April's Closing

After the sublime rest of our two day vacation at the beach, we returned once again to farm world and to all the critters and plants that live here with us. It was nice to see Jack seemingly nonplused about his bout with the horse tranquilizer in our absence, happily barking at our arrival. Marley, Heidi, and Memphis gave equal wags of tails as the others in the welcoming reception committee. Back home is good, but back home means back to work, and in spring on a farm, there is no end to the stuff that needs tending to, should be tended to, and doesn’t necessarily include that which one might actually want, to get done. It can be simply overwhelming, to the point of doing absolutely none of it, which is the exact approach we took the weekend before last.

There was yet another in the continuing series of  full moons to be rising on Sunday. It had been waxing on Saturday and we noticed the fish were being very active along the shoreline in the little pond behind the barn. The scent of fish on the bed was heavy when down wind of their underwater nests. We tossed some lures out and quickly caught several nice fish, both bream and bass, and one bass that was so large and fast it snapped Mark’s line, jumped, and spit the lure back at him. Spring fishing is an opportunity to not miss when at its peak and so that was our plan for Sunday, a catch and fry day. We made some calls for recruits to come help with our mission, our daughter and son in law, two of their friends, and a new friend who had never fished but who was very interested in the challenge to learn. I assessed the inventory of oil and cornmeal, and having sufficient quantities of both, the plan for a fish dinner was on, if, the fish cooperated as was expected of them.

This new friend of ours was someone we met recently at an art reception, and who is an internationally known violinist, female, who is currently in our town on a fellowship with our symphony orchestra. Lianna is from Russian, and she speaks with an interesting accent having learned her English in France and carries the lilt of that influence into her words and which makes for very charming conversation. She is recently engaged to the cello playing French fellow who I spoke of in a past blog, who liked our homemade wine, a lot. She is a lovely girl, dark haired and with sultry eyes, she is lithe, graceful, and is a sensitive soul. She played the violin one night in our gallery while Mark did a photo shoot of her and the walls echoed with the strength of her notes and the resonance of her skill. Lianna is beautiful and charming, etc, and has traveled the globe playing before critiquing audiences, but had never fished in her life. So out to the farm she came to try something new.

I had to spend some of the Sunday in town dealing with family matters with my parents so I missed her lesson but was told when I got back out to the farm the news was good. She had learned how to fish, and most importantly, to catch fish. Not afraid to get her hands dirty, Lianna had easily taken to baiting a hook with a live cricket, and tossing the line and bobber out to the waiting fish and then pulling them in. Not only did she catch her first fish, she caught her first bass, which in fishing fresh water is the gold standard of the fish most prized as game fish. Regrettably she had to leave to go rehearse her violin playing for several hours and was not able to stay for the dinner to come but was smiling and quite pleased with her new found activity and hoped to do it again soon.

There are few things as gratifying as catching very aggressive and strong large mouth bass on light tackle, and on this Palm Sunday, with a full moon rising, the fishing was at its best. We said good byes to Lianna and I climbed into the boat and we began the more serious quest for catching dinner. The fish obliged and we did, and then some, and threw the extras and the too big ones back.

I do not clean fish and left that job to the fellows while I went to the kitchen to prepare the mix for the batter and get the other things ready for dinner A marvelous time fishing, and then eating was had by the weary fisher people, sadly minus Lianna, and that week was done and made room for another.

A fairly monumental moment was had by one member of the barn yard in the past week or so. Frank, the Tank, my former young stallion, well not technically active as such but beginning to try, has become lightened of his load and is now, a gelding. In the history of man kind dealing with its shepherding of animals, and really its choirs too, I can’t imagine the idea suddenly popping into someone’s brain that if one were to cut the prized jewels off of a male animal, it suddenly becomes something one can use for anything besides the sharing of those jewels and their cargo, and no longer is it a rearing, biting, Mr. Stud, who thinks everything is his to, own and take his pleasure with. In the case of the choir boys, it lets them sing at high ranges for many years, their voices not succumbing to the evil forces of those hormones released by those prepubescent jewels. What random thought led anyone to think, ah, “male, cut do dads, then behavior better.”? Deductive reasoning of any sort has to have come with some experience to make judgment enough to elicit change of action. Perhaps an accidental cutting, without death, showed a delightful change in personality and behavior that led others to see a correlation to the lightening of the load of the testosterone producing glands.

Anyway it is a weird way of expressing and controlling animal husbandry, which is a strange name to call it too. Be that as it may, the act of gelding, or neutering a male horse, is critical if one wants a horse that is not prefixed on replication, to all and any ends, including but not limited to having a large horse standing on its hind legs over your head, ready for action. Geldings are not perfect, but they tend to be infinitely more consistent in behavior, and ignore those former urges to feel like, “They Rule,” and rather tend to become great partners, friends, and even, confidents who are comfortable wearing the new blanket with the gold trim their owner got for them at Christmas.

