{ Camp Cougar - Day 3 }

alOha Campers : ) 

You can read about day {one} and {two} of this camping trip <------ there : )

   Day 2 ended with a painful drumming in my head and with ezzie suffering an upset belly, but something that I forgot to mention about the close of that day was that we were visited one last time by that guy with the dogs.

   I was dangling in my hammock chair and reading a book, slowly turning with the breeze, when juwels noticed somebody approaching our camp. She went up the grass hill, and I heard her talking pleasantly enough.  I was still in my hammock, slowly rotating away from a view of the river, when she came back down the hill and told me that it was the guy with the dogs. He asked if the goats were still with us, which I thought was a strange question. Where else would they be?

   And then he said, "I don't want to worry you, but this is cougar country back in here, and they love goats and sheep. You guys should really think about getting a couple dogs to watch camp at night. Cats don't like dogs, even big cats."

   Juwels told him that we had a pistol, and he said that was good but that the only warning we'd have of a cougar approaching at night was from the goats, and that it would all happen pretty fast. (pleasant thing to think about while trying to sleep.)

   That night the whole family snuggled around the fire, and we kept the fire going with a few thick logs of oak just before bed. And the whole camp flickered in a nice orange light for hours to come. Most nights, I wake up periodically on my own, even at home in my comfy bed, but ezzie mez also has a habit of whining in her sleep, and since we were sleeping right next to each other, that would call me out of my dreams a bit more. 

   I slept with the pistol, wrapped in a silk scarf, under my pillow that night, and for the following.

   And tucked between me and mez, I kept my army flashlight, which has a bend at the top like a periscope. I remembered seeing an ad in a poultry magazine for a predator security system, and it worked by occasionally flashing light into the yard. They said that a night prowler's biggest fear was being spotted, so when I'd wake up in the quiet on my own, most times I'd click the light on, and without sitting up or lifting my head from the pillow, I'd extant my arm and do a slow circle once or twice around the camp.

   And all those times I was awoken by ezzie's whining and crying, I'd give her a little pat on the rump to wake her if it was just one of her bad dreams, and I'd sit up doing a two-handed version of the light trick, this time with the pointed pistol in my other hand.

   Another thing that would give me pause in the night was the sound of ezzie's digestion between her four very active stomachs. Sometimes after she'd cry, in the silence that followed, my alerted brain would hear a growl and not be able to place its nearness. The hair on my neck stood up the first time I heard this, thinking I'd heard a 200 pound cat hungrily grumbling before I realized it was ezzie's belly. 

   I haven't been around guns or hunting much since I was a boy, and it felt a little over the top working that 38 around in the darkness. But then again, we were 26 miles off the paved road, helplessly laying around in mummy bags wafting the scent of young female goats in the night air. And if she'd heard, seen or smelled a big cat on the edge of the camp, I might as well be ready rather than scrambling around under my pillow.

   I'm pretty quick to my wits at night, and I reminded myself, not to shoot into the main camp and don't shoot out the trucks tires or radiator in the night. My dreams between this, not surprisingly, were stressful, and when the sky would finally lightened up a shade, I'd think, Okay... we made it through.

   Since ezzie's poops still weren't solid, juwels would get up every time she'd drop one, and shovel it away.. Don't want them tracking that back to the bags.
 

   The wooden rod of the shovel lay between us for easy access, and although I was on watch duty, and she was on doody duty, I tried on a couple occasions to lazily scoop and move the piles with the shovel from a laying position, but the leverage was all off ... a bit like trying to turn off your alarm clock on the other side of the room with a canoe paddle.

   We decided that the next time we'd bring a collapsible crate for the girls, so we wouldn't have to worry about them being chased off or carried away by a lion at any second of the night.

    Somehow, through all of that, I was able to lose my headache, and ezzie got her berries back, and the new day was slated to be great : ) Were up early again that morning, brewing coffee, frying bacon and eggs and digging the charred squash and potatoes out of the dead coals of last night's fire.

The girls ate their grass, stood, circus-style, on hind legs to nibble baby oak leaves, and the hill of large red ants sent up frigid scouts who could barely move until the sun came up and into the canyon.

   On the way through camp, the girls at our sides and leashed, people came out of their tents to greet us and pet the babes. A young guy came out of the last camp and told us that he plans to hit the springs later and paint a giant rainbow over a wall that had been covered with names and initials. "Some people might get upset about this," he said, and waited a tick to see if we had any objections, but we told him we'd happily trade words four colors and thanked him for taking the initiative.

"We're not good artists," he said, "but we can paint a rainbow."

   We took the low road this time, which was a bit more difficult than the fire road, but this path had more graze for the babes, and the river bordered the whole way. We stopped and watched the bees visiting flowers and used a slingshot to skip flat rocks across the still water.

   We had the pool all to ourselves for a long while. When we were in the big pool, the babes perched on the rocks up the hill, and when we'd sneak into the small hotter pool in the room, they'd soon notice, and come crying and trampling in after us.

 

   

   We had to relocate a few toxic red paraffin candles which ezzie tried to nibble on, but then they snuggled up below the pool bench and chewed their cud.

   The rainbow painters showed up later, along with another couple, and ezzie seemed to bond with a skinny blonde girl who spent most of her time sunning topless on the pool deck. It was cute to see the goats being social with strangers, and the girl's boyfriend kept saying, "God, they're so cute. I just can't stand it."

   Which developed into a full-fledged obsession, and progressed to, "I need goats. Is there a way we could have goats in downtown San Francisco? Is there such a thing as rooftop goats?"

   The painters were very organized with their supplies as well as excitedly mapping and voicing the process, and the ambient sound of it fulfilled that silent observer's part of my brain that loves watching Bob Ross, cooking shows, or knife or blender sales pitch videos. 

   And we stayed there a long, long while watching the color go on the wall.

   While posting some Instagram pics back at camp, we caught a rare glimpse at the time, and found that we'd been gone for close to 6 hours, it now being lunch time.

