With a record abundance of vegetalia from the wet winter up here we’re spending a lot of time allergically occluded, sleeping into dogness [the dogs, particularly Lefty, being particularly adept at sleeping] as best we can.

Meanwhile apropos of the historic turmoil I’d been amply resampling of late a friend recommended  “Witness to the Revolution”, an oral history wherein the very guys who took up so much of the bandwidth the first time around retell their stories fifty years out.  Since as far as revolutions go I prefer the cultural to the political I wasn’t sure how relevant to my experience those stories would prove, but they were all all too familiar…and after slogging through to the end of the book an impressive amount of earnestness and really good people  [all else, save lip-service to a few social movements under “Culture Wars”, which was actually a political/media construct that came along years later, being ignored entirely] show up now, as then, overshadowed by the outsized influence of the radical political piggies [that’s you, Bill ‘n’ Bernadine] who did so much to shape the current and ongoing situation in which we find ourselves to this day…

Fortunately [and as ever] life, decades after, continues to intervene; in the cracks and despite.

One bright day Dave and I ventured up the zigzag road, pausing at the bottom to release the first woodrat caught under my kitchen porch, then on up to determine whether

a certain rock-in-road might be movable by a couple of seventy-somethings…

which it wasn’t although the outlook from up the zigzag is often awesome.

Next day another under-porch creature applied for asylum

which was duly granted, same spot, miles down the road [“gee Mom, how’d YOU get here?”]…

Next day yet another, necessitating yet another

detour [“gee guys, how’d YOU all get here?”] on our way to Alturas

for hardware, auto parts, copious groceries from the Holiday Market

and surprisingly good Thai home cooking at Nuch’s on North Main while our friends waited patiently outside.

South to, eventually, the Gerlach P.O. [not shown],

and digital mysteriousness at home.

Friday, same rat routine; one from under the porch, one from under the truck after which

i made it over to the Blue Pit before

Mark showed up to swap the throttle body from the 350 that’s now in the ’45 for the one totally seized up atop the 350 that started out life in the ’88 Blazer I rolled the day the world land speed record was set on the Black Rock which now resides under the ever-open hood of the ’82.  It took some improvisation and analysis but – ” now we got a problem here; there’s nothin’ left to fix”- was all done  by noon.

From the chairs at day’s end we watched as Mary and Judy pulled in for a weekend visit initiated with Prosecco and dinner on the east porch until mosquitoes drove us into the interior then

Saturday after a congenial breakfast I took the fifth member of the underporchians to the zigzag on my way to town, leaving a marker so M&J could access to the upper lands where they spent the day ranging all about the high back country with antelope and a horse while

down below our lunch was enlivened by the writhing coupling of young bullsnakes;

Sunday as our guests departed I deposited the Sixth Rat at the Usual Bush and was into the at-last-functional ’82 for some belated tasks, ending late afternoon at the chairs sorely stiff

where old dogs have learned the new and necessary trick of watering from the same bowl….

at least after an afternoon’s dry dusty trek towards the playa.

Soon, it was June. Or is.

 

M