Walks with Dogs

Click on thumbnails for full-size images. 

Female hip wound

Male leg wound

Male chest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Tragedy at the Trailhead” my March 7, 2009 blog gives the details. Now this sadist strikes again. A few yards further up the trail, I smelled corpse. On the slope to the south was a bag.

Stinking bag

 I approached with dread, knowing what I would find. A dead coyote  was wrapped in a sheet and stuffed into this bag. The forelegs were visible at the opening. The bag was Nutrebeef for Cows: Right Now Mineral for Cows which means I could possibly locate this executioner because only one or two locals keep cattle; there are no ranches here.

What is he trying to say with this display? His utter contempt for the graceful life he has brutally ended. Parading his potent masculinity, i.e. gun, to the world. A warning to all of us — anybody or anything he doesn’t like.

By contrast, ironically, symbolically and serendipitously as well as coincidentally, further up the trail I came upon a new dog grave. Locals frequently bury dogs up here, fitting remembrance of happy trails together. Witness the care put into this memorial.  Etched on the wooden cross the words: “Here lies the big dog” and mysterious numbers: ”9407″. The whimsical sculpture. The scribbles probably by a child in the family. A metal cross, possibly constructed by another child. Probably a tear-stained outdoor family funeral was held.

 

 

 

 

Again the glaring contrast. Horror for the wild dog; reverence for the pet. The best and worst of the human spirit.

More local dog graves:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gateway to Silence

Our first stop in Nevada, back in 1973, was an abandoned stone hut near Austin on Lonely Route 50. I was traveling with a man henceforth to be known as The Felon; a buddy of his and the buddy’s girl friend; two horses; two dogs. I was grateful to stay behind and tend the horses in a big abandoned corral loosely fenced with sagging wire while the others went to explore a nearby canyon.

Sadly I had no camera, so this generic desert picture I took at another time in another place will have to tell the story. In fact, where I stood was tall grass, not desert scrub, and a gentle wind blew. I faced a round hill to the north and a peace descended after months and years of self-inflicted conflict and inner noise.

For the first time in memory, I heard not others ranting at me, not the chorus of inner compulsions, but silence. The only sound was the pulse of my own life beating in my ears. I could see the red of my circulation in my mind’s eye; the rest was mercifully quiet.

I rested in that space, standing still, and Nevada had me from then on.

That was a benchmark moment.

We forget and we get back to “normal”. Today it happened again. I was hiking the usual route with Sadie. It was 6:30 AM on a misty, overcast morning and already somebody was shooting what sounded like an arsenal of various weapons off to the northwest.

I can only figure approximately where these random shooters are and I have no idea in which direction they shoot. They are the bane of my walks and I fully expect to be found bullet-riddled one day, the dog poking me with her nose, the murderer anonymous, unsought by the law, and long gone.

Nevada condones this random gunfire, another of the many holdovers from a past when the range was emptier. But the lone frontiersman today exists only in the imagination of guys (it has to be guys although here and there a sellout woman will go along with them) who in fact are too lazy to go more than a mile from their homes and who open fire wherever they happen to be. I’ve seen them shooting toward roads, across roads, toward houses.

Law enforcement told me when I complained a few years ago that nobody can be shooting if they can see a house from where they are. That would certainly apply to this morning’s gunman, but you don’t educate these guys; you avoid them.

Two possibilities: many of these pistol-whippers are lawmen themselves out for a little practice or — Armageddon freaks getting ready for the big day.

What must be noted is the dedication to the firearm that gets a man out of bed at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday to be shooting into the cloudy dawn. There were soft pops; there were bursts of what must have been automatic fire; there were long pauses followed by big bangs.

So I was irritated. And scared. Sadie was scared, clinging to my legs; new behavior for her — was Roger’s soul informing her?

Anyway we veered way south to get as far away as possible. The mist partially cleared and weak sunlight filtered through. It felt like a new dawn. And then there it was — the silence. The shooter was gone. There was no traffic. The only sounds were the blood pounding in my ears, Sadie’s skitterings on the sand, my own boots crunching pebbles. I stood still and there was absolute silence except the weak occasional peeping of some bird in a nearby juniper.

It was the same silence and it re-greeted me after 36 years. There has been a ton of meditation and revelation and bliss intervening. But this was a special, absolute silence. It would not have been much surprise if I got back to the neighborhood and found everybody gone and me the only witness, as in The Twilight Zone.

There was no fear, no bliss, no sadness, no joy, no noise. Just silence. I did not need to analyze, nor cling to the moment, nor escape the moment. The world remained as it has always been, and yet anything could have happened. It was the moment of Becoming, the closest we can approach to Now. I did not need a lama or a rabbi or a guru or a sensei. It may or may not ever happen again.

Hear me, Master Card, that is priceless. I wish it for all of you.

The leaves in the squash beds are so large and dense by now that monsters can grow undetected for weeks. I literally stumbled upon first one, then a few days later another: 15-inch veterans that take two hands to hold. So heavy they had sprung forth from their boundaries and lay upon the ground outside the raised beds, still firmly connected to their thick stems. They seemed to appear overnight, but they must have been growing all summer.

Probably some gardener out there can tell me: squash or gourd? Summer or winter? Predatory or friendly? Picked too early or too late? Suitable for drying and gourd art?

After portrait time, I baked the first one with feta cheese, butter, raw sugar and cinnamon. Rind is too solid to eat; interior is wonderfully delicate flavor.

