June 7 - 13th

June 7, 2005

Today I was looking forward to having an easy afternoon back at the cabin. You know, put away my groceries, make some lunch, check on Dutch Hen and my garden, maybe finish the novel I’ve been gobbling up. I’d gone to John Daniel’s reading and thoroughly enjoyed it, and met Dave and Stephanie Reed, long-time friends of the Boydens. I’d had a nice Italian dinner in Ashland. I’d taken Gus to the dog park. I’d gotten a haircut. But after a night in a hotel and two days spent in town, I was ready to get back to the hummingbirds and my view of Rattlesnake Ridge. No cars, no stoplights, no Wal-Marts, no people. Just tall firs, easy breezes, serpentine mists, and daisies. Lots of daisies. Oh, and rain. Lots of that, too, though I was hoping for a sunny afternoon. The ride was all but uneventful—the usual washboard ruts and zillion curves and here and there a shoulder that drops off into some treacherous abyss. And then, on the road about a mile from the upper gate, I saw a bear. Huge, light-brown, moving faster than my car, he ran in front of me for maybe twenty feet, and then dashed left into the woods. It was the high point of my day. Better than the chai tea with soy milk I’d had at Dutch Brothers. Better than the song I was listening to on my new CD from Paste. Now I was even more excited to get back to life at the cabin, feeling restful with the thought that even among black bears and all the other wildlife out here, I have the comfort of my domestic economy. I’d put away my stuff, have a tuna sandwich, chop some kindling, and make a fire. That’s what I’d do. Then I got out to unlock the first gate and heard it. A hiss like a mosquito in my ear, like a balloon not tied tight enough, like a rubber raft that’s passed over a sharp stick. But my tires all looked inflated. Water hissing on the engine block, I told myself, and then locked the gate behind me and drove on. At the next gate my front driver’s side tire looked a little lower. I could still hear the hiss. I shut off my engine. “Ruh-roh, Raggy!” I said to Gus in my best Scooby Doo, but in my head I was swearing like a sailor. My tire was wheezing out its last breath like some expiring relic of a Good Year commercial. I’d gotten a flat. I’d gotten a damned flat. Yes, a flat, the misfortunate event I had worried about for nearly a year. Late night visions of a flat tire and a dark, dark road in the middle of a vast and desolate forest. I still had plenty of pressure, though, and so I hurried on until I pulled to a stop on the most level piece of road I could find, right smack in front of the cabin. By the time I put my meats away, the tire had sagged like the jowls of a bloodhound. Dead, flat, depleted of air. So much for my easy afternoon.

I had sense enough to eat the tuna sandwich before undertaking the tire-change. “Relax,” I told myself. “It’s only a flat tire, and you’re lucky it happened so close to the cabin. Had it happened half-way home you might really have been screwed.” I’ve changed a dozen flats in my life. No big deal. And I’d specifically bought the CR-V because it had a full-size spare. At least I wouldn’t have to drive all the way out next time on some chocolate donut. No, I’d pop that full-size spare on there in a jiffy and go settle down to finish the novel. But I hadn’t really familiarized myself with the jack mechanism of the CR-V, had I? So I took out the manual and like the rational and self-reliant type I pretend I am I read the instructions: How to Change a Flat Tire. The first step was to locate the jack and the lug-nut tool, which, the manual illustrated for me, would be secured in a small compartment in back of the car. Turn knob counter-clockwise. There, the jack. Okay. But where’s the freaking lug-nut tool? There was no tool. There was no tool! And now I was cursing the tool at Tenafly Honda who’d sold me the car. How was I supposed to remove lug-nuts without the lug-nut wrench tool? I flung down the jack and searched every possible hidden compartment I could find. No lug-nut wrench tool. Yes, I was damned lucky the tire went flat at the cabin and not out along the desolate stretch BLM road 19-77-162.3, or whatever the government calls it, bleak road of my nightmares and populated with hungry cougars and marauding bears.

