SELF-PROPELLED GERANIUM

I tried, I really tried.

Leave the sandbox, I told myself. Bust outa the corral. All very well and good, but in the meantime, there's a column to write and I just can't make myself write about getting cat hair out of the keyboard or why what's wrong with Apple. Well, I can too, actually, but we'll save that for the end. In the meantime, I just have to share some recent experiences and a few new digital photos with you. . .

See this? [below] This a hole in the ground. I was on top of a mesa and found a huge area covering hundreds of square yards that was literally pockmarked with all kinds of big and little holes like this. This one is small, but I couldn't see the bottom! There were plenty of natural chasms there big enough to swallow a sheep or a fool. One misstep and everyone'd be saying, what the hell happened to Farr? Way down below, deep in the ground, there must be huge caverns hollowed out by centuries of seeping rainwater and melting snow. Who knows what all is down there? Any number of these holes could lead to caves. And this spot is actually part of a 35 acre parcel that's for sale. I mean, you could buy this 9,000 ft. high pile of rocks, stride purposefully out to the edge to look at the view, and disappear forever. I went crazy thinking of all the bones and artifacts that must lie impossibly far down in the ground, littering the floor of ancient chambers, some of them surely visited in the past by medicine men or aliens. If I owned this property I would surely die, because the urge to merge would smash my miserable puny bones. I'd have to go exploring and only end up on top of a never-seen bonepile, where years from now snakes and centipedes would slither through my ribs and never wonder who I was.

Oh, you want to know where this is, do you? Well, forget it! -- I may go back and get a death-wish deed to the place some day. Anyway, you can't live there. It's too beautiful. The view is too vast, the solitude too pure. Oh, there are people in the vicinity. They have their drinking water brought in by cowboys driving a big truck, and I'll bet phones and power are hard to come by. This mesa isn't close to any kind of real town, either. You'd have to be rich or get money in the mail to make it. You'd have to be very, very different from most folks, too: you'd have to be ready to phase into spirit, dematerialize, because living here would do that to you. When you can see everything in the sky at night with perfect clarity, you change, that's just the way it is. I took one look at this place and just wanted to sit on a rock and be there forever.

(But if I did that, would anyone ever see me again? No romantic bullshit: I mean this quite literally. Such things happen every day, you know, or maybe you don't. The comforting distractions of most people's lives mask great screaming mysteries all around us. Now scroll back up the page and take another look at that hole!)

A few nights ago while working at my computer in the cute little adobe cottage a couple of paragraphs below, I had an experience of a different nature. This was, you might say, a sign that hanging around here forever isn't necessarily the right thing, either. I just happened to glance over toward the far wall, by the steps leading up to the bathroom, when something moved! I peered into the gloom, saw what it was, then sat there dumbstruck for several seconds until my brain caught up with my preconceptions: a RAT! A great big brown sonofabitching RAT! "Land of Enchantment" fans, take note.

A fricking rat, holy skamoly. Now, I've lived a lot of places, done a lot of things, worn a lot of different hats, but I've never lived anwhere with a bleeping rat in the house. Rats were things that happened to poor slobs living in Baltimore crack houses, right?! This was a blow to my self-esteem, already at a dangerously low ebb. A bloody R-A-T had just appeared and run into the back room! I reached for my trusty Crosman 760 Powermaster, slid a .177 pellet into the chamber, and pumped nine times. "Click," off with the safety, and into the darkness I went.

Rats are not mice, as I quickly learned. As soon as I flipped on the lights, I heard but did not see a skittering whoosh -- the bastard must have gone into the closet! I pulled back the curtain, eased the tip of the gun barrel behind a cardboard box while peering over it, and hah! A big brown butt was barely visible, just not enough to risk a shot. I shifted my position ever so slightly, and WHOOSH! No rat. I swear I saw nothing move, but the rat was gone, just like that. My air rifle and I were extremely pissed, so I went ballistic and fired off a barrage of emails to our landlady (and friend) instead.

