Monthly Archives: August 2008

On my walk the other morning, I came upon a flock of turkeys, two hens and about 10 half-grown poults, hanging out in the middle of the road. Yes, turkeys cross the road as much as chickens do. It just takes them longer to figure out why they need to. Plus they tend to wait until they see a car coming, so they can dash out in front of it. This apparently is the turkey version of playing chicken.

A gray tiger-striped cat, slinking along in its best “I am a fearsome beast of prey” crouch, was stalking the birds. The tip of its tail was flicking back and forth with the intensity of a fourteen-year-old trying to dry her nail polish before her next cell phone call.

The cat executed a flanking maneuver, slipping around behind the turkeys to herd them toward the ditch. Instead of fleeing, the turkeys milled in a circle in the road. They trotted back and forth, uttering anxious little clucks and all but wringing their wings in distress.

Each of the two hens easily outweighed the cat by several pounds. Even the young ones probably matched it in size. If even a couple of the birds had made a dash at the cat, which was neither foolish nor starving, it would have been out of there.

Apparently, though, working together to deter a potential predator isn’t an idea likely to occur to a turkey. They continued their trotting and wing-wringing until a bigger threat in the form of a pickup came over the hill. Then they scattered, some running for the weeds, others launching themselves a few feet into the air like overloaded cargo planes. The cat streaked back to its own front yard, tail lashing in irritation.

As I continued my walk, I wondered how the turkeys would have reacted to a mountain lion. Maybe they recognized “cat,” perhaps through scent, without the ability to distinguish between “small cat = minor nuisance” and “big cat = scram or you’re lunch.” Or maybe not. Had the stalking feline been a mountain lion, they might have skipped the worrying and been gone before it got close enough to pounce.

Either way, inquiring minds would like to know. Sort of. Scientific research is all very well, but on-site explorations have their pitfalls. My curiosity isn’t strong enough to make me want to observe a turkey/mountain lion encounter first hand. I might learn that the turkeys could recognize a real predator in time to protect themselves, but the knowledge might not offer me any satisfaction. Because if the turkeys all fled, the next best item on the lion’s menu would be me.

It isn’t true that I dislike chickens. I do like them—grilled, roasted, fried, in salad, and in soup. I just don’t fully appreciate chickens in their pre-butchered state.

This perhaps unreasonable attitude stems, like many prejudices, from childhood experience. Being sent every day to persuade uncooperative and hostile hens to abandon their fresh-laid eggs can have a traumatic impact on an innocent little girl, even when she arms herself with a stout stick. As a result, I wouldn’t ordinarily cross the road to look at a chicken.

But last week we went to the fair, and my fair-going companion wanted to check out the chickens. When he was small, he helped raise a few bantams. Either their small size made them less intimidating than the chickens I remember, or someone else gathered their eggs, or his chickens all died before he had a chance to learn their true character. For whatever reason, he had more positive poultry-related childhood memories than I did. So we ventured into the poultry exhibit.

Just inside the door was posted a list of chicken classes. This came as a surprise to me. As far as I’m concerned, chickens have no class. As we walked (warily, on my part) between the rows of wire cages, however, it did become clear that chickens come in more varieties than I would ever have imagined.

There were arrogant roosters in bright reds and bronzes. Bright-eyed hens in gleaming browns and blacks. Tiny but proud bantams. Fancy-dress chickens with fluffy feathers between their toes. One otherwise ordinary white rooster was the most enormous chicken I had ever seen, big enough for a month of Sunday dinners. There were even “naked-necked” chickens, just what their name implies, bearing an unsettling resemblance to the turkey buzzard.

There were chickens which, instead of combs, had crests of stiff feathers on their heads. The crests quivered with every peck and bob of their heads, sticking up as if their hairdressers had been heavy-handed with the styling gel. One cage held four of these crested critters, in mottled gray and white. They looked like a rock band who had spent a lot of time too close to their own amplifiers.

Then there were the “frizzled” chickens. Their feathers were oddly crimped, as if they had poked a toe into an electrical outlet. Or maybe they had narrowly survived an attack by a coyote. Or else they had all been to a cut-rate hairdresser and gotten really bad perms.

Even as a non-fan of the chicken, this experience gave me an opportunity to see these unique birds in a new way. True, they came in different colors and sizes, with varieties of feathers and combed or uncombed heads. Still, they were more alike than different, with their proud plumage and their bright eyes and their little chicken hearts. It made me stop and think about how much they all had in common.

Particularly the fact that they probably all taste just like chicken.

Gluing carpet to a hardwood floor is a crime. An appropriate punishment would be forcing the perpetrator to pull up the carpet, then sand the floor by hand, with a two-inch sanding block, in 100-degree weather, with rap music playing at a volume just low enough not to violate the Geneva Conventions.

