A Small Furry Prayer (5 page)

10

Of course, there are those occasional situations where “rub belly frequently” isn't much use. Fuzzy was one of those situations. She was still miserable, but at least there was an end in sight: a note on the bulletin board at the feed store was all it had taken to find our donkey a new home. But that good fortune ran out about the time we tried to get her to that new home.

Locally, our donkey is known as a
burro verde
, which should translate to “green ass,” though the title seems to be applied to the full spectrum of equines. The term is shorthand for never broken, never ridden, and never acquainted with the ways of the horse trailer. Since those unacquainted tend to get pissy when they find themselves trapped in a steel cage for the first time, some assistance was required.

Assistance came in the form of a sister of a cousin of a neighbor of a friend of an uncle, or some other infinite regress of the way things work in Chimayo. Her name was Cindy. She was full-blooded Cherokee by birth and donkey whisperer by trade and arrived one hot afternoon in a truck the size of the Dakotas, black hair and rail thin, wearing jeans and scuffed boots. Out of the corner of her mouth dangled one of what would prove to be a steady stream of Marlboros. She puffed in unapologetic celebration. While many tribes regard tobacco as a sacred plant, this was not what Cindy had in mind. She'd had open-heart surgery about three weeks back and was just celebrating her survival.

Loading a green donkey onto a horse trailer requires a delicate two-step: push from the back, lure from the front. Pushing involved locking arms across hindquarters and digging in for the long haul. Luring was done by waving oats in front of mouth and walking backward. The danger with the first was that my testicles were directly in the line of fire. The danger with the second was the love of my life being smothered in green ass. There were no other options. We dug in and lured on. We pushed and pulled, coaxed and begged. Fuzzy would not be moved. We got our backs bent and boots caked, and when neither did the trick, Cindy tied a bandana around her head, shoved another cigarette in her mouth, and squatted down with her lips inches from Fuzzy's rear end. Then she started whispering.

Her voice was soft and low and ass is not a language I speak, but my concerns just then were less about the contents of the conversation and more about Cindy's lit cigarette bobbing millimeters from Fuzzy's butt. Cindy did not seem concerned. She seemed connected. The feeling turned out to be mutual. After about five minutes of whispering, Fuzzy started nodding. Eventually she lifted one foot to test the edge of the trailer. I wasn't quite sure if I was witnessing minor miracles or Monty Python, but Cindy kept whispering and Fuzzy kept nodding. Eventually she nudged that first foot in deeper, lifted her other one, and then did this little hop-step number straight on inside like she'd been doing it on Broadway for years. I didn't get kicked, Joy didn't get crushed, the donkey whisperer jumped into her pickup and smoked on home.

It was a man named Chris Malloy who helped me make sense of the whole affair. I'd met Chris about six months back, when I was writing an article about him for a magazine and he was transitioning from his old life as a professional surfer into his new life as an organic rancher. Because he was the only person I knew who had any experience living in the country, he was the first person I called for advice after buying the house in Chimayo. It was his stories of fence building and food raising and other hardscrabble, earthbound delights that helped reinforce my decision to move. To let him know how that decision was playing out I called him not long after my encounter with the donkey whisperer. When I finished telling him the story, he started laughing and didn't stop for quite some time.

“Animals,” he said finally. “They just have no time for normal people.”

11

In retrospect, there weren't too many normal people around—ourselves included—though perhaps that will become clearer as we go along. I suppose I am talking about consequences, about what can happen when you decide that anything is better than more of the same, about why large quantities of alcohol should not be cocktailed with ideas about what to do with the entirety of one's savings account. Mostly I'm talking about the inherent difficulties in chasing down a dream, but perhaps that too will become clearer as we go along.

What was immediately clear was that snow in May wasn't the only thing different about our new home. As the crow flies there were less than eight hundred miles between us and anything familiar, but down here on the ground those distances were astronomically greater. The local landscape was all terra incognita, a whorl of mesas and buttes and hoodoos and fairy chimneys and slot canyons and none of it making much sense. Riverbeds that hadn't sprung to life in two hundred years would suddenly flood; deep springs would vanish even faster. Everything seemed to have a nebulous quality that tilted the world, burned away the familiar, and rearranged fundamental properties according to laws of physics as yet undiscovered. Perhaps this is what D. H. Lawrence meant when he wrote: “It was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization.”

