News From Ron and Kathy Bird__
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Ron and Kathy Bird
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Expert German-English translation available; business and finance our specialty.
Sachverständige Deutsch-Englische Ãbersetzung; Geschäft und Finanz unser Spezialgebiet.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Later on Sunday, 04 September 2005
Kathleen and I sit around in the “office”, i.e. the room in the ranch house where the printer and the wireless internet live, until about 2230. The rain has stopped. The cats, kittens actually, which we have repeatedly driven out of the house into the storage rooms and roofed over areas, look bedraggled and are mewling to get inside. They are young but are supposed to become mousers and live outside. The bigger dogs are not allowed in the house though they try at every opportunity. The two little Chihuahuas (at home in here the State of Chihuahua) went on the truck trip to the outside world with Cindy and Bob and the boys. Just as well since both Chihuahuas are in heat and driving the other dogs crazy.
I am already awake when the visually beautiful and operatic-calibre orange rooster lets go way before dawn. The cows and calves have bawled all night and wakened me early anyway. Lying in our cosy bed in the predawn I contemplate our first full day as caretakers. So far we have lost a pig and two fowl. Tank, the huge and hugely-old, blind and lame Mastiff dog found his way into one of the storage rooms yesterday and trashed it. This happened even before Cindy and Bob left. What if Tank is dead in there? I can hear the baby swallows under the eaves of the covered area chirping for food.
I get up quietly, dress and head for the outhouse. I have been using the composting toilet in the ranch house until now. The sheet metal outhouse – looks brand new! - stands between the corral and the bunkhouse. Cindy said Simon and Bob refuse to use the composting toilet, which she cannot understand. Inside the structure are lots of old magazines. How interesting. Just like a doctor’s office. Then I realised these represent an ecological solution for recycling paper. I remember how people where I grew up in Canada used to joke about how a big family could be through the harness section of Eaton’s Fall-Winter mail-order catalogue by Christmas. What else are you going to do with old El Paso/Juarez telephone books? I have to admit that using the outdoor privy seems less messy than the untidy bathroom in the ranch house which has a leaky roof and the floors are messy with wet sawdust.
The good news is that “Porky”, the little white pig, is back this morning. I spot him when I go to let out the chickens. He is standing outside the pigpen. He takes off again when I make a move to let him into the pen. I head back to the kitchen to get the kitchen slops bucket but of course he is nowhere to be seen when I come back outside. The Mysterious Vanishing Pig. I throw some scraps inside the pen for the brown pig, who I have named “Schnautze” because he has a long nose. Maybe Porky is nearby and will hang around. Later, after feeding the chickens, there’s Porky again. He might actually be a little near-sighted. I try enticing him with the remaining slops in the pail but he doesn’t seem to get the message or just doesn’t trust me. He is limping a bit after his Saturday night in the bush and looks tired to me, at least to the degree that I can judge whether a pig is tired or not. I dump more scraps over the fence into the pen to keep Schnautze busy, open the gate a crack, and make a big circle to get behind Porky so I can shoo him (her?) around towards it. Porky finally gets the message, shoots through that little crack like a rat into a storeroom and is soon en-grossed (sic) in gobbling up the slops. Another job well done by Ronnie Bird, Boy Spot-Welding King of the World; Captain Epoxy! Oh yes, the errant chicken and the guinea fowl were hanging around the coop when I got there. As the others were slowly coming out, they shot past them into the coop to get food. Now all I have to do is milk the nanny-goat. I’ll wait till Kathleen gets up; she can hold the horns while I milk. I must get Simon to show me how to hobble the goat so one of can milk her alone.
Everything is sopping wet and muddy this morning. My feet are wet and dirty from doing my “chores”, the accomplishment of which requires me to walk through wet grass and mud. I need some rubber boots. With my flat arches I don’t do well being on my feet in sandals all day. But boots might perhaps be a nuisance and too hot. Wooden clogs like in Holland would be great and could be stepped out of at the door to the ranch house. I wear shorts and a T-shirt; at least I don’t have to worry about getting trouser legs wet and dirty; my legs are drip dry and I wash my feet and legs before crawling into bed. I shall soon have to figure out how to have a shower around here without having to walk half and hour to the warm springs down by the river.
Cindy and Bob, a former professor and a former solicitor, not to mention the two small sons (4 and 6) and the somewhat elder daughter (10; she is away visiting in the U.S.A. at present), and Simon, are essentially outdoor people. The kids were basically born here. But they are all even more outdoorsy than any farmers I ever met back in Canada growing up. There is no mudroom here, for example. No farmer’s wife back home would ever have allowed someone into her kitchen in barnyard gum-wellies. But here, everyone goes in and out tracking dirt and mud through the house and across the adobe tile floors. No one seems to mind or even notice. Most of the year, of course, it is dry and this is all not much of a problem. Now with the rains the living room is getting more than a little dirty.
The furniture is an eclectic mixture of styles. The ranch people are far too busy to spend much time sipping sherries in the drawing room. It’s a roof over your head. Too bad because it could be really wonderfully comfortable and attractive. The walls are adobe brick and have been painted yellow in the large living/dining room. The roof, alas, is in serious need of repair and the adobe walls are now during the rains getting daily soakings causing huge brown mud blisters to appear and the paint to hang down in strips. Yesterday during the night a big chunk of mud fell off the wall near the “dining table”. While we were cooking supper last night, we were dodging drips that came in at one spot, ran along the lovely logs of the ceiling until they found a low spot, and then lurked until one of us was standing directly beneath. No boater would put up with this.
Whatever the apprenticeship trials of being caretakers on a very remote ranch however, and whatever the different standards of housekeeping might be, they are for the moment at least more than compensated for by the view into the river valley. The waters are up from the heavy rains and flowing swiftly and noisily over the large gravel on the river bottom. Clouds of mist hang around the higher hills and I see some of the cattle we culled yesterday down in the deep green, withers-high grass of the river-bottom pastures. There are some puffy white clouds higher up in the blue sky. The air is scented with a mixture of meadow grasses and the mint in the garden just down the slope. What a picture! I can’t stop staring at it. If you visit www.tutuaca.org, the photograph on the opening page is the view from the living room of the ranch house. It doesn’t begin to capture the awesomeness of it all.
We spent part of yesterday settling into our guest house. I don’t know what it was used for before – a schoolroom, perhaps, judging by the small desks and chairs that are shoved back under a table, or a bunkhouse. There is a double mattress laid out on a rough-hewn moveable wooden platform, two old wooden tables, a settee made out of logs (probably meant for outdoors but surprisingly comfortable), a woodstove in the corner on a raised concrete platform (the chimney on the outside is hanging down and will have to be repaired before it gets colder; Simon says there is hielo / ice in October already!), and one folding chair. There is a large grey-green and dusty rug on the floor as well as a million pistachio shells. During a sunny and dry period we roll up the rug and take it outside for a shake before finding a broom and dustpan and giving the room a good sweep. We sweep the cobwebs out of the windows and the dirt from the window ledges of the painted adobe building. We rearrange the furniture to suit us, throw two colourful Indian blankets, which we find in the main house, over the tables, roll up the carpet again and stack it in the corner. We put fresh sheets and a blanket on the bed. There is a separate deep-cycle battery and a solar panel for the guest house and one 12-volt halogen light hangs over one of the tables. Obviously we should have brought more flashlights. The room is now clean and inviting. I want to collect some meadow flowers and grasses and put them in a jug on the table. Move over van Gogh!
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