Farm News 04-13-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 36°

Weight: 208 lbs.

Barn News

Does Shotgun have kittens hidden somewhere? I think so. She wasn't waiting to walk to the barn with me yesterday or this morning, something she has been doing amost every day, even when there was fresh snow on the ground. For the past three weeks she has been looking like she had swallowed a cannonball, so I think she now has kittens hidden somewhere. They will open their eyes nine to fourteen days after they are born, so it would be good to find them before they are two weeks old. If they are handled a bit before they open their eyes they will socialize with humans much better. Perhaps some neighborhood girls will help look for the kittens.

When I used to stack bales of hay in the hayloft in preparation for winter, I liked to leave cat passages between some of the bales. Stacking hay is more fun if you create a cat maze in the stack, one that will be run in the dark as the cats seek out rodents that fail to look both ways before crossing a dark alley. Cats often hide their kittens in a deep, dark, dead end passage, safe from prying children and right next to the haystack supermarket. One year, when living on L.E.'s farm near Vinland, we almost filled the loft with bales of oat straw and lespedeza. The mice raised lots of babies in this nutritious environment, but never were able to increase in population. It was, basically, a cat mine that produced litter after litter of strong, healthy, half-wild kittens. The hay was fed to dairy cows and goats, and a small amount of fresh milk each day was used to bribe the kittens into tameness.

Wednesday I spotted a Bald Eagle. Most of them have gone north by now, but some of them still have chicks in the nest. Eagles lay their eggs early and as soon as the chicks can fly they usually go north.

The geese are back home. They had been at Jesse's place to mate with his ganders. Now they are all back home, along with Jesse's most obnoxious gander. The gander likes to chase ducks and, when penned up with the ducks, killed one of them, so Jesse sent him into exile at my place. I keep the ducks and geese in separate pens at night, so there isn't much of a problem here.

Jesse has gone to Florida with his classmates on the senior trip.

Warthog

Why do we consider warthogs ugly? Why do I say ducks are stupid? Warthogs are neither beautiful nor ugly, and ducks are neither stupid nor smart, they are just what they are, the results of millions of years' accumulations of minor adaptations to changes in their environments. Warthogs look like they do because their ancestors who looked like that were more successful in producing offspring than the ancestors who didn't look much like warthogs. Ducks act stupid because they were bred to produce eggs, not literature.

I enjoy calling one of my nieces Warthog, not because she looks like one, but because she is so pretty that calling her Warthog is ludicrous. Being a teenage girl and not yet certain of her beauty, she doesn't know whether to put her nose in the air and sniff or to run away and cry. She just had her 18^th birthday, so I imagine that the time is coming when she will laugh, realizing that being called Warthog is an inverted sort of compliment.

Last week I overheard someone say that he would like to be a teenager again, knowing what he knows now. Knowing what I know now is why I would hate being a teenager again.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

I think it was Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, an atheistic right-wing kook science fiction writer, in which the central character makes a big spiritual production out of sharing water with people. There was a group living in KC who had read the book and adopted it as their official guidebook to things spiritual. Being more than a little off center, they frequently needed help in dealing with the rest of the world. They couldn't accept help, though, unless the person offering the help came to the apartment where they all lived in damp harmony and shared water with them. I was the only one at the Umbrella who could keep a straight face when talking to them, so I had to go help them when they were lost.

Seven or eight of them lived on the second floor of a building that should have been condemned. I would walk up the stairs, knock on the door, and then go through an interrogation through the closed door until they were assured that I was who I said I was, they person they had just called and asked to come over to help them with something. Once they were sure it was me, they would crack the door open just enough for me to slip through, then quickly shut it again, locking it with various bolts and chains. The security was necessary because if someone tried to rob them, they were prohibited by their vows of peace from resisting. There was nothing in the place worth more than 25¢, but, they were right, the neighborhood did contain some very stupid thieves.

The first time they called me I was able to help them with a very difficult question. When I finally made it through the door we all sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle like good little first-graders. The leader, who seemed to have that position because he had memorized the greatest number of passages from Stranger in a Strange Land, went to the kitchen and returned with a quart fruit jar half full of water. He lit a stick of incense, then took a sip of the water and passed it to the next person. Everyone was very quiet and spiritual while the jar of water slowly went around the circle. I dutifully took a sip along with the rest, glad that I had all my immunizations.

After the jar of water had gone all the way around the circle we all sat there for a while, silently grokking the ambiance. Then the leader spoke. “Can you find out for us if the city water has dangerous chemicals in it? We've been buying pure water, but it is expensive.”

