Doug Goodman's Blog, page 9

My father’s set of goblin-killers

Back in June, I was helping my dad clear out his shed because they were moving across the country to Washington where they would have better resources to care for them. I want to say “resources for the elderly,” but I don’t think of them that way. Yes, they are in their seventies, but my father is still a very able-bodied, able-minded, healthy person. He isn’t feeble. So while I feel I have to say “elderly” to get the point across to y’all, I don’t think of him that way. He is still a man of depth and mystery.

To that point, I have a story to tell about the shed and what I discovered there.

It is June 2020 in Woodville. My parents lived on 30+ acres of land. About 100 yards from their house, my dad built a shed to hold all his lawn mowers and kayaks while also doubling as a workshop. Most of it had to go. My parents were taking very little with them to Washington. They were downsizing from a 3000 square foot house with a shed to an 1800 square foot house. They simply did not have room for everything.

So the week before, my twin (not identical) and I had cleared most of the shed out. I took these gunmetal gray pots home with me, and my brother took most of the tools. (I am not – I repeat NOT – a fixit guy. I have no love for plumbing, wiring, woodworking, or masonry. It’s just not in me. My twin, on the other hand, is the kind of man who fixes his own cars and builds things around the house.)

So by the time I was in there a second time, the shed was pretty empty. I drove my dad and my son up to the shed, just three Dougs on a mini-excursion. There was a lawnmower that didn’t work and a really old above-ground, inflatable tool. You’ve seen this kind of place before. Random, discarded items. The remains that have been picked over again and again and left to rot.

I found a few more pots, and a hedge trimmer, as well as a larger AccuGreen Drop Spreader for putting fertilizer on the lawn. In my mind, these things were gold. They were tools I could put to immediate use, especially the drop spreader because mine hadn’t been working right ever since I stupidly used it as a wheelbarrow to move rocks and concrete.

But then, y’all, then I found the most epic thing you can ever expect to find in your parent’s old shed. I saw something that looked like chains way in the back underneath the counter. They looked rusted, so I didn’t think there was much use to them, but that curiosity cat was scratching the back of my brain. I had to see what these things were. I reached in, put my fingers around the rusted chains, and dragged them out. My mouth was agape. I held up my discovery. I couldn’t believe what I’d found! This:

“Dad, what is this?” I asked, knowing exactly what it was, but I wanted my son to hear this, too.

“Oh, it’s just some old traps I have,” my dad said as cool as a pickle in Antarctica, as natural as green tea in a vegan restaurant.

Why did my father own steel traps? What was he hunting? When did this happen? I had so many questions.

But then the real kicker to the whole thing happened. I said, “What are you doing with these traps? What were you trying to catch?”

And just like in a spy thriller or a horror movie, my dad says – and again, I want emphasize that this was as nonchalant as you can imagine: “Oh, things.”

Things? What kind of things?

He then changed the subject. He redirected us to something else, I forget now. Maybe it was a stack of old dinner plates. But the point is, he never answered. He’s never admitted what he used them for. My guess is that way back in the 1970s when he lived out on property in Maryland, he used the traps to kill raccoons or other animals that would have been a nuisance to his dog kennel business. Or maybe he used them to catch a sasquatch, or perhaps people. That doesn’t sound like my dad, but this is the mind of a horror writer. My mind goes immediately to these places. You can’t show me that you have steel traps and then dismiss why you have them in the first place.

This has immediately become the coolest thing I own and my new favorite family heirloom. Everybody who visits (which is not very many TBH because of COVID-19) has to be shown these gloriously rust-covered traps and told the story of how my father owned traps and won’t tell a soul why. Perhaps he believed chupacabras were trying to enter his house and needed the protection. Perhaps he got in with a bad crowd and had to defend his young wife and family from a slasher, or maybe it was zombies.

Probably zombies.

It’s been almost two months now, and I still relish this treasure. Although, there comes a point where the reason your mother and father own something is not as important or interesting as the fact that they own it at all. I imagine it’s like if you discovered your parents owned a fake fabrege egg from the early 1900s. Why they decided to purchase it is no longer as interesting as the fact that they bought it, kept it, stored it, and maintained it.

And the reality is that at this point, whatever reason my father ever gives for owing traps will be significantly less interesting than the stories I make up in my head. I’ve blown it to a proportion where I like it. I might, for instance, find out one day that the steel traps were a gift from his father back in the 1940s/50s in the mountains of Tennessee when my father was spending much of his childhood roaming the forests and mountains. It would make perfect sense in a 1940s/50s way. This was back when cherry bombs were a perfectly fine birthday present. But in my head it will be a goblin that was sneaking into his house and eating all the cheese.

Nope. It’s definitely zombies.

Ryder Knocks the Poop Out of Koda

All dog owners have stories. I can’t believe I haven’t told this story yet. It was hilarious. My daughter and I were relaxing in the backyard one evening earlier this summer. I can’t remember if it was before or after we drove to Washington. Maybe it was after. First, some background.

Our two German Shepherds, Koda and Ryder, typically lounge around the backyard. But even on the hottest days, once I go outside, it’s playtime. Their favorite game is “I’ve got a thing and you don’t.” Ryder always has the thing. Koda never does. The object Ryder has is not important. Most recently it has been a small rubber tire with a rope attached to the end, but it’s been a stick when no toy is available and when once upon a time it was literally an old piece of newspaper. This scrap of newspaper is paraded around like it is the most coveted piece of property in the world, and Ryder teases Koda that she has it and he doesn’t.

Now, I know that lots of dogs play this game, but for Koda and Ryder, this game has become the linchpin of their relationship. See, Ryder was always a shy, beta-dog type personality. We attribute this to Mojo, who was an adult when Ryder arrived at our house as a puppy. Mojo was unruly and old and didn’t play, so she never played. Once Koda entered the picture, she had somebody to play with, so this whole other side we’d never seen before suddenly appeared.