Frank has now, thankfully, joined the fraternity, or sorority, of males relieved of the baggage of the motivation for the perpetuation of the gene pool. Frank has made a definitive change from being a young brat to becoming a very sweet kid once again, and that has made my life safer, and Kitty, his pasture mate and nanny, very happy. Is the process a judgment call of nature? Sure. Do I feel guilt at the disfigurement it entails, the temporary pain, and permanent hormonal change? Absolutely, I do. This is farm world tho, where the animals are often big, fast and dangerous at times, and so my goal is to limit my risks. Having a young stallion is very low on my priority list. Having a superior and mentally focused, riding horse without the potential danger of the effects of its raging hormones is very high, and in gelding, this variable is largely eliminated. Frank is free now from the stresses of these hormones and already shows a more mellow character. This I like, a lot.

Years ago, when my mother’s father died, the estate was sold off, but my mother brought me one thing from his farm. He had been a cattle farmer most of his life on five hundred lush acres of Mississippi delta land, and had run a large herd of well bred Angus cows. The one thing that mom brought me from his life, from the possessions that he no longer needed, was a surgical stainless steel set of the tools one uses to perform an emasculation. I thought that was a rather strange legacy to leave a granddaughter but it was a very nice set of tools, the when and where I might actually use them was up for grabs however. For some strange reason I recently haven’t been able to find this box that holds such a sacred set of instruments and I have reason to suspect Mark of hiding the thing, but have no proof of such. I will keep looking, just in case.

And so, another week, another month, all going by so quickly it numbs the brain. So what of our actions, our experiences, our thoughts and our deeds that happens as we bumble our way through this life? If there were no photos and no written form of what makes our memories, those ephemoral events would be lost.  It is in their chronicling here that sets mine into a form that might be remembered and shared, and so I write as they happen, and I wait, for the next installment which will surely come when least expected and unpredicted.

Beer and Beaches

Day two was a Sunday and we had a problem. In this state, the Bible Belt rules say that you have to wait until after church to buy libation at any independently operated establishment for the sale any fermented liquids designed to make sure your vacation is comfortable and enjoyable. One can absolutely rule out the option of buying the necessities at a state run store. They are closed in observation of the sacred day and will not open under any circumstances. Being observant creatures we happened to notice a nice wine shop tucked in between a Radio Shack and a video rental shop. Once well supplied, off we went to the Fort.

Fort Morgan was begun being built after the War of 1812 when the USA figured out that it needed to boost the coastal defenses and defend the waterways that were the main methods of transporting people and goods to interior states. This fort sits on a prominent point on the eastern shore of the mouth of the Mobile Bay which is fed by the Alabama River. Initial construction was completed in 1833 largely remained idle until the Civil War broke out in ’61. There was a heated battle there in’64 at which time it fell to the Union army. It was active during the Spanish-American War and during the First World War, and was continually being added to and damages fixed from cannon fire and bullets. One can still see pock marks from the exchange of lead balls that hit the bricks, and mortar repair where cannons hit walls and tore them up. It is a testimony to the fine bricklaying and the engineering of its design that the structure withstood the various barrages and remains standing, an elegant and impressive old soldier still on attention.

When I was young, my parents took us to this fort once for our spring break. They sat my brothers and me on one of the large cannons that are on display in the front of the place to take a picture. At the last second before my dad took a photo of us I threw my hands up into the air and smiled, a big goofy missing two front teeth clowning act. Boy did I catch grief for that. I never really figured exactly why a very serious photo would have suited my folks better, but apparently it really mattered to them for some reason. The cannon is still there, and of course I had to climb on, this trip, for old times sake but left off the clown act. We wandered around the fort for a while, and then decided it was time to hit the sand and sit by some waves for a while.

The water on the bay side of the fort’s beach was fairly calm and a stained color, but we walked around the point to where the blue-green waves of the Gulf meets with this southward flowing river. The surface of the water where this confluence occurred showed intense currents boiling as they collided, and did not look like a very safe place to swim under any situation. We spread some towels on the white sand, put on some sunscreen, popped open a few beers, and enjoyed the view and the melting feeling of warm sunshine with a nice salty breeze in our faces.

There were cute little gray birds that darted back and forth trying to stay out of the waves, scooping into the sand as the wave retreated looking for something to eat. Terns and black headed gulls screamed as they flew by us. Then we noticed that there was a calm spot behind the confluence of waters that a large number of birds were repeatedly diving into with quite a flurry of excitement. The surface of the water showed there to be a large school of little fish, which would flush to avoid the predators. Then the show got more interesting.

The birds were just the first to tap into this hemmed up food source. Then came the other predators from the under the water. Larger fish flashed silver sides as they struck at the school, most likely Spanish Mackerels, perhaps King Mackerels, and Blue Fish too. The frenzy was on and the water was splashing and was whipped into froth. Porpoises got into the scene next, large groups moved into the fray, moving along side by side, working in team to massacre what fish were left. The worst of this dining experience was not 50 yards away, but several of the porpoises came by us, very close up, and were varying colors and sizes. Occasionally a porpoise would flap its tail on the water before diving, perhaps to startle the bait.

