It Is a Bright Sunny Day in the This Horse Camp

The Rain Is Gone and It Is a Bright Sunny Day in the This Horse Camp

It is still frosty. I just went for a walk and I should have worn a warmer jacket. It must be down into the low 30s. That three-part storm is now heading east, so all of you who don't live on the Pacific coast, watch out!

The Kumeyaay Indian cousins from Mexico moved their herd of horses last evening to a row of corrals not far from my trailer. Smokey Joe and I went out and introduced ourselves to them at sun-up. They all accepted a pat on the nose. There are nine horses and they are pretty scruffy and thin. I wish I had bought that huge bag of carrots I saw at the market the other day. I think I will ask if it would be OK for me to give them some 'treats', like alfalfa and horse food rich in oats. I did that at the last place I lived. The owner was giving her two horses only 1 leaf of alfalfa a day, half of what is normal, to each of her two horses. I gave them extra alfalfa and two cups of oats every day and they fattened up a little. When they got loose one night, I found them with their heads hanging over my gate waiting for breakfast.

It is so dry here most of the year, pastures are eaten to the grass roots, and much of the time there is absolutely no graze for fenced animals. If animals are starving right under my nose, I will bootleg food to them if I can.

The rain is over and headed east. It was a fairly gentle rain here, but accumulated to 8 inches over three days in some places in the Laguna Mountains. We sure did need it. From reading Sam Cameron's Diary written 1878 to 1903, I can tell that extremes in drought and rain is not unusual here on the Mexican border. He wrote about many devestating storms and alternate periods of cattle-killing dry spells.

This is not an area for crop raising. People who try apple and peach orchards may get a fair crop once in five years. Greenhorns still move here and plant nice orchards and a few years later give up and move on, leaving dead and dying fruit trees behind. It's sad. Others tried raising llamas, alpacas and emus, but abandoned the enterprises after five years or so. My friend Roger gave a home to a wandering llama.

One man, who is successful, raises snakes. He has a couple of high-tech metal barns close to a built-up area where he raises exotic snakes for sale. Yuck! I'm glad I don't live near him! There are enough free-ranging rattlesnakes here to suit me. They aren't so bad because they usually give warning before they strike. I wrote an article last year about a rattlesnake roaming under my daughter's trailer and was finally removed from inside a dog's kennel by a big Indian who just grabbed him near his head and took him away to be released somewhere else. That was really something to see! You should have seen that big guy kneeling in the back of a pickup truck holding the snake with both hands extended outside the bed of the truck in case he lost control of it. It was a big snake, and one gutsy guy.

Well, today is the day for political showdown in New Hampshire, and I am going to be glued to the TV screen. Looks like Obama for the Dems and McCain or possibly Romney, but I doubt it, for the Republicans. Anything can happen by the time of the big showdown on Feb 5. It is all very interesting to me. 

I've got to stop and eat. I get so interested in Gathering and watching TV news that I forget to eat. Cooking for one and eating alone is very dull. But if my daughter is moving away, and I'm going to be all alone except for the Indian cousin, who doesn't speak English and lives out of sight across the arroyo, I had better pay attention to taking care of myself or my cats and dogs may become orphans. Talk to you later.