Having Koda has been a gift for Ryder because she can exhibit all this play behavior. Because she can play, I think, she has also grown a more dominant personality. For whatever reason, even though Koda outweighs her by at least twenty pounds and is much larger, he won’t oppose her. I’ve seen him literally drop the thing for her so that she can pick it up and then he can chase her and whine that he doesn’t have the thing. It’s a bewildering relationship to me, but it seems to work for these two dogs.

However, one of Koda’s favorite game is fetch. He likes to chase the toy, munch on it a couple of times, then bring it back to me. He does this much more than any other dog we’ve owned. Unfortunately, that game has led to pooping problems for him, but not the pooping problems you’re thinking of. He didn’t eat the toy and have a bad BM. It was something much more insidious.

Yep. You heard that right.

I’m still setting the stage, and the last thing you need to know is that Ryder is now almost ten years old. Koda is past eleven. These are old dogs. Like many shepherds, Ryder’s hips are starting to go. We give her vitamin pills for joint health and an aspirin for pain management, but there is only so much you can do to stave off the inevitable. Sometimes when the brute bumps into her, she sits down. Other times, his bumps don’t bother her. Her hips are going, but they aren’t gone.

So back to the fetch game that Koda plays and Ryder doesn’t. She’s never liked fetch. Ryder only likes to play that “chase me when I have that thing you want” game. As he’s gotten older, he cares less and less for this game. Sometimes, he just wants to play fetch, and he gets frustrated when she takes the toy so he can’t play fetch!

(I know, common sense dictates that we just add a second object and this should fix everything. But these are dog minds and they don’t work that way. No amount of Frisbees or tennis balls can change the fact that there is one toy to rule them all and it is the only one that can be played with.)

In trying to help Koda, I’ve put Ryder inside so that he and I can play fetch. We play fetch four or five times until he gets too tired. (He’s an old dog after all.) He looks so happy and content, Brina and I remark how we wish everybody could have that level of contentment.

When I let Ryder out later, though, she goes right up, stands over him, and tries to take the toy. Koda isn’t having any of this. He growls back, which is odd. He never growls at her.

Ryder doesn’t know what to do with this. Her Koda is broken. He’s not supposed to growl. He’s supposed to drop the rubber toy.

But in the moment, this toy is still the centerpiece of their relationship, and it isn’t working the way it’s supposed to because Koda won’t let Ryder have it. So she grabs one end and tugs it.

Koda bites down harder and stands up.

They go chest-to-chest. Ryder tries to jump on Koda. Koda shoves Ryder back. Because of her bad hips, Ryder yelps as she jumps. She’s putting way too much pressure on her hips. She yelps like a little puppy. It comes off very high pitched and “don’t hurt me.” She’s always yelped like this, even before her hips went bad. And Koda always, ALWAYS gives in at this point. But not today. He wants his toy, he’s fond of his toy, why won’t you just leave me alone? his behavior says.

Ryder tries again and again to jump on him. Probably five or six times she does this, with the same results. She raises up, she yelps in pain, he pushes her back, and she gets nowhere. I’m about to stand up and stop this because she is now mostly hunched over on her hips. She is so upset by this lapse in decorum she’s willing to injure herself to stop him.

But at this point, the two dogs go their separate ways. She wanders to one side of the yard and he lays back down and chews the scrap rubber victoriously until he is bored thirty or forty seconds later and walks away.

Ryder runs in, scoops up the toy, and plays with it. But by this time, Koda is done with the toy and is sniffing the grass. Ryder drops the toy. It’s lost its appeal. She gets a drink of water from the small galvanized metal stock tank used as their water bowl.

Brina and I continue our conversation, having watched and laughed about the dogs. We talk about her internship, the summer, what she is thinking for graduate school. The sun starts to get low in the sky. The temperature feels good finally. The Houston humidity finally begins to dissolve. Koda sniffs around for a place to go to the bathroom.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Ryder lurking on the edge of the patio. Body low to the ground, she is stalking along the patio. Before we can react, she charges across the lawn, and she has always been fast. Old bad hips is across the lawn like a flash of lightning and BOOM she collides with poor Koda right in the middle of dropping his business. He is shocked, we are shocked, and Ryder jumps on him. There is nothing he can do. The poor dog is trying to finish pooping AND defend himself. He’s hunched over, trying to extend his legs while in mid-poop. His face is a mix of confusion and terror.

I want to add: there was no blood and no biting. She was not “attacking” Koda. She was getting payback by messing with his mind. It worked. I don’t think Koda would be more confused if tiny cat ninjas dropped out of the sky and started dancing a conga line around him.

“RYDER!” We yell. She immediately comes when called. She walks off as if nothing has ever happened. She did no wrong. She’s just a dog taking a stroll. But while Brina and I are talking about this crazy thing we’ve just witnessed and Koda is trying to continue doing his duty, that dog slinks under the table and her bad hips go up in the air. She is ready to pounce.

“RYDER!”

Brina jumps up, opens the door, and forces her inside so that the old man can poop in peace, because isn’t that what we all really want in life? Just to poop in peace?

There is often a question about dogs and their emotional capacity or state of mind. Are we anthropomorphizing them, seeing emotions that aren’t there? Are dogs loving? Sad? Angry? Well, for sure, I will attest that vindictiveness can be attributed to dogs. And apparently there’s no creature more vindictive than a dog that’s been refused the one toy that rules them all.

Koda Gets Destroyed by Ryder

I can’t believe I haven’t told this story yet. It was hilarious. My daughter and I were relaxing in the backyard one evening earlier this summer. I can’t remember if it was before or after we drove to Washington. Maybe it was after.