Our beers went down easy as we watched this show and we kicked ourselves for not having taken any gear to fish with. Well, we thought about it and decided that it probably would have taken too much energy and interfered with our relaxing plan anyway, and opened another beer.

Beer and beaches, together, are one of my earliest memories. My folks loved the white sands and big waves of the Gulf and took us there quite a bit to a house that someone lent them once a year. The routine was for Dad to pop over to a bar somewhere close by and bring a milk jug full of draft beer back for them to drink while we all played on the beach for the day. The draft beer had a rich froth on the top of their cups and so did the incoming waves. They would let me have a sip of the yellow brew and it puzzled me deeply why one tasted infinitely better than the other. Sea water simply doesn’t do the same thing for me, but visually they are inseparable in their connection in my brain.

Finally the beer ran out, the fishy frenzy had subsided, and we had certainly gotten more sun than we needed, even with the sp lotion, so we went to find the bird groups that were supposed to be trapping the migratory birds that fly into this first bit of land after crossing the Gulf from Central America this time of year. We found one group next to a small group of trees just taking their mist nets down and packing them away. They said they had seen very few for this day and were all a bit puzzled at the lack of numbers and wondered if perhaps the fog had messed the birds up.

Many moons ago, in college, Mark and I had come down to help with the netting, banding, etc with our friend and biology professor, Dr Tom. I was new to all the diverse types of birds there were at that time and the experience was amazing. To hold a tiny Painted Bunting in your hand, for the first time you have ever seen one, is a treat. The colors on it and the rest of the poor exhausted travelers were stunning. The banding gives valuable information to scientists as to populations and multi-continent migratory routes of these birds, and people from all over come to watch the process and see up close these little winged jewels.

Day light of two was toast, dinner on the water’s edge again, and back to the hotel for shuteye before the long drive back to home, horses, dogs, parents, and reality. It was good to get away, if only for two days, and a still alive, wide awake Jack met us at the carport with enthusiastic yelps. Home again, home again.

in continuum...

in the continuum….of the saga of Jack the potamus…


“I made a mistake and gave Jack the wrong shot.” I was listening very carefully now to what my caretaker/friend was telling me on the other end of the cell phone as we stood under the canopy of these gnarly oaks feeling the cool mist of the fog rolling off the ocean behind us. She asked me what might have been in the other needles that had been in the refrigerator down at the barn where I had left his insulin for her to have given him. I though a real big “Oh, crap,” because I had thought when I left the insulin in there that surely there would be no confusion as to which to use. There were the tiny insulin syringes I had left, and then there were three large other ones with writing one them for the horses’ use. Apparently I was quite wrong in my assumption, and Murphy’s Law proved to be correct, an error had indeed been made, again, but now my thoughts were racing to which of these three possibilities that were also in the fridg might be in play, and none of the three were good.

For those who have not followed Jack and his culinary capers and mishaps over that past year, Jack is an Australian terrorist, weighing in at varying weights but generally well over breed standard of somewhere around 14 lbs. He is somewhere closer to 23 lbs. and eats anything and every thing edible or not and has spent way too much time in the intensive care of my good vet, and this of course has led to the extreme level of expenditure of funds spent on his near demises. Jack has hypothyroid issues and takes his synthetic thyroid pill everyday, is a recovering pancreatitis victim from having devoured a half gallon of cooking grease, and the list continues but, he is also a diabetic and requires two shots of insulin daily. It is a holy wonder the dog is alive from these past and present problems but this one, I thought, might finally do him in if the dose of whatever it was that he had been given in error was too much for him to handle. It would be a peaceful end, no doubt, but after all that previous vet care and expense I was hoping he might hang around just a bit more if possible.

After a few more questions back and forth over the phone, I told my friend to call the vet and try to read the labeling on the used syringe to see what the heck she had given him, and then see what to do. She did say he was acting very sleepy, slumbering actually. We hung up and I waited for a reply. The news was a real stumper on the mood that we had mellowed into but there was simply nothing we could do but wait and see, so on we wondered through the foggy woods. It is an absolutely crazy world we live in that one can be at such a peaceful place in a physical and mental state and still be vulnerable to the dreaded ring of the cell phone. Does the falling tree not make any noise when it hits the forest floor if no one is there to hear it? Does bad news not really happen if you don’t answer the phone?