Luckily, the Boyden hermitage has the dubious sobriquet of DHIT, the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology. There are tools all over the place. Sure, they might be half-broken yard sale wrenches, ancient pipe cutters, dull hacksaws. But they’re tools, right? The tool box yielded nothing resembling a lug-nut wrench. But I did find a socket wrench set out in the mudroom. The handle on the ratchet was about five inches long, offering at best about five pounds of torque. The typical car lug-nut is tightened with eighty pounds of torque, and anyone who’s ever changed a flat knows that when mechanics put a tire on a car they use an air-powered Uzi-looking gizmo that affixes a nut to a screw so tightly it might as well be welded on. But the five-inch ratchet was better than my bare hands. On my way back out, I cast a glance at the green tool shed. Smelling of motor oil and kerosene and moldering pesticide dust, this tool shed houses various hand-tools: axes, wedges, picks, rakes, saws and loppers, most of them broken and repaired by some previous graduate of DHIT. I almost never find what I’m hoping to in that cool, dark, bituminous shed. But I opened the door and there on the shelf the first thing I saw was a lug-nut wrench tool, the same exact color and texture of the cheap-ass jack I’d found stowed in the CR-V. Had I taken the lug-nut wrench tool out of my car when I first arrived and placed it in this gloomy shed? It’s possible, I guess. Whether this was standard Honda manufacturer part or not, it was just as flimsy as it should’ve been, handle welded to socket and designed to break at the least amount of torque, the way all car manufacturer lug-nut wrench tools are fashioned. So now I was armed with two useless tools and feeling all too much like a useless tool myself.

Following what the manual said, I took off the spare and positioned the jack in the proper jacking notch, handily identified on the Honda CR-V by a small arrow. Next step. Loosen lug-nuts on the flattened tire. The instructions might just as well have ordered me to pull my molars out with a pair of tweezers. I pushed, I pulled, I cursed, I hammered. I sprayed WD-40. Pushed and pulled and hammered again. I cursed and cursed and cursed. Nyet, nada, nein. Those weren’t lug-nuts. They were steel extensions of the axle, and they weren’t budging. Hercules couldn’t budge them. The Incredible Freaking Hulk would be hard-put to get even a squeak out of one of them. What I needed was a bigger hammer, something with some weight to it. In the wood shed, I knew, I’d left a huge maul. That would do. But it wouldn’t. It didn’t. Another ten minutes and all the maul had done was bend the handle on the fortuitously found lug-nut wrench tool. I sat there a long time. I had enough food in the cabin to last me a few weeks. If I couldn’t change the damned flat, I’d call someone—John Daniel, Bradley, Dave Reed. They weren’t exactly local, but surely someone could bring me out a decent wrench. Maybe a new tire, too, because now I was thinking about the scenario of getting a second flat. What would I do then? I wracked my brain for options and then I chose the one that any good son would: I called my dad. My dad’s never been the most handy of guys. Sure, as a younger man he tried to do home repairs, changing a door knob or a light bulb. I learned to curse from him, his head buried beneath a sink or behind a washing machine. But I’ve seen him use a screwdriver. Bob Vila, he isn’t. Perhaps recognizing this shortcoming, he befriended guys who were Bob Vila. His friend John Tobin once changed the timing belt on my ’69 Cutlass, using his own tools and no instructions in his own garage on the coldest day of the year. Another of my dad’s friends, Stanley Lachut, could take apart the space shuttle and put it back together again. So I left a message with my dad asking him to find out from one of these self-taught mechanic geniuses how to loosen stuck lug-nuts.

Torque. The word of the day. a force that produces a wrenching effect. Force being the key word. Pounds of pressure. That’s what I needed. And how many pounds do I weigh? For the last six years or so I’ve hovered around 150, give or take five pounds. Add to that weight the force of gravity and the thick Vibram sole of a hiking boot, and you’ve got your homemade torque wrench. This I conjectured, and this I would try. I found a long, open-end, ¾-inch wrench in the DHIT toolbox. Position on lug-nut, climb atop wrench, hold on to hood, and…. First there came a squeak, a shriek, a metallic cry that made my teeth ache. Then I was being lowered to the ground on the little elevator of the wrench and the loosened lug-nut. And before my dad could call me back, I’d put on the spare, affixed the flat tire to the back door of the Honda, put away the tools, and changed out of my muddy clothes. It was later than I would have liked it to be, but I made a fire in the stove, put water on for tea, and retrieved the almost-finished novel from the nightstand.

The registrar may dispute it, but I think this one earns me three credits toward my degree at the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology.


June 9, 2005

I took my first plunge in the pond today. The morning was warm and sunny and I was sweaty from two hours of mowing the meadow. Newts and all, I dove in, and it felt great. I didn’t stay in long, because Gussie came scratching at me with his big bear claws. What I need is an inflatable raft, one he can’t pop. The dragonflies were a sight. Bright red ones, neon blue ones, and the usual black and white ones. I also saw a three-foot garter snake and a frog bigger than my fist.

Late in the afternoon I was sitting on the deck icing a bee sting on my big toe (what I get for gardening in sandals) and there were seven hummingbirds dancing around one of the feeders. See poem below for story.






Seven Hummingbirds


at the feeder, peeping for the sweet
water and making wind on my face
as I stand among them feeling envious

of their games. They seem so happy
to be dipping, reversing, trading spaces,
clapping one another’s wings in mid-air.

