Kelsey's Imp

Now we are twelve and have perks.

We brought Fonzie home from his cage at a cat show in 1999. We were there just to gawk, not intending to bring anyone home with us, since we had just moved into our new place (soon to be named "Ft. Harrington"), already had three cats and had just gotten our first dog a couple of months before, and didn't really need something new to deal with.

But then we saw this imp in a cage. He had been brought there by people from a cattery in Southern California, but only to keep his Abyssinian littermates company because he wasn't at all show quality. When we first saw him in his cage, his area was deserted because his companions and owners were off being judged in various other venues. We waited until his one of his owners came back, and we asked how much she would ask for him.

We went home shortly thereafter, our checking account $50 emptier and our hearts, as it would turn out, immeasurably fuller. His name was "Fawn-do" after his coat color, but that wouldn't do, so we modified it a little -- not too much, since he was old enough to associate the "Fawn" sound with himself -- to "Fonzie."

When we got back to his new house and opened his cardboard box, he scuttled under the big bed, as was to be expected. The other cats, Boo, Max, and the imperial Oolie, showed mild interest that something might have scuttled under there, but didn't follow. Our new dog, though, put his nose right under the bed, curled tail wagging rapidly.

We feared that he might get his schnozz shredded, or that the new cat would be freaked out by the first dog part he had ever seen, but neither happened. What did happen was that Fonzie came right out from under the bed and greeted Kelsey with a cat-bow: a stretch with the front legs extended. Kelsey was taken aback, but not offended, just curious.

Fonzie was smitten, and remains so to this day, a dozen years later.

Fonzie and Kelsey as youngsters in May, 2000.

It was pretty much a one-way love affair for the next decade, with Fonzie clearly having a fondness for the yellow dog that he never showed (or shows) for any of the other four-footed creatures. He used to follow Oolie around, and would actually actively learn behaviors from The Black Freighter*, but respect and fondness are not the same thing, even for a cat.

Kelsey, though, is an aloof dog, probably predisposed to that by the Akita genes in his mix. While he would tolerate Fonzie's down-the-hall dance ahead of him in greeting, he never actively sought the cat out for anything. But that is starting to change.

Fonzie is now our oldest cat, and he has begun to enjoy a perquisite that other elders of our pride have had: he can go outside with us from time to time. Like Boo before him, in his elder years we are confident that he won't wander outside the Fort's perimeter. (Oolie had us believing that was also true for him for a while in his later years until he found out that he could get to the road via the sluiceway under the barn. I found out about that when I arrived home one day to find him sitting calmly at the end of the driveway, watching cars and trucks speed past.)

Oolie at the potting shed, 2007.

Kelsey and the spaniels, of course, are always with us outside. The spaniels generally are comfy on the deck furniture cushions, or in the shade. Kelsey, bless his heart, can never stop being the guard dog, and is almost always on vigilant patrol. When Jax isn't asleep outside, he plays Lieutenant Jax to Captain Kelsey, following him by a respectful dog-length.

Captain Kelsey and Lieutenant Jax on patrol.

But now Fonzie has joined the outside group for the summer. Last weekend, he became the Lieutenant on patrol with his big yellow pal. It was hilarious and heartwarming at the same time, as these photos (best viewed at a larger size by clicking on them) hint:

Checking scents from the North.

Here, I'll mark this rock for you...

... and I'll mark this for you, too...

... and I'll mark this for me.

Two of a kind.

Of that last photo, an internet acquaintance from the Ukraine via the "Flickr" photo service says, "They look like brothers." Yes, they do.

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* The instance of Fonzie learning something from Oolie that Diane and I still shake our heads over was this: Oolie was a very, very clever cat. One of the doors to our main bathroom is a sliding pocket door. One day, soon after we had moved here, I watched Oolie try to figure out how to open it -- and eventually, after about ten minutes of pulling and pushing on various parts of the door, he found that if he put a paw under the door, palm up, and gained purchase on the bottom with his claws, he could pull the door open. Fonzie eventually figured out the same trick, but only after watching Oolie do it several times. None of the other cats has ever figured it out.

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A Folly of Bow-Wows [UPDATED with higher-quality video]

Christmas Day this year was a very quiet one at Ft. Harrington. Some of the extended family will converge here tomorrow, but today it was just us and the four-feet. As always, distribution of presents (in this case, rawhide chews) to the children (in this case, dogs) was the highlight of Christmas. Rawhide chews are a special, special treat for Kelsey, Jax, and Emma, primarily because they never get them on any day but Christmas. That's because one of them (whom I will not embarrass by mentioning his name here in public) tends to steal the others' and hoard them.