Our two German Shepherds, Koda and Ryder, typically lounge around the backyard. But even on the hottest days, once I go outside, it’s playtime. They have to run around. Their favorite game is “I’ve got a thing and you don’t.” Ryder always has the thing. Koda never does. The object Ryder has is not important in a physical sense. For most of this year it has been a small rubber tire with a rope attached to the end. But if the toy isn’t there, it will be a stick. And sometimes when there isn’t a stick around, it has literally been a piece of newspaper. This scrap of newspaper is paraded around like it is the most coveted piece of property in the world, and Ryder teases Koda that she has it and he doesn’t.

Now, I know that lots of dogs play this game, but for Koda and Ryder, this game has become the linchpin of their relationship. See, Ryder has always been a shy, beta-dog type personality. We attribute this to Mojo, who was an adult when Ryder arrived at our house as a puppy. Mojo was unruly and old and didn’t play, so she never played. Once Koda entered the picture, she had somebody to play with, so this whole other side we’d never seen before suddenly appeared. Mojo was never interested in her. She was nothing more than an obstacle to the attention he wanted from humans (in particular, me). So he never took to any of the other dogs we owned.

Having Koda has been a gift for Ryder because she can exhibit all this play behavior. Because she can play, I think, she has also grown a more dominant personality. For whatever reason, even though Koda outweighs her by at least twenty pounds and is much larger, he won’t oppose her. I’ve seen him literally drop it for her so that she can pick it up and then he can chase her and whine that he doesn’t have the thing. It’s a bewildering relationship to me, but it seems to work for these two dogs.

However, one of Koda’s favorite game is fetch. He likes to chase the toy, munch on it a couple of times, then bring it back to me. He does this much more than any other dog we’ve owned. Unfortunately, that game has led to pooping problems for him, but not the pooping problems you’re thinking of. He didn’t eat the toy and have a bad BM. It was something much more insidious.

Yep. You heard that right.

I’m still setting the stage, and the last thing you need to know is that Ryder is now almost ten years old. Koda is past eleven. These are old dogs. Like many shepherds, Ryder’s hips are starting to go. We give her vitamin pills for joint health and an aspirin for pain management, but there is only so much you can do to stave off the inevitable. Sometimes when the brute bumps into her, she sits down. Other times, his bumps don’t bother her. Her hips are going, but they aren’t gone.

So back to the fetch game that Koda and Ryder doesn’t. She’s never liked fetch. Ryder only likes to play that “chase me when I have that thing you want” game. As he’s gotten older, he cares less and less for this game. Sometimes, he just wants to play fetch, and he gets frustrated when she takes the toy so he can’t play fetch!

(I know, common sense dictates that we just add a second object and this should fix everything. But these are dog minds and they don’t work that way. No amount of Frisbees or tennis balls can change the fact that there is one toy to rule them all and it is the only one that can be played with.)

In trying to help Koda, I’ve put Ryder inside so that he and I can play fetch. We will play fetch four or five times until he gets too tired. (He’s an old dog after all.) He looks so happy and content, Brina and I remark how we wish everybody could have that level of contentment.

When I let Ryder out later, though, she goes right up, stands over him, and tries to take the toy. Koda isn’t having any of this. He growls back, which is odd. He never growls at her.

Ryder doesn’t know what to do with this. Her Koda is broken. He’s not supposed to growl. He’s supposed to drop the rubber toy (which, let’s be frank – by now it’s only about 3/4 of a rubber tire and there is no attached rope anymore. A couple weeks later I will take the remains and bury them in the garbage can. Somewhere, a dog will play “Taps.”)

But in the moment, this toy is still the centerpiece of their relationship, and it isn’t working the way it’s supposed to because Koda won’t let Ryder have it. So she grabs one end and tugs it.

Koda bites down harder and stands up.

They go chest-to-chest. Ryder tries to jump on Koda. Koda shoves Ryder back. Because of her bad hips, Ryder yelps as she jumps. She’s putting way too much pressure on her hips. She yelps like a little puppy. It comes off very high pitched and “don’t hurt me.” She’s always yelped like this, even before her hips went bad. And Koda always, ALWAYS gives in at this point. But not today. He wants his toy, he’s fond of his toy, why won’t you just leave me alone? his behavior says.

Ryder tries again and again to jump on him. Probably five or six times she does this, with the same results. She raises up, she yelps in pain, he pushes her back, and she gets nowhere. I’m about to stand up and stop this because she is now mostly hunched over on her hips. She is so upset by this lapse in decorum she’s willing to injure herself to stop him.

But at this point, the two dogs go their separate ways. She wanders to one side of the yard and he lays back down and chews the scrap rubber victoriously until he is bored thirty or forty seconds later and walks away.

Ryder runs in, scoops up the toy, and plays with it. But by this time, Koda is done with the toy and sniffing the grass. Ryder drops the toy. It’s lost its appeal. She gets a drink of water from the small galvanized metal stock tank I have. (I bought it too small because it is large enough for her to stand in, which she loves to do. She is the only dog we’ve owned who loves to stand in it. Even Mojo, who loved playing in water, didn’t stand in it. And, I need to add, I have to clean the filter every morning because it is covered in Ryder’s hair.)

Brina and I continue our conversation, having laughed about the dogs. We talk about her internship, the summer, what she is thinking for graduate school. The sun starts to get low in the sky. The temperature feels good finally. The Houston humidity finally begins to dissolve. Koda sniffs around for a place to go to the bathroom.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Ryder lurking on the edge of the patio. Body low to the ground, she is stalking along the patio. Before we can react, she charges across the lawn, and she has always been fast. Old bad hips is across the lawn like a flash of lightning and BOOM she collides with poor Koda right in the middle of mid-poop. He is shocked, we are shocked, and Ryder jumps on him. There is nothing he can do. The poor dog is trying to go to the bathroom AND defend himself. He’s hunched over and trying to get her away.

“RYDER!” We yell. She immediately comes when called. She walks off as if nothing has ever happened. She did no wrong. She’s just a dog taking a stroll. But while Brina and I are talking about this crazy thing we’ve just seen and Koda is trying to continue doing his duty, that dog slinks under the table and gets ready to charge him again.