They hover inches from my face.
Two brush my hand and I understand
I’m there to catch one and hold it,

because I need to, because I know I can.
And it’s easier than I would have thought.
Fingers spread beneath the feeder,

just a matter of pressing index to thumb,
and I’ve got one, a rufous male, feathers
the color of coffee with cream, a clean

splash of orange at the neck, black legs
as thin as a pencil’s lead, and the wings
fluttering, stymied, like a bee at a screen.

Cupped in my palm, his eyes look a little
wild, his feathers ruffled. His tiny heart
labors like loneliness. So I let it go.


(Note: I actually caught two hummingbirds. The first was the male rufous, who I didn’t photograph. With him, I held his foot and he fluttered and then just sat on my finger. Then I let him go. He’s a very aggressive bird, knocking all the others away from the feeder. He’s a character. The second was a female, and that’s the one you see in the photograph in my hand. I was very gentle with her, and held her long enough to snap the photo and then let her go. She was back at the feeder in about thirty seconds. Good action. The poem works better if it’s the male I hold. I think the reason’s obvious.)


June 10, 2005

It turns out that Dutch Hen doesn’t have coccidiosis but a case of egg-binding, which can be just as fatal. I’m quite sad about this. Apparently it’s fairly common, especially in fat birds, and she’s a bit overweight for her age. The egg has been stuck inside her for five or six days. I’ve tried twice to help her out by oiling her vent, a kind of gynecological task I’d rather not describe, but it hasn’t helped. I’ve also tried getting her to move around the yard, figuring that a bit of adrenaline might help her push it through. But the egg is just too big for her to lay. A clerk at The Grange Co-op, a great nursery/feed/pet store in Grants Pass, set me straight on her problem. He said the telltale sign of coccidiosis is blood in the stool, which I haven’t seen. She looks healthy except for the fact that she almost never leaves the nest now, and that she’s dragging her back end low to the ground. The clerk said it sounds like a classic case of egg binding, and I think he’s right. He printed out a web site explaining the condition, and gave me the pages, and that’s where I learned about oiling the vent. The site also said that sometimes the bird can be saved if the egg is visible and if you poke a hole in it and let the yolk and whites leak out, like making Easter eggs. The hen can then pass the shell by crushing it. But I don’t see the egg. It’s deeper inside. I feel a bit more helpless as each day passes. I’d take her to a vet, but vets generally don’t deal with chickens, and even if they did, I don’t think the bill would be worth it. I keep going to the coop a few times a day hoping to see her moving about and a big egg in the nest, but each time she’s just lying there looking like she’s trying to lay an egg. I’m not too hopeful.

I engaged in another DHIT project today: fixing the utility sink faucet. The hot knob hasn’t been closing properly. Sometimes water continues to come out, and you have to close the knob two or three times to get it to stop completely. Well, this is annoying, and it was time to fix it. But I should have known before I began, that with any plumbing job you usually start by making matters worse. I shut off the valve beneath the sink and took the knob off. I inspected the washer, and it looked fine. The screw holding the knob in appeared to be a wood screw, not the right kind at all. So I went up to the upper house tool shed to see if I could find proper screws and a new washer. I struck out with the latter. There are a hundred washers up there, but none of them the right size. I found an old bathroom faucet and took the two screws out of the handles. Then Gussie and I skedaddled back to the project. Of course, the screws were too big. So I reassembled the knob and screwed it back in with the same old wood screw, which will have to do until I get to the hardware store. Apparently, just moving the washer helped. The water turned off just fine. Then I heard the drips. Uh-oh, leaky! Upon close scrutiny, it appeared that the hoses going from the valves to the knobs beneath the sink were both dripping. How this happened, I don’t know. I barely moved anything back there, and the sink is screwed to the floor. But this is Murphy’s Law of Plumbing, and ours is not to wonder why. I shut the water off again and tried repairing the cold water hose first by using a little plumbing tape around the white plastic thread into which the hose screws just below the knob assembly. It leaked even more. I took the tape out and tightened without tape. No leaky. Pat on back. The hot water hose was leaking at the screw clamp where the hose connects to the valve. The only thing stopping me from fixing it was that there was no room to fit a screwdriver behind the sink to loosen the clamp. So I unscrewed the sink from the floor and pulled it out a few inches. Now I could reach the other clamp, the one on the hot water hose. I loosened it, cut a half inch off the hose, and refitted the clamp. No leaky. Screwed legs back in floor and, voila, sink like new. I even inserted a custom-cut brass screen in the spout for a nicer flow. One-half credit toward my DHIT degree.

