Friday Firesmith

**WARNING – GRAPHIC PICS AHEAD** Nothing an animal owner hasn’t seen at some point in their pets’ lives probably – but a warning none-the-less. -krisgo

If the internet isn’t your greatest source of information in rescue, you know the right people. I have a few dozen people I know in person who are experts, or at least have a lot of experience, in dealing with cats, dogs, and snakes. Most of these people are veteran owners and rescuers; some have been doing it all their lives. 

If the internet is your greatest source of information in rescue, you do not know the right people, and you need to stop. Don’t make life-and-death decisions for animals depending on you using information you found online. It might be good. It might not. But if you ask around, you’ll find most people in rescue will talk rescue with you.  

It’s why I’m writing this right now, in point of fact. 

My photos of Aqaba gathered no small amount of attention. It’s a good story, and so far, it’s a story heading towards a happy ending. Stray cat wanders up and is rescued by people who will be good to the cat. Who doesn’t love this? The devil is in the details. Aqaba was rescued only after Wrex mauled him. It was only then Aqaba allowed himself to wander into a trap and got to a vet before infection set in. 

Here’s photos of the wounds. 

Wrex just missed killing Aqaba. This isn’t Wrex’s fault because he’s a dog, and he lives in a nice, secure, fenced in area, and a cat got inside the fence with him and two other dogs. Wrex is older and slower, so this isn’t the disaster it might have been. 

Back in the world of social media, my friends, some of whom I know and love in person, began advocating I adopt Aqaba. My Dudes, I have been down this road before, the road that says love and training can change the inner workings of an animal’s instincts. I’ve seen it work. And I have seen it fail, and failure means an animal is dead. 

If your dog mauls an animal, you have the responsibility to heal that animal if you can. If you take an animal in, you have the responsibility to find that animal a safe, secure, and loving home. That is your obligation when you take on dogs that might get to and injure other animals. 

Right now, Aqaba is living in my bathroom. It is small, sparse, and no place for a cat to stay for an extended length of time. Aqaba loves it, right now, because there is food, water, and security. He’s a young cat. He needs socialization, companionship, and play. If I adopted Aqaba his life would be lived in a cell. A well stocked cell, but nevertheless a small place. 

If I adopted him, I would forever be watchful for an open door, or a cat bolting, or a dog trying to push in. Or Mom, at 85, making a mistake that might lead to greater tragedy than I can bear. 

No one in rescue has advocated me adopting Aqaba, and more than a few tell me that it’s a wonderful feeling idea, until something happens. 

They are correct. 

Fortunately, right after I finished writing this, someone contacted me about adopting Aqaba, and we’ll know soon where that leads. 

But know this, and know this well, rescue comes with hard lessons. Dogs kill cats, and dogs kill other dogs. You may or you may not be able to change the animal. You get to be wrong one time, and that’s going to get an animal killed. 

Take Care,

Mike

And Wrex

Back in late July, a cat arrived here at Hickory Head. I got a photo of a piece of the cat darting into the woods and assumed it was a feral that had drifted in and would be gone soon enough. 

My neighbors had seen the cat, too, but no one had gotten a real good look at it. Hickory Head is a place that has owls, hawks, bobcats, venomous snakes, and alligators. Darwin isn’t delayed out here, very much at all. 

Then one day the little gray and white cat walked right up Mom’s wheelchair ramp, like she wanted to come in. I opened the door and the cat fled. But ferals don’t do that. Someone had dumped this cat out, and now it was looking for a home, I thought. 

So began an on again, off again, relationship with the cat I called Aqaba. Small, underfed, it seemed independent and standoffish. We were making good progress until the hurricane hit, and Aqaba disappeared. The sound of the generator frightened her away, and it was only last Monday before I saw her again, haunting the edge of the woods. 

I had tried to trap her but she would have nothing to do with food in the trap, and I wondered how to go about catching this critter, or if I should even try. After all, what was I to do with a cat who was wild? 