And nowhere in this dread state are these forces stronger than in northern New Mexico. Here they seep in through cracks in the floor and catch you while you're sleeping, making off with whatever might be left of your mind. You want proof? Just north of my front door is the Hog Farm, which Wavy Gravy once dubbed “a mobile hallucinogen-extended family”—both America's longest-running hippie commune and the spot where the acid trip scene in
Easy Rider
was filmed. Just south puts you in Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was built, site of a small museum where you can stand before exact replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy and feel, at least in my case, damn unsure what should be meant by the word
humanity.

In between these spots stretches our little valley, Rio Arriba County, ground zero for an entirely different kind of bomb. Northern New Mexico is some of the most serious outlaw territory in the lower forty-eight, populated entirely, as Kerouac would say, by “the mad ones.” Bikers and bandits and beatniks. Guys who still ride horses to work; guys who can strip a car in no time flat; guys who haven't been sober since Nixon. Everybody has a secret to hide and a knife in his boot. It's an area where work wear runs from Carhartt to Dickies, weekend style from Harley to Davidson. Jailhouse tattoos are also popular. Not long after we arrived, I was standing in the checkout line at our grocery store when the clerk asked the woman in front of me how her brothers were doing.

“Ramón got himself shot, José's upstate for a nickel, and Juan just broke his parole.”

“What about Arturo?”

“Oh,” she said with a smile, “they haven't caught him yet.”

And none of this, none of this was anything new.

New Mexico became a territory in 1850, yet wasn't granted statehood until 1912. Utah came first, as did Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and both Dakotas. Known as “Robber's Roost,” Oklahoma still beat out this place by five years. In fact, my new home was the fourth last state—only Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii came later. But New Mexico's sixty-two-year waiting period between territory and statehood represents the longest such stretch in U.S. history—and not without good reason.

The Indian battles fought here were among the country's bloodiest. None of the tribes went gently into that good night, and the first “settlers” weren't much calmer. There were wars fought over timber and wars fought over land—known as the Tall Tree Wars and the Land Grant Wars, respectively—and more war over cows—the Lincoln County War—and banditry, mostly known as Billy the Kid, but really, he wasn't alone. The reason it took New Mexico so long to become a state was that everyone with a lick of sense and a say in these matters was just too damned scared of the place.

Which brings us to our neighbors. In dog rescue, because dogs make plenty of noise and have a tendency to go missing, having a good relationship with one's neighbors is critical to success. So on the afternoon of our third day in Chimayo, Joy decided it was time to meet ours. She snipped a few flowers from the garden and started walking down the road. Shortly thereafter, a car came flying past. The cops came next. They caught the guy in front of our neighbor's driveway and pulled him over fifty feet beyond. Joy figured speeding ticket and kept walking. Around the time she knocked on our neighbor's door, a second squad car arrived. Then a third. Suddenly the street was filled with cops. A moment later there were men pouring out of the woods and coming down from the hills, their blue windbreakers reading
DEA
in big yellow letters. Joy's jaw dropped, her feet froze; she was the only person in sight not carrying a firearm. Not surprisingly, our neighbor didn't answer his door.

Instead, he cracked a window, parting the curtains an inch.

“What the hell do you want?”

“Um,” said Joy, “just moved in next door.” Then, pointing toward the drug bust, “But, uh, don't have anything to do with that.”

The window opened another crack, the curtains parted slightly more.

“Who are you?”

“Your new neighbor.”

“What?”

“Obviously, this is not a good time.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to say hello.” Then, holding out the flowers, “And to give you these.”

There was a long pause. Our new neighbor glanced from Joy to the flowers and back again. He glanced at the military action in the distance. Apparently, the DEA wasn't there for him, rather had been using his property as a staging area for a raid down the street. This didn't improve his mood.

“We can just wave to each other over the fence,” he said finally. “We'll be neighbors like that.”