“RYDER!”

There is often a question about dogs and their emotional capacity or state of mind. Are we anthropomorphizing them, seeing emotions that aren’t there? Are dogs loving? Sad? Angry? Well, for sure, I will attest that vindictiveness can be attributed to dogs.

The Busy Life…or, There and Back Again, COVID-19 Edition

So, one of the things I have to admit about me is that I have this innate need to digest experiences. The more impacting the experience, usually the longer it takes for me to talk about it. The same is true for decisions. If you want to know where to eat tonight, I’ve got a couple of ideas that I will throw out there. Want to know if we should buy that thousand-dollar thing we really need but is over our budget? I need time to think about that. (as my poor wife can attest, my opinions tend to be “no” if I’m pressed into a quick decision.)

I think that’s why I haven’t posted anything here in a while. The past month has definitely been…chocked full of experiences? Great stuff for future writing?

My mother and father are alive and well, but as my mother has gotten older, her dementia has moved from mild to moderate. If you imagine a scale with mild dementia on one side and severe dementia on the other, most of the scale is taken up by moderate dementia. My mother is definitely leaning more toward severe than mild, but it still has a ways to go before it is considered “severe.” At least, that has been the case for the last 6 months or so. And since my parents live in deep East Texas, there just weren’t enough resources to help them out. They need people who can watch over my Mom while my Dad shops for groceries, help with Mom’s care, and they need to have somebody around who, if my father injures himself, can be called upon to help out. If my dad said to get the phone, Mom wouldn’t know where the cellphone is or how to use it. On the way to the phone, she may forget what she was doing. That’s not hyperbole. That’s dementia.

Fortunately, they lucked out and found a place next to my brother, who is a doctor, and his wife, who is a sociologist and has helped the elderly as well as people with schizophrenia. The problem is that my brother and his family live in Washington state, several thousand miles away from Mom and Dad. So for much of May and June I have been helping out with their move. My family drove up with them to Washington a couple of weeks ago. It was a daunting task over a lot of highway. We got there in four days, driving through Kansas, Wyoming, and even Utah. (I’ve now been in every state in the “lower 48” except for Delaware.)

We drove the long road back to Houston, stopping to visit Shoshone Falls and Arches National Park. For the past few weeks, we’ve just been getting back into the swing of things. There are items to put away, books to read (Smoke From This Alter by Louis L’Amour), school choices to be made, and things to do.

I don’t have much to update on them or anyone else. This isn’t some grand post. The last three months have been very eventful. I will chew over them in the coming weeks, months, and years. Right now there is just a lot going on. To steal again from Tolkien, I’m a little fellow in a big world, and thank goodness. In the midst of this big chaotic world, though, I have a family I love and that loves me back, and that is all anyone ever needs, really.

Level One Prepper: An Exploration of Ketchup Water Balloons and Strippers

It’s funny how life has changed us since stay-at-home began in March. In Texas, stay-at-home ended officially in May, but in all likelihood some form of stay-at-home will stay with us for the near future. I think it was interesting how my family prioritized jobs and tasks during stay-at-home. For instance, my wife took to organizing. She’s always excelled at putting things in order and finding the right place for them, but since March she’s become this Four-Star General of it. My kids prioritized school work first (yeah!) and social media/YouTube/video games second. Me, I became a projects-around-the-house kind of a guy. In hindsight, I was a like a Level 1 Prepper trying to get ready for the apocalypse. I failed miserably.

To detail how bad I am at this, I have exhibit A, “The Deep Freeze,” and exhibit B, “The Stripping of The Stained Glider.”

We have a not-so-old Deep Freeze that I repurposed for the storage of food. My idea was to get ready for this upcoming fall/winter. I thought it would be good to be able to store frozen foods so that we wouldn’t have to visit the grocery store so often. It took me two weeks to remove all the rust and gunk out of the interior (cause it’d been sitting in the garage). The ranking officer in command of organizations (and beautiful goddess) gave me plastic shelf liner to put down over the rusty parts.

Now it was time to freeze things, right? Wrong. Sort of. I kept finding new ways to destroy foods by freezing them. One day, I tossed a bunch of vegetables in there. SMH. No, you can’t store lettuce in the deep freeze! Once you bring it out of freeze and try to make a salad, the whole thing turns into wet seaweed. What happens to tomatoes is even weirder. You have to cut them up before freezing them unless you genuinely like the idea of ketchup water balloons. Seriously. After thawing, the roma tomatoes had the feel of plump water balloons. Nobody wants to eat water balloons. Poke one, and they bleed water. You see what I mean? Useless prepper!

Also, don’t try almond milk. Milk seems to work fine as long as you write down the date that you remove it from deep freeze. If you don’t, your kids will assume that the milk in the fridge is a month past its expiration date and never drink it. As for the almond milk, I’m not a chemistry major, but something happens to that stuff. Something that looks like yellow water separated from white chunks that NEVER mixes back together, no matter how furiously or how long you shake that carton. I went at it like I was competing in a shake-weight endurance contest, yet for the rest of the time we poured it into our coffee, we’d get white floaties.

Exhibit B is the glider Mom and Dad gifted me before their move to Washington. I hauled it and a bench here from their home in East Texas. The family helped me move the patio furniture into the backyard, and it looks so nice out there! But the glider needed a new stain on it. Especially since Houston gets so much rain.

I did what I always do when encountering a new task, prepper or otherwise: watch a YouTube video. I found a 15-minute clip of a guy showing how easy it is to strip the surface of a wooden table. And, as a Level 1 Prepper, I already had all the tools I needed: stripper, steel wool, and stain. So I moved the glider onto a tarp Friday afternoon and began stripping.

Worst. Decision. Ever.

The guy in the YouTube video was working indoors. I was working outdoors. In the afternoon. In Houston. In the summer! Did you know that the H in Houston stands for Heat and Humidity? I grew a pile of caps, wraps, shirts, and shorts that I sweated through in the 3+ hours it took me to strip the stain from the glider. The guy who did it made it look so easy! I apparently belonged on one of those failed home project reality TV shows. And I wasn’t renovating a house! I was just stripping stain from a glider!