   We swung back and forth, passing glass serving bowls from one hammock to the other like dance partners, eating fresh guacamole, Mediterranean quinoa, fennel salad with toasted pine nuts and dried cranberries, and when juwels came back from packing the bowls back into the cooler, she returned with the Holy Bowl of homemade caramel. Oh .. that caramel, how I loved thee.

   The rest of the trip was more of the same. Soaking, hiking, feeding, snuggle piles beside the fire and on the grassy banks of the river. Waving the gun in the night, and fending the goats off our sleeping bags. (They'd make your legs go numb if you let them.)

  

   Ezzie slept next to me every night. I think she could sense the protector in me. And for half of the second night, when she had returned from a 3 a.m. potty walk, chia stepped over me and flopped, with a grunt, directly between our bags, and there she spent the night snoring, cooing, and flapping her little swan neck and goat head onto the shoulder of my bag and then back onto juwels'.

   Oh, and we were also almost killed in our hammocks one evening. 

   We got a fair amount of wind cutting through the canyon, this was very pleasant at the springs, but on one particular occasion back at camp, we were in our hanging hammock chairs down by the water, and this gust came on us from down the river. The sounds of it came like a wave, throwing the trees and reeds into a physical frenzy before it even reached us.

   And we both pulled our eyes from our books to watch this thing coming. The meat of it stayed with us for a while, and then I heard those unmistakable sounds of a tree beginning to fall. That tearing sound, cracking, warning, but obscured by the sound of a million leaves flapping like tattered flags overhead.

   I jumped out of my hammock and bolted, yelling to juwels to "Run! Run! Run!"

   I had gotten four or five strides when the tearing noise of the tree got louder, and I knew it was coming down.

   It was behind me somewhere, I could tell that, but was it falling towards me?

   I paused, knowing I had to source the thing if I was going to avoid it, and I see juwels just standing there beside her hammock, book still leafed open in her hands, and staring up at a 30-foot oak with a dazed expression on her face.

   The thing snapped in half just as the wind had passed, and in the new silence, it sounded even louder still. It ripped branches from smaller trees as it fell only 15 or so feet from our chairs. 

"Oh my God," juwels called, laughing.

   After the shock wore off, I read juwels the riot act, "What were you doing just standing there???! You can't just freeze like that."

   She gulped comically ..

"I was yelling Run, Run, Run," I said,  "And demonstrating, too." 

"You did?" 

"Yes!!"

She laughed. "Well, I blew it," she said. "I failed."

"Shieet." I sighed.

   And after juwels' non-reaction to an actual tree falling from the sky, the next 45 minutes were filled, on her end, with speculation as to whether or not the long thick branch that we were hanging from in our hammock chairs was going to break as well.

   I fluffed it off, lazy in my hammock and seeing that the tree was healthy overhead, but after the first 5 minutes of her investigation into every nook and cranny of the base of its trunk, I finally resorted to scaling the tree barefoot, and jumping up and down directly above the hammock chairs to prove its stability.

   The half tree that had fallen was stretched directly across the path that we always used to reach the river and the hammock chairs. I walked over to the fallen thing and saw that it had been weakened by some kind of burrowing bug. I placed the palm of my hand on the smooth inside of the peeled back park. It was wet and cool. I rubbed the tree blood on my cheek and thought about licking it, but it was tucked back into a prickle bush, so I didn't. The pulpy heart of it was soft and spongy, and I could dig my thumb into it.

 And oddly, about an hour later, with no wind blowing at all, juwels had been talking about how crazy it was for the tree to fall like that, and just then, in mid-sentence, another large piece fell with a crash in the exact same spot.

   I have no clue where the second piece came from. The broken tree looked exactly the same, sheared off midway, matching the picture in my mind. It was the strangest thing, like a wormhole had opened up and dumped that second piece out ...

   We didn't have an exact date when we wanted to head back to society, but we figured that either the food or spring water would run out or the influx of weekend traffic would push us away, and the day we left was actually pretty unexpected. We were loafing around down in the hammocks, again, recouping from another long soak, and I was walking up to camp on a back trail (since the oak was blocking the old one) and I saw a set of big footprints in the mud with enormous nail marks slashing 

 deep into the earth.

Hmmmm ....

    I walked around and found more, right on the edge of our camp and coming up from the river, and they looked real fresh. I called juwels over, and we talked about it. We had off-and-on service on the phone, and we tried to look up the tracks, but it wasn't easy since the back of the pad was incomplete...

   This was all happening amidst one of our most favorite parts of the day .. the gloaming hour (which lasts an abnormally long time since the canyon ridge is so high on the horizon). We'd would have much rather enjoyed winding down during this magical part of the day, making a hot supper and meditating on the fire .. but due to sleeping on edge listening for mountain lions, and finding these unidentifiable tracks we talked about heading home to our hive.

 Juwels didn't really want to go, but then again, I was the one on guard duty, waving that gun around and getting covered in dirt every time the goats would come back from a potty time and feel the need to dig in the dust beside my pillow for a couple of minutes, so I finally made the call to pack up the gear, bribe the babes with corn chips to empty their bladders .. and hit the high road. 

And that's the way it all ended.

   With the four of us filthy, smelling like campfires and hot springs and safe and sound ; ) 

loVe, 

p&j .. & .. c&e 

      .... yes, this trip was full of many different polarities - from the warm soul melting into a pool of the earth's liquid heat, to the animated frights of mother nature in unexpected forms, but I guess that's what they call an adventure rather than a pleasure cruise with pillow mints and white towels folded like swans. (we could use one of these, too ; ) We love all that ends well, and life keeps you sharp in this way.

Oh ... and I'm not even going to mention the sticker bush that pricked the my eyelid as I was cleaning up camp to go ... or how the whole left side of the bridge of my nose swelled up and made me look like an avatar. "I'm sorry," juwels would later say, "but I can't look at you without staring at that thing. It's kind of freaking me out."

ha ha ha ..

"I know... me too."

The End ; )

  

{ Journals from the Trip - Day Two }

*****
    I decided to use this blog as a little editing project, and you can listen to the audio version (read by yours truly) right here:




Hello Again ; )

  I think I just decided that I'm not going to do a post for each day of this camp trip ... there were 4 days and 3 nights for the linear record. But after this post, I'll just blend a highlight summary of the final days.

