Dog Mountain
Cabin fever struck again, time to head south. I meant
to go to the desert, but hate traveling, so I decided to
check out a couple of old mines near Mayer, which is 30
miles to the south. The weather was overcast and 60
degrees. The countryside here is rolling hills covered
with bushes, I never found it worth exploring before, but it
was close and lacked 12 inches of snow cover, so it qualified.
There seemed to be a lot of quarries, with colorful
quartz and shale-type rocks.
I pulled up to a woman hiking with 2 shepherd dogs. The dogs immediately tried to get in the back of my truck, difficult since I have a camper on the back. I asked her where the old miney junk was. I was on the wrong road as usual, but she turned me on to some exclusive premium old miney junk content nearby. She owned a ranch, the U-Cross, farther down the road. I headed back to where she suggested and came upon this-
It was crammed full of stuff. At first I
thought it was garbage, but it was just 'stuff' like you'd keep in
your storeroom. I continued on up the
mountain, and saw this:
This bus was empty, but the trailer contained stuff also:
In America, if you don't have any stuff, you ain't nobody. You're graded on quantity more than quality. So even our homeless poor can be seen wheeling shopping carts down alleys, looking in dumpsters, this reassures onlookers that these too are doing their American thing, amassing stuff, albeit crummy stuff.
But whose stuff was it? I wondered. Finally I came to a locked gate, no trespassing sign and had to park. I heard a dog bark uphill. I'm never sure if they really mean 'no trespassing' or not, so I decided to ask. At the top of the mountain were more derelict vehicles. Suddenly from nowhere, a pack of dogs came running at me, and I mean about 50! I was kind of nervous, with them barking and milling all around me. An old man came walking after them and calmed them down. His name was Gail Dingman.
He was a little paranoid about the picture taking until I assured him I wasn't from the government Dog Tax Protective BusyBody Meddling Agency. Apparently he's the Humane Alternative to Killing Unwanted Dogs for the area. He said his dog food bill is $750 a month, so any philanthropic billionaires who may be reading this, I'd say this would be a Good Cause, unless you hate dogs. He said the County Judge said he could have the dogs as long as they weren't bothering anybody, which was unlikely since his nearest neighbor looked to be 3 miles away. I read sometimes about these old geezers/geezettes out in the sticks with 83 dogs or 68 cats, all mangy and diseased and starving, but these dogs were in good health. About 10 were chained to trees because they would fight or run away.
Even
though situated on a mountain top, the smell of 57 dogs crapping was
strong. Gail acted like someone living in a stinky middle of nowhere
who seldom had visitors, ear-banging me about all the mines he's
worked on, all the planes and helicopters he's flown on, the name of
each mountain we could see through our binocs. Down in the gulch he
pointed out a mine he'd worked on in 1956. Later I thought, 1956? I
was 5 years old in 1956. Life seems very long sometimes,
considering almost all of us spend the second half of it without a
sex drive. Only occasionally do I flash on the fact of how short it
really is, when I compare the Stuff I Mean To Do with The Stuff I've
Actually Accomplished. I went on my way around the mountain, happy to
breathe fresh air again. I found this mine, with unusual blue rocks
nearby-
And some actual old miney junk:
Copyright 2001 by Terry Morgan
http://terrymorgan.net