The next night at about the same time, he (?) appeared again. I heard a scratching sound behind the piano, and sure enough, out came a motherwonking big rodent, not more than four feet from my chair! My weapon was leaning against the wall, so I swiveled around to reach for it, and ZIP! Where had the damn thing gone?! "Scritch, scritch..." Aha, the closet again! This time I called in reinforcements: grabbing a sleeping Hobbes the Wonder Cat from his 140 degree Fahrenheit chair by the wood stove, I literally threw him into the closet. Result? Nothing! But he figured out something was there and took up a watchful posture in the hallway. Later, during my bath, I heard a crash and a scuffle, but when I came out, the cat was sitting there looking stupid and there was no sign of a rat anywhere.

Yesterday I set out rat traps, one in the attic and one in the closet. The landlady said to use peanut butter, but guess what? Rats don't like peanut butter, at least not served on traps. This one likes Burt's Bees Bay Rum Shaving Soap, however, as I found out this morning. But last night took the cake. Last night made history. Last night. . .

There I was, sitting at the computer again, this time with the Crosman on my lap like it is now. The time was a little after ten o'clock (rat time). All of a sudden I heard a frantic scrabbling off in the corner behind me, off to the left! What the -- there was nothing there but some houseplants and a pile of wood for the second stove, so why would anything -- WHOA! Would you believe it, A GERANIUM HOPPED OVER THE WOODPILE AND RAN UNDER THE BED! I'm talking 15 inches worth of stem, leaves, and blossoms, folks, half a whole damn geranium with a tail! And now it was under the futon where my wife lay sleeping. I grabbed Hobbes and tossed him under, too: nothing! I walked to the other end of the bed and stamped my foot on the floor to frighten the thing back toward the cat. This naturally woke up Kathy but accomplished little else, so after a long moment, I got down on the floor to peer under the bed with gun and flashlight: there was the Wonder Cat, staring blankly at half a geranium, sin raton. These suckers are fast, lemme tell you. I left the plant where it was and went to bed, leaving the worthless cat to stand guard. The covers were thick and heavy, and I pulled them way up.

The next morning I checked under the bed: the blasted geranium had moved all by itself (?) another two feet in the direction of the closet! Remarkable. Hobbes had nothing to report, so I rebaited the traps with cheese this time, and that's where matters stand. So far this evening (Sunday), there's been no sign of our visitor. He probably stuck his head out earlier, spied the rifle across my legs, and decided to come back later after snacking on my shaving soap ("hey, I have to put that stuff on my face, dammit!").

[For the record: New Mexico always reports a few cases of bubonic plague each year, and I know the county extension office will tell me to use poison tomorrow. Our landlady (hi, Sheri!) won't like that, since the property's for sale and you know what dead rats in the walls will do. We won't like it either, but if the bastard won't take cheese. . . ]

And now the promised Apple content: I've been reading all about OS X and have decided to go whole-hog Luddite on this issue. What, I can't have popup folders or make skinny little windows? It's as if a certain turtlenecked rat hopped over the motherboard with the good ole Mac Finder in his teeth and left us with, with. . .with something he likes. Danged interface varmit! And all these articles about how to hack the beta so it halfway functions like you'd expect remind me of nothing so much as cockeyed cookbooks that tell you how to bake potatoes on your exhaust manifold. Gimme a break! I don't care if OS X is really Unix or Finno-Ugrian, the final version better have a desktop like I'm used to or they can curl up and die (they just might, you know).

While they're at it, they can come up with a faster processor. In today's marketplace, anything less than a gigahertz is just plain silly. Enough of this hardware cultism ("Nyah, nyah, our megahertz are cooler than your gigas!"), Apple needs some speed! In fact, I know where they should look for something really fast. . .

In my closet!!!

[UPDATE: This just in. . .a solid "clack" was heard from the attic while the above article was being uploaded. A Monday morning examination of the frigid attic revealed one dead rat with its head smashed in a trap. The caracass has been tossed to the coyotes and the trap replaced. We shall see. . . -- JHF]

John H. Farr also edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past three years of columns. John also writes a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM and has an ongoing project called Zoozone News that he really wants you to visit (over 70 New Mexico pictures can be seen at the Photorama).

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