At The volcano.

When Mrs A. and I first got married we took three weeks for our honeymoon, and went to Morelia, Mexico and stayed with my Uncle Ben and Aunt Pat. It was a wonderful time. Uncle Ben is a Professor of History at the College of Michoacan in Morelia. Since both my wife and I are History buffs, it was a magical time, as we had our own bilingual driver and tour guide. When we got there there was an international conference of Humboldt scholars at the college. We were invited to the closing ceremonies, and got invited along on a trip the next day.

Wilhelm Humboldt is the guy that the Humboldt current is named after as well as the Humboldt Valley in California. He was an internationally known explorer and diarist. 200 years previously, he had come through Mexico with the intent of visiting an active volcano. After the conference, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his explorations, the people from the conference were going to take a trip and climb that same volcano.

We took the air conditioned Department of Agriculture bus as far as the town of La Huacana, where we stopped for lunch and changed vehicles. That's Uncle Ben in front of the bus. The bus was a trip. As Mrs A. put it, "All we need is a chicken and a pig, and it would be the bus from "Romancing the Stone" . We took off out into the jungle and went to the end of the road, where we left the bus. Some of us hires horses from the locals for the trip. That again is uncle Ben on the horse.


The University had payed the local villagers to feed us dinner, so we set up right in the middle of the road and they brought out a big old tin washtub full of the best Chicken Mole' I have ever eaten.

I was wandering around eating baked corn meal wrapped in banana leaves when I heard a noise coming out of the jungle. Now we were at the end of the formal road, but I heard a vehicle coming. A truck came out of the jungle, and it was loaded with people in black fatigues and carrying AK47s. I had visions of the headline back at home "LOCAL MAN SLAIN BY BANDITOS IN MEXICO"

I tried to fade back into the crowd, but when you are approaching 6", and the crowd is 5' 6", fading is difficult. The truck came roaring up and the armed men jumped out. They seem agitated that we were blocking the road. There was a very heated discussion, but I finally figured out that they had been invited to join us for dinner.

They put their guns in the back of the truck, and pulled up chairs and chowed down.

It turns out that they were Federales who had been patrolling for Banditos out in the jungle and were on their way home. So we ate Chicken Mole' and drank a little Mescal and had a good time.

Turkeytale

We raised all kinds of things on the farm. It was primarily a dairy farm, but we raised chickens for the eggs and also for meat, pigs for the meat, cats to keep the rodent population down, dogs and horses for amusement.
One year we decided to try raising turkeys, just for the heck of it. At that time I believed domesticated laying hens were the stupidest creatures on the face of the Earth. I was wrong. Turkeys have to be the holder of that dubious honor. A creature could not be stupider and still live.
We ordered a dozen turkeys from the supplier when we made our spring order for chickens, and they arrived at about the same time. When they ship the chicks, they throw in an extra, because they figure that one will die from shipping and handling. In this case all 13 arrived sound and healthy. The instructions told us we had to teach the turkeys how to drink from whatever water dispenser we were using, because otherwise they would drown. You were to hold their head in the water until they swallowed and then take it out. Repeat once, and they got the idea. One of the persistent folk tales is that turkeys will look up at the sky with their mouths open during a thunderstorm and die. I cannot attest to the truth of this, as we never lost any turkeys that way, but it strikes me as likely, seeing how dumb they are.

My little sisters decided that they would make a pet out of the extra turkey. Of course the named him "Lucky" and he had the run of the yard. Come slaughter time in the fall, Lucky got passed over. He grew to be huge. And mean. The side yard was his territory, and he defended it fiercely. One of his major sources of amusement was to terrorize the dog. The dog at the time (Tschindi) was a half border collie, half coyote, and was the best mouser we ever had on the place. The turkey ambushed him almost daily. Seeing as the turkey outweighed the dog by about 20 pounds, it was a pretty one sided battle. The turkey also ambushed anyone who wasn't paying attention. After getting ambushed a couple of times myself, every once in a while I would amble casually out into the side yard, and when Lucky was about ready to pounce, I would turn around and give him a good swift kick, and then run away before he could recover.

Down at the end of the driveway we had a power drop which ran the welder and a 120 volt outlet for an old beat up refrigerator. We kept fresh eggs in the refrigerator, which were for sale for 50 cents a dozen. My mother raised the laying hens, fed us all the eggs we needed and kept the "egg money" for little extras for her and the girls. There was a box next to the refrigerator to deposit the money, so anyone could come by at any time to get eggs even if we weren't there. We trusted people to leave the money, and to the best of my knowledge no one ever stiffed us. If we were home, they would usually come by the house and have a glass of milk or a beer and visit a spell.

We were off at church on Sunday when someone came by to get a dozen eggs, and when we got home we noticed that the turkey was moving mighty slow. We went off on a berry picking expedition up Pack River, and picked several gallons of huckleberries.

When we got home we were greeted with a gruesome site. There were feathers guts and blood all over the side yard, and in the middle of them, chewing on a bone was the dog. He had figured out that Lucky was hurt and couldn't defend himself. He not only killed the turkey, he mutilated him, There was no piece left bigger than a pack of cigarettes. He had paid that turkey back for every peck and every wing slap he had ever gotten, and looked mighty please with himself.

