Thanksgiving

This is the place where we earn our bread, sleep our sleep, and do our work. This is the place where some make a living, some find a living, and some, like me, are just passing through. This is a place where your work isn't for yourself, but it is.
This is a gathering place.
Dr. Wilson started the ranch with only animals in mind, in heart, in thoughts. She started with a few horses and several dogs and a self-righteousness and a belief to carry her through. The ranch grew, and grew, and expanded til it housed hundreds of animals. And people from all corners of the country arrived to fill a need.
Many have come before me, passing through, though perhaps with more intent to stay. Their stories linger, told mostly in tales of singular ineptitude, scoffed at by those who remain. Cheryl has been here for over two years. This is her life. She is the permanent one, the record keeper, who holds the pedigrees of the dog managers, who have all come and gone more quickly. But now there are three more besides her living on the ranch, and making of it a home.
It's easy to hold the thought in one's head, that people are more than they seem, with a whole story to tell. It's daunting to learn pieces, stories like gifts. Because with so many years behind them, there are more pieces to a fifty year old than a twenty-year-old can comprehend.
Sixteen years, 10 months, and 23 days ago, Cheryl's partner Barbara received a lung transplant on Christmas Eve. Without it, Barbara would have died before New Years from the emphysema that took her life 19 years later. She was sick for a long time before she died, at age forty-three. Her sister died the night Barbara went in to her first hospital evaluation for her lungs, from cirrhosis of the liver. Her sister was thirty four. Cheryl said, she always thought she got the “cream of the cop,” in that family. Their father died of emphysema in his fifties. Barbara's brother was a coke addict.
Cheryl grew up in Catholic school, product of a classic, Long Island Italian family. She was a coke user, reckless drinker and Harley driver, tried school and got good grades, but had more success in her first job in an airplane machinery. She's been here two years. Doesn't go to church anymore. Calls the ranch her temple. Would die for her animals.
Three years ago, old-Kim's son committed suicide. “The little shithead,” she said. “He could have done anything else. Like ask for help. Instead the little shit killed himself.” The doctors told her two years ago, after she went in the hospital for pneumonia, that she'd die if she kept smoking. She quit, for ten months, but then she moved here, to Prescott from Milwaukee, WI. “It was smoke, or kill myself,” she said. I closed my mouth at the irony. Two days ago, she dared Dan, Young-Kim's boyfriend, to a smoking ultimatum—starting the second of January, the first to smoke owed the other a hundred dollars. Dan hasn't taken her up on it yet.
Kim comes from Missouri. Don't know too much about her, still, other than she hates vegetables of any, any sort, and eats pasta, cheese, chicken, Mountain Dew, and potatoes. She's 22. She met Dan a week after I arrived. Last month, he moved in with her. Dan is a city employee, does jobs for the county and outside work in the parks. He's been married before, and has a couple kids. He's thirty one. He doesn't get along with his family. His mother's from England and he lived there til he was nine, and then did the rest of his growing up in Prescott. He's the only Arizona native on the ranch. When Dan was eighteen he tried to do a trick on a scooter on a wall. He fell off and smashed some vertebrae in. They've apparently hurt him ever since.
Brie is the last and newest resident of the ranch. She moved here from Iowa. She used to be a professional runner, for Nike. Had qualifying times for the Olympics, in steeple chase. But then something happened. Something happened to her side, so that when she runs, she gets a sharp shooting pain up her side and if she keeps going, she can't even breathe. They tried a 25,000 dollar operation to put a stint in an artery in her side. They tried exercises. They even tried Viagra (to increase the blood flow). Nothing worked. There went Olympic trials. There went the Olympics. Now she's here. She's tall and dark haired, green eyed and gorgeous, and she lives with over thirty dogs, and just became a permanent resident of the state.
Chris was a worker who left this week, going to a better-paid job at a hotel where his wife works. He'll miss the animals, he says, but he won't miss the winter, or being out in all weathers. He's fifty eight. He's British, came over here years ago to marry his American wife. He was a member of Harsher Reality, a rock band who had an album break the top 25 in the UK around 1970. Spent three years touring the world with his band. Played with the Rolling Stones, the Styx, the Kinks, met the Beatles. He had a lazy eye, was a drummer for his band.

