The Dry Spell by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Chapter 4
April 25, 2004; Sunny, warm spring day. Greening non-native plants and trees. Lightly clouded skies, resulting in an irregular shallow blue.
After walking exclusively in our neighborhood for four months, I decide to be adventurous and take Daisy elsewhere.
She had been attacked seven times and bitten four of them by loose dogs belonging to the friendly denizens of Camino De Lucia and I guessed that things couldn’t be any worse elsewhere in proper Corrales. This was the first warm morning of the year, a good day to see new sights and a good day to depart old ones.
Over the past few years I learned how to get to the Bosque, making a U-shaped journey through public land. I have to admit that I was nervous about it for a few reasons including; 1) What if either of us get hurt far from home? I will not wear a bell, like a cat, otherwise known as a cell phone. 2) What if we get lost in a wild area? 3) What if coyotes attack? and 4) What if Daisy merely decides that she is tired of Camino De Lucia and will not go back? Retrospect makes the questions silly, but on that day I felt like Davy Crockett and Daisy must have thought that she was a non-violent tigress.
We carefully worked our way out of the friendly development. When we got to Academy Road we saw the old church on the
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Seventh Day Adventist property and the overgrown, unevenly contoured and unused baseball field behind it occupied by surveyors attempting to find each other peering through their equipment. Instead they found Daisy and yelled out their jovial witticisms, like “Where’s the fire?” the meaning of which completely escaped me at the time and “Where are the other hundred?” which took even longer to decipher. A group of Spanish guys walked over to us and the leader of the pack, who resembled an unshaven Wallace Beery playing Pancho Villa said;
“She got good hips.” When he leaned over to pat her roughly on the side, I was somewhat concerned that he might be sexually attracted. I can honestly say that in all the time I’ve known her I never evaluated her hips, though she is a big strong girl overall. He continued to pat her, saying some things to his amigos, unclear to me. He looked at me and said; “Big hips.
Make a lot of babies.” I said; “She’s been fixed.” He looked a little bewildered and said; “You mean....,” making some kind of motions with his hands around his own belly. I wasn’t really sure of what he meant, but nodded “Yes.” He disappointedly said; “Oh” and led his friends back wherever they came from.
As we weren’t yet regulars we made the rest of the circuitous trip un-accosted. The ditches were not yet devoid of vegetation, the five foot tan and green plants lining the edges, as after a century’s existence the powers that be had not yet
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discovered that the tan and green plants were ignitable. Their existence afforded me the privilege of having numerous somewhat hidden spots to stop when nature called, increasing my apprecia-tion of the wild ones. Romero Road had not yet been improved with an entry gate and signs, so we walked right down it, me wondering if we had come the right way. At the end of the road was an indented area replete with tire tracks, that I would soon discover was used by the visitors as a parking area, in later years to be forbidden, probably because some local official decided that it was wrong to give away any convenience for free.
Today no cars are in attendance.
An excited Daisy led me around the unsigned gate and we saw more ditches which ran in both directions. She investigated them a bit and then went up the graduated approach to the levee, quickly reaching the top. We remained there a half minute admiring the quiet beauty and in her case, considering which of many routes to take. My first view of the Rio Grande River made me think it was a reflection of the sky, currently very lightly clouded, producing an amorphous gentle azure. The green of early blooming plants and trees decorated the unevenly sloping and pitted ground that would lead the next two hundred feet down where it met the flowing water. On the descent she was attracted to something on the ground. It was a thin five inch long silver case bearing Indian designs and red and green round
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mounted pieces of plastic, with a leather strap. As she sniffed at it I thought that we must have been the first visitors in some time, as an object this valuable could not have been ignored by much traffic. When Daisy tired of it, I picked it up to discover that the case held a small dull knife. Another Davy Crockett must have been here a long time ago. Now in the wild and poor at directions I had to quickly find an easy approach to being able to get back to this spot. Daisy made a right at the river, so I tried to remember “river on the left, levee on the right.” I quickly concluded, however, that if we were trying to get back it would be “river on the right, levee on the left”.
This was pretty confusing and I kept saying the phrases over and over to myself, but they became meaningless when I kept forgetting whether I was coming or going. I also considered what to do if we arrived in a spot so densely wooded that I wouldn’t be able to see the river or the levee. My old dog, Willy, was excellent at directions and I would just mindlessly follow him through national forests, confident that he would get me back, but Daisy has logistical instincts more impaired than mine.