My family ran a dairy farm for about 50 years until progress and modern agribusiness caught up with it. Don't get me stated on how Corporate America has squeezed the life out of the small dairyman.
Being around cows all those years has not endeared the bovine species to me. When you have spent some years at the aft end of hay processing plants, you begin to think of the animal as not much more than a means of producing fertilizer. In the words of a famous Japanese industrialist "Whether you are building rocket ships or taking a dump the basic process is the same. Raw materials go in one end, and the end product comes out the other."
Cows are one of the stupidest animals on the face of the Earth., which leads to


COWTALE I

Spook was a weird cow. Skittish as heck. She liked to sneak up and peer around corners or through windows. It could be startling as heck in mid winter to be out in the milking parlor and catch movement out of the corner of your eye and look up at the window to see this huge eye rolling and peering in at you. She didn't just look, she PEERED and rolled her eye. It was pretty unnerving.
Somewhere in the family is a 22 Winchester pump rifle, 1920's vintage. A sweet gun that has had a lot of ammunition put through it over the years. It has a home made stock, made out of Birch. Spook is part of the reason it has that stock.
One winter we had a porcupine that decided to pay us a visit. Problem one was that it had come to the barnyard in search of salt. There was a plentiful supply of salt on the handles of the barnyard implements, like the pitchforks and the manure shovel. We tried to discourage this by taking the juice from a bottle of canned Chilis Torridos and painting the handles to the tools. It was pretty effective, and is a remedy I have used over the years to keep dogs from chewing on things. The porky no longer was chewing on the handles, but he was still coming around the barn. The way we found out was when we were awakened in the middle of the night by a cow bellowing in pain. It was spook, and at her most curious, she had investigated the porky. She must have irked him, because she ended up with a nose full of quills. We had to take her into the milking parlor and get her head in the stanchion and get all the quills out. Porcupine quills are barbed so that they will not pull back. Most of them we pushed through her lips, but some we had to take a very sharp knife and run it along side the quill and free the quill. Spook was a little more than displeased with the proceedings, but we did manage to get it done, and escape with no more than some bruising. That was the first time.
When it happened to Spook the second time, it was worse. In fact she had a couple of quills in her tongue. I was in favor of shooting her, as a critter that downright dumb should not be allowed to live, but calmer spirits prevailed and we went through the procedure again.
The conclusion we came to was that the porcupine needed to go away. Permanently. With prejudice.
So we staked ourselves out in the barn and waited. Along came Mr. Porcupine. Uncle Fred Shot him, and he turned around and ambled away. Shop him again. He kept on going. Shot him again, and again. In fact emptied the 15 shot tube into him, and he was still ambling along. Finally Uncle Fred hit him over the head with the stock of the rifle. The stock broke, but it did the job.
We salvaged the quills, because they make nice decorations and can be used in tying trout flies. Left with the carcass, we wondered how Porcupine tasted, so we skinned him out and cooked up a haunch.
That was the foulest tasting piece of meat I have ever tasted. Old Mr. Porky had been eating the inner bark of pine trees for some time, and the taste had been infused into the meat. Sorta like eating meat marinated in Pine Sol. While it didn't make up sick, it will never make it on to the main menu.

COWTALE II

Most dairy cows do not have a real strong mothering instinct. When they give birth, the next day you take the calf away and put it in the calf pen and raise it separate from the mother. She will be a little confused and irritable for a day or so, but quickly forgets.
Not so with Angie. Angie had real strong mothering instincts, and when we took her calf away, she was not just irritable, she was downright pissed. If you had to go out in the barnyard for any reason, you double-checked to make sure where she was. She had chased people around a couple of times.
My older brother Larry and I were going to go down to the creek in back of the barn and do a little fishing. I think he was nine and I was eight. We checked out back of the barn, and Angie was not in site, so we headed across the barnyard. When we were out in the middle, we hear this bellow behind us, turn around, and here she comes. Angie had never been dehorned, so there was a very real possibility we could get hurt bad. Larry ran one direction and I ran the other. He ran for the gate, and I ran for the hay wagon. There was a piece of barbed wire across the open gate, and it hit Larry neck high, and took the feet right out from under him. It cut his heck pretty bad, so he was bleeding and screaming his lungs out. I made it safely to the hay wagon. Everyone came running at the sound of the screaming, and they bundled Larry up and ran him in to the Doc.
Which left me stranded on the hay wagon. All afternoon.
Angie would go inside the barn, and after I waited a couple of minutes, I edged to the ground, I got about four steps away from the wagon, and here she came, chasing me back. This happened a couple of times before I figured out that she was going in and peering out through the slats in the barn so she could catch me when I tried to get down. So I gave up for a while. She got tired of waiting for me to get down, so she went out into the pasture a little was, and started feeding, but she was keeping one eye on me. She managed to rush in and chase me back on to the hay wagon a couple of times. The afternoon was warm, and I got almighty thirst up there on the hay wagon.
It wasn't until close to dinner time that someone wondered "Has anyone seen Al?"