Ireland - June 2016 - Part 1

June 4^th - Arrived in Dublin in good order, even managed to sleep a bit on the flight over. Celebsul was there to greet me and after a stop at her hotel to freshen up and grab her belongings, we were off. It turned into a beautiful sunny day as we headed towards County Cork. We gassed up in Cashel - I could see the ruins of the Rock of Cashel from the pumps, although most of the near side was wrapped in scaffolding. 

Then we continued on through Bandon and towards Rosscarbarry, where we took our first look at the sea. And a beautiful look it was, brilliant sunshine amidst the rush and roar of waves and the water almost Mediterranean blue. It looked like most of Ireland was out in their shorts and summer clothes, soaking up the sunshiny day. The scents and sounds of the sea sure ironed the wrinkles out of my travel-weary soul.

Finally we wandered our way to our lodgings at Castletownshend. http://www.castle-townshend.com/ 

The main Castle is an 18^th century manor house, very picturesque and situated right on the water. Our lodgings were in the self-catering "cottages," one of a three-plex of apartments in a stone building that looked like it might have once been housing for the hired help, perhaps in the 1800s. Looking at the stonework outside, I'd guess at one time there were more than just three apartments but they'd long since been remodeled to accommodate 20^th century guests. We found the interior cozy, plain and well-appointed, with all the necessities for a comfy stay. All we had to bring were our clothes, toothbrushes and groceries.

  

The tiny village of Castletownshend perches on a steeply sloping lane that runs down to the waterfront, the street framed between green trees and stair-stepped ranks of quaint old buildings. A small, pretty harbor filled with little sleeping boats lay right outside the Castle's door, with a stone breakwater framing the shore. The village included a pub and the local version of a tiny mini mart shop, but since we needed actual food, we drove up to have a look at our "home town" for the duration, Skibbereen.

We found it to be a pretty town with brightly painted old buildings and tiny, crooked streets that went every which way. So small and twisty, in fact, that the main route through town was strictly one-way. If you missed a shop, you'd have to go full circle and come back around.

Fortunately that only took about five minutes. But after a bit of driving in circles to acquaint ourselves with the town and find somewhere to park, we discovered a quirky little late 19^th/early 20^th century storefront - that my surprise opened into a huge, modern supermarket. Belatedly we also learned there was a big parking lot out back. Oh, well, next time! And so we were set up with the necessities for adventures to come: bread, cheese, some breakfast fixings and of course wine.

June 5^th - DAY ONE. First full day exploring! Had a great day, even if the bright sunshine of yesterday was replaced by mainly overcast skies. It wasn't cold, though, and we picked a heading westward. As Celebsul drove, I got my first look at the scenery along the southwest coast of Ireland. Farms and fields and hedgerows, if you wonder, and quite a lot of multi-colored cows. I'm sure there were plenty of the stone walls Ireland is famous for, but they all seem to be overwhelmed by brambles, bracken and shrubbery.

One wandering little road eventually led us the town of Baltimore, for which the town of Baltimore, Maryland is names. It's a very picturesque village wrapped around a boat-studded bay at the end of a peninsula that would have been nice to explore - but to our dismay, it was utterly CHOKED with tourists. It's a bank holiday here which means a 3-day weekend and EVERYbody was out and about. That was kind of curious - we'd driven for miles and seen almost nobody, and suddenly here they all were. Celebsul wondered if all of Baltimore, Maryland had descended upon Baltimore, Ireland!

Escaping Baltimore, we returned amongst the patchwork fields and shorelines to Skibbereen and the N71 towards Ballydehob. From there we headed out along the Mizen Head Peninsula. http://www.ireland-highlights.com/sight/mizen-peninsula-mizen-head.html. Again the road turned to a wandering little lane among farms and cow pastures and lovely views of green fields overlooking the sea. Finally the road ended at a visitor center with a gift, a tea shop and a lot of chain link fence long the cliffs. And once again, the people we somehow did NOT see on the road were all parked here to take in the views. There was a path out to the old Mizenhead light house and along the storied cliffs where ships had wrecked and sailors lost their lives. But they charged admission for that privilege and there were rather a lot of people about, so we had a look around, used the loo and left.

From there we turned towards
Durrus, driving through a rural, rugged countryside with yellow patches of gorse, scattered farmhouses and even more scattered sheep or cows. Back on the N1, we continued to the town of Bantry and the harbor at Bantry Bay. 

