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Apr 21st, 2005 - 21:10:55
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The Travels of our First Webmaster
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Voices of Spencer Creek
I was standing on the porch this afternoon watching the spring weather when our portly, ten year old Manx cat trotted up the never used wheelchair ramp, dropped a mourning dove at my feet, and proceeded to rub against my shins while purring loudly. I picked up the tan and taupe bird with the powder blue mascara eye lids and determined its worldly cares were over.
I opened my mouth to admonish Max the Manx and then closed it. It wouldn't bring the dove back to life and Max was so happy at being able to give me something. I remembered a decade past when Max the coon cat had died on my birthday. He was old and sick and and wasn't going to get any better so my friend Mike shot him for me. A few months later, a buff colored Manx kitten materialized in our yard. Charlie the dog did his best to run him off and he mysteriously vanished.
As we started driving to Eugene to the salt mines, my wife heard a sudden yowling noise and I found the kitten on top of the spare tire under the pickup bed. We returned home and shut the kitten in a bathroom with food and water and resumed the trip to Eugene. That evening, upon our return, Sande took him across the road and asked the neighbors if they were missing a kitten. Turns out he had "followed" the grandkids home and they couldn't keep him. The little Manx burrowed his head in her arm and she said we were fond of him and would give him a home. The two grandsons told her that he loved to play and was sort of rough some times but he was a good cat--oh yeah, his name is Max.
Max never made any attempt to return across the road. Charlie the Dog accepted him with ill grace but eventually played with him. Max was fascinated with tails as he had only a stump. He pounced on the dogs' tails and Mai Ling, the grumpy Siamese's. When he was about five years old, the neighbor's dog bit him full in the chest. Max was able to scratch up the dog's face so there was no argument about who did it. He didn't come home that night and I worried. I called him the next morning and he came out from his hiding place and collapsed on the lawn. I called the vet. When I came back out, he had moved ten feet closer to the house and collapsed again. The vet patched him up and he came home and a horrible anaerobic infection set in. The vet flayed him open and hosed out the wounds. I took him some Thanksgiving turkey which he ate in his cage in the back of the Cottage Grove Veterinarian Clinic.
His front was so ruined that he pushed his bedding in a corner and slept on his back. Eventually he came home with a bunch of surgical tubing stuck in his chest. He would sit in the kitchen sink twice a day while we hosed out his massive wound with solutions. He would lie on a lap like the dead until you had to get up to pee. After a couple months of this fun, the vet pulled the tubes out of his chest and you could watch the skin knit before your eyes. I had been carrying him wrapped in a towel up and down the driveway when the weather was decent so he could sniff the local news.
One day the sun was warm and the daffodils were out. Max had fuzz over his chest now and I opened the door and he walked down the steps for the first time in three months. The staff at the CG Vet Clinic called him "Max the Wonder Cat." I dubbed him the "Six Million Dollar Manx" in honor of the massive vet bill he had accumulated. I would lean my shotgun against the house whenever I saw the neighbors' dog off its chain. The neighbors moved.
"Good Cat," I told him and breasted the dove and gave Max the heart. I fried the dark meat in a little garlic butter and ate it plain.
An Afterward about Cats, "Millions of Cats"
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| "Lorane Laura and Her Kittens" found on Spencer Creek Road, photo courtesy of webmaster> |
Our reclusive neighbors across fire road moved suddenly a while back, leaving a couple of junk automobiles, a cow with a horn growing into its eye, and a dozen or so semi-wild cats. At least they took their rabid pack of wild dogs with them.
There must be at least four generations of half wild cats hanging out around the deserted old mo-beel home. They wandered the neighborhood looking for food until we started feeding them on their own turf. We checked with all the animal shelters and were pretty much told that if somebody took them in, they would all be terminated. This was very depressing and it would seem more merciful to just do it yourself than put them through the stress of a car ride to a "relocation center." If there were just one or two, I would adopt them myself and be done with it. As it is, I frequently don't get a night's sleep with a yowling bengal cat in the house.
The neighborhood had a meeting and we decided that the only thing to do was to trap the cats and get them sterilized. This is not a perfect solution but I could do without the onus of executioner. Eventually somebody will move into the wasted mo-beel home and then there is sure to be some sort of triage.