(Video -- "Treats for the Canines," starring Kelsey, Jax, and Emma with a special guest appearance by Cooper-the-Giant-Kitty -- at the bottom of this post.)

It's a Ft. Harrington Christmas tradition that Emma winds up with no toys or treats because...

... her bratty brother steals everything of value.

Bow on the Bow-Wow

But enough of the mutts. This is MY blog, so what did I get? I'm sure everyone reading this is impatient to find out, right? I made out like a bandit, I did. Not only did I score the traditional Pendleton shirt and a great barn jacket, but my loving spouse also gifted me thusly:


I'm gonna spoon out a bowl of that corn relish and snuggle in with my Patti Smith books and just disappear for a whole day. Just as soon as my mouth heals from its Christmas Eve emergency extraction of a shattered tooth.

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Click for video -- "Treats for the Canines," starring Kelsey, Jax, and Emma with a special guest appearance by Cooper-the-Giant-Kitty.

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Note, for those who need it, on the title of this post: click here.

A Grave Post

Before Diane and I left for Ireland earlier this year, I posted an offer in this space to take photos while we were there for anyone who had a specific place or thing in mind. Our friend Ronnie Peterson took us up on that, as did a friend of mine over on Flickr.

Ronnie's request and its great benefits to us have been chronicled here earlier. Linda ("chocolatepoint" over on Flickr) asked thusly for something that proved, similarly, to be of more benefit to us (in the places we sought out that we might not otherwise have seen) than to her:

Thanks for the kind offer to take a photo that I might want. I don't have anything specific in mind. If you happen to roll by an interesting old cemetery, though, and feel like taking a few shots, I wouldn't mind seeing the photos. You know how I love old cemeteries and genealogy and such. Don't go out of your way, though!

Our ultimate response to Linda can be seen by clicking here, transporting you over to sharrington.net. The set that lives there includes, among others, these sights:

Passage to the heart of the Neolithic tomb at Knowth,

the 12th Century Dominican Priory ruins at Lorrha, far northern Tipperary,

the ancient monastic city at Clonmacnoise on the Shannon, and

Fury.

Once again, click here to view the full set.

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For No Other Reason Than That He's Still Here

This recent photo of Kelsey has gotten some positive reaction over on the "Flickr" photos arena, so I thought I'd pop it up here for my smaller circle of blog friends.

Kelsey, fresh from a laboratory victory over dire expectations, May, 2010.

Good dog. Yes you are.
Even if you are a geezer.

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Oh, for the Luvva Pete, I Don't Believe They Did This...

... again!

And to think, as I was going to bed last night, I was griping about the smell of wood smoke in the air from the nearby wildfire.

As the above frame from "Ihasa Hot Dog" gives away, we had a skunk incident last night here at Ft. Harrington. Mrs. Fort let the dogs out to do some business, as they requested, at about 2am. Kelsey then lit out into the darkness like a bolt toward the chicken run, with his faithful lieutenant Jax close behind him, and rotund Emma waddling along as quickly as she can behind them. Shortly thereafter, yelps from the dark. Shortly after that, the stench of skunk, mildly reminiscent of burning tires but orders of magnitude more revolting.

Kelsey, first to trouble as always, got a face and chest full, butt-blank ("point blank" just doesn't work in this context.) Jax got a little all over, and Emma was blessed with just a coy hint of an emetic perfume.

Since this has happened before -- at least four times before -- we were prepared, and all three got an immediate sponge bath of our current best remedy. It's a no-particular-ratio mixture of water, white vinegar, and baking soda that cuts the stench a lot, though not entirely. The mixture has advantages over other remedies: it's cheaper than commercial enzyme-based deskunkers, and it's made of stuff we always have on hand anyway, unlike our veterinarian's skunk bath of choice: Massengill douche. Contrary to legend, tomato juice doesn't work at all, and just leaves you with something else that you ultimately have to clean off your dog.

More effective than tomato juice.

Our vet, by the way, isn't shy about recommending over-the-counter human personal hygiene products in place of prescription veterinary remedies. At her suggestion, for example, we always have some Vagisil in stock to treat Emma's frequent ear-canal yeast infections.