Aqaba also liked playing with fire. In the front yard, she was safe because the fenced-in backyard is separate from the back. She showed up a couple of times in the back, even on the deck, and I knew this would end poorly if Wrex Wyatt ever caught her in the open. 

On Monday, September 18^th, Aqaba strayed too near. Wrex was able to tag her. I heard about this by Wrex barking like hell in the back. I went out in the predawn darkness to discover Wrex had treed Aqaba but I wasn’t aware of the damage until she got up on the front porch for breakfast. I saw blood on both side of her neck and knew if the injury didn’t kill her, infection would. It was now, or never, for this cat. 

I went and got a new trap, because the old one wasn’t working, clearly. Tuna was the bait of choice, and on Tuesday morning, I put a trail of fish leading into the trap, and one big lump in the back of the trap. I took a shower, got ready to go to work, and as I walked out, I saw the door of the trap was shut. But a raccoon or a possum might have come in. I crept forward and peeped in. Aqaba sat in the back of the trap, pissed off, but trapped. 

I wrapped the trap up, put on some gloves, strapped the trap in, and away to the vet’s I took what I thought just might be a dead end project.

 After all, there are a few diseases a cat in the wild might pick up, that are fatal. She might be pregnant. She might already have kittens. She might have a serious injury to the neck. I waited. 

The vet called a couple of hours later, and this quickly it had to be dire news. However, I was in for a surprise or two. Aqaba wasn’t pregnant. Aqaba was male. The name still worked. No diseases, no broken bones, and it seemed Wrex just got enough of Aqaba to break the skin and not cause real damage. 

So Aqaba came home with me. More surprises followed. Day One, he let me pet him, purred at me, and then let Mom pet him yesterday. He’s a pet, and always has been, it seems. Someone dumped him. 

So, the adventure begins now. I have to find a home for him. I have him living in the bathroom right now, Wrex is still hostile, but Aqaba is alive, well, and looking for a place to stay. 

Take care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

Once upon a time, I was good with an axe and a bow saw. As I aged, I leaned more towards using a chainsaw, but the damn things are dangerous and unforgiving. I’ve witnessed some gruesome injuries from chainsaws. Most of the people using them were skilled and careful when they were injured. Yeah, there’s been some true idiots missing skin and blood, but Darwin allows for that. 

Things went a certain way today, and nothing I wanted to happen did. I feel bad complaining because some people are still without power, some don’t have dogs, and some don’t have books. 

Clearing the fallen limbs from the oaks on the west side of the property seemed like a good idea until I took a good look. Big stuff is on the ground; worse, it’s my stuff on my neighbor’s property. Firewood-sized limbs, lots of little branches, and enough to use a chainsaw on lay on the ground. But no one is home this weekend except The Mom and me. I will not use a chainsaw unless someone is nearby in case of amateur night amputations. 

Dragging out as much as I was capable of took about thirty minutes. A limb hanging from a tree had to be carefully cut with a bow saw until I could tilt it over and make it fall. The firepit is submerged, so the yard is getting crowded with debris. 

Looking at the larger limbs, I really and truly ought to wait until I can crank up the chainsaw. But the axe is right there. I sharpened it, taking time to get the edge right, which I was once good at. I cut one big piece, using a square cut to get the limb into two pieces instead of the wedge cut.  

I remember cutting a tree that had fallen several years ago when Bert was alive, and he stayed with me the entire time. It was bitterly cold, but Bert would not go inside, the good dog that he was. Bert liked cold weather, and he liked being outside with me. I started a bonfire with the wood the next morning, and Bert really liked that. 

It felt good to swing the axe again, to see the head cut into the wood where I wanted it to cut. I was rusty, sure, but at the same time, the handle in my hand still fit the way it should have, and the cuts were clean and smooth, for an axe, when the wood separated. 

Sweat made my work clothes cling to my body, and I began to stumble over the bramble, so I knew it was time to call it a day. Bert isn’t here anymore, hasn’t been for over a decade now, and it’s too hot for a fire. Yet there’s comfort in hard work, you know. I can still swing the axe, I know how to cut wood, and being alone in the woods is never a bad time. 

I have dogs, books, electricity, and my health. 

