Ghost Herd

Quick in the Jungle

Dogless Days and Cupola Nights

Every morning this August, I went down to the chicken house and called the hens out to range with the three guard roosters - Dot, Lefty, and Whitey.
Some harmonica clucking and a trail of black berries gets them away from the door fairly easily. The native blackberries are the biggest and sweetest here this year I have ever seen in the wild.
But most mornings the hens then went right back into the hen house as soon as they had snapped up all the berries , and I was back in the trailer, having a bowl of berries myself.






The chickens knew that those hot and humid days of Blackberry Summer were going to be like a great big light bulb sitting smack on their backs.

Chickens don't exactly know the future, but they know the weather and are very sensitive to everything that comes from above.
They also sensed that pretty damn soon, molten chunks of glowing matter might just possibly come streaking down from the sky. Because August is the month of the yearly Perseid meteor shower.

Chickens are well aware of it, but humans mostly don't notice because most people are either living inside the regional light bulbs or are still blind from the protracted and overblown fireworks of July. And anyway, most people wouldn't notice a shooting star unless they got hit by one.
As the rate of the meteor fall was just picking up in early August, when there was still a fair amount of water in the ponds, G and I sometimes watched the sky at night from on our backs in the middle of the round pond. Except for picking blackberries a to watch the sky at night, me and G spent as much time indoors as the hens did. We were cooking and tubbing in the day time, and up in the cupola at night... under the the wide screen of stars, with the occasional fucking thunderstorm blowing by.....mostly sound and furious clouds, like stampeding buffalo ghosts.

And with the moon racing through (don't look directly at it or you will be blinded) , lying there was all in all the greatest thrill since flying in dreams.
But Dot, Whitey, and Lefty, roosting on Davey's deck rail, were not amused. They muttered at the thunder, and when an occasional star streaked across their piece of sky, they made the clucking five syllable alarm that sounds like "Jesus fucking christ", and then the roosters in the chicken house would start it up a few beats behind, and they would continue until they all came into unison and then it gradually quieted down to a murmer and to a mere rumor.... until the next star alarm.

Yeah, chickens know that thunder storms and meteor showers and shit from above in general are just dandy until you get hit by something.
And now brother Davey knows too . He isn't quite beaten flat, but he looks like he has at the very least been struck by lightning several times. He has taken some hits. Maybe it is about over now .....the pace of the events has slowed down...and he is starting to come out of doors.





Here's the hit list:
In the dog days of August both of Davey's dogs died; his truck quit; his hard drive died so he lost all the data; a close old friend was put in jail for a few years; he heard that his child hood ex wife - missing since - April, was most probably murdered; one of his three college room mates whom he had not seen in forty years, and who had just in July refound each other.... and with whom he was planning a reunion here in August....died suddenly..... and then Davey strained his loin or his groin or something, when burying the second dog, so now he can't sit still to write.
Of course he doesn't write much even when he isn't thunderstruck . The point is that he has been knocked silly by all this, but I still say that , half drunk and with the flu, I myself could write his biography on an etch a sketch, in about half an hour.
I just can't do everything at once...even if G can.



And what about the trip I planned, hauling and poling the Arc up Cayuga through the great lakes Chain to Great Bear Lake on the Arctic sea? It's not entirely off the agenda, but it is at least a couple of years away at this point.
My work here isn't finished. I think I have managed to get the chicken range under control, but we are without dogs now, so other critters are drawing nearer. The skunks are back living under the chicken house, and that is good because the coons and every other sort of chicken killers will stay back a little, but the chickens, especially the roosters, do not control themselves without some help, and I don't think Davey is ready to get with it..



I wish it would rain, really rain. People think it has rained a lot, but it was only a lot of sound and furious clouds. The water-table is very low by my measure: The dug ponds here are as low as they were during the drought several years back that killed all the bass in the upper ponds. Either it hasn't been raining (however it may seem to sun bathers and container gardeners) or else someone is sucking the water out from under us. Maybe the miles and miles of Cargil salt mines under the lake are flooding . Or maybe the natural gas companies or Nestle company is coming at us sideways for their bottling or fracking water.

A cat came creeping around last night. I saw it. Black and white. The Roosters raised the ruckus call.

G got a ride into town with her friend from the inn, to get some vinegar and hickory- smoked salt She said that while she was there, she planned to peek in at Bridge House.

Name of G

says she wants me to get a big fancy G, like the bigger one shown above, tattooed on me somewhere.
?Like maybe on the lower forty acres of my back?

I knew the G-on-me tattoo was one of the ideas that would most likely blow right through on its own, but we splashed each other and argued in the tub for half an hour about whether it made better sense as a tattoo for her own left butt hock...... since, on her right hock, she already has a tattoo of fractal stars in the constellation of the Big Dipper . The dipper handle extends down her leg, the north star out of sight. I kind of like it.
Actually I don't want the big G on her either, but until this discussion about the G letter , G had never told me that her real first name was "Virginia".
Virginia Ann Something-Something.
She doesn't go so far as to say what her maiden or married (ex) names are.....but she says they belong to well-known people she doesn't want to be associated with. I don't know for sure if that means she necessarily ever really was associated with famous people of whatever names, but thanks to the Cornell legal aid clinic, and a liberal judge , G is her legal first name. It is a G without a period, pronounced like the letter G but signifying nothing fixed.
Ask anoyingly what the G stands for , and she will say it doesn't stand for shit, and I had always given her that.