  A trip like this is a kind of a blur .. as it should be. Days were spent walking the desert roads with our hoofed babes, leaving boot-prints, cracked pistachio shells and goat berries in our wake. We soaked in the hot springs to the point of hallucination and then dizzily scaled the rocks like monkeys down to the leisurely moving green river for a plunge and shocking return to reality.

   If anyone hasn't seen Day One <---- you can read it there ; ) 

____________________________

But as for day two - Tuesday Morning - it started memorable.

   We'd gotten to bed at what felt like a late hour after setting up camp, star gazing and negotiating a favorable sleeping arrangement with the babes. (we all slept on the ground, and they seemed perplexed at the fact that we hadn't brought them any sleeping bags.. )

   We had hopes of leaving camp before the sun, so we could hit the springs and enjoy them all to ourselves/ avoid any loud people or those traveling with dogs.

   I nudged juwels in her dusty bag just after the first birds started to chirp, and she groaned a little, but didn't want to move. I couldn't blame her ... but I also couldn't fall back to sleep, so I prompted her on all the benefits of soaking before breakfast and napping in the afternoon, and she went for it.

   About 20 minutes later, thanks to juwels, the trek bags were packed. We got the goats to tank up on spring water from their silver bowl (they never seem to drink when we hike) and we set out a bucket of feed and timothy grass, and they ate with hungry bellies.

   Earlier, I'd walked to the edge of the of our settlement when juwels was packing everything up, and I only saw two other camps ... but I also thought I saw something running by in the distance and into the brush. A dog? A pack of dogs? They had a very smooth movement that made me think they were wild, but I only saw the movement for a 1/2 second, and wondered if it wasn't just something floating by on the surface of my eye ball.

   We'd bought the babes leather collars the other day, and juwels had used a leather punch kit to hammer their full names in "ezmerelda..." and "lucia maria" (and she squealed, in that way I love so much, with the uncovering of each letter ; )

   We'd also brought along two leashes, so we could walk them through camp and keep them close. The worst thing that the goats can (and will) do when a dog comes around, is run. This running prompts even the friendliest dogs to chase, and off they go ... far away from the help of their two-legged parents. And when a dog gives chase like that, it's an easy thing to expect that the predator in them starts running the show. I've daydreamed, grimly, about what I might do if a dog attacked one of my babes, and it brings out the caveman in me - not a pretty sight for anyone, so .... we just try and keep them close. 

   With that said, at 7 or so in the morning, we headed out on foot. I was in the lead, and had gotten no farther than the edge of our camp, when a pack of three dogs came running up on us, bouncing and barking and coming fast. Juwels only had the leash on chia, not ezzie, and ezzie tried to run off behind the truck before juwels caught a hold of her collar.

   I ran up ahead toward the dogs, increasing the gap between them and the girls, and juwels stayed back with the now-leashed babes. I carry an umbrella with me on all our walks and hikes. This can be used effectively when pointed at the dog and quickly puffed open and pulled closed like the hood of an angry snake, and normally, this spooks the dog, and off it goes. Such was not the case with these three ...

   They were Boxers, purebreds from the looks of it, and in some strange way that made me feel a tiny bit better. The gangly mutts are the worst, housing the temperaments of many different hunting breeds. A few trips ago when I was there, I was jogging through the main camp in the brightest of moods, when a very large dog came out from under the shade of a tall, beaten pickup truck, a giant wolf of a thing with the hair standing up between its shoulders, barking and snarling for no good reason. And a woman, taking her time, stopped plucking her brows in the rear view of the truck and came yelling after the dog, "Don't look him in the eyes," she told me, "he's half wolf. Just slowly walk away.."  

   The Boxers were different. I puffed the umbrella open and closed, yelling, "Back. Back. Back." with each puff. The two bigger and older-looking dogs in the back recoiled, but the younger one (who's name I later learned was Buddha) stayed right on me, barking. I advanced a few steps on him, Puff-Puff-Puff, and he backed a little. I could hear the goats crying behind me. The two bigger dogs came a little closer, seeing that the other wasn't finding any real harm in me, and I puffed it a few more times.

   I was just beginning to wonder, "okay, they're not leaving ... what's the next move?" when I noticed a man speed walking up from a camp in the distance. He was yelling at the dogs and looked at me with a confused expression. He swatted at the two old dogs, and they ran back to camp, and then yelled,  "Buddha! Back !!"

   What a sight to deal with so early. Me, with wild dreads, wearing a borrowed 38 caliber pistol on my hip, hiding out beneath a black rafter's hat, grimacing and yelling, "Back. Back. Back."

"We have goats," I said. "Maybe they just don't know what to think of them.." 

 The confusion on his face deepened into a frown.

   With the umbrella stowed, the dog was right up beside me. I put out my hand, fingers cured in, and he sniffed it. The man and his remaining dog walked off, and as an aside, he said, "Well ... I'm going to be going to the hot springs, so ..."

  "Put them on a leash," I said, but I think he was too far to hear me.

   We walked off again, this whole thing taking maybe 3 minutes, and my pointer finger and the tip of my thumb ached from working the umbrella so frantically. As we walked by his camp, I didn't look over until we were directly beside him, and he just stared at the 4 of us like we were pink elephants holding each others tails.

   He had a fire going. I'd remember this fact later when we were at the springs, "Calm down and stop looking up the path," I'd tell juwels. "He had a fire going - a good one. I don't think he's just going to smother it and leave so soon." 

   "Yeah.. " she said.

   "He did have a fire, didn't he?" I asked .. the whole thing seemed like an extension of the night's dreaming. I had hoped to slowly sleepwalk the two miles to the spring, maybe drift off in the pools for a bit and find my wits organically, but then there was this.

   "Yeah, I think so.. " she said, "a big one."

   The hike was nice - but oddly unsatisfying. We walked all the grassy areas we'd crossed before, when we'd talk about how much the girls were going to love it there and all the new plants they'd chew along the way, but the energy of it was all tainted because of the dogs ... and also with the knowledge that the dogs would be heading our way at some unknown point.