Today, baptized in sweat, was a good day. 

Take Care,

Mike

Addendum: Photos of the pile of stuff it took three days to cut up and haul to the backyard. 

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

      

Idalia, which to me was an odd name for a storm, didn’t seem to be much of a bother until a couple of days before landfall. I’ve weathered a few hurricanes in the last twenty some odd years here, and this one just didn’t seem menacing.

            I got up early Wednesday morning, took a shower just in case it was going to be a while before another was available, cooked breakfast, and waited. The rain had already arrived, swirling around in the illumination of the outside lights like crystal moths. No dawn appeared but the grayness brightened.

            About nine or so the wind picked up noticeably, and small debris began to fall. The rain was beginning to pound the roof. Going outside to get videos of the storm meant getting wet, even if I was on the porch. By eleven the storm had arrived, in all her glory, sideways rain, trees losing limbs, and the power blinked a few times, then was gone.

            Few years ago, when Michael hit, I was without power for a couple of days, but that was it. Michael hit hard in this area, but not really as badly as west Georgia. By two in the afternoon, Idalia was gone, we had no power, no internet, but I was certain things would be better by the next day.

            When all else fails, go to a Waffle House. I headed west towards Thomasville because Valdosta, east of us, had to have been hit as hard as we did. Quitman, just seven miles north, was a disaster. No power even in the traffic lights, nothing open, and that was my first sign things were not going to go well.

            Thomasville was intact, but very few restaurants were open. A guy at Waffle House told me the damage to Valdosta had been “catastrophic.”  Text messages were now coming through from people in that area. It was bad.

            By Wednesday night, the damage reports had gone from bad to worse. Valdosta was 95% without power. Colquitt EMC had 58,000 customers without power. Social media lit up with photos of homes destroyed and videos of trees on top of cars and houses. Thursday morning one of my neighbors who was still one hundred and fifty miles away, told me where his generator was and let me use it.

            We could keep the refrigerator and the freezer humming, but that was about it. What we had would be all we had for at least another day. Five gallons of drinking water, five buckets left outside to catch rainwater, and enough canned food to last us a few days is what we started with. Friday the grocery store opened, and I took a shower in the rain. No AC, no electricity, no lights, no cooking, and at night, damn little rest became the new normal.

            Saturday, Day Four, the out of town working near us was nowhere to be found. Everyone thought they might have gone home for the long weekend. But close to lunch, they started work again, near us. At three in the afternoon, they began working on a line pinned by a tree a quarter mile from our house. And finally, at eight-fifteen in the evening, the lights flickered, went out, came back on, and the ordeal was over. At least for us.

            As far as I know, all the local people are taken care of now. But in Valdosta, it’s still a mess. It’s getting better by degrees, but thousands of people are still without power, as of Labor Day, when I wrote this.

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

I met the wife briefly, but her husband couldn’t be bothered to socialize with anyone beneath his pay grade. He had done well and made some money, but greed had driven him to invest heavily in high-risk stocks. Fortune had turned on him, but he still considered himself better than simple folk. 

She was pretty and expensive. Lovely dresses and shoes with names, glitter, and magazine taste, because if it was good enough for a model, it was good enough for her. 

They were both married when they met; he saw a trophy, she saw a bank account, and the wedding, thrown at the very height of his money-making, stunned those who attended. But a man who flaunts his money will soon be a man who loses his money.

She wanted more. He would not settle for less. Yet the reality of creating wealth stood in the shadow of spending. He bought a new truck and an old house; the truck because it made him look bigger, and the house to flip. She started dating a lawyer because the writing on the wall was getting clearer. 

I drove by this house every day on my way to work, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why he chose this one. Old, beat up, and in a poor neighborhood, but later his wife would tell people he meant to buy all the property around it and gentrify the whole area. The money was running low, and the woman was leaning towards the door. 