When I was a child, I had a book entitled "Millions of Cats." In the end they all ate each other up and only one was left. The ending of this story isn't going to be quite as handy. I really resent the neighbor not fixing the damned cats, then taking a powder and leaving the neighborhood to deal with it. She was careful to maintain an unlisted phone number. I was surprised to learn that there is no regulation about abandoning cats. (There are state humane laws that apply.–Editor)They are deemed "free spirits."
The neighbor didn't get around to fixing her two dogs either, and soon she had a pack of slavering, ill mannered mutts roving the 'hood. the Lane County Animal Control Dept. did compel her to build a serious fence to keep them cooped up but it was still annoying to have them yammering and baying when you tried to walk to the end of the road in the lengthening evenings. Anyway, don't be a deadbeat. Spay or neuter your animals immediately as soon as they become of age. There are reduced price outfits that will sterilize your cats and dogs, sometimes even for free. The City of Eugene sponsors a low cost Spay & Neuter Clinic or ask your own vet.
I guess it's time to go across the road and feed the menagerie. One orange kitten always runs in circles around the dishes when somebody shows. I sure hope the former neighbor reads this but it is doubtful.
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| Norm and Dead Car Number 288 |
Dead Cars
I had fairly recently achieved permanent employee status at the Bureau where I work when John, a fellow employee, was killed in a vehicle rollover involving an agency Bronco. We were similar in a lot of ways although he was a decade older. Both of us were accustomed to having nothing handed to us on a silver platter.
A week after the funeral, Dave, our manager, told me that I had inherited John's abandoned vehicle program. People have always liked to leave junk cars on federal land as part of what we call "recreational dumping." A couple of yahoos buy a case of cheap beer in 40 ounce bottles and tow some heap that will never run again up into the nearby hills up an old BLM logging spur where they leave it on a landing, strip it, remove the plates and vehicle ID numbers, shoot it, maybe burn it in place, shoot it some more until they run out of ammunition and/or Olde English 800. Then they get in the tow vehicle and weave down the hill towards home, leaving a ton or two of smoking junk.
John's solution to abandoned vehicles was to round them up using BLM road maintenance personnel with backhoe and dump trucks to load and haul the wrecks to our cyclone fenced yard out by Low Pass. When I went there to look over the "inventory" I was dismayed to see more than two dozen abandoned vehicles that had been carefully smashed down by the backhoe while in the back of the dump trucks. I started calling automobile wrecking yards to find somebody who would take the vehicular remains. "Do you have the titles?" they all wanted to know. The answer was no. I swiftly figured out that John was stockpiling the derelicts because he couldn't get rid of them.
I called Oregon's Department of Motor Vehicles. Surely somebody knew what to do. The people who left the dead cars on our land didn't want them back and took some effort not to be traced. "You have to have the title in order to get rid of an abandoned vehicle." a woman who's favorite word was NO, informed me. "What if all the VINs have been removed?" NO was immutable. It is easy to just say NO over the phone so I put on my official uniform and drove up to Salem to the DMV office the next day and started up the chain of command, closely followed by Madame NO every step of the way.
After most of the day, I finally got an audience with Jane Cease who was head of DMV at that time. I explained the problem and suggested that she grant me the authority to designate an abandoned vehicle on federal land as worthless and summarily get rid of it by assigning it my own serial number with a can of spray paint and hauling it to the steel yard. I showed Jane some photographs to illustrate what I was dealing with. Jane looked at a photo of an old pickup missing its doors that had absorbed several hundred rounds of small arms fire with somebody's plastic fantastic girlfriend lying in front of the thing looking utterly deflated from numerous bullet holes. Presumably Bubba had caught Plastic Pamela cheating on him.
The pickup bed was filled with noisome garbage. It had been thriftily used as a disposable dumpster. The dump fee saved could easily buy a couple cases of charcoal filtered Olde English! Jane nodded agreement and looked at Madame NO and instructed her to set me up with an abandoned vehicle appraiser's license and a stack of 6017 forms. She told me to photograph every junker I removed in case somebody should ever inquire about them. NO glared at me behind Jane's back.
Now I have junk car removal down to a science. Employees report heaps that materialize overnight on the district. I limber up my tilt bed car trailer with rear facing winch behind my Ford Expedition when I find time and head to the scene. Today's target is a mid 80s Camaro that has been pushed over a thirty foot bank up McGowan Creek Road near Marcola. I follow the strip map provided by one of our law enforcement officers. A glint of silver down below the road and I am there. McGarbage Creek Road is a popular place to dump trash, cars and major appliances. It's nice when people leave them on a landing for me but I can cope.