    It was spring everywhere. The green of the trees and grass and tiny flowering weeds coming up had a glow, like soft lights had been installed in each and every one of them. We passed the rusty old corral where I'd seen a cowboy on horseback one day, and the wind cut through the ceramic plates of the telephone poles and made an ominous sound like howling in the distance.

   We crossed the river at a narrow to reach the hot springs on the other side. I carried chia over first, and juwels waited with ezzie on the other shore. Setting chia's little pig feet on the damp edge of the river, I told her that I'd be right back and went back to get ezzie. She cried as I left, looking around like she'd been abandoned, but mellowed out a bit when she noticed that juwels was heading her way. Ezzie was considerably heavier than chia, but I hoofed her across, and she made no move to spring free until we'd reached the other side.

    We talked animatedly as we approached the stairs to the springs, knowing that we'd left everyone at the camp and on the other side of the river. This geological divide seemed to work wonders for our state of mind and relaxation.

    As we neared, I noticed a backpack on the bench, and we both stopped talking, looking for signs of man .. or more specifically, man's best friend. I caught a flash of skin, a naked shoulder, I thought, ducking into the doorway leading to the small springs, and we continued up to the pool deck but didn't revisit our line of conversation for the distraction.

    I thought that somebody was trying to get dressed behind the wall, and slowed just a tad to give them time if need be. As we passed the doorway, I glanced for a second and saw an old man, full grey, sunken eyes with thin lids and a grey beard. I didn't look directly at him, but passed by to put our bags where we normally do.

   As we passed, I heard him say, "Why'd you quiet down all the sudden?"

   I wasn't ready for the question, not to mention that it was coming at the side of my head, but juwels said something that didn't completely make sense.

   And he said, "Oh .. I thought you were trying to protect yourselves."

   Protect ourselves?? From him? My breast swelled with an uncommon sense of youth and pride as I contemplated the prospect. But then again, humans don't normally ram heads to prove strength or to do each other harm, so I guess all fields were level in that respect. And then, way out of time pace, I finally said, "We were just scoping to see if you had a dog. We have goats and just had a little run in with three of them back at camp."

   He didn't say anything.

   He wore a long button-up denim shirt like a bathrobe, wet on the shoulders, and it mostly covered up the rest of his naked body. For his age, late 60's, he was wiry and trim, and he looked like an old gold prospector.

   I noticed that his stuff on the bench was all neatly packed into a tupperware bin that was the perfect size to slide snugly into the open mouth of his backpack, and I thought about an old friend of mine, 68 years old, who had developed many charming systems like that. And I noticed a plain silver flask resting on the top of the bin of clothes, and I wondered what his poison was ... whiskey?

   I was immediately fascinated by the guy and wanted to know all of his ghost-town stories, but I could feel (and would later hear) that he was an old hermit crab and couldn't care less about making conversation with a young know-nothing like me. So instead, I watched him out of the corner of my eye and noted all of his mannerisms. He seemed indifferent to almost everything - even the goats, who'd found a nice nook above the pool on the rock wall where they could eat crab grass and keep a lookout.

   After soaking for a while, a group of younger kids walked down the stairs in a line, the foremost carrying a bright blue box of canned beer. I rolled my eyes below my dark sunglasses, and nodded to juwels that it might be time to go ... the old hermit crab in me.

   The kids turned out to mold to their surroundings rather than dominating them, and the quiet atmosphere that we'd been living in continued but now with some small talk about the history of the place.

   At one point, the old man came out of the small pool room, which he'd been enjoying all to himself, moaning and romancing that flask of his, and one of the young guys who'd showed up asked him how he was doing. And he laughed a laugh that didn't seem to permeate the muffle of his grey beard and said, "Too good to tell you about.." And I don't know why, maybe I wanted to challenge him to prove it, give me something that I could place in my mind's eye, but I said, "Don't go blowing our minds.."

The kids chuckled, and I instantly felt embarrassed and wished I hadn't said it.

   I wondered where this guy was staying since I'd already seen the people at the other two camps, and then I remembered seeing a small 70's VW Bus parked amidst the cactus way up on the entry road, illegally camped far away from the sites on the river. I pictured him wandering back up that hill, half drunk, mumbling and daydreaming about an ex-wife or a friendly dog he once loved and lost.

   He soon left, and so did we, all the while eying farther up the path for our friends from camp. We found them at the river crossing with the three beasts wagging and splashing about.

"Just walk past the crossing, and we'll let him go on," I said to juwels, but we didn't have the jump on him, and one of his dogs came running up on us just as we came near.

   He was down by the river, leashing one of the big dogs up, and it looked like he'd actually walked all three of them on leashes, but just for that moment had let them off so they could cross the river.

   He came up the hill to us, with one dog on a leash and trying to get the other, and as the unleashed dog was nearing the now-frantic goats, I stepped into the dog's path and called to him, "Is your dog a biter??"

   He laughed and said no. "They'll bark until they fall down, but that's about it."

    I got a hold of the dog's collar, and delivered it to the man. The goats whined and tangled themselves around juwels' legs.

   He had another dog on the other side of the river, looking scared to cross, and he called to it, "Oh .. come on, Smiley, don't be such a wimp."

   The dog waded in, being taken by the current for a moment, but got across okay, and then ran, smiling, but not barking, up to the goats.

   Chia and ezzie, still on the leashes, ran directly up the side of a near-vertical rock wall and turned around to look down their noses at the dog. They were standing about level with the height of juwels' head, 5 or so feet up the wall, and it looked like she had a couple of perched birds on a leash.

I couldn't help but smile at the scene.

   I grabbed the second dog, too, and delivered it to the man. We talked for a few seconds. I apologized for the "conflict of species" and told him that we'd moved out of the pools quickly so he wouldn't have to damn those poor dogs to the ropes, and he thanked me and said he was leaving today.

   And as we started to walk our separate ways, I noticed that he was now wearing a giant, giant diver's knife on his hip. I smiled at the idea that we're all strangers in this world, and we went on our way back to camp, and food, and the swinging hammock chairs.

