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Ramona falls from a tree
Wednesday, June 21 2017
There was a great racket this morning as a row of planted evergreens were cut down and ground up from where they'd been along the boundary between our across-the-road-neighbors ("the Fussies," the second family with that nickname to reside in that lawncare-obsessive-attracting house) and the next house to the west (41.931692N, 74.107626W). I don't know which of those two people were getting rid of that row of trees or why anyone would ever want a natural privacy fence to go away, but that was the result. It didn't much affect the view from our house except to provide a little more visibility of the northern sky.
I drove into town to handle a couple landlord tasks. One was to repair the household hose at the brick mansion (this required cutting off a short piece that had been damaged and attaching a new female fitting) and the other was to further firm-up the handrails up to the porch at the Brewster Street house. At Home Depot, I'd bought a couple potential solutions for that (including rebar and pipe brackets). But what I ended up using was a kind of stout steel stake with holes drilled through it horizontally. I drove these into the ground beside the bottom of the wobbly rail posts, which I secured with screws. It wasn't perfect, but it was better. As I've explained multiple times to Gretchen, it would be hard to make the post completely solid without digging a deep hole and replacing it completely. To this, she keeps asking, "Why are other posts so solid?" They're probably more wiggly than she thinks.
I made my inevitable return to the Tibetan Center thrift store on the way home, though there was nothing there that I wanted. As I returned to my car in the parking lot, some older guy with a grey mustache asked if that was my Subaru, when I said that it was, he said he'd hit it slightly and that he didn't think he'd damaged it but... well, he just wanted me to know. I looked at where he'd hit it (the bumper!) and there was nothing to see. I chuckled and said, "I don't see anything. And it's a piece of shit anyway!" And drove off. As if to prove my point, the damn check engine light was back on again. It was showing P0137 and P1037pd errors when I checked it with the OBD reader in the West Hurley Park parking area.
Back home, Gretchen was excited for Wednesday morning decaf (one of our lesser rituals), which we drank out on the east deck. The dogs hadn't come back from the walk Gretchen had taken them on, and, though it was difficult to do so over the continued loud grinding-up of trees across the road, I could hear them barking off in the distance. I said we should probably go get them, and Gretchen agreed to come with me.
Using my smartphone and the Whistle app to home in on Neville's position, I lead us down the Gullies Trail, though this proved to be further east than I'd initially thought. It turned out that they were somewhere up on the bluff just west of the Stick Trail, and my radical change of direction caused Gretchen to wonder how effective the tracker was being. But the problem lay with me and trying to find my way in a featureless sea of forest viewed from satellite.
Our dogs had treed a bear along the Chamomile Headwaters trail (41.926651N, 74.105885W). Gretchen and I need to develop some sort of protocol where we communicate and move quietly when approaching a treed bear because the technique we used today was all wrong. We were shouting at each other and the dogs, though of course the dogs ignored us and the bear freaked out at the sudden arrival of humans and came down the tree. At this point, of course, the dogs went to chase the bear, and soon they'd had it treed at another tree some distance away. Of course, we were hollering the whole time, though it did no good whatsoever and only made the bear more desperate. As I approached the site of the second treeing, I saw Neville leaping repeatedly at the bottom of the tree. I didn't see Ramona anywhere but I saw the bear, which was 15 to 20 feet up in the tree, swinging what appeared to be a limp black form on its arm. Initially I thought this to be a baby bear it was trying to protect and I freaked out and screamed at Gretchen that there was a baby bear. But then things happened quickly. The black thing on the bear's arm fell free and hit the ground with a horrible thud. I still thought that was a baby and that now the dogs were killing it, which was going to bring on the full wrath of the bear. There were all sorts of angry snarls, and I was still some distance away. But again the bear came down the tree, and this time Neville tried to scrap with it, though he seemed to want to run away after a brief tussle. Somehow Gretchen had managed to grab Ramona by this point, but when the bear ran off, Neville was chasing it.
It was soon clear that there had been no baby bears. That limp object up attached to the bear up in the tree had been Ramona holding on with her jaws. The bear, which was probably actually a male, had been able to climb the tree with a 60 pound dog attached to his arm. Despite falling from the tree, Ramona seemed active and alert. Her mouth was filled with bright red bear blood and she had a two inch gash on the front of her left upper thigh, along with another puncture nearby and a cut on one of her ears. Gretchen's immediate concern was for Neville, though I was less concerned given that a bear could probably outrun him. But I set out in a discombobulated state, using the Whistle App on my phone to go where I thought he was after first going some distance in the direction I'd seen him and the bear run. But the app just led me back to Gretchen, and, more precisely, to the first tree where the bear had been treed. It seemed that maybe the tracker had come off of Neville in his scuffle with the bear and was now lying somewhere on the forest floor. But we couldn't find it anywhere within the 30 foot error range of the device. We did find a spot of blood, probably from the bear.
Back at the house, I used superglue to close up the gash on Ramona's leg. For the most part she seemed intact; she didn't wince when we palpated her ribs, indicating she'd broken no bones in the fall from the tree. Still, she was panting heavily and seemed to be generally in pain, perhaps from the trauma of the fall.
Ramona's bear-related injuries today. Those dirty feet are mine.
At some point Gretchen set off down the Farm Road in hopes of finding Neville, but at that point he was almost home already. He had one mild puncture wound in his cheek and his whole backside seemed to be sore from all the frantic jumping he'd been doing. But he otherwise he was completely fine. And it turned out that he was still wearing his Whistle Tracker. That damn thing hadn't bothered to update its location after the site of the bear's first treeing. What a piece of junk!
[REDACTED]
This evening Gretchen and Andrea went to Woodstock, and when they returned they had a falafel sandwich from the Aba's Falafel food tent at the Wednesday Woodstock Farm Festival. For me, Wednesday are not just hump days; they also have the distinctly Middle Eastern inflection of authentic Isræli falafel. For this reason I've been using a camel emoji to denote my Wednesday status in Slack.
This evening I heard an enthusiastic whip-poor-will carrying on near the house. It was the first one I'd heard in years. [He piped up a few times later in the night, but then he disappeared, not to be heard again.]
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