She called back about an hour later, and told me that the syringe had been a load of Acepromazine, a MAJOR tranquilizer, for horses. The load had been in the fridg for a just in case need, the dosage designed to knock a 1200 + lb horse to its wobbly knees, and definitely not to a somewhat, overweight, but still, very, little dog. The dosage was a major overload, but Jack wasn’t worried. Jack was in a basic coma, sleeping soundly, and was totally oblivious to his predicament. She had taken him to the vet where the vet had given Jack some form of shot to hopefully counteract the narcotic and was told to watch the poor puppy carefully, that he would sleep soundly for a day, then have a hell of a hangover but be fine afterwards, most likely. She drove the sleeping beast home with her for the night and gave him a bed on her screened porch. He really didn’t care.

We continued our journey on towards the Fort but, once there, found a sign that said it was closed after hours. Thwarted on that mission, we noticed a pier next to the dock for the ferry that shuttles cars to Daulphin Island that was facing the Mobile Bay and westward and so we sat on it and watched an orange sun slowly settle into the shrouds of fog out on the water. Mark took lovely photos and I marveled at the change in the view of the bay since I had last been there some nearly 20 years ago. Everywhere there were lights on ominous shadowy platforms of the pumps and drills of the oil wells that pump crude black oil from deep under the sands. It was a stunning sight, especially in the aftermath of last summer’s fiasco with the deep wells in Louisiana and the mess it made of the entire Gulf region. Statistics say the room for error increases exponentially with the increase in number of the rigs, each one before me a possible equal or worse disaster waiting to happen. It was stunning and sobering to see. The sun gone, we moved on to find some grub and libation.

I don’t know what made me do it but the seafood platter, fried, seemed the best choice and so we sat on the pier in a pleasantly cool night air, contentedly munching away at globular morsels of fat and flour with a nugget of some form of former sea animal in there somewhere that had been cooked in some equally unidentified form of serious fat. The lights of the oil rigs twinkled before us with a mocking innocence and mingled with the further away lights of the shore on the other side of the bay. Once damage was done to our gastronomical systems, my pancreas in overdrive, we headed for our base camp, Hotel Nondescript, and called it a day. My thoughts were with sleepy Jack, and I hoped to sleep almost as well as he was presently doing, well, almost as well.

Sleep well we did. We awoke to yet another rare foggy day, and gulls screamed as they flew past our balcony as we walked to the elevator to start our day. I needed a pair of shorts to wear since it was fairly muggy, an so we dropped into my idea of hell, the ultimate tourist store extravaganza, a store called Alvin’s Island, a place where every person who wants to look like they surf, wants a tattoo, or a piercing or two or three, and needs a reminder of exactly what town they got these relics from and want to wear a garment to keep them fresh on the idea of where they came from, can get all this, and more.

We had visited this store in a past lifetime when our kids were small and this was kind of a relatively benign place at that time. Now as I wandered past vast racks of incredibly trashy items of clothing, all emblazoned with something about having “done it” at Gulf Shores, I was trying desperately to block out the lyrics of a female singer that was blaring over the pa of the establishment, singing about having sex in the air with whips and chains to the beat of synthetic drums knocking my ear drums silly. I didn’t get it, but on I trudged thru the store and finally, at the very back of the store, I found the 75% off rack and a pair of very plain black shorts. Perfect. And then, my phone rang, again. This time the news was good. Jack was awake and ready for more.

Shorts purchased, mission accomplished, Jack was amazingly still alive, we set off to the Fort for day two of the mini-vacation.

Also to be continued,…no dangling cliffhanger this time…rather chilled out instead… just drifting

SSSSSSS

It is late March. Typical to this month of the year it has been one of extremes in weather, at times cold and blustery, and others balmy and bathed in healing sunshine. In between these have been violent rain storms with hail, lightening, and tornado watches, all brought on by the colliding frontal systems that almost weekly push their way thru the state.

The rain and increasing warmth of the daily temps has also brought the world back to life and green again after the winter gray. Trees are beginning to be covered with a bright chartreuse flocking of tiny leaves and flowers and every surface, outside and in, is covered with a sickly pale green powder of the thick sticky pollen from the hordes of the trees around the house. Flowering shrubs are also reawakened and are beginning their spectacular show that southern gardens are famous for. The exploding reemergence of the continuing cycle of life in the world can be felt, heard, and experienced with all the senses.

March brings many things to life and mind and surprisingly there is much alliteration to them; spring (the official start there of), showers, spring break, shedding, sneezes, and snakes. So many folks I know complain about their horribly incapacitating allergies to this plethora of pollen, and walk around with Kleenex, swollen noses, and puffy, runny eyes. The horses are now dropping massive amounts of long fuzz as I groom them daily and I find piles on the ground where they roll trying to scratch the winter coat off. I am fortunate to not be allergic to either, the pollen, nor to the endless amounts of horse hair that finds its way into my nose, eyes, mouth, and which covers my clothes inside and out. As to the snakes, this time of year as their reawakening time, is not my favorite aspect of the season. You can feel when its snake weather. There is just a certain temperature and humidity that feels snaky. That is when they begin to show up in all sorts of places.