The fight was ugly, public, and fueled by alcohol and disappointment. She wanted a pool at the house, but he said no. She went out into the yard with a shovel and started digging, A hole formed, and he filled it with water and painted a sign that read, “Pool Now Open”. She threw mud on his truck. He grabbed her and sat her down in the mudhole. The video of the fight surfaced, and the judge ruled he had to pay her money or give her the house. He saw this as a ploy to get money, so he unloaded the house on her, but she sued, saying it was not fit to live in, and the judge made him finish the work or pay to have it completed. 

In the space of a few years, he had lost the bubble rising to the top, and so did the work himself. Lights were on in the morning when I passed the house, and his truck parked in front after five. Perhaps this was his bower to her, initially a way to lure her back. But she and the lawyer married beside his pool in an ordinary ceremony, and she looked happy in the photos. 

By all accounts, the house was perfect when completed. It was a bright white glowing beacon with new windows, polished wooden floors, and a small brick patio where once a tiny pool had sat. I went by one morning and saw thick, black smoke rising from one side, getting up in a hurry smoke pushed by fire within the walls. As I drove past, I could feel the heat from the fire, deep and fierce, like the hate of a man who has lost everything and blames someone else. 

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

One of the first things I did after I moved to Valdosta in 1985 was help someone move. Valdosta is a college town with an Air Force Base nearby, so people moved in, moved out, moved away, and anyone willing to do some heavy lifting for beer and pizza was never sober or hungry. 

A friend of a friend knew a woman who needed to get out of her apartment now. Not tomorrow, not even after lunch, but at this very moment, she had to go. Her name was Mary. She was a business major, had rented an apartment in an old house, which was what I was doing, and after a year of being in that apartment, was willing to leave a lot of stuff behind to get away. 

Red flag number one came when her landlord told Mary he would make arrangements if she needed help with her rent. An older guy, and by older, that meant he likely was late thirties or forties even, but Mary brushed the remark off. After all, unlike some students, Mary had a job, had family support, and paid all her bills on time. 

A few months went by, and Mary hadn’t missed payments. Her landlord called her one day and told her he wanted to show the apartment to a potential buyer, they set a time and date, and Mary let them in when they arrived. The buyer seemed to be more of an old friend of the landlord than someone trying to buy the apartment. After the two men stood around asking her questions that were growing increasingly personal, Mary asked them to wrap up the tour and move on. Both men seemed pissed off about it, but they did leave. Mary installed a deadbolt on her door after that, just in case. Being no stranger to paranoia, Mary also started looking for another place to live. 

The apartment complex Mary had her eye on called Mary’s landlord and asked what kind of tenant she was, and he got pissed off. She still had two months on her lease, and he wouldn’t refund her security deposit if she left early. Mary told him she would stay until the lease was up, which seemed to piss him off even more. That’s when he told her he would have her apartment painted and that moving her stuff out of the way was necessary. 

When the same guy that was supposed to be interested in buying the apartment turned out to be the same person doing the painting, Mary bolted. 

And I got the call. Five of us, including Mary, moved her bedroom furniture, a sofa, two excellent and plump chairs, ten billion books, forty-three thousand house plants, and more clothes than most small countries own in four hours flat. 

Moving involves pizza and beer if you’re a guy calling another guy about helping. If you’re late on your rent, and you’re a guy, your landlord might offer to let you work it off. But when a woman is on the wrong end of money, the transaction involves sex. And even if she isn’t late on her rent, a landlord might try to find out if she will run, if pushed so that another woman can rent the apartment. 

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

It’s difficult to believe that one day, some of the social media platforms will be a century old, provided we don’t destroy the earth first. Somewhere, a server with the stored memory of lives will sit, and perhaps modern archeologists will sift through the pages and pages of people’s daily lives for clues as to who we were and what we valued. The message inboxes will provide details of who wanted who, clandestine affairs, flirting, marriages began, and divorces caused. 

While it was once a simple thing to escape your past, now your grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, and even your children record moments of your life on a daily basis. There are dogs my family owned from puppy to grave; only two or three photographs of these animals survive, and surely no videos. Tiny marks on a wall may have been evidence of a child’s growth, but now there’s an entire library of everyone’s life in video. 