As I say, this has happened before. The first time was three years ago, when skunks first moved into the hollow to take advantage of one of our neighbors' habit of leaving food outside for his cats. Unfortunately, the people who had to deal with that first episode were not Diane and me, but her sister Carolyn and brother-in-law Mel, who were doing us the huge favor of caring for Ft. Harrington while we were in Ireland. Lovely.

Carolyn still has a fondness for Kelsey, albeit from a distance (they live in Oregon), which may make it easier. She read here recently about Kelsey's favorite park, and sent this along the intertubes (the three pictures in it were taken nine days ago) :

Kelsey in the Park
verse by C. J. Meeks, photos by S. Harrington

Was there ever a dog so full of his doggieness as Kelsey in the park?
With plenty of room for a dog to run and jump and bark.

There are other dogs here in Kelsey's park.
So just so they know that Kelsey's been there he leaves his doggy mark.

The look on his face pleadingly begs, "Please, can't we stay until dark?"
"If not, please, won't there be another day in the park?"

That's really sweet, Carolyn. Thank you.

Mel and Carolyn with Kelsey when he was very, very young. Ft. Harrington, October, 2000.

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Dead Park Walking [UPDATED, July 24]

[Update, July 24:
As Brian notes in the comments, today's action by the State legislature has spared most of the California state parks from closure, if that ever was a serious possibility. Some State parks will almost certainly close, but lists I've seen of the ones on the Governor's plate of possibilities include only those that actually could be physically closed: museums, historical homes, and mines, for example. So it seems that "Kelsey's Park" -- our local Henry Cowell Redwoods -- is likely to remain available to him for at least a while longer.
Now I can get back to the business of worrying about my colleagues' jobs, my students' welfare, my community's ability to function, and the intelligence of my State's leaders.]

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California isn't just broke, it's broken.

How do you close a forest? How do you close a river?
Kelsey and me, 2001, Henry Cowell State Park

The state is in a state of financial collapse. The legislature and the governor are trying to address a deficit of staggering proportions. The numbers are numbing, and beggar attempts to fathom: currently, the figure is $26 billion dollars for the next year. To try to put that in perspective, it's almost twice the entire yearly expenditure on prisons, and almost half of the entire state annual spending on elementary through community college education, and one-third of its annual expenditures on health and human services. Any fix will involve massive reductions in services, and conjures up images of Dickensian despair among the poor.

Just how the State with the world's eighth-largest economy got itself into this horrid mess can be (and is) debated endlessly, but it all boils down to an initiative process which has written mandatory, large expenditures into the State constitution while also making revenue increases almost impossible. We've been heading toward this gargantuan train wreck for more than thirty years, and it's here.

My own job is in jeopardy, of course, since my salary as a community college teacher ultimately comes from the State's coffers. While the people of my local district have been very, very generous over the past few years, taxing themselves to the tune of half a billion dollars to fund capital improvements (including my incredible new planetarium), that largesse can only go to capital improvements -- it can't fund salaries. My department is in relatively good shape, since we teach huge classes... but the folks at the Titanic's stern were in relatively good shape, too, in the spring of 1912.

Kelsey helps his mistress around the circuit after surgery, Henry Cowell State Park, 2002.

Since crucial state functions like education, safety, and social services are about to fall into an abyss, I almost feel guilty writing what I'm about to. But I'll write it anyway.

Bliss, 2004, Henry Cowell State Park

At last look, California is planning to close 220 of its 279 state parks. This supposedly will save, over a two-year period, about two-tenths of a billion dollars, if one doesn't factor in additional expenses that trying to keep forests and beaches "closed" will entail. Among those 220 are the three parks in our part of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Big Basin (California's first state park with an awe-inspiring stand of thousands of years old Sequoia Sempervirens), Castle Rock at the crest of the mountains, and Henry Cowell Redwoods park in Felton.

That last one is what pierces my heart like a shiv, since it is Kelsey's favorite place in the entire world.

Shortly after we rescued Kelsey from the pound in 1998, we took him for a walk in Henry Cowell park. The joy he manifested on that first visit was thrilling: he didn't walk or run, he leapt from place to place along the path. Sniffing, peeing, pooping, bouncing, grinning... it was like he had found heaven after his puppyhood of neglect. The course we took through he park -- a roughly two-mile circuit through the hardwood forest and along the banks of the San Lorenzo river -- burned itself into his brain then, and he and I have followed that course countless times since.

A winter's walk, 2006, Henry Cowell State Park. Our friend Lucile jollies Kelsey, while Diane is tended by the spaniels.

