /><br />Flying. In a helicopter.<br /><br />Oh, goodie. I've always wanted to go up in a chopper.<br /><br />On the day of, I drive the rig to the designated take-off point, a grassy meadow outside of town. I am prepared to be all circumspection - it isn't my project, after all, so I am ready to sit meekly in the back of the chopper. I firmly bite my tongue and do not (though I dearly want to) ask to sit in front. But Glory Hallelujah, Maggie doesn't want to sit where she can look down between her feet through the plexiglass bubble and see the ground slipping away beneath her - nor where there is an open door to her right, with only her harness to keep her from falling out the door. Personally, I don't understand this: I myself am <em>dying</em> to do that very thing. But when Maggie makes a face and asks me if I'd mind sitting up front, I decline to look a gift horse in the mouth and tell her as graciously as possible that I'd love to.<br /><br />I get to fly up front in the right seat! Yay!<br /><br />We get in, strap down, don headsets. The pilot checks to make sure we're secure and can all hear each other. He fires it up and the blades of the rotor begin to turn, ponderously at first, then faster, driven by the throaty roar of the engine. The heavy <em>whup</em> of the blades rises in pace and pitch, their power translating down through the frame of the bird, and I am so excited I'm having a hard time holding still. I bite my lip on an ear-to-ear grin, trying not to look like a complete moron, but I can't help it: when the pilot lifts his bird into the air, a laugh escapes from low in my throat, gurgling up from a deep well of delight. I get a sidelong glance from the pilot and a half-smile, as if he's saying: <em>Yeah, I get it.</em><br /><br />I look down. My heels are on the metal frame of the chopper, my toes on the clear plexiglass bubble. The earth falls away, grasses flattened in the prop-wash, and then our nose pitches slightly down and we are skimming forward over the tops of the trees. I am enchanted.<br /><br />We approach Battlement. The pilot asks if we want to do a quick scout for Bighorns before we locate our camp site. Yes, Maggie tells him - after all, if we can find animals now, we'll find them all the more easily when we are up on the Mesa. Obligingly, the pilot threads us up and down the canyons that crenellate Battlement's edges. I am beside myself with glee. This is the coolest thing <em>ever</em>. I am watching the cliffs skim by alongside us, looking for desert bighorns. The pilot, with better skills than I, sees them first: they're moving along the cliff to the right of the chopper, and he banks his bird to tilt Maggie's seat up and mine down, giving both of us a better view. I count seven, maybe eight, desert bighorn ewes, guessing at five or so lambs, all leaping lightly along the cliffs. They are running toward us, so they're gone in a flash, but it's no less a thrill for all that.<br /><br />The pilot banks us back the other way, peeling away from the cliffs and carving a wide circle through the sky, buying us altitude before he swoops us up over the top of the mesa. This gives me an enjoyable roller-coaster thrill in the pit of my stomach and I laugh again, unable to help myself. The pilot doens't spare me a look, but from the corner of my eye I can see him smiling. Oh, well; I may be a dork, but at least I'm entertaining him.<br /><br />Maggie points out our future base camp and the pilot makes a wide loop around it, scouting the slope and assessing landing sites. There's a decent amount of flat in the midst of the mild undulations of the mesa-top; our camp will be a hundred or so feet below the crest, down a relatively gentle slope. <br /><br />Scouting complete, the pilot turns back toward town. Ah, well; I knew it couldn't last. Still, this is one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do, and I lean forward to watch our shadow racing over the earth between my feet, trying not to waste a minute of it.<br /><br /><em>Next up: Installment two of this tale, as yet untitled.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>*In the interests of privacy for various parties, this is a mythical name.</em>AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6589783647802842771.post-18542270807622952442011-01-16T14:21:00.000-08:002011-01-16T16:03:08.961-08:00Bad IdeasWell, I've been a little quiet lately. I'm laying low because I've been a wee bit indisposed.<br /><br />It all started so innocently. I got this cold. A little tiny cold. The wimpiest cold ever. No big. But then, I made a mistake. A Very Bad Mistake.<br /><br />See, I posted on FaceBook that I had the wimpiest cold ever. In effect, I laughed at it. I gave it a virtual raspberry. I might as well have waved my metaphorical private parts at its aunties (silly English ka-nnnigit... with apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Ultimately, it boils down to this: I taunted the virus.<br /><br />Never taunt the virus.