I still have to sand and stain it, but hopefully I can learn from my mistakes and not make it so hard on myself. After stripping, I was worn out and wiped. I went inside, took a shower, and just laid in bed in the dark. So sun, please!

On the plus side, by spending the rest of the day inside, my son and I got to watch most of Revenge of the Sith together. It was the second time he’d watched it that week, and he enjoyed watching it “for the memes,” which means to point out lines in the movie that make great memes. Like quotes such as “It is treason then” or “Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?” Man, that’s a whole new way of watching a movie.

But all in all, we’re doomed in my house if the apocalypse ever happens ‘cause at the end of the day, my butt is still a Level 1 Prepper.

To Travel or Not To Travel This Summer

Honestly, I don’t know what to do here. I’m having a first world problem. So I feel a little guilty posting about it. Almost a year ago, I put down payments on a big National Parks adventure. Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Glacier. Some of the best places on Earth. I’ve been excited about this adventure for a long time. And I was really excited that I got to use “writing fund” money for a lot of the down deposits. But now with COVID-19, I’m just not sure if it’s the right time to travel.

One part of me wants to go out on these adventures. Having these adventures with my family are what I live for. Truly. But with a global pandemic going on, is it the right time to travel? Is it the healthy, safe thing to do?

It seems to me there are four major places/considerations. There’s the travel, whether it’s by plane or car. Then there’s what you are doing. Will you be in a crowded area? There’s where you’re staying. And there’s how you’re going to eat.

My awesome wife found this article by Joanna Reed and National Geographic. It’s a good place to start. It asks the question, Is It Safe to Travel Now? The answer seems to be, “maybe?” but here are ways to mitigate the health risks. They echo travel suggestions made by the CDC.

The CDC website lists seven questions to ask when deciding whether or not to travel:

Is  COVID-19 spreading  where you’re going? You can get infected while traveling.Is  COVID-19 spreading  in your community? Even if you don’t have symptoms, you can spread COVID-19 to others while traveling.Will you or those you are traveling with be within 6 feet of others during or after your trip? Being within 6 feet of others increases your chances of getting infected and infecting others.Are you or those you are traveling with  more likely to get very ill from COVID-19 ? Older adults and people of any age who have a serious underlying medical condition are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19.Do you live with someone who is  more likely to get very ill from COVID-19 ? If you get infected while traveling you can spread COVID-19 to loved ones when you return, even if you don’t have symptoms.Does the state or local government where you live or at your destination require you to stay home for 14 days after traveling? Some state and local governments may require people who have recently traveled to stay home for 14 days.If you get sick with COVID-19, will you have to miss work or school? People with COVID-19 disease need to stay home until they are no longer considered infectious.

It’s always good to ask these questions. If you’re weighing whether or not to travel, you should, too. Texas and Montana aren’t “bad” as of this writing. We’re in this middle-ground that gets subjective. But as an overweight man with hypertension, things don’t look great. Based on CDC guidelines, I should probably put it off.

Fly vs. Drive

But if I do decide to travel, half the family will be flying to meet me while I would drive up. For my family traveling by airplane, the concern is less the actual flight than being in security lines. That’s according to the articles, which talk about HEPA filters on the planes. But a filter won’t help if the person sitting within six feet of me has COVID-19, will it? Roughly, for a Southwest Airlines flight, I think that’s the eight closest people to me. (Southwest seats are 17-inches wide., so that includes at the very least the two people on either side of you, plus the three in front and the three behind.)

In a car, as long as everybody else in the car is okay, then you should be okay. The main concern is bathroom breaks and getting gas. I think a big bottle of sanitizer would help with the latter, but the problem with the former is standing in a long line of people waiting for the bathroom. You’d have to wear a mask when you went inside, and you’d have to wash your hands. Again, these seems like something you can mitigate, right? As long as you bring like a hundred masks with you.

Crowds

Being in the National Parks is actually my least concern. I’ve been there in the heavy season, and I still think there are lots of ways to avoid crowds. If you show up early or late, you will be there when few others are there. And most trails are not giant crowds. “Most.” If we show up to watch Old Faithful at 1pm, there’s going to be a giant crowd no matter what.

Having hiked in all three parks, I think again that even when there’s heavy foot-traffic, the trails are generally wide and probably not as populated as you’re thinking.

Where to Stay

Hotels, however, seem to be a whole other issue. Because if the air conditioning ducts are connected, then you are breathing the same air as all the people around you. Even if you social distance, does that do anything if you are sharing the air? So staying in old Many Glacier Hotel, which has been a dream of mine, may have to be cancelled even if we do decide to go. I figure it is better to stay in a motel with an outside air conditioner.

So, I don’t know where to go with this. We’ve been going back and forth a hundred times. One day we think we’ll do it. Another we think we won’t. It doesn’t help that this one hotel my wife called, they said that they were expecting a really low attendance and suspected that we’d be upgraded just because there weren’t enough people. (Personally, I doubt the upgrade. I suspect it’s them trying to keep us from cancelling.) If we do cancel, my wife was told we’d have to cancel through upper management. We couldn’t just cancel with the person on the other side of the phone.

This could be the year for Air B&Bs and cabins. Because at least this way, we are social distancing. We may need to go to grocery stores to pick up food, and I don’t know whether or not that option will always be viable, but at least we aren’t staying in the same residence as a few hundred other people.

How Do I Eat?