I harvested my first head of lettuce today. For a few weeks now I’ve been enjoying the mesclun mix (mostly mustard greens) and a leaf or two each night from one of the heads of red romaine or the green leaf lettuce, but this was my first full head.

You plant a tiny starter, water it for weeks, mulch it, weed around it, let it soak up sun, and this is what you get.

It filled up a gallon-size Ziploc and will give me salads for a few days at the very least.

I’m looking forward to picking the red romaine, too. Here’s what they look like:


My cukes and squash are about three inches long, though the cutworms have done a number on the latter. Here’s one they haven’t gotten to:


I’ve been doing some decent writing. This week I put aside a sixteen-page short story I’ve been laboring over, a story close to its end but which the more I think about the less I like. So this week I started something new. I’m twenty-two pages into it, and I’m hoping it’ll take off into something good. I don’t want to say more for the fear I’ll jinx it.

My back aches from too much sitting on the orange couch. The recliner offers more back support, but during the day when the sun’s coming through the window it throws too much glare on the laptop screen and it drives me nuts. The best place for writing is on the orange couch out of the glare. I can keep the computer plugged in to the solar inverter from there, too. But, oy, my aching back. I fear I’m getting curvature of the spine.

June 12, 2005

Sharen’s birthday today. Thirty-five years old. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and she was hanging by the Subins’ pool—one of her favorite places, one of her favorite people. I’m happy for her. I sent her a bottle of scotch, Johnny Walker Blue. In her old age she’s become a bit of a connoisseur. What she really needs is a jet-pack; she’s always on the go. One days she’s in Batavia, the next in Brooklyn, the next up in Maine for a wedding, the next down in Rhode Island visiting her folks. She’s put about 60,000 miles on the Mini already. Slow down, I want to say. But she seems happy.

I saw cougar scat on the road near the pond this afternoon. A big pile full of bones and blood and fur and other nasty, undigested gunk. I’d walked up the road to clear the screen at the stream dam and to remove fallen branches from the road. But after seeing the scat, I kept looking over my shoulder and panicking every time Gussie went bounding off into the woods. It’s creepy to know there’s a huge cat out there, one who’s well aware of the presence of this human and this tasty-looking dog. Then I remembered the smell of carrion that Neil and I had sniffed one evening walking up to the pond. I think the cougar killed a deer somewhere near the pond and has been feeding on it. The smell is gone now, so the cat either finished the kill or carried it off to some other location. As scary as it is, I’d really like to see this huge feline.


June 13, 2005

Gussie and I spent a perfect day down at the river yesterday, a good five hours of lying about, swimming, fishing and fetching sticks (well, Gus fetched the sticks). I had one tentative strike from a half-pounder, but it looked pretty small. I think the fly was too big for it. We saw about a dozen rafts go floating by. One guy said, “Shouldn’t you have a boat or something?” I smiled and gave the enigmatic reply, “Or something.” It felt like a real summer day. No squalls. No cool breezes. Just warm and sunny. I’d brought along a beach umbrella, so we had some shade. Here’s what our shady nest looked like:

The only thing I was lacking (my own forgetfulness) was a book to read. But the river is so clean and sparkling and beautiful, I was content to follow its story.


After dinner last night Gussie leapt off the floor barking, and I looked out and saw a black lab in the road. At first I thought some hikers had wandered up here from the river and that I’d have to go out and politely as them to leave. Then I stepped out on the deck and saw a family—mom, dad, sis and junior—carrying Pulaski tools and heaving with sweat. There was a second black lab, too. I knew right away who it was: the Cummins family, the folks who bought the crazy castle up the road so they could raise and ride horses there. I went out to greet them, and we chatted for a while. They knew about the writing residency, and I think they’d spoken to Bradley. They were curious to see the river (oddly, there’s no trail from their place) and hadn’t known what to expect, so had brought along the Pulaski tools. I told them they wouldn’t need them, that the trail was clear all the way to the river. I’m sure Bradley’s told them that the homestead is private property, that we don’t want horse traffic coming through here, and that no horses are allowed on the Rogue River Trail. I told them I enjoy my solitude and like it quiet. We exchanged phone numbers. It’s good to have another contact out here, though they’ll probably only be coming in on weekends. Then one of their labs took Gussie’s bone and a scrap ensued, Gussie doing quite well for himself and winding up atop the lab in alpha dog position, teeth snarling. We broke it up, gave Gussie back his bone, and off the Cummins went to check out the river. An hour later, nearly dark, Gussie announced their return. I waved from the deck, and they walked on up the road. They seem like nice folks.