<br /><br />Thing is, if you taunt the virus, it goes, "Oh, yeah?" and then it calls in reinforcements in the form of a secondary bacterial bronchopneumonia. And having pneumonia of any form, let me tell you, is a Bad Idea.<br /><br />It's not my first round with pneumonia. I had it when I was an intern. I worked every day for a month with it. This also: Bad Idea. However, I was in a seven-intern program and we'd already lost two: One had broken her leg whilst cowboy dancing (no one could say she wasn't enthusiastic) and the other had wrecked her motorcycle. Five interns can (with great difficulty) do seven interns' work. Four interns can't. I knew if I went down the whole house of cards was going down with me. I wasn't going to do that to my intern mates. So, I lay on my side at night, feeling the secretions rolling down my airways, and then I coughed and coughed until I cleared them out. Then I rolled to my other side and did it again. I started on antibiotics and I got up in the mornings and I went to work. I also developed an interesting drug eruption as a result of an allergy to the antibiotic, but that's another story. But I got through it, my injured intern mates recovered and returned to work (one of them in a wheelchair at first), and I gradually got better. The intern program returned to full strength (for a while, anyway, until one of the interns left to give birth slightly prematurely - some people will do ANYthing to get out of their intern presentation! - and another had to leave the program for personal reasons.)<br /><br />However, the entire experience left an indelible impression on me. Coughing your brains out for a month will do that to you. Go figure.<br /><br />Which is how I knew, four days after the wimpy cold had started, that I was heading into Big Trouble. One day I was fine - mild sore throat, no cough, a little stuffy, a little blah. The next day I started coughing. Still no big, not much coughing. Par for the course. The next day, like a fool, I posted the wimpy cold status on FB.<br /><br />Day after that, coughing a little heavier. By that night, it was kicking my ass. But I was off the next day; I figured I'd sleep it off. Still no big. Except that by the evening of the following day I Could. Not. Breathe.<br /><br />If I concentrated hard I could draw a full breath, but I was drawing it against resistance, and it took effort to exhale. This - slow, deep respirations with effort - is an obstructive pattern, which indicates airway narrowing. A rapid, shallow pattern would indicate restriction, such as would occur with air or fluid inside the chest, anything compressing the lung tissue. But I couldn't tolerate any compression of my chest - not leaning back against the pillow, not laying down - and I had to concentrate on every breath. I didn't need a stethoscope to hear the crackles and rales in my chest. I could hear them just fine without (and feel them even better).<br /><br />Okey-dokey. Time for a pulse-ox, and I may be heading to the people hospital to admit myself.<br /><br />I struggled into clothes and tottered down to my truck. It was cold and the wind was absolutely howling - gusts into the 70 mph range. I warmed my truck up for 10 minutes - it took that length of time to recover from the trip down there, anyway - and I drove to work, concentrating on driving, concentrating on fighting the heavy winds as they snatched at my truck and bounced it around, concentrating on breathing. I made it to the clinic, went inside and leaned on a table for a while til I could breathe again. I put the pulse oximeter on my finger. I waited for it to pick up my heart rate - 120, too high - and my oxygenation - 90, too low. On room air I should be 98 to 100%, and standing at rest my heart rate ought to be in the high 80 to low 90 range.<br /><br />This means that my lungs are impaired, but not as much as my bronchioles. My oxygenation is down about ten percent, but that's better than my respiratory effort, which is up by a factor of two or three above normal. I've never had this much effort breathing - ever in life - and that's for just standing there, doing nothing. Still, 90 isn't good - but it isn't dying, either.<br /><br />Okay then. No hospitalization. On the other hand, big Yes to getting some meds (and yes, I <strong>do</strong> have a people doctor, why do you ask?)<br /><br />So I started on antibiotics. I'm a proponent or reserving the use of antibiotics for those situations that merit them, which means I never take them for a cold. Especially not for a wimpy cold. But if said wimp-cold calls in a nice bacterial backup - okay, then. AB's it is.<br /><br />Two hours later I felt markedly improved. Pulse ox had climbed to 92 (okay, not great, but I was getting it without the extreme effort.) I went home. I laid down. I slept. A miracle has occurred, and I can do both now. Or maybe it's not so much a miracle as the glory of antibiotics, appropriately applied, and thank God I live in a time and place where these things are available.