It's a strange sort of family here, though it has to be. Last night, I ate a Thanksgiving dinner with the dog-people . We all helped cook. We ate the day before Thanksgiving so Dr. Wilson wouldn't be offended by our turkey—our sources said she'd be here today. But she wasn't. And so I awoke to a fresh-turkey-less Thanksgiving, perhaps the most surreal Thanksgiving I've had. Around 2am last night, I woke up to Lady, a dog we've nicknamed Gargoyle for her looks, scrambling into my room. After kicking her out, and wedging my door re-shut, I lay and listened to the thunder and lightning storm, the pounding rain from outside, hoping it would be gone in the next four hours. When my alarm went off at 5, the rain had stopped. I dressed for cold, looked over the news, had tea, everything I always do, and then headed outside. Bleating goats drowned out even the sporadic barking of the dogs, and as I reached the end of the backyard, I saw only Cheryl's huge Diesel truck, rumbling with its lights on pointed towards the goat pens. Hurrying forward, I looked around for Cheryl, not seeing the tractor she usually had already loaded and started feeding with by then. Instead, as I reached the barn, I saw Cheryl coming through, the automatic lights going on as she came through the breezeway, with a herd of goats in front of her. “What happened?” I asked, running forward, thinking all the goats had gotten out. “Their pens flooded,” she said.
And so it was. We waded through inches of water, getting the goats re-situated in dry pens with other goats, that were on higher ground. Then we navigated small lakes in the tractor and got the horses their alfalfa. And then I scraped wet hay out of the goat pens and we got it into the tractor and tried to drain out the hay barn. All the while, my feet were wet.
Finally the day was over and it was time for stuffing and warmth and relaxing. Because I've learned, here, that eight hours isn't that long, especially when it all starts at six in the morning, and you look up and see orion for an hour before you see the sun, and then, if you're lucky (or unlucky—red skies take warning...) there's a beautiful sunrise that lights up the bowl of the valley. Today, no sunrise, but instead clouds wreathed the valley, covering various parts of the mountains—first the base, so the peaks floated in the clouds—and then the tops so only patches peaked through. The clouds drifted throughout the day, sometimes opening, so that a random distant mountain shone suddenly gold in a fickle beam of sunlight, under a patch of blue sky, before the clouds closed again and flowed gray over the sky.
Other observations:
On windy days, the pipes of the fences sing like an asthmatic organ, or really bad harmonica player.
Whoever made up that song “Drifting along with the tumbleweed” has a very romantic idea of tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is prickly, with little spiny spikes that break off and get all into your clothes and skin and burn like acid. No one except a turtle hiding in its shell, or maybe a scorpion, could painlessly drift with tumbleweed, or think it was a good idea.
Dogs snarl. And yes, I knew this before, but it's one thing to see the start of a snarl, and another to see one with full lips back, teeth bared, and realize that a dog can quickly forget it's a dog and man's best friend and all that, because its instincts are to bite and rip and kill. Not that most here rip and kill. Although there definitely are some who try. Mostly to other dogs, although Rory's had his share of bites.
Eventually, one can make friends even with a couple, once one has proved oneself "harmless." And not a total ditz. And willing to work. And can share laughs with the guy and the girl together and apart. Hi Deb and Rory. Glad I have you guys as friends.
There's a guy here who delivers our hay. His grandpa is his uncle is his grandpa. His sister is a Mormon. Or maybe it's not his real sister. The last time he came, he leaned into his truck, with a full beard on his face, while saying, "I have to learn how to shave better, I keep cutting up my phone." I laughed so hard I cried. While hiding behind the woodchip pile.

There's more to say, and more to think about, but those are the things that have been running through my mind lately. And the fact that, although I'm excited to leave, I'm going to miss this place.