This one is the most perplexing. Either I can bring a giant cooler and make a stop every other day to pick up food, or the family can eat out. Both are risky. Should I wear a mask into every restaurant and only remove it to eat? It sounds silly when I say it. If governments and restaurants have good social distancing measures, we should be eating with only 25-50% capacity. So inside the restaurant shouldn’t be a problem. There’s only two possible problems I see in the restaurant situation:

Restaurants are more open than they should be. So maybe the restaurant should be at 25% capacity, but the governor is allowing the restaurant to be open at 50-75% capacity. Or maybe restrictions are lifted? I don’t know about the restaurants around you, but what I often see if a moderate-sized crowd waiting outside a restaurant because it is only allowing a small number of people inside. Lower capacity seating doesn’t help if you have to wait 25 minutes in a crowd of 20 strangers waiting on your table to open up. And I see this really compounded on travel.

So the best way to mitigate restaurant health issues is to make reservations. This means less roaming on adventures and more structured schedules, which if that’s your thing, you’ll really enjoy. If like us, you prefer to wander and find a place to eat, you might have extra risk.

However, restaurants in national parks aren’t open. Or they’re grab-and-go. For road travel, there are drive-throughs. Those lines may be long, though. There is also curbside pickup, but I don’t know how effective that will be in remote areas of Montana and Wyoming.

So, I don’t know what the best answer is. I’m still not sure. I think with enough preparation, a perfect adventure can be planned. But I’ve had a mantra since May 1 when states began to open up: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And maybe that’s what summer will look like in 2020. I can, but perhaps I shouldn’t…

I Get a Chance to Walk the Wendigo Road

So, I wrote a book called Wendigo Road. I loved writing this book. It was this kind of post-apocalyptic military story about a group of cybernetic soldiers wandering through Montana, escorting a legendary soldier home to his wife and son. The book is chock full of Native American monsters that are hunting the soldiers and trying to kill them. It was an Indigienous version of The Odyssey by way of Mad Max. Crafting it both challenged and moved me. I can’t say that for every book I’ve written. But getting to that story was a journey in itself.

Long time readers know I conduct outreach for the Johnson Space Center, talking about a small business program where companies and research institutions can work together researching technologies for NASA. I got the idea to talk to tribal colleges about this concept, and for the past couple years, I’ve pushed outreach to Tribal Colleges and Universities. This put me on a lot of reservations. Twelve total, I think. One year, I got the chance to conduct outreach in North Dakota and Montana. I spent ten days on the road driving from town to town talking about the program. I ate up every minute of it. If there was a way I could get my family to travel with me, I’d do it permanent and non-stop. Visiting these little map dot places in the middle of nowhere is something I adore.

At my side was my NASA counterpart. And aside from getting us pulled over by the Minot Air Force MPs or nearly detained at the International Gardens up in North Dakota, she was a good compatriot. We had adventures. Flying out of Denver, the plane filled with smoke and the gas masks deployed. This happened as soon as we took off, so the plane “immediately” turned around and landed. By “immediately,” I mean there was nothing the plane could do until it reached flying altitude, so it was probably 5 to 10 minutes from the point where the cabin filled with smoke to the point where we landed. That experience became Chapter One of Wendigo Road.

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We spent most of the week driving through North Dakota. At one point, we dropped cellphone coverage. We lost the road, too. The last direction we had said to drive down an old dirt road in this small rental car. The dirt road took us through a sunflower field (there’s about a million and a half acres of sunflowers in North Dakota, by my guesstimate). The “road” was so tight, the sunflowers were practically brushing against either side of the little rental car. If anybody else came down there, we probably would’ve crashed into the crops. The whole experience was a little spooky. It didn’t help that as the day went by, the sunflowers kept turning. They do this to face the sun, and it’s a really beautiful thing, but when you are lost without a landmark in sight, it’s a little unnerving that all the plants are turning their heads. Then boom! we were back on a busy state road. It happened that quick. Dust, flowers, and darkness, then snap your fingers and we were surrounded by cars and asphalt. It was weird. Also, we were in a different part of the state. I don’t know how that happened, but there we were. We thought we’d gone one direction, but we ended up in another.

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After our last visit in North Dakota, we flew from Bismarck to Missoula on a plane full of hot shot wilderness fire personnel. There were giant wildfires in Montana, and these heroes were flying out to help control them, protect lives, and protect homes. Toward the end of the flight, the captain announced that we were going to begin our final descent through the clouds. We never finished our descent. The wildfires were so bad, it was like descending through a charred fog. Everybody on the plane could smell the ash and fire. Wildfires appeared everywhere for the rest of the trip. Sometimes they were in the mountains beside us while the fire helicopters pulled buckets out of the Flathead lake to drop on it. For a kid from the plains of West Texas, this natural disaster left a huge impression on me. I’d never seen anything like it! So wildfires had to ravage the Wendigo Road.

[image error]Can’t see it well, but this helicopter has picked up a bucket of water. It is carrying the water to the fire, which is just up the side of the mountain.

One of our last stops was Browning, North Dakota. To get there, we drove beautiful Highway 2. By this time, I was alone in my little car. My imagination really stretched itself along that highway. The road itself was this well-paved black ribbon winding through the mountains. The experience was very cinematic. I felt like I was driving into a horror movie while somebody narrated about unexpected dangers and sudden truths. Perhaps I was staying in the Overlook Hotel that night. Perhaps I would never make it to the hotel because my car would run out of fuel and devious things would happen to me. All I can say is that in the shadows of the giant pines I was both excited and terrified. I easily imagined giant wendigo monsters looming from the low peaks and terrorizing the highway.

But it was in Browning that I had my most unnerving experience. See, at the time there were two places to stay in Browning. One was the casino, and the other was a road motel. The casino was out. Nobody would authorize us to stay at a casino. Completely understandable, right? That left the road motel.

I forget its name, but it was an old 1950s roadside motel with a bunch of bungalo cabins facing the parking lot. If you’ve ever seen Bad Times at the El Royale, you know what I’m talking about. But the bungalos had a distinct Norman Bates/Psycho vibe. My counterpart retired early for the night after the long road to Browning. While I was bringing in my luggage, a poor vagabond walked up to me, panhandling for money. I told him I didn’t have any money. He asked again if I could spare some change. I said no. He then went into the room beside me and stayed there at least until I left to pick up dinner.