<br /><br />Meanwhile I got my truck stuck at the bottom of my driveway. The screaming winds have blown away the sand on my drive and polished the ice to something that even my Yak Trax are slipping on. It was a struggle to make it up the hill in the howling winds and the dark, but fortunately for Christmas (thanks, Dad) I got a headlamp that I believe might be visible in Russia. This means I could see even the slightest patch of traction, so I managed it in a under ten minutes, and only had to stop for breath every twenty feet or so. Easy-peasy. Fortunately I'd taken one Border collie along for moral support (I wanted two, but couldn't manage both), and he kept running back to check on me, facing into the knife-blade of the wind to watch me with quizzical gravity, moving up the drive when I did, as if concerned I'd forgotten the way. Every time I stopped, he'd run back down to me, watch, wait, lead me again.<br /><br />Getting inside the house was lovely.<br /><br />I slept and coughed the next day. I drank water and ate antibiotics and felt better. The following day I took a sick day and did it again. I called Rock Ridge and asked them if they had any miracle solutions for my driveway. They did, they assured me, and if I needed anything - food, medications, help of any description - I was to call them for rescue.<br /><br />Gotta love Alaskans.<br /><br />The next day I had challenges to face. Challenge number one was getting out of bed. That managed, I faced the Big One: making it down the drive to my truck, preferably without falling and breaking anything important. I put on my Yak Trax and crept out onto the icy drive, into the face of the howling winds. In the main, there are trees to grab onto - well, saplings, at least - and maybe a tiny rim of traction right at the very edge of the drive. Most of it I managed to do completely upright. Part of it I did literally on my hands and knees, where it was too slick and steep for the Yak Trax to grip the ice. The bank beside the driveway is devoid of both snow and ice, but the dirt is frozen so hard that there is no traction on it; my boots just slip off. I solved this by toeing in hard to the bank, bracing my knees against the steep slope of it, and using my frozen hands to find meager hand-holds of equally-frozen knobs of dirt knurling the surface. I crab-walked down that part sideways on my knees, but soon the bank's slope levels out and there is real footing again. Ah, success: My truck is there, the door is open, the dog and I are inside. My hands ache with cold and I can't feel my fingers, but steps one and two are complete.<br /><br />Challenge number next: starting the truck, which has not had its block heater plugged in in three days. It is three degrees at my house - and, most unusually when it's that cold, the wind is still screaming by at vicious speed. The wind-chill is brutal. This might be a problem. But no, the truck fires right up.<br /><br />Okay, now all I have to do is ease it out of the driveway without sliding into the lake, and then do my solo day at work. Piece of cake. Well, maybe not a piece of cake, but at least manageable. After getting down the hill, the rest of the challenges combined seem reasonably undaunting. My staff hunts around and finds me cough drops. They help me wrestle the tough dogs. They volunteer to slap me helpfully on the back if I need help coughing. We treat everything that comes in the door successfully.<br /><br />Time to go home. Parked in the teeth of the wind for almost eight hours, the truck is dreadfully cold and won't start. It floods, straining to kick the engine over. Crap. I regroup, press the gas pedal to the floor, coax, pray. She tries, fails. Tires again, fails. Then a little gift: She turns over for me now, gargling and choking, but fighting through it to roar into life. Bless you, my little Canyon. I love this truck. I know Rock Ridge would come rescue me if need be - and so would any number of others - but I want to go home, crawl under the down comforter surrounded by dogs, watch Phantom of the Opera again (love that score), sleep. And that's what I do, because Rock Ridge has made my driveway navigable again, and the truck climbs right up.<br /><br />Today I am better, and continuing on. It'll be a bit before I'm back to normal - once things settle into my chest, they stay a while - but I'm on the mend. But this is why I haven't posted the Bison story I promised Jenny - or anything else, for that matter. I'll get to it, eventually. I promise.<br /><br />Meanwhile, on the plus side, I'm up to 94% oxygenation (heart rate mercifully 89 now). As a handy bonus, I think that all the coughing must be an excellent abdominal exercise, since my stomach muscles are sore, sore, sore. (Somehow, however, I doubt that the Bronchopneumonia Ab Workout will catch on and make me a million dollars.) I can think, I can breathe, and while I still have a lot of coughing in my future, I am now on the up-slope.<br /><br />Also, I've learned an important lesson: Never taunt the virus.AKDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533003137934379516noreply@blogger.com7