Last weekend, Sunday afternoon was spent in the ritual “clean the boat up” session. This traditionally is a group effort, which involves pulling the fishing boat up onto the trailer and up to the house to take all of the rusting fishing lures, empty beer bottles, piles of leaves and acorns, and anything left over from last summer and fall’s excursions out. The boat then gets a good scrubbing and rearranging of all the stuff and everyone feels good and ready for the next adventure. This process was finally finished and as my daughter and I walked to the back door to put away the cleaning stuff, I stepped on the first step and heard her behind me say “SNAKE”. This is a five letter word which always does get my attention and I turned to see what she was referring to. There on the carport, less than two feet away from where I had just stepped, was a fat, coiled up, young copperhead snake, its tongue flickering and tasting.

There is always the “holy shit” moment after finding one of these slithering serpents so close to one’s feet. My heart goes into overdrive in an instant and my mouth starts spitting obscenities that I never knew I knew, and for some strange reason I feel like standing higher on my toes, as if that would save me from a bite from the snake. Copperheads scare the stuffings out of me because their tendencies to be waiting in places like at our back door steps, or under the lawnmower just before I was going to hop on to cut the grass, or even the big sucker that I sat next too on a big granite rock by a quiet trout stream one day. The little ones also have the tendency to look incredibly like a pile of poop made by a small dog, which we have a few of and so have their monuments scattered here and there, and while I do keep eyes sharp to avoid them I don’t always look at them carefully enough to rule out a snake instead of mere poop.

This particular snake met with his demise before he could sink his tiny fangs into any of our feet or into any of the very curious dogs that were milling about, and we all cooled our nerves with a chilly brew. Our daughter and our son in law then needed to head to town for the evening and weren’t thirty seconds down the drive before I heard gun shots. Pow, Pow, Pow,….Pow! My cell phone showed a text “ANOTHER SNAKE” and Mark and I headed out to investigate this second serpent on this sunny Sunday.

This one turned out to be a much larger cotton mouth or moccasin, who had happened to be considering crossing the drive right when they were driving out. This one also met with its demise, but we were all left a bit jumpy about if there were more to be seen for the day. Fortunately we did not. It is a normal and expected part of spring that snakes move around after their dormancy of winter and we understood going into this farm that we would encounter them. They were here long before we built this house and I suspect that they will be here after we are gone. I would just rather understand their being here fills an ecological nitch, but would also rather to not have to come face to fang with them.

I have seen two more since that Sunday, one, an incredibly long black racer that I nearly tripped over in my barn aisle way. Not being a poisonous one I didn’t freak but told the thing to get out of my barn with a “shoo”. This snake was not very impressed with my threat but finally slowly retreated to the door to the barn and went his on way. Then yesterday, when I opened the doors to the trailer I store my hay in, there on the bale in front of me was a kind of interesting colored one, who dropped out of the trailer and slid silently under the trailer. I had to look him up in the field guide to find he was a Speckled King Snake, and while I am not a fan of any serpent I was happy to see this one because the mice who also live in that trailer kill time by chewing on hay ropes and breaking bales open. So I hope this fellow stays and enjoys many of the evil rodents, but just not when I around, a symbiotic relationship of sorts with a slithering serpent.

And so March comes to a close in a few days. Spring in entrenched. Our Purple Martin colony is full and noisily vibrant. The horses are beginning to look like polished marble with their newly emerging coats, and the infamous Jack has eaten nothing to report and stays thankfully away from the vet’s clinic. I have waged war on the overgrown garden, again, and will be planting the summer vegetables soon with wishful hopes for a bountiful crop. I did find a clue yesterday about the mystery of the missing peach crop from last summer…we had stacked a bunch of landscape fabric on the ground in the corner of the garden last year and it had not been moved since we put it there. Well, I did move it yesterday and lo, I found hundreds of peach pits underneath it there. It looked as if a critter had made it a mission to stash the ripe peaches under this cloth, maybe to save for a rainy day? Who knows? I mean, what kind of animal steals peaches and hides them? I will definitely be watching the peach tree more carefully this year and make sure the hot wire keeps the browsing deer out of the garden, if possible. Ah, the simple life on the farm. Not. Still, it is good.

Atlas

Many years ago my father introduced me to a writer named Ayn Rand and to her books on her philosophy of what she called “Objectivism”. Her stories were of heroes and heroines of strong character, intelligence, and who were the creators and do-ers in societies of those who would be carried along on the backs of these heroes’ actions. Perhaps her most famous book, “Atlas Shrugged”, involved a group of such characters in a time of an industrial boom in the world and these people were the ones making progress happen. When they felt that they were taxed to the point of suffocation and felt that the weight of a world they were making spin was taking too much of a toll on them, they left it all behind and formed a commune of sorts, leaving the ungrateful behind to figure out how to keep it going without them. Hence the name of “Atlas Shrugged” in reference to the mythical strong man who held up the sky and kept it from dropping to the earth below. I did a senior English project on her books and her philosophy and I took much of her thoughts to heart. I knew personally, characters like hers of such extreme strength of will and who acted with deliberation and an honesty of unparalleled proportion. My father is one such person, and he has been my “Atlas” my entire life, and for so many others whose lives he has touched in his long career and life.