There we visited Bantry House and Garden, a noble home in that's in the process of garden renovations after some years of neglect. http://www.bantryhouse.com/bantryhouse/. It's a lovely, elegant old place full of magnificent art and furniture, as well as a highly eclectic collection of 19th century semi-Asian pottery. 

Outside, a tea room made use of a beautiful Victorian porch and at the front of the house a broad green lawn swept down to the waterfront. I could easily imagine the ladies and young gents of another age strolling in their summer finery amidst the cool sea air. Definitely worth a visit and a mosey around the gardens - and not crowded, either!

From there we continued up to Glengarriff on the other side of Bantry Bay, where tiny islands of pink rhododendron stood just offshore - the gardens of mermaids perhaps? Someone had told us there is an island garden that's reachable only by a few minutes' boat ride, but the hour was beginning to grow late. So, we turned around and headed back "home." It stays dark a lot longer than I'm used to so we didn't even get back to the cottage until around 7 pm! We fried up some lamb chops and were soon off to bed.

TO PART TWO

Autumn in the Air

Tonight our cottonwood trees hold up the moon like a silver offering bowl in an indigo sky. I can feel autumn now, see it in the fat white clouds that coast across our skies of late, in the shadows that reach lengthening fingers across the earth. Our Jeffrey pine is casting its long needles on the lawn, the rabbit brush is blooming and in the high country, I've seen willow bushes turning yellow and aspen turning brown. It's not a good autumn. It's Nature throwing in the towel on a fourth year of drought and saying, "That's it, I'm done, let's get ready for winter." The prayer of the West now is for a change of weather and the miracle of rain. Rain for the parched earth and stressed plants and trees, rain for the dry stream beds and shrinking lakes. Rain for the wildfires that burn and burn and burn beyond the ability of humans to do much more than fight defensive battles. I'm never in a hurry for summer to end, for my flowers to wither and the trees to go naked and lean. But I think I'm ready for a change. For weather that means something beyond the shrinking of the ability of our fields and woods and hills to support growing things. This fall, this winter, let there be rain. Let there be snow in the high country and drifts on the passes and I'll shovel my driveway without complaint. Let it be so. Please. But until then, I'll pray for the days to pass slowly so I have time to count each blessing that comes. .

On Wildfires

They fled like shadows on this great day, this terrible morning of red skies and choking ash, she leading her young ones in bounding strides through the forests that were their home. These beautiful daughters, clean of leg and clear of eye, they matched her pace as if they shared the same mind. But she knew they could not hold it much longer. At the edge of a dry stream bed, she stopped. No water here to halt the red Beast that followed.

Their breathing heaved in the cage of their ribs and other shadows moved nearby: a young Wolf and his brother. Yet they spared each other but a glance, the grey ash falling in terrible silence. On this day of fear and fire, the boundaries between predator and prey were breaking, crumbling before the greater need to flee and stay alive.

"Come!" she hissed and they flew on. At last she came to a place she knew and dropped their pace to a light-footed walk. Her daughters crowded close, fearful and wary, but stayed close at her side. Finally she halted and looked keenly about. All was as she knew it would be.

"Here," she whispered. "We shall bide here."

Lightly, carefully they crept from the forest's edge and into open space. Water waited just yonder, there where the Gentle Ones jostled nervously. She led her daughters through the sharp scent of their wool and fear and kept watch while they drank. When done, she led them to a nearby place of quiet and shelter.

"Let us rest," she said, and bent her legs to lay down.

"But, mother," the first daughter said, "what is this place?"

The second daughter sniffed the air, tense and trembling, for even through the smoke, they could smell all the things that nature taught them to fear: metal and fuel, dogs and mankind.

"It is a safe place, my daughters," she said, and looked upon them in vast lovingkindness. "Come and rest with me. All shall be well."

"But, mother!" whispered the second daughter. "I am afraid!"

"Fear not," she said, and settled herself more comfortably amidst the fragrance of hay and horses. "Watch, my children, and learn."

And they looked, her beautiful daughters, they looked and they saw. Out there where brown smoke smothered the sun and ashes fell like bitter snow, Men labored in ways incomprehensible to their young minds. But where they worked, the Beast did not come. Where they worked, smoke rolled in huge and ghostly plumes but never thence the flames.

"Today," she said, "they fight for us. They fight for all of us."

So she and her daughters rested in this place and it was good.

~ * ~


This is for my friend, Tea Yamamoto, and her Pete and brother Cam, and for all who flee or fight the red Beast throughout the West. May all in harm's way be kept safe. Godspeed to those brave firefighters who pay the ultimate price.