Fortunately, I was able to immediately reassure them. I told them that, only a few days earlier, I had asked our consulting pharmacologist the same question, and he had assured me that if the water was left standing, uncovered, for at least twenty minutes, that any trace chemicals would disappear, and that being penetrated by pure vibes would clear the water of any impurities. “In South America,” I continued, “the medicine men take yohimbine, and then meditate in front of gourds full of Amazon river water, which becomes clear and clean after a few minutes.” I wasn't lying, I was helping. They were so full of shit that water-borne dysentery would have been curative.

Books

John Burdett

John Burdett, the author of the mysteries set in Bangkok (start with Bangkok 8), has an interesting essay at http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/burdett.html. Thanks, Dianne, for bringing it to my attention.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is great, especially if you are having a gloomy day and need a boost. His books are full of round-heeled babes, bright kids, and weird good guys, all beset by environment trashing jerks. In this book, an old Bald Eagle lands in a tree, under which an environment trashing jerk is sitting. The eagle, being wise, shits on the jerk, providing the first of a series of events that bring the book to a satisfying close.

Farm News 03-30-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 47°

Weight: 206 lbs. Progress? Yes. But achieved at the cost of not drinking. Bah!

Barn News

The bunnies have started learning about the world. They have visited the dentist's office, made several trips to the library, been to the chiropractor's office, and had two exciting days in the elementary school in the past week. They have been very busy little bunnies.

Sally spent Wednesday night with Bucky, so she should have baby bunnies by Monday, April 28. Sally was quite happy to spend the night with Bucky, unlike Suzette, who is as sour about mating as she is about everything else.

I've been caring for the goose eggs in the incubator. They have to be turned every day, soon it will be twice a day, and they have to be watered. Goose eggs expect to incubate in a humid environment. In nature, the mother will take a daily bath and return to the nest with damp breast feathers. I keep a pan of water in the bottom of the incubator which has to be filled every few days.

The vultures are back. The carrion eating birds commonly called buzzards, not a rock group. Now the dead animals that have been lying around stinking will be cleaned up. It's easy to tell the difference between eagles and vultures: the vultures fly with their wing tips lifted, their wings forming a shallow V; eagles fly with their wings perfectly flat from tip to tip. They are the only large, black birds that you might expect to see. Juvenile eagles are all black and don't develop white heads until they are several years old. Usually the eagles, young and old, depart for the long days and good fishing of the northland by the time the buzzards appear. In the fall the buzzards fly south, usually just before the eagles return from the north.

The Wichita Umbrella

Hippies were not wanted in Wichita, but they were there, most of them home grown. Wichita is not the kind of place to which you run, it is the kind of place from which you run, thus most of the hippies were home grown. There were a few from Kingman and other places west of Wichita, but not many.

Being the kind of city it was, hippies had a hard time in Wichita and needed a place like the Ecstatic Umbrella, so we went about helping organize one, the Wichita Umbrella. Nobody was ecstatic in Wichita. The first step was to identify and enlist a group of people with sufficient political clout that they could make the cops think twice about simply assassinating the Umbrella staff. You think I'm exaggerating? No. Wichita was that kind of place and had that kind of cops.

Working through our network of clergy, we identified about a half dozen clergy in Wichita who weren't on the side of Pontius Pilate. They, in turn, helped us identify about twenty other people in the community who might be helpful. We spent several months on this process – if only we'd had Google. Finally, we were ready to enlist the board of directors for a no-for-profit corporation that would funnel money to the Wichita Umbrella. I nominated two people, Don Pedroja and Sam Nunemaker, to be co-directors, went down to Wichita, got stoned with them, and talked them into taking the job.

To begin enlisting the members of the board I had to clean up a bit. The first things to wash off were the cops who kept following me around in their spare time. I had somebody drive me to the KU Med Center where I got out of the car carrying a suspicious looking brown paper bag. Sure enough, two guys got out of a car behind me and started to follow me into the Med Center, probably hoping to be able to bust me for carrying drugs across a state line to the lab for analysis. I went in the door a bit ahead of them, cut to the right, slipped into a stairwell, went down one story, changed stairwells, and went down to the first sub-basement. There, I took off my pants and shirt, slipped into the pants and shirt I was carrying in the bag, and then walked through the tunnels to another building, where I came up one level to a barber shop. I had them give me a short haircut, slipped on a pair of horn rimmed glasses, and walked out the other side of the Med Center, clean as could be, took a cab to the bus station, and got on the bus for Wichita.