My mind went into a million different directions trying to figure this out. Immediately (and because of family tragedy), I wondered if the person staying in the room next to me was a drug dealer. Why else would somebody panhandle for money, then go spend a few hours in the hotel room next door? I had no idea. My paranoia was setting in. I tried to rationalize it away. The people in Browning were friendly, and maybe my neighbor was just helping the poor guy out. But as positive as I tried to remain, that little paranoid fear kept digging into my brain.

I bought fry bread for dinner. When I drove back, the panhandler was now at the far end of the motel parking lot, talking to some other people. It set off my alarm bells. Who was this people? What was that guy doing in the hotel next to me? The room was vacant now. Whatever had been happening was done. It was enough to give me the creeps.

I closed the door behind me. The door didn’t completely close. There were huge gaps between the frame and the door. Wide enough for somebody to see through? It didn’t matter. The window curtains, fully closed, still left a three-inch gap. Anybody who wanted could look into my room, see me sleeping, and see everything I owned. Since that far from a safe set-up, I left everything in my suitcase and jammed my luggage up against the door. If I had a midnight visitor, that pathetic luggage barricade might give me the half second I need to jump up.

The room itself was very large and very simple. Bed, curtain rod, and an old box television set. I didn’t even know they made those anymore. The pictures hanging on the wall all seemed to stare at me. It was again, unnerving. I thought of Norman Bates watching people through the walls, deciding whether or not to kill them.

While neither the room nor the vagabond ever made it into the book, that fear, that sinking dread, that sense of being perhaps hunted by some unknown thing weaved into the book’s fabric.  

As all these things go, of course nothing happened. I was just nervous as Sylvester the Cat staying in a haunted house with Porky Pig. The next day we met some of the best people in the world at Blackfeet Community College. I was invited to “go sweat,” which probably would have done me some good, but nah. I got turned down by my counterpart. We had miles to go before we stopped for the night.

I’ve stayed in many places over the past four years. With COVID-19 raging across the globe, I don’t know if I will ever get the chance to visit these wonderful reservations or hear so many rich stories. I was so taken by the people I met on that trip to Montana, though, I knew then and there that the main character in the book would be a Blackfeet from Browning. He would be a kind and thoughtful leader, much like the educators I met in Browning. And he would be returning home because the one thing I really wanted to do was get home to my family to see my wife and children. So while the experience gave me the horrors and the monsters, it also gave me that familial core that would center the story. If you are returning from war like Oran Old Chief and wanting to see your family, will you stop to take care of homeless children lost in the woods? Of course you would, even if it means risking your life, but that wouldn’t make your heart stop yearning for your home at the end of the Wendigo Road.

Of Course My Family Meets a Ghost in Puerto Rico’s Famous El Morro

This pandemic has changed so much about our lives.  So many things are in question, like summer vacation plans. We’ve made plans for a 2 week plus road trip this July. We’re staying hopeful, but we know that there’s a possibility of summer vacation taking place in our house. (God, I hope not.)

In order to keep our spirits up, we revisit some of our other travels. In November 2019 (wow, that seems like more than four months ago!), we were able to travel to Puerto Rico, a first for both of us (and our 12-year old).  I’ve shared some of our adventures in different blog posts, but exploring El Morro hasn’t been shared yet.

Getting to El Morro was an adventure in and of itself. We knew there was a holiday (November 19, Discovery of Puerto Rico Day – also, the start of the Christmas season). Parades were planned for the area of old San Juan, but we didn’t have much info on it. We hoped for the best and headed into town.

Oy vey.

We soon realized we wouldn’t be able to get very close to the downtown area and turned around and parked the rental car in the first free space we could find that wasn’t cut off by gates. According to Google, it was only 2 miles to El Morro. Since I keep up with my cardio (see previous post), this shouldn’t be a problem. Right? Well, the best laid plans…

The previous day, when we explored Castillo San Cristóbal, it had been overcast and cool. Today was a beautiful Caribbean day with nary a cloud in sight. But we had hats, sunscreen, and water, so we persevered. Wow. Bit of a mistake. With the holiday, there weren’t any little shops open on the walk there so our depleted water bottles couldn’t get freshened up. Well, we passed the parades/protests, and I even got to check out San Juan’s Holocaust memorial. We made it to Old San Juan and got lunch and drinks in the first place we could find. We tried to decide if we should Uber to El Morro at this point or continue to walk. We decided to keep walking and maybe we’d be able to hop on one of the golf carts we’d seen zipping around. This part of the story is important because by the time we made it up El Morro’s w-i-d-e and GIGANTIC front walk, we were all wiped. My sweet non-cardio loving wife and my son were tired and thirsty. My wife was not going to give up the exploration though; she’d worked hard to get there.

[image error]The long, unshaded paseo to El Morro. My son, who is soooo done with this walk and this photo.

But with that hot walk behind us and no clouds providing cover, my wife was not interested in exploring the battlements out in the hot sun. No problem- there were plenty of cool shaded rooms to see.  And there were the bottom levels of this fortification. This old Castillo has been around since the 1500s. The innermost and lower levels of El Morro are rocky and dark and cool. In the “dungeon” area, you can see remnants of a mortar shell from one of the World Wars.

[image error]Okay, so maybe this isn’t the bomb frag, but I only took two photos in this room. One was a photo of my family, and one I thought was the bomb frag. So either my family looks like a piece of wood sticking out of the mortar, or this is the bomb fragment. Commenters will let me know…

We started to make jokes in this cool dim dungeon about ghosts. This spot had been part of many wars and even during peace time, people gathered and lived in this place- there must be ghosts galore! We giggled amongst ourselves to ease any stirred nerves. Once we’d cooled down, we decided to move up a level to the area where soldiers had lived and slept and tried to eek out a life on this corner of this island. Many of the informational texts talked about the harshness of this military life.  As we moved out of the dark-shaded dungeons, the thought of lost lives and crazed soldiers waiting on their next shipment of food were uppermost in our minds. I kid you not, my wife stated to us as right before we stepped into the first soldiers’ quarters: you can almost feel like you’re going to see a ghost somewhere, don’t you? As we walked into this dark soldier’s old quarters, our eyes had to adjust from the bright sun outside. And we walked into this centuries old room to see THIS:

[image error]AAAAH!