The Nature of Dog-ness

.
On a border collie forum I frequent, someone asked how people see and perceive their dogs. The answers engendered made me think and I decided I'll share my answer. Which is:

My dogs are my partners. We stand together on a very old, well-trodden path laid down by shepherds decades and centuries ago. Personally, I can only make poor mimicry of what those shepherds did - and still do - for I am not a farmer and I have no flock of my own. Perhaps there's a shepherd or farmer somewhere in my family tree who walked the fells with a pair of shaggy sheepdogs at his heels and "whistled through his fist" to bring the sheep down or put them out. But I don't know, and I can't say. My dogs, however ... their heritage is gloriously undiminished.
My dogs carry, undiluted, the blood of canine kings. To some, that ancient, hardscrabble shepherding life may have seemed like one of servitude, but I know, and my dogs tell me, that it's in their blood as sure as song and the sea. So, I see my dogs as furry, dusty, dirty, muddy, hairy, four-legged miracles that have been gifted to me to caretake and enjoy. I am their servant as much as they are mine, for I can't demand their instinct, their talent, their heart. They share that with me without reservation, and it's upon me to be a good custodian of those gifts.

I see my dogs as partners and companions, but in no way human. They are better than human. They still possess what we lost in the Garden long ages ago. Whatever pettiness they may own, it's innocent and like as not our fault. Whatever meanness they may own, it's without guile and again, possibly our fault. I'm glad my dogs aren't human. I'm glad they encourage me to look outside myself, to stop short when things go wrong and ask myself the question, "What can I do better?"

I see my dogs as friends who give me their whole hearts, who devote themselves to loving me as no other thing on earth can or does. But this does not preclude their dog-ness nor does it diminish them to "little furry people." They are Dogs: honorably, faithfully, cleverly, wisely, beautifully, joyfully, wholly Dogs. They are my gifts. They are the axis around which my funny little world revolves. In all things and all deeds, I always come back to their Dogness.

I'm farm-sitting for a friend this weekend. We just got done feeding sheep, horses and chickens and in a little while, I'll bring the ewes and lambs in off the pasture for the night. My dogs are presently napping, content in their dogness, and they'll spring to their feet the moment I stand, alert and ready and cocked to fire. This Dogness of theirs - I wouldn't dream of insulting it with silly anthropomorphizing. They are ever so much more than that.


And that is how I see my dogs.
.

Home Sweet Ever-Lovin' Home!

.

.Yesterday was our wedding anniversary. 26 years together! It was a pretty darned good day. We went into town, saw some friends and had a very nice breakfast and dinner out. We also bought a few needful things: a vacuum cleaner, some bedding - and a house.

This house. Mountain House. Where we've lived for the past five and a half years.

Yup, the realtor just called and said we are done. We're done? It's ours? Just like that? Shouldn't there be .... I dunno, bugles or drum-rolls or something?

I have never had this. In all my life, I've never had a piece of ground that I could sift the dirt through my fingers and say, "This is mine. I belong here." But now we have just that. This 2.05 acres with the funny little house and all its quirks, from the bedroom door that's older than the house (it has an old fashioned keyhole and a colored glass door knob) to the downstairs room that's probably needed baseboards for 20 years, and the doves and blue jays and sparrows and chickadees, the finches and thrushes, the kingfisher and redwing blackbirds, the coyotes and bears and the pear eating, tree climbing, porch rail walking foxes - even the chicken killing bobcat ... they're ours. Or we're theirs.

And now we can do and fix and rearrange Stuff to totally suit ourselves, because we are our own landlords. That is so freaking groovy. I think I'm gonna celebrate with a cup of tea and a shortbread cookie. Welcome home to us.

Our Trial Did Not Suck

.
I haven't blogged here since way back last spring, mainly because I'm not very bloggery, but today I have something to say.

This past weekend, our local sheepdogging club, the High Desert Sheep Dog Association, hosted its first-ever sanctioned USBCHA field trial. Very little about the Open trial went as planned and I've winced and cringed and moaned. But now I want to write about it one more time and be done with it.

First of all, our Open handlers are not alone in thinking, "Wow, that didn't go very well." Of our 29 to 30 Open competitors, only 9 or 10 per day walked away with scores. That is absolutely not what we had in mind!

But our trial did not suck. Let me go over this with a few bullet points.

• The exhaust pen was in an awkward, inconvenient place, creating a crappy draw for dogs bringing sheep down the fetch. Why didn't we put it back in the corner behind the handler's post and the judge?
  