Once in Wichita I started talking to various respectable citizens about how we needed to help the poor lost children on the streets. I checked into a hotel where I had a reservation under my favorite name, Joseph Grogan, and felt safe for the first time in months. The recruiting went well, and soon I was ready to go back to KC. The evening before I left I met secretly with Bear (Don Pedroja). We smoked a couple of joints and he gave me a little ball of hash. On the way back to the hotel a cop car slowly cruised by me a couple of times, so I took out the hash and cleaned up by swallowing it.

When I got to the hotel I went to the elevator and punched the button. The doors opened, I started to step in, and realized that there were two DEA agents in the elevator. I also realized I was getting high. Those guys never blinked. They knew me as a long hair, not a guy in slacks and white shirt, with short hair, wearing horn rimmed glasses. They got off on the floor below mine, I went on up, went to my room, turned on the TV, laid down on the bed, and soared off into outer space for the next five or six hours.

The first home of the Wichita Umbrella was a huge old house that looked haunted in the daytime and was very spooky at night. One of the residents, brought in by Sam to scare off normal people, was Palmer, a guy about six and a half feet tall who weighed maybe 150 pounds, looked like he had never been exposed to sunlight, and had stringy black hair hanging down to his shoulders. His costumes fit his appearance – the first time I saw him was in a dimly lit hallway and he scared the crap out of me. Palmer didn't talk, he sort of croaked, and his favorite language was one he made up as he spoke it. Sam figured Palmer was a fake filter, people who were faking a freakout would take one look at Palmer and leave, but people who were really freaking out just thought he was part of their delusions. The only time the cops came busting through the front door Palmer delayed them in the hallway for twenty minutes or so, giving the residents who didn't want to be found by the police plenty of time to escape out the back.

The old house had been condemned, and the authorities soon forced the Umbrella out. Their next home was an old church, complete with a large adjoining parish hall. In the sanctuary, behind the altar, was a large zinc tank formerly used to wash away the sins of the faithful. Sam and Bear thought it was a fine place to put groups of stoned youngsters who needed to have their heads rinsed out. They equipped the tank with a candle and left the trippers to their heavenly visions.

The more interesting drug users entertained in the parish hall. I sat in there for three or four hours one night listening to two who had been shooting speed and sniffing toluene describe the battle going on in the middle of the floor between Jesus and the devil. In KC we seldom saw any inhalant use, but in Wichita it was widespread. Three day speed runs were rare in KC and common in Wichita. Few KC hippies carried weapons and most Wichita hippies carried some sort of protection. In KC you had to watch out for the cops, in Wichita you had to consider everyone dangerous. Different worlds.

Late one night, a few months after the Umbrella moved into the old church, a bunch of unmarked cars showed up and discharged about twenty cops, all in plain clothes, off duty, and armed with pistols and shotguns. They quietly surrounded the buildings, then woke everyone up, and shoved them outside into the driveway between the church and parish hall. There, they lined them up against the wall of the church, lined up in front of them with shotguns pointing, and told them they had one week to shut down the place and leave. Bear said he didn't think they'd try that again, so there was no reason to leave. Sam said he couldn't count to one so he wouldn't know when the week was up.

It couldn't last, though, and everyone knew it. The Wichita Umbrella was a tiny thorn in the skin of Wichita, but without active civil rights organizations to help protect it, it was doomed. Bear started over-using speed and opiates and Sam, who had never been too stable, became too erratic to function. Slowly, the organization crumbled, but it sure was interesting for a while.

Books

The FOOLs held their Spring Book Sale this past week. Being the Chief Fool, I helped supervise the old women who sorted and put out the books for sale. That gave me the opportunity to snatch treasures and bring them home. Among the treasures is a copy of Roadside Kansas, which I recommend for anyone who is traveling in Kansas. I already have two copies, my first needs to be rebound, and will give this copy to anyone who would like to donate $5 to become a FOOL.

Bankok 8 by John Burdett

I've really enjoyed Burdett's books. Bangkok 8 is the first of the series, followed by Bangkok Tattoo and Bangkok Haunts. Highly recommended.

The Tombstone Conspiracy by Tim Champlin

This is a good western and is available in a large print edition.

Travels with Zenobia by Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston, edited by William Holtz

In 1927 Rose Lane and Helen Boylston, accompanied by Yvonne, their French maid, set out from Paris bound for Albania in Zenobia, their new 1927 Ford Model T, a very modern Model T in that it was painted maroon instead of black. It was equipped with carbide lamps for headlights and was started with a hand crank. Rose Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, was an idealist seeking a society of noble savages in Albania.

The book is a compilation from the journals the two women kept during the trip. The writing is clear and light, bubbling with good humor, like a glass of champagne on a warm day. A preface and an epilogue by Holtz sets the stage and closes the book with affection and understanding. I think it is a delightful book, and I'm very glad I happened upon it at the library book sale.