Monthly Archives: June 2019

Risky business?

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Last Friday I happened to be driving back up the mountain around lunchtime. When I got to the top, right at our road, I saw something I have never seen around here before — a backpacker. He had just crossed the top of the mountain from Little Texas Valley and was starting down Fouche Gap Road towards the bottom on the other side. I slowed down to make my turn, so I got a pretty good look at him. He was a middle-aged man with a large backpack. I assumed that maybe he had been camping somewhere in the forest. There are certainly a lot of places where you could do that.

I mentioned it to Leah after I got home, and then I forgot about it. Later in the evening we went down to a fast food place to get some chicken. We stopped at the store on the way back home, so we went home by a different route from the one we took into town. There we passed a man standing stooped over with his hands on his legs and a huge pack on his back. As we passed I realized it was the same backpacker I had seen on the mountain. We turned around and went back to make sure he was OK.

It turned out he was fine. He was just resting his back and shoulders. We asked where he was headed. He said a nearby convenience store to get a little something to eat. So we offered him a ride and he accepted.

At the convenience store we talked a little. We asked if he would prefer to eat somewhere else and he said he would. So we ended up taking him into town to eat at a Steak ’n Shake,* a hamburger joint that stays open 24 hours. 

Tim was his name. He had spent the morning hiking from a lakeside campground down in Texas Valley. I estimated that to be at least six miles from the top of the mountain, and I later got an actual distance that was a little more than that. He had spent all morning hiking up to the top of the mountain, and the rest of the day hiking down to where we found him. I measured that distance with the car trip meter. It was also a little over six miles. That was a 13-mile hike with a big pack on a very hot, sunny day.

Tim used to live in Rome, and his daughter still does. He had visited her for some time, and than set off to somewhere else. We asked where he was headed, but he was indefinite about it. All he was concerned with was where he would spend the night. He said he had several options in town because he knew several people from when he lived here. He also mentioned a homeless shelter.

He said he had had trouble with drugs in the past but was clean now. He told us he had worked in a lot of different fields, from mechanical work to healthcare. He said he had come from South Carolina, but we never got a straight answer on exactly how he had reached Rome, by foot or some other way.

He was a 43-year-old free spirit. Whether he was free by choice or necessity was never clear.

When he got out of the car he offered to let me get a feel for his pack. It was far heavier than any pack I ever hauled in my backpacking, and it was not a particularly good pack.

We gave him some money so he could have as big a dinner as he wanted. He seemed to need some help, but he never asked. That’s one reason I volunteered a little donation. He later texted us a photo of his Steak ’n Shake dinner, so we know he actually spent the money there.

We asked him let us know how he was doing, but he hasn’t contacted us since the hamburger dinner photo.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Tim. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and we’re happy we helped him out. He was a little old to still be trying to find out who he is, but I guess we all start on that job at different times.

For all we know he could have been an axe murder on the run. But he didn’t murder us, so we’re happy about that, too.

* Despite needing two apostrophes, Steak ’n Shake uses only one.

Scatter shots

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It’s been a while since I posted. Nothing much has been happening, but I took a few pictures.

The blackberries in the valley are ripe now, but up here on the mountain they’re running behind.

They are prettier when they’re still red, but taste much better when they’re ripe and plump. Unfortunately, even the black ones still lack a few days before they are completely ripe. I ate one, which was semi-OK. The dogs know exactly what’s going on and want in on the action. I gave one to each. They didn’t complain.

On one of our other walks I heard some scrabbling around in the weeds beside the road. I expected an armadillo, and was not disappointed. It was about half-grown. The dogs were extremely interested. I thought I had included the armadillo in this shot, but I can’t find it. They are well camouflaged.

I don’t know how hard an armadillo shell is, but it must be proof against whatever predators they had to face when they evolved because they seem fearless, even with two fairly large dogs and a human almost within grasp. I suspect Zeke wouldn’t have much trouble with the shell.

We have had a few fairly windy storms, although not what some other areas not far away have had. I have been finding limbs on the road, but I had not seen any downed trees until I saw this one.

I have taken a photo of this tree before. It was a large oak tree, huge in these parts. I imagine that it was in the yard of an old farmhouse. It’s hard to tell from this photo just how large this one was. Apparently it was old enough that the center had rotted. It seems to have split down the middle. It’s sad to see the end of this old grandmother tree.

The full moon passed a few days ago. I took some shots of it as it rose. This was just before it was full.

This was just after.

And now for another movie experiment. Open garage doors seem to be irresistible to hummingbirds. We have had quite a few fly in and not be able to find their way out again, both in this house and our old house up on the mountain. This one managed to find its way back outside.