  Well, that was the plan. The ranch recently sold and all those acres of beautiful grass hay fields are being ripped and replanted with alfalfa, but they were reserving that particular field for our use. We reckoned on maybe 60-70 acres. The exhaust pen doubled as our night pen, so it had to be where someone could park an RV and keep watch over the sheep at night. However, with all that acreage, we could just put the pen at the end of the blacktop and the handler's post would be out away from it. The course itself would lay east-ish well beyond that.
  
  But a couple weeks before the trial, I got a phone call: "Will 40 acres be enough for your trial?" 
  
  Errr ... oops. Now we had a little square field into which we must squeeze an Open course and still allow for an RV to watch sheep. We daren't risk someone bogging down in the field, nor could we camp someone on the trial course, so the exhaust pen had to stay where it was. That, we are well aware, was not ideal. But that didn't make our trial suck.
  .
• What the *bleep* was going on at set out, with a crowd of half a dozen people and two or three dogs on the field at once?
  
  Well, simply put, dogs alone could not pull those sheep away from the set out pens, nor hold them once at the drop off point. They simply were not very impressed by dogs, and we learned that people actually exerted more influence than our dogs. Maybe that's how the Rafter 7 flock is handled at home. I don't know. But I have never seen (and certainly never set) sheep so adamant about running back to set out. Once these yearlings broke and bolted back, they would run right over a dog - and if the dog gripped to stop them, they would just drag it along behind. So, we had to march them out like a platoon of Marines because not one other damn thing worked. But that didn't make our trial suck.
  .
• Yeah, and what about those sheep? Most of our dogs couldn't even finish the course with those lousy things.
  
  Yeah, we kind of noticed that. Especially when we took our turns at the post and fared as poorly as everyone else. They had two speeds: run like hell or stand there and stare.
  
  But you know ... we had no idea. We hired range ewes. We got range ewes. I've worked set out for a few trials so I thought I knew a little bit, but these were different. Rafter 7 has also sold and these sheep will be moving to some other ranch, so maybe with all the sorting and selling they've been doing lately, these ewes just kind of went dead-headed. Heaven knows, because I don't. But we truly wish more people could have enjoyed success and come away happy. That right there is suck.
  .
• So, why didn't you put them out in sets of 5? Maybe that would have settled them down a little.
  
  True. But we only leased so many sheep and allowed for sets of 4, so had we tried to change to sets of 5, it would have meant re-running some of the sheep each day. I don't think anybody would have liked that. If done, that would have been suck.
  .
• Alright, then why didn't you get the sheep a couple days early and move them around the course in groups with dogs?
  
  You're kidding, right? The HDSDA spent over $900 to lease those sheep for 2 days, plus the cost of hay at about $20 a bale. If we'd got them two days early, those expenses would have doubled. I guess we could have doubled our entry fees, but who really wants to see that? Plus we'd need someone to camp out there to babysit the sheep those nights, too. Simply put, getting the sheep early was a financial and logistical impossibility. But that did not make our trial suck.
  
  .
  Did elements of our trial suck? You bet they did.
  
  But did the trial itself suck? I say NO. We did the best we could with the situation we had. The trial field shrank, the sheep were difficult, the exhaust was in the wrong place and set out looked like a circle jerk. There are a number of things we'd love to have done differently, and things we'd change and improve if we do this again.
  
  But for this first time ... by golly, we pulled the damn thing off. We held our first Open trial and handlers went to the post and dogs went up the field, and some of the time they came back down with sheep. I'm proud as hell of our crew and all the volunteers who stepped in to keep things rolling. From our judge who dragged and fed hay Saturday evening to the handlers who came up to help at set out, from folks who fed the sheep Sunday morning before the trial crew even got there and stayed to help tear down pens Sunday afternoon, to everyone who, in countless ways, offered help and kindness and hard work ... our trial freakin' rocked.
  
  So, maybe it wasn't pretty and maybe our dogs got sucked into the Vortex of Wrongness, and what should have been good runs just died out there in the grass. But so it goes. I saw a lot of good happening out there, even if it didn't involve the sheep's behavior. I'm proud of everyone who stepped in and pulled together and did their bit to make things right.
  
  If you were there and you are unhappy with how things went for you and your dog, I understand. Believe me, the trial we got is NOT the trial the HDSDA planned, wanted or envisioned. But we tried. We tried our damnedest and worked our butts off, and good people showed what they were really made of.
  
  That's what I'm taking home from this. Our trial did not suck. Maybe the sheep did. We had no control over that. But given the situation, I think we did pretty damn good.
  
  And that's all I'm gonna say about that.