Over the years, an exceptionally talented photographer named Christopher Wray McCann has joined me on a number of jobs that involve too much travel and not much sleep, and Christopher occasionally responds to such trying conditions by limiting the majority of his communication to Irish whiskey and
Apocalypse Now
quotes—“There are mines over there, there's mines over there, and watch out, those goddamn monkeys bite” being but one example. I mention this because the day after the drug bust we met another one of our neighbors. He dropped by early the next morning, wearing a pink bathrobe and blue shower sandals, to let us know of a pack of pit bulls rampaging in the area.

“Possibly rabid,” he said, “definitely attacking local dogs.”

I hadn't had coffee yet and wasn't quite sure what he was telling me.

“You know,” he said, “one pit bull bites the head, another the ass, a third tries to tear out the entrails. It's usually over pretty quickly. Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood.”

It was right about then I recalled another of Christopher's favorite
Apocalypse Now
quotes: “I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.”

12

Squirt was our first rescue in Chimayo, arriving our first weekend in town. She had been sprung from a shelter in LA, then driven across the Southwest because no one in California wanted a dachshund-pug hybrid with a weight problem. At least we'd been told it was a weight problem. The truth was Squirt looked like three bowling balls stuffed inside a tube sock. Worse, all that weight made her fearless. She was a brawler with a short fuse and a roamer with no common sense, and in those early weeks in New Mexico that was a lousy combination.

We had coyotes in the hills, wild dogs in the streets, and no fences surrounding our property. I was in charge of putting up those fences—and failing miserably. I started failing on our second day in town; by the sixth I was head to toe with scratches and again on the phone with Chris Malloy. At the time, he was at the airport about to board a plane for Tahiti.

“Seriously,” I said, “surfing's for pussies. The tropics suck. Why not trade it for a week stringing fences in the lovely American Southwest?”

“Seriously,” he said, “you have to get a grip.”

A week later, I still didn't have a grip—though we almost had a fence. The property was entirely enclosed except for the front gate, which I had yet to figure out how to install. But I forgot about that detail and banged into the house to brag about my success. I also forgot to close the door. Thirty seconds later, from somewhere near our neighbor's fields, we heard a frantic bark, a blizzard of growls, and a scream that still keeps me up nights. By the time we found her, Squirt was in tatters. The gashes started up by her neck and ran down toward her belly, and that was the last time I forgot to close a door.

It was also the first time we met Kathleen Ramsay—though nobody calls her that. She's Doc: a middle-aged, salt-and-pepper-haired woman, slender and small, given to bright scrubs and blunt talk. Doc was born in Los Alamos at a time when seventy-five percent of the town's adult population had postgraduate degrees and security clearances. Her mother did geothermal research, her father worked on detonation sequences. This was not long after the war, and Los Alamos was still a “closed city.” During those years, parental duties were neglected for national emergencies, so most of Doc's childhood was spent on horseback, alone in the Jemez Mountains.

When she was twelve, her father took a job in Saudi Arabia, but she went to high school in Lebanon. The 1982 Beirut embassy bombing relocated her to Bahrain, then she came back to New Mexico for college. She studied metallurgy and biochemistry and was all set to do more of the same at the graduate level when she realized that the only jobs open to her afterward were in big cities, and having come to hate big cities, instead took a hard left turn and a considerably harder path and went back to school and eventually became, to the limited number of people who know and understand the rather special work she now does, a kind of legend.

For the past twenty-five years, Doc has run the Cottonwood Veterinary Clinic and the New Mexico Wildlife Center, both with the goal of “helping any injured animal that comes in the door.” What comes in the door at the clinic are mostly dogs and cats and birds. What comes in the door at the center are black bears, mountain lions, and bald eagles. Also frogs, snakes, lizards, hawks, eagles, lots of owls, bobcats, elk, deer, and the rest of the ark. Not surprisingly, Doc hasn't slept more than three hours a night in a very long time.