I once helped a friend clean out an old house his family bought. The people who lived there before had moved on, but they left bags and bags of personal belongings behind. We discovered hundreds of photographs, ancient Polaroid prints, in boxes and neatly placed in albums. Photos of children, grandparents, cats, dogs, houses, Christmas, precisely what you would expect. Yet the people who moved had inherited these photos, and those who cherished them were all dead. “Throw them away,” they told my friend, so he did. 

This destruction seems tragic, for entire lives lived with no record, and if the evidence exists, no one cares. Yet life moves forward, a function of time, and the past sinks deeper and deeper into the dark water of what was and who was. 

The beginning of a friendship I had with Jon began when he helped rescue me from bankruptcy. My dog Lucas needed an operation, and the surgeons would only perform it if I paid upfront. I maxed my card out, drained my account, and saved Lucas. 

Jon started a crowdfund, and after the first week, I stopped talking about selling my house. Somewhere on a server, the first conversation he and I had still exists.

In five hundred years, someone may unearth the basement of a tech company and unearth the servers for this essay. It may very well be English isn’t used by then, or at least in some form that would render these words unintelligible by the average person listening to Taylor Swift’s great great great great great granddaughter sing. More likely, the personal past of ordinary people will not be of great interest, no more tomorrow than it is today. 

Billions of people have slipped out of memory, billions more will follow, and only once in a while is anyone remembered for something that happened in the deep past. 

I found Lucas in the middle of the road on August 14^th, 2009. Jon helped save Lucas in 2012, and Lucas died in 2014 of a death unrelated to the cancer the doctors removed. To me, it’s not important that any of this lives on in the future, but only that the people who live there have the same sense of compassion and love that Lucas found in these times. 

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

When I was a little kid watching detective shows, the main evidence against the bad guy was fingerprints or eyewitnesses. Entire movies have been made about getting a witness to the stand, but the reality is most prosecutors would rather have herpes than an eyewitness. Memory is fluid, not concrete, and putting someone on a stand in front of a courtroom full of people and in front of a jury has to give any lawyer pause. 

DNA evidence arrived on the scene in the early part of the 2000’s. Gary Ridgeway had managed to murder at least fifty women and girls with impunity for twenty years. Yet it was his DNA left with some of his first victims that put The Green River Killer behind bars, once technology caught up with him. I was the jury foreman in a trial in 2014, and the prosecutor stumbled the first day of the event, because they had lost a cell phone. The case was salvaged when the DNA evidence was presented and with the help of a nurse whose expertise was sex crimes. The defense, knowing human witnesses could be rattled, went after her. The nurse, having done this for a decade, chewed him up, spit him back out, and made him look both foolish and desperate. 

Cell phones became the next big thing in evidence because a person can be reasonably tracked if they have their device on them. Cars now have GPS systems, so your vehicle can rat you out. OJ Simpson was famously tracked via his cell phone during the white Bronco low-speed chase, and that was back in the late 90’s. 

Recently, a man accused of murder in Utah turned his cell phone off during the murders and turned it back on after the killings occurred. Moreover, he did have his cell on when he cased the murder scene several times before the crimes. His cell phone activity, and inactivity, would be enough to lean most people towards conviction, but his car was tracked by traffic cameras and neighborhood doorbell cams, too. 

Doorbell cameras have suddenly become the biggest of Big Brother eyes, recording everything on every street, all the time. From firework displays gone horribly wrong to tracking the movement of a person from point A to point Z, this is a new tool for police to use to find someone. 

Ridgeway was a killer who hid in plain sight. He frequented prostitutes, had been arrested for it, had been questioned twice, and half the detectives on the force knew he was the murderer. Yet until DNA technology advanced, nothing could be done. Now, you can hardly go to the grocery store and back without being recorded, and DNA evidence technology has been enhanced by genealogy sites. Your DNA is no longer necessary; your first cousin a thousand miles away is the one who led the police to your doorstep. 

It is still possible to get away with murder, but given the advancement of technology, the omnipresent video cameras, and the speed at which technology is evolving, it’s getting more and more likely you’re going to spend time in prison. Just let it go. 