   We were starved by the time we got back, and I had a headache. (I'm not good at dealing with headaches, and luckily I never really get them.)

   The rest of the day was spent around camp and by the river. Off the shallow banks, we bathed ezzie, who'd gotten so emotional about the last run-in with the dogs that she'd come down with a bad case of diarrhea and had made quite a mess of herself. And when that was all over, we napped under the mulberry tree .. this only becoming possible after learning that tea tree oil made a great fly and insect repellent.

   I kept eating honey and pounding spring water to try to kill my headache, but it was a part of me for better or worse. We relaxed, and read books on beekeeping in the hammock chairs, and every few minutes juwels would say, "Oh ... poor ezzie .. I feel so bad for you, poor girl." when she'd let another loose one go.

   We had a shovel for the campfire, and she used this to dig up the landmine spot each time and toss the whole clump off into the bushes. The way she'd vocalize poor, poor ezzie's condition every time (and there were many) made my headache worse, and I said that I though that kind of pitiful energy wouldn't help her recovery any, but she was just trying to be compassionate and empathize.

   I thought about going home ... to let my head pound in my own fenced-in space where I could get clean if I wanted or fish an ice pack out of the freezer for my head if I needed to. But that was just a dramatic thought .. besides, we couldn't leave with ezzie in this volatile state anyway. We'd used up all the paper towels cleaning up their liquid "bad potties" on the way here, and it would be a complete shit show to get out now, so I didn't voice my thoughts, and we hunkered down, enjoying the rest of the day and getting to bet very early.

  Tomorrow - everything would be back to normal for pappa and emotional ezzie, and we'd all have a good time.

Until next time, loVe,

 -p&j .. & c&e

{ Journals from our First Family Trip - Day One }

Here's an audio recording of this blog : ) 



   We just got back from a pretty amazing camping trip to the hot springs, and the first we've taken with the babes !! We'll be posting a journal for each day - this is the first ; )  There will be pics in the others, nothing to see here though ...

________________ Day One - Monday, Morning: ___________

Juwels: is still packing things up and finishing all the delectable entrees and side dishes that she's scratched into her informal menu for the week.

Me: making good on an 8am dental appointment that I'd scheduled the week before ..

The guy I go to is in Sedona (best views from the chair) and luckily I'd come to my senses the day before and decided Not to ride the motorbike 2000 feet down the switchbacks, through oak creek canyon and into red rock country just after 7am. It was a much better ride on the wide bench seat of the truck, heat blowing from the dash and Jack Johnson taking my mind off the impending chair.

Back up the hill - (didn't get any work done on that visit .. (just xrays). And juwels was still in the kitchen .. sampling her homemade bowl of caramel, and sweet jesus is was good. I would later tell her, licking the spoon, that I thought this caramel could be a good treatment for depression, or maybe given to people in place of morphine on the battlefield. 

Juwels assigned me jobs - chop the firewood, get the goat feed together, climb the cherry tree and pull the hammock chairs down, make sure all the house plants were watered and happy, turn the hot water heater down to "vacation mode", collect any last minute eggs from the coop (we'd need these), and a couple hours later, finished with the tasks I was suited for, I realized that it was going to be a late camp setup, so I fired up the motorbike after all and buzzed into town to fill up at the local grass fed burger joint.

Pulling back onto the ranch with a brown paper bag containing a half eaten burger and fries tucked under the belly of my leather jacket, I found juwels sweeping out the back of the truck. We piled everything in, around 5pm, and the goats had taken advantage of the swinging front gate and ambled off somewhere up the hill.

As I warmed up the truck, I noticed that we seemed to be missing something(s) in the extra cab. I pulled down to the fork in the road and saw the babes up the hill, nibbling fresh green grass, and looking down at us with their googly eyes.

Juwels popped the suicide doors open on her side of the truck, and called for them to hop in. But they just stood up there, chewing and wagging their tails. I tried to pull the, "Okay... we're leaving you" routine by slowly pulling away, but they weren't going for it. 

Shifting into reverse, doors still hanging open, I skidded up the hill beside them, "Get in, ya little stinkers."

But it took juwels crinkling the bag of Krispy Crunchies to get them to come tumbling into the truck (we'd folded the narrow seats up in the back cab, so they had plenty of room to sit or stand) and off we went.

I'd fueled up the truck earlier in Sedona, so there was nothing to slow our progression down the freeway and into the desert. Going 75 miles an hour, up and down pine covered hills, we talked about the bees, and not so much of keeping them, but fostering them and camping out beside the hives some nights, pressing an ear to the box and seeing the girls swarm the flower fields at dawn's early light.

Ezzie lied down, but chia stayed on all four dainty hooves, "surfing" around the turns, and in the small open space beside my elbow on the armrest, I could feel her little white-tipped skunk tail whisking back and forth every 30 seconds. She seriously wagged her tail for most of the ride ... even when she was getting in trouble for peeing in the truck (good thing we have rubber floors and not carpet. )

Speaking of the goat's bathroom cycle, pretty much we just had to pull off as much as made sense, and they always seemed to have more. About 15 miles down the 17, we pulled off at a lovely scenic viewpoint (overlooking Sedona and a great expanse of juniper covered valley) and urged the girls to "go potty" ... "gooooo pooooooty", and they did. Rewarded with treats, we were back in the truck and racing the sun to the horizon.


______________ Monday - Evening. _______________________ 

Pulling off at Camp Verde, we debated whether or not we should stop off at the gas station to pickup ice and an extra lighter. This would also give us an additional potty break for the girls, but I had ants in my pants, and kept my sights trained on the pull off to the dirt road .. they could make it !!

Passing cattle ranches and pecan fields, we buzzed passed town and into the stark desert hills. Chia's little tail was still wagging, and I could feel a small breeze on the back of my arm every time. It was the cutest damn thing, and we were all so happy to be heading off together.

I reached my left arm awkwardly behind me and got a hold of her little tail (which is the shape and size of a pointer finger under the fur) "gimmie this little waggin tail," I said.