My father is now old. He is ready to move on from this life. I know how much he hates that he is no longer super man, the sole hero to us all. He is tired, he hurts, and he is no longer able to carry our hopes and our faith that all is good in the future. It isn’t necessarily. And for the first time in my life, I can totally empathize with his feelings. No I do not wish a soon end of my father’s life, but the inevitable will happen at some point and in his mind that time is soon, or so I think he hopes . He never wanted to be old and decrepit and dependent on helpers to tend to his meds, and check on his pace maker. His has been a life of total independence on anyone’s actions, or anyone’s opinions of his actions. He can no longer be this thing that he was for so long. He can no long be Atlas, and he would rather die than be ineffective. I understand it now. The hero and warrior that he was, is now simply tired of fighting and wants to put the weight of the world down.

My earliest memories and my first awareness of my dad, was of me riding on his shoulders when he would take us on hikes at various parks and such. I would hold his ears for balance and I would pretend to steer him by pulling one way or another on them. I of course out grew this activity pretty quickly but my father continued to be the pillar of strength and the force that carried so much of my formation and personality. He pushed us, my brothers and me, to be the best we could be at whatever the endeavor, to be self reliant, and to expect excellence out of ourselves. I certainly did not make the aim in many of my attempts but I gave it a whole effort when I did, and was always seeking the nod of his approval.

As a young man called to the military he proved himself to be the leader and hero and was decorated with many of the highest medals awarded. After a very successful career of being a commercial contractor building shopping centers, my dad sold his business and was in a bit of limbo at what to do next when fate called him to a much different line of work. My brother David, who I think was Dad’s favorite child and who was so much like him, was killed in a car crash just before his 21st birthday, during this limbo time for my dad. David had been encouraging Dad to get into politics for years, because David felt that if the brightest and best don’t take on the responsibility of such, that the society will be governed by the leftovers, morons. With David’s death as his motivation, Dad stepped into the city government, and ultimately became the chief manager and tsar of this town and held the mayor’s office for 22 years, and did so without ever taking a penny of the salary.

There were many who did not like the iron hand that he held. There was the Christmas Eve that the windows to his car, parked just outside the living room where we sat, were blown out by gunfire. Those who were used to the good ol boy method of getting things taken care of were surprised to find him unwilling to take their bribes and under the table offers. The city was a wreck in disgrace when he took it on his shoulders to carry and he left it in a perfect financial state and a safe place to live, when the fickleness of the voters forgot what it had been like before him and un-elected him.

The un-election was a deeply wounding thing for him, feeling the pain of putting so much of his life and spirit into being Atlas for this town and its people, and having his efforts become so unappreciated, and largely forgotten. He rebound, however, with another career, and then yet another, each one was left in the best business shape possible.

My dad was a always a fierce competitor, and played sports with brawn and a mental toughness that would leave you gasping. The first time I played racquet ball with him, my shoelaces were soaked and I was totally winded, while he bounced around like a puppy slamming the ball across the room with arms of steel. He loved to take the family of ski trips to Colorado and dragged us down countless idiotic black diamond runs, where we fell for distance, and he characteristically fought the moguls with a definite lack of grace clamping onto his ever present cigar.

He continued playing with this focus, and worked out with weights daily, even through his first couple of rounds of chemo therapy with a bout of throat cancer a few years back. Finally the poison that was being used to try to save his life, knocked him down and he never fully recovered that same fire. His mighty strength has waned, and the once fierce sparkle to his eyes has dimmed. So now he waits, for that which awaits us all.

Today marks the one year time passing of the loss of my other Atlas, my beautiful gelding who died from colic last March 15th. I can not help but feel the pain of this memory, still a very raw nerve, but mostly compartmentalized now so I can function. Reading my last year’s blog entry can open it right up, and tears are not far away when I do. Seasons have come and gone but the grief remains.

It is such a sad part of this wonderful life that it has to end, however the age and whatever the form and it is only the ephemeral memories that keep their spirits here, and close. I have been so fortunate to have been a part of my father’s life and there is no way I can ever repay what he gave me and the things he taught me. I now sadly wish him a gentle crossing when his time does finally come, a truely great Atlas that will be so sorely missed. The world will never be the same without him.

