I couldn’t take Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton beating up on each other in Brooklyn, and I’ll have to wait for Mike Coleman’s story on Gov. Susana Martinez speaking at the GOP gala in Manhattan, so I went outside this evening to take a look around.
Other than the usual suspects — coyotes — the chief noisemakers in my neighborhood lately are these guys, Curve-bill thrashers. I could listen to them chatter and sing all day. The biggest kick in the pants is when one perches at the top of your chimney and turns your fireplace into a megaphone. That’ll get your day started.
Audubon has recorded its calls and songs here: https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/curve-billed-thrasher
Today: First rain since a trace on Feb. 23.
And here is a cautionary post from @jfleck on Twitter.
Cabezon sunset tonight reminded me of the well-known Navajo prayer.
“In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk
Beautifully will I possess again
Beautifully birds,
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk
With beauty before me may I walk
With beauty behind me may I walk
With beauty above me may I walk
With beauty all around me may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.”
The Lori Fan Club listens up.
I shoot it just about every night, now that I am fooling around with a camera. It’s the view west from dreamranch. When I’m grouchy, I call it old butt head. Otherwise, it’s just Cabezon. But, as stolid as it is, it’s always got something new for me. Tonight, for instance, you will notice its inverted shape in the cloud above.
Far be it from me to make light of climate change and global warming, but they were a convenient excuse for a work stoppage today at dreamranch.
I am building a new viewing platform — aka picnic table –for Cooper and offer photographic evidence at left that progress is being made. So, there, you Cooper lovers: He soon will have his new perch.
Here he is is on the old one, which I had to consign to the fireplace because it had become structurally unsound. I know I could not be sued by a rescued “Aussie X,” as the animal shelter called him, but my conscience couldn’t bear any injury to my longtime pal, who in the photo at top is watching me work … or rest … as the case may be.
It only reached 60-something today, but it felt like 80 and it never rains anymore, you know. Hot, dusty and dry in April seems to be the new world order. I haven’t seen a wildflower yet this spring.
It really was the desire to protect Cooper that led to the whole picnic table routine, which allows him to look out over the snake-proof adobe wall surrounding his yard. I never got around to cutting and screening windows in the wall.
Even with the table-top view, he’s always demanded that we take lie-down breaks on morning and evening walks so he can scan the hills for lost sheep or pesky coyotes, or think out lines of doggerel, whatever he does.
So, it’s not like he’s a shut-in. And soon, when I get back to work on that pile of red cedar, he again will be monarch of all he surveys, night and day.
I hope for rain as muddy wisps of another dusty sunset drift over Cabezon’s long-running shrug.
Three of my favorite places, with bay or mountains at the doorstep, and all with diagonal parking: Sausalito, California; Livingston, Montana; and Silverton, Colorado.
And a quote that has stuck with me since youth: “Elbow room,” cried Daniel Boone.
Sausalito is crowded beyond belief, especially since I lived there in the early 1960s, but you still can get out on the bay and Mount Tam and the Dipsea Trail still beckon to the north.
Silverton and Livingston have gotten a little tony, but it’s the country around them you go for anyway.
The Murray in Livingston used to have my favorite notepads anywhere. I stayed there on a trip north through the cow country around White Sulphur Springs, Lennep and Martinsdale, where my mother lived and my sisters grew up.
I used to ski around Molas Pass, above Silverton, and remember having to hug the bar at the Grand Imperial afterward because of a fencing tournament in the middle of the room.
Home from the cancer doc with Coop. No news is good news. I’m one year out from treatment today. I’m going to stay out of the wind and read and give old Coop’s paws a break from our rocky trails. Everything’s OK. And thanks to Lori for being our friend.
dreamranch 