I need to show the latest off for a while, maybe take it places with me, before sacrificing it. When vegetables get this big, they’re more like pets.

Click on thumbnails to see full image.

Monstro One: dressed up

Contrast: ordinary mortal

Monstro Two

Monstro Two and relative

The fire was summer of 2007. I didn’t see the damage until a year later. This used to be an especially pleasant landscape with Utah junipers for shade and gently varied terrain: round hills, sandy side canyons, winding arroyo. I had just lost a significant friendship, and the devastation of this place where we used to walk, was a startlingly apt metaphor.

They say juniper takes 80 years to mature; so I won’t see it restored in my lifetime.

To make matters starker, the first time I went there and experienced the shock of the charred waste, there was also, inexplicably, a dead steer by the road where I parked. The dogs set to munching on it, despite the flies and rotting stink. Sadie gave up when I yelled, but Roger persisted until I got out the leash — my symbol of authority — and brandished it at him. Then he skulked back to the car, his only refuge from my fury.

Now, two years later, I can take it. This week was the first I could bear to take pictures. Click on thumbnails for full image. Sadie is in the pipe. The tree with the nest used to be the grandfather tree. Oddly, the hawk’s nest survived.

An often-repeated walk is never boring if one observes clouds. It’s about time I looked up.

Slide show:http://websighttrish.com/clouds0809/clouds0809.htm

Or click on thumbnails below. This is why I live in Nevada.

Horned Lizard 2-a Notice orange spots on sides. Gravid female?

Horned Lizard 1-b

Horned Lizard 1 -a

Hiking with friend Christi saw not one but two horned lizards bringing the total to about four I’ve discovered in my life. They’re everywhere, most often lurking by anthills. And they don’t run as fast as the thinner lizards, so once you spot one your chance of getting a picture is good. I spotted the first one and Christi found the second. These pictures occupied my desktop for a long time.

I avoided vegetable gardening until 2009. I do not like to fight nature, especially when backache is involved.  My soil is mostly clay with the thinnest of topsoil layers, no nutrition to speak of, no drainage, and hard as cement. So gradually I gave up on anything that required spectacular effort. A beautiful yard grew up around me over 16 years with volunteers and some plantings from the previous homeowner: aspens; honey locusts; a carpet of Virginia Creeper; apple and pear trees; blazing star, a desert flower some despise but I admire; a stick whose identity I do not know but which is today a graceful tree; cottonwoods sprouted from the neighbors trees; juniper now towering over the 2-story house . Yarrow flourishes even in my demonic killer flower bed, so does mallow.

I don’t like square angles. I don’t like trees in rows. My yard is graceful as a Tai Chi master and hardy as an old coyote. There’s some desert with rabbitbrush, another desert plant I happen to like, and some All American lawn.

I learned through painful setbacks to cultivate volunteers and introduce only the toughest survivors. Leyland Cypress did beautifully as did Scotch pines and that street thug of plants, pyracantha. Some roses blossomed; some died. All the carnations died, all the sunflowers died, although this season one sprang up in another part of the yard, possibly from birdseed.

I started talking to my plants as though they were candidates for a Special Forces green beret unit: if you can’t hack it, hit the road. No sissies. I avoided conversations with anybody dealing in fripperies like annuals and flowers. In fact, I avoided gardening talk altogether because it drove me crazy with everything they were doing and I was not. “You just go out there at midnight if the temperature drops below 48 degrees and you cover each leaf with a special coating that you have to order from a catalog and then you wrap them in plastic, but not just any plastic, and then you stay up and blow the hair dryer on them from a generator…”

The sunflower year further embittered me. There is a section delineated by wood strips in the center of my back yard presumably for flowers. So a ray of foolish optimism motivated me to buy starter sunflowers. Within a week they were crawling with aphids. Chemicals are out of the question, so I tried every home remedy on the internet. Soap suds, tobacco juice, garlic; then a noxious mixture of all three. My sunflowers were rapidly degenerating into chewed-up stalks resembling broccoli stems. I tried the ladybugs, only later finding out they are a joke among experienced gardeners. I purchased and set loose in the so-called flower bed an army of ladybugs. Within minutes they disappeared somewhere. I never saw them again. The aphids munched on until my sunflowers were bumps in the ground.

Interestingly, such invasions localize themselves. The aphids never left the flowerbed. By now, about six years later, I found the one plant that would not perish in that location: grass. And one of the five eunymous bushes remains. Nevertheless, that area is now lovely, the best feature is vinca, donated by a former handyman, thriving in an old stump.

The underlying truth, however, is that I was jealous. I was jealous of the neighbor leaving anonymous zucchini on my porch; jealous of an ex-boyfriend who raised all his own food (there’s a long story there), jealous of all the obsessive compulsive control freaks who had wrestled nature to the ground and produced vegetables in Nevada. I knew the answer was raised beds. I finally had the money and the time and I got the beds. The results were spectacular. Today I give overflowing bags of squash and Swiss chard to St. Vincent’s and various friends. Eggplants and melons are coming down the line. It’s a miracle to me and, like the birth and development of my grandbaby, ordinary in the big picture, but astoundingly magical if you really think about it.

See photo show of beginning stages in May. The soil around the beds became pliant from constant watering, then we got a miracle rainy June. By now I can throw melon seeds on the ground anywhere around the raised beds and they will sprout. The farm in May:

The produce: