Since I was on "the mound" I was quite visible. She waved at me. As I waved back I deduced that this must be our neighbor to the west--let's call her Anna. I stopped what I was doing and started walking over the pasture and toward the road. She was asking me something but I couldn't hear her well enough to decipher anything. As I picked across the field I heard her ask if I had seen a blue truck. Someone had hit a deer. She didn't think I had hit the deer. She didn't know who had hit it. At least she thought it was a deer. She wasn't sure. But the truck, the blue one, she thinks picked up the deer. From the road. If it was a deer. She's pretty sure it was a deer. 
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I was nodding and shaking my head and making noises of assent and questioning sounds when the shiny black truck came back. I could now see it was an Oregon State Fish & Wildlife vehicle. The officer was looking for the deer. Or the truck. Who may or may not have hit the deer. Or taken it away. If it was a deer. Because at this point there was no truck and no deer and nobody knew what was happening.

Especially me.

It turns out it is illegal to collect a dead or injured deer from the road. It is a type of "poaching". The only deer one is allowed to take home (or put in one's truck) are deer for which one has a license. A deer that can be accounted for, recorded and, essentially, paid for. One may not barrel down a road, hit a deer, take it home for dinner and call it a freebie. (I later learned this is a ridiculous thing to do even if you are desperate for deer meat. One, it can total your vehicle. Two, it causes all the blood to flow into the muscle tissue rendering the deer meat inedible. Three, it's stupid.) But, regardless of whether this blue pickup had hit the deer or not, it was still not ok for the driver to take the deer away. If there was a deer. To take away. 

The Fish & Wildlife guy got out of the truck and spoke with us. He really seemed to be taking this seriously and I respected that. Anna explained she had been driving home (I still can't figure this out) and she had spotted a small group of crows (yes, yes, I know, a murder) hovering and eating at something on the road that looked like a deer and yet she was "too far away" to tell if it really was a deer, but, come on, she's seen enough dead deer on the road to know a dead deer on the road when she sees one. She's pretty sure. (This would have put the deer in front of our property somewhere.) Anna then pulled into her driveway and was sitting on her porch with her grandson--I'm pretty sure this woman is younger than I am--and that's when she spotted the blue pickup suspiciously trolling up and down our road.  She called the F&W office and now here was this State Police officer looking for the deer. Or the truck. Or both the deer and the truck.

I feel I ought to qualify that Anna was not actually "partially clothed"-- she just had on a neutral colored spaghetti-strapped maxi dress that didn't register too well from far away. 

After I had asked and answered all the questions I could think of concerning people hunting on our land without our permission (poaching!) and blue trucks and dead deer, I extracted myself to finish planting Japanese Weeping Cherry. I had become a little concerned about men with guns going wherever they wanted and shooting things that moved. I didn't know if poaching was more often a planned thing or not. Does one purposefully go out to poach? Or does one find one's self tracking an animal that crosses a property line and decide to go after it anyway? Or does one simple spot a deer in someone's pasture while one is driving home from work, grab one's gun off one's gun rack, leap a fence and shoot it? Frankly, I'm not thrilled about any of these options.

When my husband and I were in the process of purchasing the property we found out we had "Land Owner's Privilege" which was the right to first refusal of a Buck Hunting License. We were entitled to two because there are two of us. I had planned on obtaining both licenses  and then purposefully not shooting the deer in order to preserve two lives. But I forgot. I suddenly regretted this.

My husband and I discussed what happened a bit later. Considering the myriad reasons one might stop at the sight of a dead deer in the road, it is hard to say whether a call to the Fish & Wildlife State Police was necessary. My husband and I once stopped to move a spotted baby deer from the road--to keep if from being more seriously mauled and for traffic safety. My husband once removed a deer to bury it--not on the side of the road--but on his own property. My point is, it would be hard to gauge the actual reason one might pick up a deer carcass. Anna mentioned trophy-hunting--possibly removing the head from a road kill and taking home the "rack". Not a trophy in my estimation--but then that is a cultural thing.

Sometimes I don't know where I am anymore.


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The latest post The Diet of Worms is not, in fact, missing--but has posted at an earlier date October 04, 2016. So it is in here, just not where I thought it was going to be!

We inherited a leftover burn pile--and then we added to it. Last Wednesday was Burn Day! My first. I wrote the following while sitting with the fire for 4+ hours.

​​I tend the fire—it is my first. I can’t breathe--but altogether it feels appropriate. I first I was bored fire-tending-- and then I was not. One can pretend a lot of different scenarios while attending a super large fire: Lord-of-the-Rings-Mountaintop-Fire-Signal Tender, Stranded-On-Desert-Island-About-To-Die-Fire Tender, Game-of-Thrones-Khaleesi-Dragon-Fire Tender, Beach-Blanket-Bingo-Bonfire Tender...I've been them all.
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​Where there was no fire, I created ONE. Where there was one fire, I created TWO. And, hopefully, where there are TWO I can create NONE.
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​Raking through a giant fire is like exploring the moon or some other planet’s moon…or a made up moon that isn’t really there at all...Even though I know it is unlikely that I will unearth anything that is so-called “valuable” I do keep unearthing “interesting things”. And aren’t “interesting things” better, in the long run, than “valuable?
 
That may be an obnoxious statement; I am not afraid of money. Interesting and valuable would be best, I think.

Ok, most of these things are neither interesting nor valuable.

Everything I find interesting these days, everything I find valuable seems to come from a Theory of Absence. The creation of nothing:
 
Buck wild. Giant sucking hole. Giant sucking whole. Giant sucking the toes of small men. Tiny people with special belts to hold up who they are. Sitting in trees, waiting to drown in the elbows of rivers. A friend won in battle. A shared enemy uniting two false lands. Stars that come down to grab you when you least want it. Hands that hold you down when you never want it. Sails of Eyes. Arms of arms.  Walking backwards three broad strides with your arms extended if you hope to ever communicate anything at all. The tiny little colors of red, green and blue tell you anything you want to hear. But killing people should always be wrong.
 
See there—I just created nothing.

Here is something; a new life form that lives in the fire. The fire is its HOME:

I love fire and all her denizens.

The only God I know is absent by design. The Chilean rugby team that crashed in the Andes mountains---they went through some crazy shit. Most of those boys—and a few women-- had been raised in religious households. God was assumed. But as the frozen tips of the earth’s vast heave began to swallow them whole, some began to question this so-called (valuable and interesting) God of Love and Mercy. When they ate their teammates rather than starve they asked (naturally) did God put me here for this?Is it better to survive at all costs? What is God if not Life itself?  But there was one guy that never spoke of religion, never spoke of God and did not join in the frozen prayers in the hollowed fuselage--he claimed agnosticism. In the book, a boy approached the Agnostic one freezing night. The boy asked, “How can you not believe in God?” But before his teammate could answer he added, “How can I believe in God?”

I loved the response that the Agnostic gave him. I loved it so much I read the passage of this book every morning for six months. I don’t remember anything verbatim at this point, but this is what I took away from it:
 
God did not create the Universe and God did not create us. The God of this universe was created just as we were --with this world, for this world.  This God is a God but it operates within the same organic framework of nature in which we operate--but beyond our understanding. The Laws of God are the Laws of Nature, just as the Laws of God and Nature should be the Laws of Man. This God is always with us, and it will neither save you nor condemn you. This God does not interfere in the way so many people are hoping. But this God is accessible—and it is possible to align yourself with the God of this universe by aligning your actions with principles we witness in the natural world everyday. When I am in harmony with what already exists, I am with God. That connection brings acceptance and acceptance, for me, is love.
 
Now that’s a Nothing that’s Something!
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