The New Mexico Wildlife Center began as the Northern New Mexico Raptor and Rehabilitation Center back when raptor medicine wasn't a field anyone knew much about. “When I was in school,” recalls Doc, “it was dogs, cats, cows, sheep, goats, period.” But when she got out, while working in a clinic in Los Alamos, some guy brought in a golden eagle caught in a foothold trap. “He was dangling from a chain, thrashing and screaming. I took one look at the bird and decided if I did anything with my life, I wanted to be able to give these guys a second chance.” So she quit the traditional clinic and opened the Wildlife Center and quickly expanded the operation to include other animals beside raptors because, well, other animals kept showing up.

In doing so, Doc put herself on the front end of a wave that's been cresting for nearly two hundred years. The first official animal welfare organization was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in Britain in 1824 by a group of twenty-two reformers who liked to meet at the appropriately named Old Slaughter coffeehouse in London. They were led by parliamentarian Richard Martin, a man whose philanthropic actions earned him some fame, much notoriety, and the nickname “Humanity Dick.” The society's initial thrust was to support Martin's Act, an 1822 law that attempted to curb cruelty to farm animals. In 1840, Queen Victoria became hip to the cause and granted them official status, and their name was changed to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In 1866, a former diplomat to the Russian court of Czar Alexander II, Henry Bergh, carried this fight to America, where he began to plead on behalf of “the mute servants of all mankind.” He next drafted a “Declaration of the Rights of Animals” and brought it to the New York State Legislature. The result was the creation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the passage of an anticruelty law that the society was authorized to enforce. In 1867, the ASPCA began operating the first ever ambulance service for injured horses; also the year David Heath became the first person prosecuted under the new law, receiving ten days in prison and a fine of twenty-five dollars for beating a cat to death. Thirty years later, New York dogcatchers were still rounding up three hundred strays a day, packing them into cages, and hurling those cages into the East River. Since these catchers were paid by the dog and not the hour, abuses were frequent and house pets were missing. To fight against this, in 1894 the ASPCA was placed in charge of animal control duties, and a more “humane” method of euthanasia was found inside the gas chamber.

Pet ownership, in its earliest modern form, began as a Victorian hobby. The nouveau middle class, suddenly flush with leisure time as a result of the Industrial Revolution, discovered a passion for genetics that quickly turned forty core dog breeds into four hundred varieties. The results of this were adopted by working-class Americans in the years after World War II, when the development of canned food, kitty litter, and other such conveniences made pet ownership affordable for the masses. But more convenience meant more pets and more pets meant more work for the ASPCA.

According to the official numbers, shelters take in somewhere between six million and eight million dogs and cats every year and euthanize about half of them. And this is an improvement. While it was back in the 1970s that the HSUS began trying to raise awareness of the benefits of spaying and neutering, it wasn't until the 1990s that their catchy tag line, “Less born, less killed, less cruelty,” really caught on. In the 1980s, shelters were euthanizing twenty million animals each year. But then birth rates dropped and admission rates dropped, and today, while the three to four million animals they kill annually is a slaughter, it's also a significant improvement over the massacre that came before.

Of course, veterinarians also have to put dogs down, sometimes at alarming rates. After sewing up Squirt's wounds, Doc told me her morning had been spent euthanizing puppies.

“It's the season for it,” she said.

“Euthanasia has a season?”

“Distemper has a season.”

Distemper, I learned, is an always painful, always fatal disease that affects young dogs the worst. Spring is the season for puppies, so spring is the season for distemper. It turns out the disease is entirely preventable provided dogs are vaccinated—a treatment that costs about seven bucks.

“Sixty percent poverty rate in this valley,” said Doc. “When you have three jobs and three kids, and eight hundred dollars a month is your income, do you spend it on groceries or the dog?”

Then she told me it really wasn't about the money. What was going on came down to culture.

“This area has a few Caucasians,” she said, “but they're farmers and farmers are a different type. Mostly we have a large Mexican and Spanish population. In those cultures, the animal is a commodity, something put here for human use. It's hard to fight against that. I try to look at the broader picture.”

“There's a broader picture?”

“I may not like having to put down seven dogs, but at least I get to put them down. Ten years ago, if I told someone their dog needed to be euthanized, they'd take it out back and shoot it in the head.”

“So things are looking up?”

“Welcome to New Mexico,” she said.