three-legged dog blog

Today I travel with a three-legged dog. For years this old dog had four legs and found plenty of trouble. Hit by a mystery car while I was in Egypt - my folks nursed her til I returned for dog-and-human swim therapy. She had a strong mend on that back femur and a tan. Then she stuck her head in the mouth of rattlesnake and barely recovered her life and senses.

This fall a fat round bulb sprang from the top of her hind foot - a tumor. I spent quiet hours and inner-looking hours during winter days in Albuquerque and Taos waiting for biopsy results. I called people and I dreaded and wondered about what to do. Would it be possible for the pup to pull through another hard time?


Her vet thought so. But she would have to lose the leg. She did and recovered in southern New Mexico on a special pecan farm (more in a later post). She was road-ready the week before Valentines Day. Since then we've traveled to Phoenix, Tucson, and are in Oakland, California. There's a big bridge out here - we'll cross it in a day or two. Our last spectacular bridge visit was the structure spanning the Rio Grande Gorge in Taos, NM - you can see a dog serious about getting a good view below . . . this was her last four-legged hike day.


Today we walked down International Blvd in Oakland, CA - once called East 14th Street it became a rough neighborhood when people moved to other suburbs and left houses vacant - then boarded up. This morning it seemed like a lively place (maybe the name change helps focus us on what we may be proud to find here). It felt like somewhere South or Central America with pinata shops and cake shops and quinceanera dresses in windows. And on International Blvd I could have stopped for the international cuisine - Chinese, Mexican, Italian and more. But I had coffee and "organic banana bread" (that's how I knew I was in Cali) to share with a pooch who gets more attention than she wants these days. Everyone wanted to know how she learned to walk on three legs. But that's the thing. She just keeps going - not knowing to be sad over the loss of a limb, or to look back on a life with some major recoveries - and big adventures. This dog's brain isn't wired to worry and lament. Nope. She's forward looking (for eatable things).

other-ness

"And its one life, and its this life, and its beautiful . . ." First Aid Kit - Hard Believer

Last fall I traveled in Peru and Bolivia. Those places sound exotic, but is it by virtue of their distance from home? The truth is they are similar in most big ways and the other-ness one feels - it's the trick of culture shock. People show up vibrantly against the backdrop of a new landscape, a different city. The things they do seems surprising. Oh, it's easy to romanticize when you travel. Sure, the Bolivian women - in long black braids and aprons all day squeezing fresh juice from every fruit available - was unique, was new. But it's juice. Why not try to see all the earth as special? Catch the details - find all precious things. Think about the juice - and the people here, there. Looking out a bus window I would try to absorb the passing world. Why not absorb always?

I returned in November to take a family road trip to the Grand Canyon. I knew the sense of "the extraordinary" could stay around me - a lens giving sharp focus to every day and every place of one's life. I wanted the lens to stay in place as I roamed in Arizona and now in New Mexico - my home.



I tell myself - and you can imagine it's true - the southwestern US is always ripe for adventure. Its wide-open spaces lure. Its nestled communities collect dust and invite the curious. Southwestern cities with fabulous culture, traffic, art, music, pollution, and people are as other as Peru, as Bolivia, as Egypt.

the naked earth - concluding thoughts

To conclude - the earth is hiding nothing - the earth is nude and making new earth, and also by the apparent layers and wrinkles and folds, the earth is old - old, old. The history of lakes that once were and coral reefs that were, and magma that bubbled and cooled was revealed in surprising places during the four-day desert crossing. Thanks Tupiza Tours and to all my traveling companions - it was real!

the earth gets naked - part three

When you go to the naked earth you go from many things on your horizon to few things - grand things. Leaving Cochabamaba Bolivia - I left a scene of humans caught up in much activity - surrounded by their structures, sounds, and smells. Busy, busy place.


Three days later passing through a desert where a particular rock formation stood out distinctly - the stone tree - I thought, "how restful."


A nude mountain and blue-green lake, two things to look at. Next, a red lake full of flamingos. The thoughts I had were simple and quiet, "they match the lake . . or the lake and the birds, like, match."


Pay attention and remember.

At lunch, a fancy affair that came from the back of a jeep, which I ate off a plate in a desert over 12,000 miles above sea level, I was visited by a curly-tailed rabbit looking creature - the vizcacha.

It is true - all of it. There is a red lake, and a green one, and a rabbit with a long tail and I ate a vegetable medley off a porcelain plate the day I saw a stone tree and a nearly full moon in the day-time sky.

the earth gets naked - part two

Our Tupiza Tours expedition rolled out at the crack of 9:30am, took dirt roads and dry riverbeds, and climbed up to over 4000 meters into an open, uncovered eroding land. Trees and plants and organic matter, I think, dress the earth, and where those things are missing – the earth gets naked.

I thought this while I traveled across the exposed stretch of southern Bolivia. It was exposed, but not unadorned. The earth let it all hang out - stratigraphy and folds of time; it’s gray geyser juices, and its sulfur breath. The mountain peaks had not gone bald – no trees had ever lived there.

Peaks melted like piled Neapolitan with rose and cream, chocolate and mocha chip layers. We crossed by land rover – for four days. Here you could be mostly alone if you forgot to bring some company. You could freeze at night, sunburn, and windburn and dry out by daytime. Few people live here and those that do tend llamas and wear so many layers they look big and thick, but small again against the landscape. It’s too high to grow anything – even potatoes.
This land is good to go into – wide open for thinking, but not humane enough to stay. This is not the tender place that makes you imagine a gentile mother earth that provides for her creatures. The earth would let the wind rip you away from her surface.
If you were this naked earth you wouldn’t be alone - or ashamed. You would have the company of skinny legs needling into your pitted skin: flamingos and the rare vicuña.
Grass clumps, that occasioned your surface, would grow as resolute as the oak, blades with the integrity of cactus spines. Proudly you’d display your ores and minerals from within – rust and lavender, green and yellow, and sometimes pure white. The heat that builds in you could vent and spew.

The earth doesn’t have resentment; it has volcanoes.

the earth gets naked - part one

Good place for a nap - Tupiza, Boliva.


I couldn't leave Bolivia and return to my New Mexico desert without a visit to the high, dry south of this country. I went for it's geothermal action, big salty flats, volcanoes, flamingos, and fanciful animals like spindle-legged vicuna and curly tailed rabbits. I'd only read about this desert realm. Could those fables have truth to them? To find out I joined my friends, Audrey and Dan of uncorneredmarket in Oruro, west of Cochabamba where we'd pick up a train south to Tupiza - but not before having juice. Fresh juice is a meal - and I try to have it several times a day, like other meals.

Oruro to Tupiza is 12 hours by train and out my window the view looked like a western. We were traveling into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid territory. The stories you read say they met an untimly end near the town of Tupiza. It was odd to think of them in Bolivia until I arrived in its desert south. They may have felt as at home as I did in the dry, red rock country. Tupiza was sleepy and laid back - like its street dogs.

flatland

What on earth? Is this Earth? If a planet can be called Dune - we should call this one Over-sized Monster Egg.

Dawn on the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia - the salty fossil of a prehistoric lake.