Sense of Adventure

That’s basically it.

We went out to walk the bike path and trail that follow the clear ditch that run past the RGNC. It was hot; I was hoping to beat the days’ worst heat by getting out and back before it peaked around 5-6. I reckoned without our high desert sun, which even when the air is cold can heat you up pretty quickly.

Emma usually goes into the ditch right before we head onto the bridge that leads from the Nature Center gate to the bike path on the levee. There’s a notch in the bank there which makes it convenient to get to the water. Today was no exception: she piled right in, slurped up some water, then walked a few feet back along the bank and for some reason nosed back toward it.

As she reached the bank here came this frog out of the grass, flying high in the air. Cleared Emma like Evel Knievel jumping a schoolbus lengthwise, plopped into the water behind her, and was seen no more.

Not sure what kind of frog it was. I’m familiar with leopard frogs and bullfrogs. This one, like the others I’ve been seeing around the ditches lately, looked dark for a leopard. Whereas I’m used to bullfrogs looking like, to be blunt, extra-thick cowflops with eyes, and this frog was definitely not in that size class. Then again, logically even bullfrogs must go through some kind of intermediate state between cure little tadpole and Big Fat Wad. Rather like the rest of us.

Anyway, Emma seemed to be the least startled of all of us. I was certainly taken by surprise. And for the frog, not happening to notice the splashing, utterly overt approach of a big black predator certainly constituted an Awareness Fail.

Oh - happy Fourth of July, everybody. I suppose it’s a good time to remember, nostalgically, the freedoms we’ve lost.

A bit of an experiment today - take that as yesterday, Friday, May 2^nd, the day before this nominally posts.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by the Nature Center, I decided to try my hand at an audio diary. I keep a journal of our walks anyway, and it’s struck me several times just how convenient it’d be to be able to record interesting events, sights, impressions, and suchlike, just by speaking. I do carry my beloved Pilot T/X religiously, but writing into it’s … not so efficient. Especially since Graffiti 2, their writing interface software, basically sucks. Although in truth I’ve never been terribly accurate at writing on my PDA.

But talking, obviously, is pretty easy.

Also, of course, it’s my intent to dictate my fiction on the go, implementing what I’ve long thought of as my “Man in Motion” concept. So I reckoned this’d be a prime opportunity to test several things at once.

What follows, therefore, is my transcript of the day’s session. It runs 1006 words. It’s proofread, but not edited - I’m proud I only said “um” once. It’s as close to word-by-word as I could make it.

Feel free to skip this one. If not - here goes:

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I just got back from taking Emma on a walk on the ditch that leads along the eastern side of the RGNC wildfowl preserve. It was a beautiful Spring midday, mostly clear; the sun was hot and the breeze cool, a combination I really enjoy. Too bad we don’t get it too often.

As we were heading back to the car along the southern fence of the RGNC fields I saw a couple of ring-necked pheasant cocks (okay, get the giggles out of the way. It’s what they’re called. Deal.) Albuquerque’s North Valley down by the Río Grande is infested with pheasants. The males strut around, looking absurdly gorgeous with their shiny green heads, red-circled eyes, golden breasts, and long-feathered tails. And of course what they’re doing is trying to attract babes.

So these two cock pheasants came running toward the fence through green ground cover that was maybe chest-high on them, four or five inches on average. It looked as though they were racing. Their courses converged until they came within about eight feet of the fence, when they stopped ten feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back out into the field, again angling toward each other, until they were walking side by side.

Then they stopped and turned toward each other. They started doing this bobbing routine, one ducking low while the other rose up, like pistons in a two-stroke engine. It looked suspiciously like a courtship dance; I was wondering if we were going to see some serious gay pheasant action here. Right out in front of God and everybody. Think about the children! (Imagine that as said by Bill Clinton in his customary Berkshire hog-as-televangelist squealing grunt.)

More likely it was some kind of rivalry dance. As I watched this Emma and I started walking again. Before we’d gone more than a few steps this hen pheasant comes booming out of the low brush right by the fence. She flew off at an angle past the fancy-dancing males and out into the field. The nearer male turned right round and went running off in her direction, chuckling to himself in triumph. The other emitted a loud clack of dismay. “Dammit!”

Or actually, just a pair of muskrats. They didn’t get up to anything … untoward during the short time I had them in view.

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring day: warm, clear, calm; the trees are getting green and the fruit trees and the lilacs fragrantly in bloom. A marked improvement over the gale we walked through a couple of days ago, and the Arctic day that followed it.

From the levee bike path I saw some big, soft-shelled spiny turtles sunning themselves down on the ditchbank. A guy cruised by us on a nifty recumbent tadpole trike, lower-slung and probably more expensive than my TriCruiser. Sometime this week I need to get my tricycle to a bike shop for an overhaul so I can start riding it before it gets brutally hot and I’ll snivel too much.

Not a lot of birdage about, though some of interest. Our usual Piper Cherokee-sized Canada geese kept flying low overhead, honking stertorously. As we walked north up the dirt path along the east side of the clear ditch, which is very pleasantly shaded by trees and brush, a bitty grey wren-like thing flew over with a whir that seemed to be a call, rather than the sound of its wings. It gave a little cheep as it lit in a tree to our left. Naturally it went promptly around the other side of a big branch where I couldn’t see. It seemed to have a very curved beak, almost like a thrasher. But they’re way bigger than this bird, which was so tiny I first thought it was a cicada - although we’re at the wrong end of the season to see them. It may’ve been a Canyon Wren.

There’s a notch in the ditchbank that leads right down from the trail to the water, perhaprs halfway between the footbridge that leads back to the east side and Montaño, where it’s convenient for Emma to go wade in the water and drink. As we approached it I heard a big woodpecker thudding away off in the bosque proper, across the ditch and the bike path.

And then when we got to the notch, right there swimming south and not eight feet from the bank I saw a muskrat. A beat later I saw a second toward the other side of the ditch. They both dove pretty promptly; one surfaced briefly under some brush overhanging the far side. I bet they have a burrow under there.

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When Emma and I went on our walk today, on the bike path and trails down along the clear ditch by the RGNC, it was a lovely afternoon. The breeze was cold, but it’s mostly a sheltered walk. Only walking west down the path from Candelaria did the wind-tunnel effect make it really bitter.

As we crossed the wooden footbridge across the ditch from the Nature Center gate a young mother with two kids by the far landing stepped aside to let us pass. A wise idea, as it turned out.

Her older kid, a little boy of maybe five or six, came tottering forward as we reached that end, blithely ignoring his mom’s repeated commands to stop. And then he did stop, and his eyes got real wide.

“There’s a big dog!” he announced breathlessly.

Yeah, kid. No diddly. Listen to your mama next time, won’t you?

Actually I don’t think Emma would ever remotely hurt a child. She got along well with the kids at the home she lived at for a year. It was the other dogs she had a problem with. Still, I prefer to avoid putting such things to the test unnecessarily.

There’s no question that, at almost 100 pounds, burly and black with a shoebox head, Emma looks formidable. Okay, she is formidable. Most people just assume she’s a he. A lot of people admire her, some with visible trepidation.

They should hear me coo at her as my baby girl…

It seems the cranes have finally flown away. I didn’t see any in the field along Veranda, east of the RGNC. It’s sad, of course, in a way. But if they don’t go away, where’s the poignancy when they return?

That’s not altogether true. The Canada geese don’t all leave. A goodly population sticks around and produces broods of deceptively cute babies. (Deceptive, in that their parents are huge and scary.) But when I hear the wild geese flying back as the autumn air turns crisp, it always stirs me at a very deep level.