I was busy keeping an eye on her as she excitedly pulled me through her new playground. I’d get small breaks when she’d find smelly things worthy of close scrutiny and that day learned that she would eat anything she could get to. Alive or dead,
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small furry creatures were her French restaurant. At this point I let her enjoy the new cuisine, primarily because I had no chance of getting them away from the soon to be one year old mistress of energy and willfulness, but I also had no desire to deny her pleasure. She was fortunate the first few years that she gorged herself, but after that it was evident that pursuing her culinary delights resulted in tape worms or diarrhea about half her engagements, at which point I started to make partially successful attempts at getting the bushy creatures away from her.
We followed the river, not taking any special note of the giant cottonwood and soon cut inland. There was tall vegetation at the sides of the winding road, resulting in an inability to see more than fifty feet ahead in most places, so that at every turn there was a surprise. I don’t think they would excite anyone other than we two, but we were very interested to see that one turn put us in a heavily treed area, the next mixed eight foot tall bushes with the trees, the next resulted in a five hundred foot sandy area populated only by ankle high clusters of tan weeds, etc. etc. Every few hundred feet warranted a new description and I wondered which type of topography was preferred by the coyotes. We hadn’t yet seen any and I was feeling more relaxed, as we had covered more than a mile, without being joined by the predatory opportunists. I prefer
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vultures over killers, thinking that they should have found some other way to make a living, like going back to school.
The well-worn obvious thin brown path soon became too mundane to be tolerated by our exotic tastes, so we got off it and attempted to navigate the lumpy fields and thickets. Daisy had no trouble whatsoever, but I had particular problems trying to pass through the woody areas with low branches, broken limbs on the ground and thorny immature Russian olives, Daisy not fazed by my “command” of “slow, slow.” Time would tell that these were words she must have considered obscene, as she never included them in her vocabulary. Years later, after being pulled over for the twenty-eighth time I got an idea. I would stop her, put my foot on her chain and make her sit through my lecture of; “This is New Mexico. Nothing here moves. It will be there when you get there. We’ve got all ******* day.” At least that’s what I believed at the time, but not sharing my opinion, as soon as my foot would release the chain, Daisy would continue at her frantic pace.
Eventually, her foray turned more inland and utilizing the opportunity afforded by her going, in effect, sideways I convinced her to move in the direction of Romero Road, this time taking the trail in sight of the levee, away from the river, through ground never before touched by human feet, though we did find some McDonald’s and Wal-Mart bags, junk wood, cinder
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blocks, broken ceramics, a television set and barbed wire. When we were again within sight of Romero Road, we circled a cluster of eight foot Apache Plumes heavy with one inch white roses and were startled by him.
He was probably about forty years old, nondescript to a fault and was standing motionlessly there with a brown poodle on his or her haunches. His most notable features were his perpetual maniacal grin and his beaming moist eyes, perhaps thinking; “Kill and eat. Kill and eat.”
Considering it a rude gesture to be hiding in the bushes, I sarcastically said; “Hi,” bringing Daisy to a full stop ten feet away from him.
He said nothing and continued the grin and stare, possibly indicating high rank in the Gawk family.
She wanted to meet his poodle, yet something told me that we didn’t want to get closer. As I struggled with Daisy, I angrily said; “What do you want?”
He stared, the unchanging grin apparently tattooed on his face. Thoughts of the Joker came to mind, but at least this one was not wearing lipstick.
With difficulty I pulled Daisy around him, wanting to get back on the way to Romero. He turned toward us as we passed, changing nothing but his foot position. I was both angry and
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scared, so when I got Daisy moving again and we were twenty feet away, I said; “What the **** is wrong with you?”
He stared and grinned. I should have already known his repertoire of possible responses.
With the small caveat that this person may be deaf and dumb, I would contend that this appears to be someone who has or should be frequenting a psychiatrist’s office, though I’m not sure which side of the desk he should occupy.
Our first Corrales Bosque acquaintance would continue to haunt us in precisely the same manner for about a year. Maybe he escaped to here from an intolerable confinement elsewhere.
We would have the experience of seeing his wordless plastic grin and perfectly still poodle once a week and they were to become the poetic symbols of my home town. In retrospect I wish that I had determined if the unmoving poodle was among the living, but at the time feared a possible surprise swift attack.
Exhausted, hungry and exhilarated at surviving the wild, Davy and the tigress made their way home, to the safety of development dogs; vicious, loose, grinning and staring. I couldn’t wait to leave again tomorrow morning.
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