So I learn that G's parents named her Virginia Ann, and always called her by the whole Virginia Ann , which made boys of a certain age think of Virgin Aunts,or Ants in bras, so they would make appropriate comments.
She adopted "Ginny" as her name with friends, at school.
But when she was sixteen, she walked away from her home (in another tiny college town she won't say which) leaving with nothing but a shopping bag full of whatever stuff was on top of her dresser, and some compact food from in the fridge, including cheese, carrots, and a head of garlic.
From nowhere, like she gets everything else, she got the idea that chewing Garlic would keep male predators at bay, and as she walked out of town she husked and chewed gartlic cloves like they were sticks of Dentine.
A few prospective rides drove off as soon as they could get the window rolled up, but all in all the idea worked from the beginning, and she arrived in Ithaca on her second or third stop-over.
She stayed around Ithaca for ten years before I ever knew her. I passed though but was in the wild most of that time. She still had the garlic habit when I met her then. But it never bothered me.

Back then G asked herself what she wanted to do in life, and she told herself it was to be in movies. She some how thought that working in a movie theater in Tiny Town Ithaca was a way to start. She worked the concession stand at the Paradime Mall theatre complex until someone complained about the garlic pop corn.


When working or applying for work she usually wore long, kinky, apricot colored hair in scarfed bun, but outside, she generally let the hair fall around and in front of her pale eyes. Her hair has micro kinks in each hair, which has a hallo effect in many kinds of light, and also really holds scents.
The garlic aura kept her out of attempted Massage school too, but the big aura didn't keep her from getting a series of jobs in hippy restaurants: Moose Pie, Apple Blossom, XYZ , Frankie and Johnnies, Uncle Bodie's and the rest.
Using the plumbing at her job and sleeping on group home couches, at communes, and at pet sitting locations , she was tolerated, and protected, and gradually made herself necessary, then moved on.........around and around the ten or twelve hills surrounding Tiny Town. She likes to move. She might want to move me.
Ironically, or what ever you want to call it , she actually stayed a virgin until she met me.
But, believe it or don't, I didn't realize then that she WAS a virgin. That's because I was a virgin too - if you rule out episodes with trees and flowers, melons, and mud banks - not unusual with feral boys like me.

We have both come a long way , and it has been quite a while since G habitually chewed raw garlic, but along with her big Thing about Urine Utility, and her many other Big things, G is still big on garlic......only it is dietary garlic now.
I can go along with that. I will submit to her cooking. I can hardly get the grilled garlic zuchinni out of my head. It sticks to the inside of my head.a
G says that she is trying to develop a menu for a new Bridge House Inn. That again.
I can be easygoing like nobody else you know, but I'll go along with that move just as soon as I get a giant G tattooed on my ass.

Bathing with G

Early last week G and I had just got into the bath for a long summer night's splash, when I noticed the yellow billowing at her end of the tub. She has obviously been pissing in our bath water as a regular thing, along with always adding the fuzzy sumac clusters, the juniper berries, and the dried pine needles she always puts in. All the herbs and flotsom turn the water to an Adirondack river amber after an hour or so.
We get in a lot of tub time, and G is a real mermaid in the water. Mermaids don't climb out of the sea to piss.
Piss power is one of her nut issues that I don't argue with her. She had already told me more than once that ammonia is the best cleaning agent. And she mixes piss water with vinegar to mop the floor. The former President of India or somebody used to eat gold and drink his own urine every morning.
I'm learning. She explains to me, waving her arms with the floating leaf tattoos. I just take it in.
She has a small red guitar with a cracked sound box and no case, which she pretends to play when she pretends to sing. She says she is writing an "Ergonomic Memoir" all in her head. And she says I might need to help her with the second draft..
Be her secretary maybe.......... but then she says she wants to be my muse.
She thinks she really is some kind of fairy, and she definitely is a witch. She is just like she used to be our first time around, only more so. She looks forty at most, and she has to be sixty at least.
She doesn't act her age. She puts spells on me, but has all kinds of conflicting ideas about what I should be twitched into doing. Maybe building a barn and starting a feral cat rescue and garlic farm here, or maybe moving back to Bridge House, or both. And build a high-heat, Hopi style, adobe outdoor oven in the yard. I put up with the over-stimulation and with her transparent, watery blue eyes . She could probably get me to do most anything. She could sell piss-cola to penguins.

Davey's Problem, and French Canadian Toast

My editor slash brother Davey's problem........ as simply as I can state it,....... is that , deep in his heart, he doesn't really believe that other people exist.
This is a big problem if you are related to him in any way, and especially if you live too damn near him, Like I do here at Dog's Plot..

Anyway, this morning G fixed me her special French Canadian Toast, using our chicken eggs, rather than the traditional gull or tern eggs.
"Deliciosso," is what she promised, and I don't think that is a French Canadian term, but she was right. G has cooked and chored at all kinds of Inns from the Extreme SouthWest, to the far NorthEast, traveling with a French Cook's knife about sixteen ax-handles long.