I was talking about how stinking cute she was and juwels was saying, "does poppa got your tail, chia ??" when I heard a tinkling sound. It took the sound, tinkling, to register first in my brain, and then I also noticed that a few of my fingers had an odd warm sensation.

"She's peeing!!" I called to juwels, reeling my hand back and studying the seemingly paralyzed fingers.

"What ??"

"She just peed ... she peed on my hand," I said.

"I told you we should have stopped for ice," juwels said, pulling out a roll of paper towels (without offering me one) and flopped over the backrest of the tall bench seat with the spray bottle in the other hand.

"That's bad potty, chia," she said, "Baaaaaad potty !!"

Her tall boots were hovering about eye level beside me, legs in black tights, bent at awkward angles and kicking with the effort,  and she bobbed around, spraying and wiping. I was playing my favorite audio book, and tried to tune out the play-by-play commentary coming from under my seat, "Oh ... how can she pee this much?? She just went 20 minutes ago ... That's a bad potty, chia, okay - you have to wait till we stop. At least we have rubber floors. Maybe we should pull off and see if ezzie has to go??"

"We're almost there," I said, stepping on the gas.

Three minutes later, she was back up on the seat beside me, still describing every nook and cranny she'd cleaned in detail, and her cheeks were bright red from all the hanging upside down. She pulled a final paper towel off for me, but I declined, "It's already dry," I said.

We got to the pull off, and as I shifted the truck into park on the dirt road, we both jumped out and grabbed the girls (they tend to go potty as soon as the truck stops, so you have to hurry). With the four doors all hanging wide open and Edward Abby's 'Desert Solitaire'  playing on the speakers and describing almost the exact scene that we were standing on the edge of, vast hills, cactus, mesquite, grazing cattle and the songs of cactus wrens, we sang the song of good potty, and our prayers were quickly answered. The girls were all ready to set in on some prime wild flower graze, when we scooped them up, tossed them back in the truck and lumbered off.

About 5 miles down the dirt road, juwels thinks it's because of the bumpiness, chia peed on ezzie (ezzie was laying down like a good girl).

I was the one to notice it. "What smells like wet fur," I asked. Juwels looked perplexed. "It smells like a wet dog," I said. "Is somebody licking themselves back there?' I asked, immediately knowing that it made no sense, and that it would take a lot of moisture to throw that strong of a scent ..

Juwels looked back there, and said, "Chia ... that's Baaaaad potty!! You don't pee on your sister. That's Bad Potty, okay !! ??"

(By the way - they normally -never- do this ... ) 

She was in the process of climbing back over the seat again, but knowing that we'd soon be driving on cliff edges with no guard rails, and that a kick in my face could send us all rolling head over tin cups, I said, "Wait - I'll pull off."

We pulled off, and as I was doing My good potty, the girls walked up beside me and showed me that they could do theirs too ... chia only had a few drops, but seemed to want the positive affirmation, "Good potty, chia. Goooood potty, ezzie mez"

I smelled the wildflowers and mesquite in the air, and called back to juwels that we should keep our bees out here. She agreed, and called the three of us back up and out of the wash, saying that she wanted to get to camp before dark - this would not happen. 

About 5 more miles down the road, because of the bumps, juwels says, "it rattles it out of them" ezzie peed, and we ran out of paper towels. The sun was already behind the mountains, but the mountains were high on the horizon, so we'd still have at least 30 more minutes of gloaming light. We passed more cars heading out, stopped and snapped a few pics of a big black bull on the roadside, clicked on the high beams, drove over black shadowed potholes looking like like empty bathtubs in the truck's lights, and made it to camp without another accident.


_______________ Monday - Night _________________________

Juwels had a special camp in mind, one at the very end of the row, next to  the only spot where the river narrowed and the water made a constant rushing chorus. We'd been told about the spot from a local who said that he'd been coming there for 10 years and only found the spot open once. It was tucked way in, and the hope was that no newcomers would even know it was there. We pulled over a few humps and through a wash in low gear, and were delighted to find the spot all ours ; )

It was beyond black - the moon had not come up from behind the rim, and the goats followed us around not knowing what to think. I pulled off my shoes and dug my toes into the soft and silty brown sand, and something came alive inside me, like a switch had been thrown. The crickets were going full scale and the night air still had a touch of heat in it.

By the light of a lantern, we descended a narrow dirt staircase which I'd cut out with a shovel almost a year ago to the day. At the base, we found ourselves on the mossy edge of a small swirling cove. We normally do our dishes in this spot beside a turtle-backed boulder, but I occupied myself with splashing cold water on my face and the back of my neck, fully waking up for the second part of the day.

Behind the open truck bed, I setup a small metal bucket of goat feed (grain) and let the girls feast while we setup camp. A few minutes later, as were were re-bending the metal legs on the foldout picnic table, we heard the goats come running and crying from around the truck and to our sides. They did Not want to be separated from us in the dark new place, and in the coming days, we'd find that they didn't want us to be separated from each other, all four, at anytime day or night, they insisted that we stick together and complained loudly if anyone should break that bond. 

Flying bugs crowded around the lantern, thinking they'd finally reached the moon, and I apologized, sincerely, to the few who'd found their way beneath the glass. We pulled out wood for the fire and the cooler full of food, but skipped both in trade for star gazing in our reclined chairs (chia insisted on laying directly on top of my lap and chest in the chair, and ezzie curled up between us.)

** Oh, there was a 20 or 30 minute stretch while juwels was organizing other things in the camp, when I dug out my recorder, (taking notes) and went on a nonstop riff about the warm sweetness of the air and the cut shadows on the trees and the rumbling song of the river, but I haven't listened to any of it yet .. never do.

We watched satellites skating across the sky, and juwels wondered what isolated tribes must think of these things when they see them... flying gods?? We marveled at the idea that we exist at all, and then, while holding hands, and almost breaking each other's fingers with the squeeze of surprise and delight, we saw hands-down the most amazing shooting star ever.

It came screaming across the sky, with a tail twice as thick as normal, and threw a wake of sparks and fire, then, midway across the sky it exploded - literally exploded from a yellow/ white stream into an orange ball on the black sky - and then in its original color again, kept cutting across the heavens before vanishing. Juwels squealed when it exploded, and I held my breath and didn't dare blink.