On most of those trips along his circuit, it has been just him and me, and we traipse it a couple of times a month. Now eleven years old, he can tell when I'm even thinking about taking him to "Kelsey's Park," and his usual dour demeanor changes to giddiness. He will remain patient in the back seat as we drive, until we go past the turn that would take us to the vet, and then he begins trembling. As we turn in to the road to the park entrance, he whines a warble that he never does at any other time, and when we get out of the car, he becomes ecstatic. For a while. Then he becomes all business, sniffing every leaf along our well-known path, marking his specific spots until both tanks are empty, and even beyond that. He wades in the river for about a minute along the way, pauses respectfully when horses pass on the horse-trail part of our circuit, and ignores, for the most part, other people and dogs. He has business to do, you know, and doggy newspapers to read on the scents of the grasses and the leaves.

From a horseback vantage point, 2000, Henry Cowell State Park.

River dog, 2005, Henry Cowell State Park.

If and when the park is closed, I suppose we will find other places for special times -- but, at his advanced age, he will lose something that has been an integral part of his joy forever.

And so will I.

Closure of the parks pales so much compared to other losses that will befall this State that I can't bring myself to become too active in protesting them. Many of the poorest among us are about to be handed a slow-motion death sentence, not by lethal injection but by lethal abandonment. My students, for many of whom community colleges are the last, best hope not just for them but for their families, will lose that opportunity. My co-workers will lose their jobs. How dare I worry about what effect it will have on my dog?

I don't know. You try explaining it to him here in the evening twilight of his life. I can't.

His heaven.

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Kelsey's Excellent Encounter

Usually when we have a weekend BBQ for family here at Ft. Harrington, there are many, many people involved. On Saturday, June 27th, 2009, though, we had an unusually small gathering: just Grace-the-Granddaughter, her mom (Adrianne), and her uncle Adam.

Old yellow Kelsey generally has an absolute gas at family gatherings, tripping happily from one person to another until he's so worn out that he collapses. With fewer targets this time, though, for some reason he zeroed in on Adrianne as the object of his attention.

In this little set, we see him wooing her, greeting her, and, ultimately, settling in happily at her side.

What a suck-up my dog is.

Adrianne, Kelsey, and Grace. Kelsey starts by placing himself where he can't be ignored.

Kelsey sandwich! Excellent!

"Please, let me introduce myself!"

"... I am a dog whose refinement belies my breeding, my lady."

(It's interesting to note how he holds his ears in this set compared to how he does when he's at work.)

Kissing the back of the hand is customary, but Kelsey's doing pretty well for a dog, don't you think?

She's let me sit here! Oh, the ecstasy! Oh, the joy!
Oh, the damn' little suckup spaniel, horning in from the left. He always does that.

Settled in.

Little does Adrianne know it, but, at this instant, Kelsey would have followed her through the very gates of Hell. He's also actively guarding her now; note the position of his ears.

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Spring Pictures of My Dog

There are many, many animals here at Ft. Harrington. Three of them are dogs. Two of those, Emma and Jax, are special beyond expression, and are loved to an extent that would probably be considered obscene in poverty-ridden places.

But they are not My Dog, with a capital M and a capital D. That distinction goes to Kelsey and to Kelsey only. However, Kelsey is not cute by any stretch of the word's use, nor is he the product of multi-generations' planned breeding. He's a mutt, one found wandering in a pack in an industrial area eleven years ago. Taken to the nearest shelter, he wasn't given much chance of being re-programmed to be a good family pet.

Through a long series of co-incidences, though, he wound up in the high forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, in a place where he could be some of what he wanted to be, and sacrifice an acceptable amount of the other things: he could be a watchdog, a guardian, a protector... and a lesser member of a pack (not expected to be the alpha, which he was never cut out to be.)

His first two or three years here at Ft. Harrington were tough for all of us, but he eventually learned his place, and our place, and the place of all the other animals here. And so we all have enjoyed a decade of great, great joy: Kelsey in his place, and us in ours, and love and confidence and joy.

He doesn't get much play here, or over on Flickr, or on PicShers, because he's such a working part of our Fort. But he deserves more, so here are recent pictures of Kelsey-the-Dog: (click, please, on each of them to be taken to larger views):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/3337320944/

God bless you, Kelsey-the-Dog.

A Surprising Tree in a Place Where Trees Don't Surprise

This is the San Lorenzo Valley in California's Santa Cruz Mountains:

The trees you can see from this vista point along California Highway 9 are almost entirely sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwoods, and their magnificent height and abundance hides thousands of homes -- including Ft. Harrington, which is roughly in the center of this frame -- from view.