Take Care.

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

Dream images came at me in a blur last night, most of them passing through, some of them making no sense, but one was too large to slip through the sieve. Of all random items to appear, was a VCR, a device some of you may not ever remember. The first one I saw was huge and nearly useless. The owner had one blank tape, and he recorded an episode of the show, “Happy Days” on that tape. Very few commercial tapes were for sale, so the only use for the machine was to record shows to watch later. It didn’t have a timer so someone had to be there to record the show. Worse, the VCR came with a remote that was attached by a cable only five feet long. The remote was kept on top of the device, so…

Still, this was the very top of the mountain for technology. Nothing at ever been seen like this before. There we were watching an episode of a television show that had been on the night before. It was magic. Even the commercials seem to have an aura to them now. I remember a half dozen or so people at my friend’s home and everyone stared in total silence and disbelief at the wonder. It was 1979. 

Then in 1986, someone had one of these ancient devices and gave it to me. It was huge and heavy, but all I needed to repair was a new belt, a round rubber band. I went to a repair shop and the new belt would have cost me fifty dollars, and newer VCRs were going for just over that. I threw the device out of the window to keep from having to carry it down the steep back steps, and my neighbor downstairs saw it fall, and heard the crash. She shrugged and said to her visitor, “That’s Mike.” 

Later in life I would buy a VCR/DVD combination device for less than twenty dollars. I could carry it in one hand, and it played anything that would fit inside. The remote had all the whistles and bells imaginable and could record off on one channel while watching another. I think I remember that being possible. It might not have. 

From 1980 to 1999, I didn’t own a television. I had roommates that brought one in at odd times, but as far as me buying one or having one of my own, no. People would come over and ask how I managed to live without one, and it was easy. Most girlfriends I’ve had have told me a television is a must and felt lost without the presence. I still have never purchased a television. 

Now, every computer or cell phone can give you what once only a TV could. Televisions have evolved into mini theater screens filling up wall space in unimaginable dimensions. VHS has long since been dead. I cannot imagine what we will see in twenty years if the earth hasn’t burned by that time. But everything you own at this very moment will be a relic faster than you can conceive. 

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

           

Work is different when you don’t have to be there. But knowing I don’t have to be there makes it oddly worse. The money is good, my plans for the cash are fun, and the time I am working is clearly defined as weeks, not months or years. All in all, it’s a win-win.

            Yet even in the box of limited work time, it is a box. Being somewhere I do not want to be is a reminder I spent most of my adult life in a similar situation. Suddenly, even with a more significant payoff in money, time seems more precious. Moments wasted now seem more egregious.

            I miss the free-flowing days of deciding to go here or there, or not anywhere, all on a whim. It’s only for a short period of time, a couple of months, tops. Yet the feeling I am trading off more than getting is like a swarm of gnats around my head. And there are gnats. It’s hot now, to the extreme, and I miss working out in the yard where true heat lies, but the sense of accomplishment is personal. The time to do what I like to do, and the time to do things I have to do, are all susperceeded by the idea that work and making money is important.

            Traffic is worse than the nightmarish pyroclastic flow I remember it being. People running late, on their phones, drinking coffee, and hating the idea they’re flinging themselves into occupations that do not feed their souls, are passively suicidal. Life is reduced to fleeing from their families so they can go somewhere to work somewhere they sit and wait to escape after enough prison time has been done. Day after day, week after week, and year after year, only unhappiness await them, or worse, a dull sense that it’s no worse than that.

            I miss the woods, and the stillness of the day, where thoughts can be gathered like sticks from which a fire can be built. I miss the time I spent sitting and watching the sun move shadows across the floor, in patterns that formed languages that existed for only those moments. I miss the food I buy that is healthy; eating on the run never is.

            After it is all said and done, working part-time after retirement seems to refocus me on why I left the working world behind in 2019. Apparently, I needed the reminder and some time in the lost world to find myself heading back in the right direction. I will serve my two months and have more money, but it will be a while before I tell someone I will go back to work again.

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit.

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.