I reached this conclusion as a result of my latest home-improvement project, redoing the guest room. It was too dark, with its blue walls and its 30-year-old variegated dark brown carpet. Under that was a 35-year-old variegated light brown carpet. Under both layers of carpet was a hardwood floor.

I’ve been wanting to uncover that floor for a long time. Last week, I decided the time had come.

The first step, of course, was to clear everything out of the room, including the solid oak antique dresser, the seven shelves crammed with books, and the surprising hodgepodge of stuff that always manages to accumulate in a guest room. Umpty-eleven trips and a lot of shoving later, the room was empty.

It was time to start pulling up carpet. The first layer was easy. It was at the second layer that we made the Awful Discovery. Any home-improvement project has to have at least one Awful Discovery. It’s required by section Q, subsection H, sub-subsection W, of the Do-It-Yourself Regulation Manual. In this case, the Awful Discovery was finding out that the carpet had been glued down.

Snarling and muttering about the taste, ancestry, and criminal intent of anyone who would glue carpet over a hardwood floor was beside the point. It was too late to back out. We pulled up the carpet, leaving about half of the original backing stuck to the floor. We scraped that up with wide plastic scrapers, which wasn’t actually as dreadful a process as it sounds.

The next step was scrubbing off the remaining bits of tattered gray gunk with a wire brush. This provided great exercise for the triceps and abs, but resulted in considerable wear and tear on the hands and the knees. Being that close to the floor also gave me a chance to see that it was covered with two layers of glue. Someone had glued carpet over hardwood, not once, but twice.

Okay, I had to admit there were extenuating circumstances that reduced the second offense from a felony to a misdemeanor. This house had an inch or so of water in it during the 1972 Rapid City flood. The first water-ruined carpet must have been replaced when the house was moved to its current location after the flood.

We learned two things through hands-on experimentation. A: the adhesive remover we bought at the home-improvement store didn’t work on either type of glue. B: sanding through the glue with our small sanders would be possible but would probably take a month of 10-hour days.

It was time to start calling professionals. The two or three who even bothered to return my phone calls wouldn’t even be able to give me an estimate for at least six weeks. Finally, one wonderfully agreeable man said he could take a look at the floor that same afternoon.

His verdict? Damage from the flood had left gaps between the boards, plus black bacterial stains that probably went too deep to be sanded out. Refinishing the floor would mean a higher-than-average cost and a lower-than-average result. He didn’t recommend it.

Three days later, the room is bright and fresh with its new coat (three coats, actually) of paint and its new carpet. But I’d still like to get my hands on the home-decorating felon who first glued carpet to the hardwood floor.

Was it something I said?

Last week I wrote about the over-abundance of bunnies this year. The Rapid City Journal wrote about them as well, after one of our city council members (councilpersons? councilpeople?) commented on cottontail crowding at a council meeting.

A couple of days later, the cottontails were gone. No adolescent bunnies playing in the driveway or sneaking into the garage. No little nose-twitching, bright-eyed statues beside the road when I went for a walk. Not so much as a glimpse of a white tail vanishing into the grass.

What happened? Maybe they got out their leather vests and went to the Rally (on their Harley softails, of course). Maybe they came down with some fast-acting lagomorphic disease and expired. Maybe they all hopped down the bunny trail to a family reunion. Maybe the neighborhood foxes had a family reunion and invited the bunnies to be guests of honor for the main course. Maybe they’re all holed up somewhere producing the next generation of bunnies.

Or maybe they didn’t care for what I wrote, and didn’t care to be discussed in the newspaper, so they all cancelled their subscriptions to the paper and their links to my blog, and they’ve left the neighborhood in protest. Everybody’s a critic.

On the other hand, this opens up some possibilities. The other critters we have to excess in Rapid City (besides deer, mountain lions, and—this week, anyway—Hogs) are geese.

We went for a walk the other evening in Canyon Lake Park. The hundreds (no, that’s not an exaggeration; I wish it were) of geese and ducks who have made the lake their home have turned the place into a disgusting mess. If any kids are naïve enough to play ball or Frisbee on the grass, the resulting green smears on their clothes aren’t going to be grass stains. You can’t even enjoy the beauty of the lake, because you’re too busy watching where you walk. Doing the “goose step” anywhere near the lake doesn’t mean marching like Hitler’s storm troops. It means tip-toeing, skipping, and side-stepping your way along the sidewalk in order to avoid the excess of excrement that is turning a beautiful park into a foul fowl habitat.

Maybe, if I write something nasty about the geese, they’ll all get mad and leave. At least it’s worth a try.