The view from this place a hundred years ago would have been very different. After the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 (which actually devastated most of the Bay Area, not just San Francisco), this land was almost entirely clear-cut to provide building materials for the great reconstruction. That means that essentially all of the trees you see in the above photo are juveniles in the reckoning of redwoods, only about a century old. Between 1920 and about 1960, as the second-growth redwoods were growing up, the shorter trees of the blanketing forest allowed some things to exist profitably that are now long gone: many swimming pools behind dams in creeks (because shorter trees allowed more sunlight to reach the ground) and even an airport (which is now the Boulder Creek Country Club's golf course), for example.

Part of a poster for the long-gone Boulder Creek drive-in movie theater from half a century ago -- when the re-growing forest was only about half as high as it is now. Two things that were snuffed out by the forest's re-growth are evident in its map: the airport and a big swimming pool. (Click on the image for a higher-resolution view.) Poster courtesy of Jeff Liebermann. Note that apostrophe abuse is not a new phenomenon.

Many of the trees in the photo at the top of this entry, when seen up close, are members of tight, circular groups. One such group is on the Ft. Harrington grounds:

The summer furniture and patio occupy the footprint of the surrounding redwoods' ancestor, the ancient giant that lives on in its offshoots.

The circle of trees in these groups are sprouts, or "suckers", from the roots of a truly ancient, mammoth, primordial redwood, which may have been thousands of years old when felled. The scale of our patio in this photo shows the trunk size of the ancestral giant. All of our neighbors in "Creepy Hollow" have at least one such circle of sprouts, and those sprouts themselves now are more than a hundred feet tall.

Hundred-foot tall trees, while they may be "juvenile," can still be a problem to those who live underneath them if they are not cared for. Redwoods tend to shed limbs as part of their growing process. Trouble is, the limbs they shed are typically as big as full-grown pine trees in other climes. (Adam, I'm sure, remembers very well how impressive such shed limbs can be when they hit the ground -- he was visiting during a winter storm in the first year or two of our living here when several of them shook the earth. The previous occupant of this place neglected her trees' care.) It's wise to have weakened limbs removed before they break off on their own. Intentionally-removed redwood limbs are called "maintenance expenses;" spontaneous fallers are called "widow-makers."

There are two different ways of thinning potential widow-makers that local arborists tend to use: selective thinning and "columnization."


The above photo shows three circles of second-growth redwoods: the one on our property whose base was shown above (left), one on our thoroughly irresponsible neighbors' property (center), and one on a good neighbor's property (right). Ours is pretty much indistinguishable from the reprobates' cluster, because our tree-caretaker's philosophy is to take only those limbs that pose a danger. His (and our) preference is to leave the trees looking as much like they naturally would as possible, and thus the appearance of our trees is pretty much like neglected ones'.

The right-hand clump shows the other way of caring for them: just shave everything up to the point where you'd better leave needles for survival. Our tree guy snortingly calls this approach "columnization," and, until two weeks ago, I never would have thought that this particular neighbor would go for that look.

But she did. Two weeks ago. Before that, her trees looked pretty much like ours.

I didn't ask her about it, because the opportunity never arose in passing, and, besides, that's the kind of thing we tend to leave each other alone about here in Creepy Hollow.

On Christmas Eve, Diane and I drove up to Pleasant Hill, a couple of hours away, to celebrate the holiday with Grace-the-Granddaughter, Adam, Adrianne, and a whole gaggle of the clan. We didn't get back until well after dark... and were then well and truly treated to what our neighbor had in mind when she had her trees "columnized." The next day, Christmas day, I took a series of photos from late afternoon to dark, that shows her plot:

Afternoon.

Evening.

Night.

What a HOOT! It's like suddenly having an illuminated Washington Monument plunked down in your little hollow! The lights extend well over a hundred feet up the tree (I know; I used a high-precision Fies Protractor for the measurement computations) and are visible throughout the neighborhood. She says that next year she may have the remaining, high-altitude branches festooned with lights, too, and I hope she does. Then it would be a hundred-foot arrow of lights pointing straight UP.

Meanwhile, the Ft. Harrington Christmas Tree was of much more modest scale:

More about Christmas will be posted here soon, but Christmas isn't really over yet. I'll leave you now with how Emma looked yesterday while presents were being opened:

Please click on the above images for higher-resolution versions, especially the ones of our neighbor's tree.