Singing in the Rain... or Not

There are few things more soothing than waking to the first spring thunder storm that is slowly making its way across the landscape. Low, continual and deep rumbles are interspersed with resounding cabooms and sharp cracks. There are the brief flashes of light with the following ripping of the sound barrier, a crack that shakes the windows and leaves one wondering what got hit so close by. The rain is a constant, socked in and soaking the earth. The sounds are very hard to inspire one to get out of bed. The safety of the flannels and pillow lured me into repeated snoozes until finally I could stay there no more and I got up to see what the rainy day would bring. After coffee I figured the horses might like their breakfast, albeit later than usual, so I donned my long rain coat, my snowy river felt hat and pulled on my water proof tall boots and headed to the barn.


I fed the first group, letting them into their stalls to get out of the rain for at least part of the day. The last to be dealt with was Cistine, whose paddock has no shed roof for shelter and so she was anxiously waiting for me to come rescue her. I grabbed her halter and set out into the rain to bring her in. I stepped forward through the fence line to put on her halter and she stepped quickly away from me. This repeated several times. The problem was, she apparently just didn’t like my hat and coat, and she decided that she just absolutely could not be caught and haltered. I could get face to face with her and she would reach up and bite my hat and then reach down and bite at my coat, but I could get not closer to her. After a few unsuccessful attempts to reach over her neck to get the halter strap around her, that were met with her head going straight up and her walking backwards, I knew the game was on. This issue of not being caught, was what the new focus of my day was going to be about. It was the principle of the issue, she didn’t like my garb and wasn’t going to play put on halter and go in to the barn, like she has done every day of her entire life. The choice was to leave her in the rain with no food or use the moment as a lesson of sorts. I chose the later.

Years ago a fellow named Monty Roberts brought a really old school method of breaking horses to the mainstream with a book and videos and such, and he called himself the “Horse Whisperer”. The techniques of his method went way back to very early horsemanship and were based on principles of the psychology of prey animals and how they react to being pursued. The idea of it was that one would chase the horse, and direct its movement until the horse finally gave up its fear and began being curious about the pursuer to the point where the horse turned to the pursuer and gave in and “joined up” with the pursuer. This point of acceptance in a horse is a huge break through when the training process is going on. It goes to the core of the relationship that is forming at the beginning of the training and sets the tone from then on. Breaking a horse can certainly be done by other methods than going to this end but it is a very fast and definitive moment that some horses really need to become solid partners with their riders, especially ones with strong opinions, like whether they like your rain coat and hat or not. So standing in the pouring rain with an empty halter, I realized that this was to be my expenditure of time and effort for the next minutes, or however long it took to win the game. “Oh boy”, I thought, but somewhere I had known this moment had been coming and I resolved to see it through.

I began with approaching her with the halter and if I reached to put it on her head and she even flinched away, I would make her move away from me. I kept her moving across the pasture, back and forth, cutting her desired paths off and sending her where I wanted her to go. She did not want me on her left so that was where I concentrated my body language, pushing but watching for signs of submission on her part. There was no room for almost here. This was a clear line drawn, that only a willingness to be haltered was the answer, and patiently I walked behind her, back and forth, back and forth.

Over head the skies were still rumbling and the rain was steady. An occasional flash of lightening would elicit a,”SHIT!” from my mouth and a involuntary cringe in an expectation of becoming flash fired by a direct strike of these bolts. Fortunately none struck so close that I did not mange to survive to write these words but at one point I seriously questioned my sanity for the sake of an issue with a stubborn mare, and on ward I trod relentlessly pushing this silly beast. The dogs watched this parade from the safety and dryness of the barn and did not give their opinions of the scene nor of my apparent total lack of sanity.

She kept an ear on me at all times and would periodically act like she had tired of the game and was ready to stop. As soon as I raised my hand off she went shaking her head and narrowing her eyes in a peevish way. I wondered at just how long this was going to take, but the choice to stop and pick it up another day was not an option.

At long last she began chewing and making mouthing type movements which I took for a good sign as all good herbivores do this to indicate their lack of interest in eating another critter and to hopefully avoid being eaten as well. She began stopping more frequently and would put her nose to the ground, also a good sign, but still held out when I went to halter her and moved away. Two full hours of walking in the pouring rain in a spring thunder storm following an opinionated horse, finally came to a close and she dropped her head and stuck her nose in the halter. She then reached over and took another half hearted nip at my hat to let me know she had relented, she was hungry and wet after all, but she still just did not like that hat and didn’t want me to forget it. She quietly walked with me to the barn and I fed her her long awaited breakfast after she had rolled in the dry shavings to get the ichiness off. I left her to her meal and went back to the house for dry clothes and more hot tea.

I returned after a few hours to turn her back out, the rain having mostly moved on and thunder quieted. I did wear the hat for curiosity and when I walked into the stall she immediately reached up and grabbed my hat with her teeth. She did not move away tho this time when I reached up to the side of her neck, as she had done for the previous several hours. I took the hat off, let her smell it, and then placed it on her head and she was fine with it. I guess as well as the new shape, the wet smell of felt must have been strange enough to cause the holdout.