It’s the Ghost from The Ring!

My wife worked hard to keep from screaming out, and so grabbed my hand and squeezed. We all stopped in the doorway. Had we found it? Had our jokes lured out a soldier gazing out to sea, upset at his unfair court martial and execution?? As our eyes adjusted, we realized, no, it was just some young girl, taking advantage of the window to meditate and cool down. But oh my gosh, in that moment all our exhaustion was chased away by the adrenaline rush!  We moved along and looked at the rest of the quarter areas, but our hearts continued to beat a little faster and our dungeon jokes seemed to be in bad taste now.  We left El Morro with tired feet and a respect for the history there and my wife sated that she’d had enough of dark dungeons for now. We Ubered back to our car which was a much better choice than a 2 mile walk and lightened our hearts with a walk in Luis Munoz Rivera Park.

[image error]Meditating in front of a barred window is a great way to find your calm while scaring the mofongo out of tourists…

Puerto Rico. Rich Door.

El Morro. Could be poorly translated as spooky place!

Happy (eventual) travels!

Moving Forward

I wanted to say something about how I’ve spent the last 30 days because a lot of people seem to be struggling with it. And look, others have it a lot harder than me. I’m still getting paid and I live in a middle class neighborhood with a yard and enough rooms in my house that everybody can go to their own space, shut the door, and not interact with anyone. That’s a commodity right now. I get that.

But based on what I see posted and re-posted to social media, I think some people are struggling with how to spend this much time in their homes. What’s worked best for me is putting my head down and pushing through one day at a time. It’s my work ethic mentality, this idea to just keep pushing forward. So here are a couple of ideas of ways to push through:

Binge-watching. That’s a good place to start. STOP DOING IT. Look, I know we all want to binge the new seasons of Schitt’s Creek and Ozark. Resist that temptation. Watch a little, then move on to something else. Over the past 30 days, I’ve finished watching Star Wars The Clone Wars, and now I’m almost halfway through Rebels. I don’t watch more than 4 or 5 episodes in a day. (Each are less than 30 minutes.) Usually, I watch 2 episodes, and that’s it. This gives me a long goal, and that’s one of the things that’s helping me to get through the weeks, not just the days. It helps to watch something good with lots of episodes. Netflix has six seasons of Community. The first five seasons have 20+ episodes each. The Office is 9 seasons long, and don’t forget there’s that Marvel Universe on Netflix and Disney+. If there’s a show you’ve never watched but always wanted to, now is the time to do it.Get a hobby. I’m a fiction writer when I’m not working for NASA. Stay-at-Home has been great for me. I’ve edited two of my books and I’m beginning writing a third. The daily task of writing a thousand words requires time and patience, two things which I can have in spades during these times. In addition, it technically costs me nothing but my laptop, so I like artistic hobbies for people who, like me, don’t have great amounts of cashflow right now.Learn a new skill. My wife is teaching my son cursive. I’ve found an app to teach sign language. I’m not very good at it, but the point is to build each day on what I learned the previous day. I’m not always great it signing or consistent with my education, but I’m gaining ground. It’s also part of a general theme to this year: if not now, when am I going to learn it?Exercise. Seriously, y’all. We gotta exercise. I mean, I was already putting on the pounds. I needed to find some way to account for the extra brownie/cookie/cake calories. I’ve used My Fitness Pal’s blogs and my Wii U to assist. I’ve seen fitness routines set to show-watching, if you want to combine some of these. I think in this new pandemic age, I’m actually losing weight. Which is not what I expected…Projects. I have an old freezer that went to pot. Over the past two weeks I’ve been getting it back into condition. I may not be successful, but my mind and body have been occupied on something that isn’t fussing over dinner, kids, or the news. It’s really helped me to clear my head. As a bonus, I’m using old rust removers and sponges to clean it out. So I didn’t need to go to the store, which was important to me. I really think the best way to beat this thing is to avoid unnecessary human interaction, and going to the hardware store for a side project doesn’t feels frivolous and a little fool-hardy right now. (Don’t quote me statistics – Never tell me the odds.)

So that’s it. Just some ideas. Maybe you’ve done these or you’ve tried something else. A lot of people are making masks and doing sidewalk chalk. I think those are great ideas. Do you have something quirky or different that you’re doing to pass the time? Let me know in the comments.

Zombie Dog FREE This Week Only

Available on Amazon

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me there’s a lot of bad news out there. So I’d like to give you a little bit of good news. This is the last week that I’m giving away my books for free to help combat cabin fever and get away from it all. Zombie Dog is free this week only (Monday to Friday). Cadaver Dog and Dead Dog were free the past two weeks. 

Zombie Dog is different from the the other books in this series. It’s more urban, and set in Houston. After all the experiences Angie and Murder have had tracking zombies in the wilderness, this time they are called to help the Houston Police Department with a very particular conundrum. Gangs are weaponizing zombies. HPD needs Murder to find those zombies before they’re released. 

The book has a much larger scale than the previous two. Whereas previous books focused on Angie and Murder with 2 to 3 additional characters, I introduce several teams in this book. I think the characters are really vivid, like a curandero named Santa Anna and the detective “Cut” Williams, who’s my latest in a line of characters named after Texas cities. Cut is named for “Cut and Shoot” Texas, a real place I’ve been to. Look it up. The book also ramps up the “horror” aspect more than the previous two books. Personally, the first chapter always makes me squeamish when I read it, but that’s just me…

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