The road is too narrow to point the trailer over the bank at the car. I hang a couple tow chains out of a tree and attach a ten inch logging pulley to it and run the winch's cable through it and over the side where I clip the bull hook onto the hotrod's front torsion bar. I engage the 15,000 pound winch and decide to pull with the Expedition. The cable system comes tight and the back tires squall. I shift into 4WD, low transfer and try again. The Camaro leaps up the bank to where the hook meets the pulley. I dismount and stick rocks under the car's front wheels and back off the winch electrically. The car perches precariously when I disconnect but I think it will stay.
I drive a mile down the road where I can turn the rig around and come back where I can just squeeze the outfit in the ditch between the front of the car and the cutbank and pull 20 feet past. I set the brake and pull the pin on the trailer and reconnect the hook. I prefer pulling uphill as I have better control over the heap and don't have to worry about it charging into the winch or back of the Expedition. The Camaro still has its tires--only one is flat--and it rolls easily. The hand brake and PARK selection still work so it is a snap. I have burned out an 8,000 pound and a 12,000 pound winch before getting the 15,000 and it moves the car move with no strain. It passes the Center of Gravity and the trailer tilts level with a clang and I pin it in the horizontal position. I spray paint BLM # 288 on both sides and the hood and FOR SALE on the back. I snap a photo and head up the road to turn around and chain it down.
The Camaro had clearly been a fine automobile. Somebody removed the battery, seats & roof panels, shot it a half dozen times with a .357, and hurled a bowling ball sized rock through the windshield before rolling it over the side. Our cop couldn't find any numbers and nobody had reported the theft of a similar vehicle so presumably it had broken down and the owner didn't want to deal with it. Tomorrow it will be plucked off the trailer by the claw in the steel yard and start the long trip to Japan will it will be reincarnated as a Lexus before its return.
I turn on the local radio talk show and head for town. I will do a triumphant drive through the front gate and all the office clones can admire kill # 288 from the windows in their Dilbert boxes. I work the trailer brakes with my thumb on the steep hill as I descend to the pavement. Cars, trucks, vans camp trailers, pickup campers and even boats. I remove them all. The Forest Service Willamette National Forest found out about my operation and now I remove their junk too through an interagency agreement. I am able to hijack some assistance from the office sometimes but I am used to doing it on my own.
The weighmasters at the steel yard were initially suspicious that I was trying to pull a fast one but have come to accept that I am merely getting rid of junk in the woods and not part of some sort of chop shop scheme. I was busy when scrap steel was worth $200.00 a ton but I am really hopping now that the market is flat and you have to pay to leave a junker at a wrecking yard. I recycle at least a dead car a week and during the summer when I come back from a two week fire fighting stint I frequently find half a dozen dead car reports in my mail box. Although recreational dumping is a year round activity, there is a lot more of it in the summer for some reason. I frequently get to empty hundreds of pounds of trash and or personal stuff into the dumpter from a vehicle before recycling it.
I wear rubber gloves as I slowly go through squalid crap, always wary of needles. A few months back, I removed a small van that had a fried motor from a landing on federal land. I found a journal where a young woman described her boyfriend punching her in the head 20 or thirty times as well as parole papers from a bust for cooking meth with (presumably) the same boyfriend, child visitation forms, pictures of sad children, sex toys, glassware, lots of clothes and somebody's ashes in a plastic bag in a cardboard box with a metal dog tag. Our cop took the ashes to attempt to reunite with somebody who cared and I chucked the artifacts of a ruined life into the dumpster while a half dozen idlers looked on. I told them it was OK to help themselves to the sex toys and that they didn't have to sneak back after dark and root through the dumpster. Nobody would make any value judgements.
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| Norm Hauls in Dead Car No. 300, decorated by himself! |
Norm just brought in car number 300.
"Dead Car and the Six Million Dollar Manx " Copyrighted © 2003 by Norm Maxwell
This article updated June 7, 2003.
Writer Norm Maxwell is a Bureau of Land Management Fire Fighter, on the ground and with a BLM helicopter crew, and an union negotiator. He lives on Fire Road which he has successfully saved from development.
For more of Norm Maxwell's writing visit:
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Song of the Open Road
Remember Fire Road
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Home, Home on Fire Road
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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