Who knows with horses, what they will be freaked out by and behave so adamantly about. How can you possibly know what to school them about until you really need to school them on it? How do know which buttons will do what until you push just the right one? You can’t, and that is why horse training is never in a straight line. It requires a whole bunch of patience and a willingness to do stuff like walking for two hours in the rain dodging lightning bolts to make a point. But my still damp hair will straighten back out eventually, my clothes are in the dryer, I have a new cup of tea brewing, and tomorrow is just another challenge waiting to happen in horse world. Silly critters, they are.

The Pre-Spring Not-So Blues

It isn’t officially Spring yet but don’t tell the flowers and bees, and amorous birds on wing. After a nasty start to February, the recent weeks have been so balmy and deliciously gentle. The sky has remained a powder blue with a few fluffy clouds drifting along pushed by a soft breeze from the south. The low angle of the sun keeps the shadows long and makes for dramatic scenery when it hits the still bare trees and brightly lights one side and keeps the back in a cold, dark contrast giving the horizon strong vertical lines of silvers and blacks
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These easy weather days have made for good opportunity to get horses worked, though the ones still wearing their long furry coats are sweating a bit more than they want. I will probably clip the woolliest of them soon, and that will probably get the weather riled up again and cold, but I hope not.

I have been spending a lot of time ground working my soon to be four year old filly, Cistine and she is doing so well now, after surviving her bout with the circingle that slipped on her back and startled her a few weeks ago. She is now pretty confident on the lunge line and has just started working with my training trash. I noticed today that on one side she was wearing a plastic vodka bottle with a pebble inside, and on the other side I had hung a V8 juice. I just need to add a few more things to her wardrobe like a bottle of Worchestershire sauce, a pepper grinder, and some Tabasco and I will have the makings for a nice Bloody Mary. Or wait, if they are all empty, that means I already drank them.

After our work today I walked her down to the pond dam where the grass is bright green and enjoyed standing in the sunshine while she devoured the shoots of green. Her eyes blinked in a slow motion repeatedly, deeply calm and relaxed as she ripped the grasses and munched them away. I could fully empathize with her state of mind.

Yesterday as I headed to the barn I noticed my neighbor’s truck parked up at the top of the hill where our driveway cuts next to an old graveyard. Margerie had called earlier to ask permission to come look at the stones because the local historical group is trying to get all of the little abandoned cemeteries catalogued and noted. I changed my course and drove up the road to visit with them, giving the horses a few more moments to eat before working them.

We had first learned that there was a graveyard on our property when we were building the driveway and a gravel truck found one of the unmarked graves, sinking a front tire to its axel. After looking around we noticed many more indented places all running east and west on the crest of this hill. Few had stones to mark their names or the few facts of their lives gone by. The ones that remain are crudely hand scratched reminders of the names of the buried, lives over a century ago, that once shared a story of this land that we now are caretakers of. These are obviously not the graves of aristocrats.

Margerie, and her husband Davis, live down the road from us and own most of the many acres surrounding our farm. They both grew up in this area, she was the daughter of a dairy farming family, and he the son of a general all round farmer, who raised cattle, chickens, oats, corn, and whatever was needed to live on.

They know the history of this area well, but they also know the tales, the stories, the names, and the things that happened that won’t make it into a history book and which will soon be faded memories that will most likely die with them or perhaps linger a bit more by their sons hearing and remembering. We stood together over these graves and she jotted down the few inscriptions left and we talked and looked around, and I took in several stories about things that had happened on our property and of the lives of those that had been previous stewards of it. We talked about the spring that once flowed near our house that once watered the crops, and the people and livestock that lived here to work this land, in a very different time and way of life.

Early sign of spring are definitely happening now. The daffodils that grow around these graves are now in full bloom and I saw the first Trillium coming up there as well. When I walked past the now suddenly in bloom, Flowering Almond tree, yesterday, it was alive with the sound of thousands of busy bees hitting on the first bit of pollen they have seen in a long time, their legs bloated with yellow. There was a continuous drone of their collective buzzing wings that gave the tree a vibration that could be felt as well as heard.

The main harbingers of spring arrived in full force today though. The long awaited sound of a group of Purple Martins’ morning calls filled the air when I opened the front door this morning. There were three pairs flitting around all the houses and gourds, checking them all out. In and out they went, some showing preferences to the older gourds and others liking the new super large gourds we recently added to the colony pole. At one point a male flew to one of the gourds and stuck his feet inside the hole and pulled out another male. They fell towards the ground with the first male still holding onto the second, and finally he released the relocated martin before they hit the ground. I guess the wife of the first really wanted that one house, or else. I absolutely love to hear their lyrical songs and watch them in flight, and the fact that they return each year at this same time is simply magic. Their arrival really marks the beginning of the season for me and for all of the folks who raise a pole up to try to attract these flying nomads. Turn up your computer volume for a treat below.

There are not many things better than a fine day in pre-Spring listening to martins once again singing in the barn yard. Aaahhhh.