After a second, she broke out into laughter and praise that surly could be heard at the far reaches of that camp, and I didn't want to talk about it, thinking it was the kind of thing that just needed to be felt, a magic stored away for later. Plus, I was still in a blank shock with no words.

She, the humming bird, was more of the feeling that it needed to be explored, chanted, celebrated and howled at. We finally blinked, unlatched our stuck hands and decided that it was a great time to setup our bags under the wild fruiting mulberry tree.


___________________Monday: Bed Time _______________

As soon as the bags and mats were setup, the goats immediately lied crosswise on both, cutting them off at half length. Hmmm ...

We hadn't brought their indoor bed, thinking it would get dirty beyond repair and that they might pee on it, but they were looking at us like, "okay .. this will do just fine, but where are you guys going to sleep ??"

We tried evicting them from the bags, but they wouldn't budge, and we had to walk off into the darkness, to get them to scamper off the bed to follow us. We had an extra blanket, and folded it up beside the bags, and with a little coaxing, they both nestled up beside my bag, and only got up a few times to pee and do their berries dangerously close to my head. The next day we'd build a little buffer with milk crates above our heads to keep them at a better distance when doing midnight potty times.

I woke up throughout the night when the girls would get up, holding them at arm's reach and covering their wet spots with a handful of sand. Ezzie woke me up a few more times, and I had to shake her out of bad dreams to get her to stop whining. I woke up on other occasions, too, somewhere between dream and reality, and saw the trees overhead in strange computerized filters through my sleepy eyes and liked it.

For deeply engrained reasons of her own, ezzie found it necessary to dig in the lose sand (dust, really) every time she came back to lay down, and I tucked my head in my borrowed mummy bag and made peace with the fact that she'd be covering me in dirt all night long throughout the week.

We'd mentioned hiking out to the hot springs at first light to avoid seeing anyone, but when I noticed a grey-blue shade to the morning sky and asked juwels if she was up to it, she just yawned, made a little humming noise and rolled over, so we left it at that.

   ******* I figure I'll just post different days on different blogs (while at the same time pasting them onto here to make a master) but this is the push off to the trip. The rest of the days aren't quite as linear, and roll through long spans of hanging in the hammock chairs beside the river, reading beekeeping books and listening to the waves, hiking out to the springs, avoiding dogs (packs of dogs), wielding a pistol in the night, hearing things, trying to identify large tracks with very long nails in the mud beside our camp, and witnessing the (sometimes dangerous) elements.

More to come, working on it now ; )

loVe,
p&j .. and c&e 


  ... if you liked that, and would like to continue on, here's a { Link } to the second of three parts .. also on audio : ) 

{ Break-In @ The Hive }

alOha ; ) 

   I came across these pictures today, and thought we'd share a little tale on raising our kids ...  

   Now this happened a while ago, actually on the night that we were finishing our Bio Video and uploading it for that contest at the last possible second. And back then, we didn't have real internet here at the Hive, just a USB thing extended on a long cord, out the window and paper clipped to the eave of the roof, so we had to go over to my brother's place to get the right upload speeds for youtube. 

   And back then, we also had a problem with the back door not closing properly ... and this is how the burglars entered. I guess they were more vandals than burglars, since they didn't take anything away but rather consumed all they wanted right on the premises.  

   I was the first to walk in on the scene, luckily, because it gave me a chance to step out onto the deck and warn juwels (she's very particular about the cleanliness and organization of her space) "Okay ..." I said, "Ummm ... there's a mess in there. I just need you to prepare yourself before waking in." 

   She pushed passed me through the open door and gasped. 

 

Potting soil, strewn on the floors, and plants nibbled down to the narrow green stalks. 

It was a gruesome scene indeed.

   We found evidence of little hooves strolling across counter tops and goat lips grazing from the trash can. These little punks were partying, dancing on the ceiling. If we had a chandelier, no doubt they would have been swinging from it.

This orchid was sampled (from a standing position on the dining table) but lucky for her, she wasn't up to taste.. )

   We also have antique bottles on the sill full of spring water and fostering vine clippings. They were spilled and toppled, but somehow not broken. 

   The hanging plant on the left, which juwels prized and named Rapunzel, used to touch the ground ... no more. 

   Finished candles, wrapped and ready on the packing table, were sniffed and chewed and tossed aside.
   OooOoo .. Pappa was not happy to come home to this after working overtime on the shoot, video editing and interview. 

   And in the pouring room, we found a mess of candles with dents and cartoonish teeth marks. They must have slowed by this point, because most of the product was left untouched ... Or maybe it hit them how far afoul they'd gone ... Or maybe it was the fact that most of the house plants that they were eating were mildly toxic, and they had had enough .. we'll never know what compelled them to flee.  

   When we got back, they were just out in the yard, playing around like nothing was wrong, and after surveying the damage in the house, I called them over and gave them a good talking to. (This mostly consisted of parading them around the crime scene by the scruff of their necks and barking and growling and making all sorts of angry goat noises which I hoped they'd connect with their actions.)

   Pappa's N-o-T happy ... N-O-T Happy .. (we were laughing and reaching for the cameras though ... but they didn't need to know that.)

   They're goats .. I know. And they eat plants, sure. But they'd been warned, and trained, about these plants, and jumping on counters, and they knew just what they were doing. (smarter than dogs, they say ... More stubborn too. )

   After that, we never had a problem with the plants again. If we have them in to sit by the fire or to listen to one of juwels' piano recitals, all it takes is a sharp look or a billy-goat grunt, and they pull their little snoodles far away from our taunting green housemates ; )

   It was seriously a crime scene, and I wished so bad we had a security camera rolling when it happened. The door has since been fixed, and the plants are back to normal ; )

   loVe,
      p&j  ... and baaAad baaaAaad c&e

___________________

  .... oh, juwels just reminded me that there -was- one other occasion that they got in through that old trick door. This was a while after, and we were out of town in NY for 10 days, and our neighbor was watching the babes. And on one evening she came by after dark to lock the chickens up and check in on the girls, and they were nowhere to be found.