I really like hummingbirds, but I am afraid they aren’t the brightest of all the birds. Another small bird has flown into the garage on at least two occasions lately. It flies around frantically but then sees the open garage door and escapes. The hummers can sometimes manage to see the huge opening to freedom, but often can’t. They seem to focus on the white ceiling, apparently thinking its’s open sky.

I am not sure this movie will play. It plays on my laptop, but when I try to preview this post, it seems to hang up. That might be because I have a slow connection tonight, or there might be something wrong with the movie. Let me know if it doesn’t play and I’ll try to load a different version.

Catching up

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The summer has been slow so far. Slow and hot. Hot and dry. So naturally that’s when I work outside.

I have been trying to prepare a couple of areas for seeding grass, but I also have been trying to landscape a small area between the house and the driveway. It’s a steep slope, and most of it has been bare, red clay, baked by the sun pretty much all day long. We found a little Japanese maple that, according to its label, can stand full sun. That’s it standing all by itself, barely visible right between the ornamental grass and the corner of the house. The white hose is looped near it.

I built a low retaining wall to try to contain all the runoff that has been washing red silt down into the rest of the yard. We’ll see how well the maple stands up to the sun. The rows of little green specks below the retaining wall are a variety of vinca. I had to dig up the brick-like soil there and replace it with store-bought dirt.

Vinca is a nice ground cover. It grows low and has nice little flowers all through the year. I bought a good number of small plants to cover the bare dirt between our pet maple tree and the driveway. I have seen vinca growing on the north side of a house, mostly shaded, so I thought it might do well under the tree, but its growth is almost like a joke. Everywhere that is not directly beneath the maple’s limbs is growing well, but anything under the limbs is struggling. The dividing line between spreading vinca and struggling vinca is an almost perfect outline of the shadow of the tree.

I am still working on a series of retaining walls right next to the house, where the slope is steepest.

I’ll probably have two more retaining walls between the lower one and the upper one in this picture. All that red dirt has been washed down the slope from up where the wheelbarrow sits. It used to be mulch.

Once all this is finished, and I get the grass seeded, I need to start on our front sidewalk. No ever comes to our front door, so I guess there’s no rush. But it would help keep the cats’ feet cleaner.

Speaking of cats, since I last mentioned Sylvester, he has returned home again.

Cats and boxes; what can you say?

The vet said he’s OK to go outside again, so we haven’t had to worry about his problems with using a litter box, or rather his problems with not using a littler box. But the vet reported that he had yet another problem, a large seroma on the back of his neck. A seroma is a pocket of blood serum, that is, the clear part of blood. They said that it was pretty large, but it had drained. However, it left a large, open wound on the back of his neck. Now he looks like something from a horror movie — a perfectly normal cat from the front, but then he turns around that there’s a hatchet in the back of his head. Only in this case, the hatchet is gone and only the wound is left. It’s so ugly I am not going to post a photo.

A seroma is often the result of some sort of trauma. The vet had no idea how he got it, and neither do we. We didn’t see any sign of it before we took him back to the vet’s office. Sylvester doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, so aside from giving us nightmares, it apparently will not cause any problems. Unfortunately, it looks like it will leave a large area bare of hair.

Another problem on the cat front showed up in the form of a possum eating cat food on the front porch, where Leah feeds Chloe and Dusty. Possums like cat food, but apparently this one was attracted to some yellow jacket traps we put out on the porch. They are plastic bottle-like devices into which you put a mixture of water, sugar and detergent. Insects are drawn to the detergent odor, fall into the water, and drown. There, depending on how long you go between changing the bait, the drowned insects begin to stink. That stink is very attractive to possums, it seems, because this one knocked over most of them. So, we had to do something.

That something was a trap. With all the cat food and stinky, dead insects, it ignored the trap when we used our usual peanut butter bait. But cat food did the trick, at about 11:30 Tuesday night.

Some people don’t like possums, but I kind of do. I also feel kind of sorry for them. Possums don’t get no respect, but they are pretty harmless, and generally go about their business innocently.

It turns out that it is probably illegal to trap a wild animal on your property and release it somewhere that is not your property, at least unless you have permission from the land owner and possibly a permit from the state. So, of course, when the possum tripped the trap, I did not put it in the back of my truck and take it down into Texas Valley, where I did not drive a few miles into the woods and release the possum into the wild. I did not look for the small creek where I would release a possum or raccoon if I did such things, and I did not miss it somehow in the dark of the night. If I had done such a thing, I would certainly hope that it found food, shelter and water, if I had released it. But of course, I would never do something like that.