   She walked back and noticed the door hanging open, and knowing what had happened with the plants and candles in the past, thought, "Oh Sh*t" !!!

   It was dark, and she couldn't find the light switch from the doorway, so she flicked her flashlight on. Wincing at what she might find, she saw the goats in the spotlight, snuggled up on the futon and totally asleep.

   "I looked around, and they hadn't touched anything." she said, "And I felt so bad moving them out .. they didn't want to budge, and they were giving me a look like, 'Nooo ... this is where mommy and poppy live. Leave us here .. Pleeeeease !!"

    Too cute - and Gooooood girls  ; ) 

{Sweetness & Sorrow - The Plight of the Honey Bee}

So .......

   We've been looking around for a good honey connection, so we could start providing wholesome, honest honey to our friends and collectors (bee pollen too !!)

   And sadly, we haven't found what we're looking for, but we have found the motivation to finally make a direct change to a problem that's been on our minds for a long while.

  

    As many of you know, bees are not only a friend to mankind for their sweet and healthy honey, but more importantly, they play a huge part in the food chain by passing pollen and playing cupid between flowering plants. 

    The majority of the time, the bees are hired out and stuck in some city-sized span of a single crop - called a monoculture. In the States this is largely almonds or citrus, but over a third of our fruits and veggies rely on the bees pollination.

   Feeding bees only citrus flowers is the opposite of what we know to be a "well balanced" diet, like eating nothing but tomatoes or corn. And the product = sluggish bees, more prone to health problems and weak to fend off common internal invaders ; (

   Another problem, and one that is more direct to affect we humans, is that most of the food grown in the States is saturated with chemicals ... sprayed from the air, poured in the soil, and even genetically "programed" into the seed itself. (oh ... no, here's one of these hippie rants coming on .. ha ha ha, I'll spare you, but we'll leave it at this: the bees ingest the nectar (and the chemicals) with which they make your honey ... for your tea and biscuits.)

   This is worse for the simplistic bee than for you. We'll survive, probably, we'll just have to expand our livers, drink an extra cup of coffee to fend off our own sluggishness, and keep filtering this industrial age we're living in.

   Last thing - and then we'll get to the good news !!   

   In the wild, bees eat honey. They eat nectar and honey through the Spring and Summer, and they set aside a lot of honey for the winter months when there's not a flower to be found.

   In the Winter, there's no work to be done, and the bee girls just hang out in their ultra-organized fem community, rubbing wings with the queen and eating their nutrient rich honey till the next Spring. But .. to many beekeepers, these winter boxes are all loss (burning honey with no output) so .... 

   Now I'm going to throw this out there, and I don't want to shame anyone or make anyone feel bad ...  As someone who's been involved in small business for over a decade, and just having an idea of worldly biz, I understand how these things happen. The industry can be a tricky place when things become common practice and the big boys are telling everyone that something is safe (and affordable) .. and there's so much pressure to be competitive with pricing. So most people try to do as much biz a possible ..  But the way the game works right now is that all that Winter honey the bees have been setting aside during the season is normally robbed completely, and a bucket of chemically grown, gmo corn syrup is poured in for the winter feast.

   As I said, I think the corn syrup thing has been handed down as an industry standard, (I've seen beekeeping supply books advertising corn syrup by the semi-truck load..) and the boys upstairs said it was perfectly safe (don't they always say that) and if Joe down the way is pulling that extra honey and feeding syrup, that means he'll have more stock, and he can afford to sell his stuff cheaper, so what choice is there? And we ... the consumer, are bargain hunters, not rich, so the supply, price and standard change, and we're drinking from corn syrup sickened bees with an unbalanced diet and living around so many toxic chemicals ...

   And we wonder why they're dying ???

____________________

   And now - the good news !!!! By the way, I love the people that will sit still and read this much text on the internet. A rare breed indeed ; ) Hungry minds !!

   So .... since it has been proving hard to find sweet gold from bees who eat their own honey, year round, and steer clear of chemical crops ... we've decided to start beekeeping with the theme of loVe, respect, and nature as a guide, rewriting the current script of a bee's life. Free the bees !!

   Our bees will be happy bees ; ) And they will survive mainly off desert wildflowers, cactus blossoms and blooming trees in the wild. (the State offers many sites to leave bees for the season, and their work helps those beautiful spring flowers bloom in all those scenic towns (like Flagstaff and many other under pollinated places in nature ; )

   And the honey that we'll harvest, pure and honest honey from happy bees, will be the most Mmmm-azing stuff you've ever tasted ; ) Our honey will bee raw and unpasteurized! Most commercial honey is processed at high temperatures (to keep it runny) and unfortunately many of the amazing enzymes and health benefits are cooked off ; (

  We'll bee shipping worldwide! They say eating local honey is good for local allergies, and that can be true, but does it outweigh all the other commercial junk that you might be ingesting too? Our girls will be free and wild and happy and healthy ; ) And they'll live and thrive in a buzzing community, sustaining the way mother nature intended.

   I think we'll be starting a kickstarter campaign soon, to raise money for hives and happy bees, and we'll need a nice long trailer to haul our girls into the clean and wild desert. Or maybe we'll find an angel or grant to put wings on our dreams even sooner. We'll have thank you gifts for people who donate - sweet raw honey from our first harvest.

   If you'd be interested in helping out with a donation (and earning a credit for some raw honey at the same time) send us a message or comment below, and we'll make sure we reach out to you when the time comes ; )

   We're excited to make our dreams come true and finally learn the art of beekeeping !! So if any of our friends already have a passion and a gift for the craft, we'd love to hear from you too ; )


   We'll be starting small, but we hope to grow with the Spring flowers and possibly become a known source for the healthiest pure honey, and you can help us make it happen ... and maybe even start a movement among other small honey families. If the people ask for it, and are willing to pay an extra dollar or two for it, I think beekeepers around the globe would respond with a better product from a happier hive ; )

Long live the Queen,
loVe,
p&j


.... let's make sure the honey bee doesn't become a thing of the past.