In Sue Sternberg’s new book, The Dog-Driven Search coauthored with Dana Zinn, Sue credits my teaching of “body English” and movement as an important influence on her approach to the handling of nose-work dogs.
To be perfectly honest, I know nothing about training or handling nose-work dogs. But in the context of dog agility I teach that dogs understand movement like a spoken word. So, the “pure for motion” handler takes a lead in “the dance”.
A favorite YouTube video shows me running somebody else’s dog at a TDAA Judges clinic. I remember the young lady was struggling just to get this dog to do a sequence of three obstacles. And I told her “Stop handling like you have a Border Collie. You need to move.” So, she slapped his leash into my hand and told me, “Here. You run him.”
As a seminar leader I ran dozens of dogs over the years, especially if I saw the handler struggling with it. Though I don’t have many recordings to look back on them. YouTube didn’t even exist until 2005. And I don’t think I had my own channel until about 2010, or so.
Retrospect
I’m pleased and flattered that Sue Sternberg found value in my early teaching. Though I get a little chuckle out of the notion that I have no expertise in Nose Work and not much of an idea how what I taught applies to that sport.
Funny looking back on it now. My legacy as an agility trainer is probably my methodology for teaching independent performance (great distance work) to an agility dog. Almost forgotten I suppose are the many years I spent teaching “pure for motion” handling.
The onset of Rheumatoid arthritis naturally changed the focus and direction of my study and teaching of agility.
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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
I’m happy to announce that a new Joker’s Notebook training series is set to begin on Clean Run Classrooms in the first week of February. The class has gone on sale now. Follow this link to see a good description of the class:
The introduction, I’m tickled to note, refers to me as an “agility pioneer”. This means, of course, that I’m an old guy who’s been playing this game for many years. It also means, practically speaking, that I’ve tested my dog training methods many times over. This class allows me to share these time-tested methods with you.
A Successful Outcome
It is not my intention here to sell anything. If you must know, I really don’t care about the money. What really makes me excited is the prospect that I will have students who succeed with their dogs teaching amazing distance skills using methods that I have designed and tested.
I was thinking the other day that my most successful students are dog trainers who follow the instructions and do the work. There’s nothing magical or special about dog or handler. There’s no predicate for instinct or intelligence or luck. Just follow the instructions and do the work.
That being said, I’d like to share with you a couple of final observations on how to achieve a successful outcome from this curriculum.
Throw away everything you think you know about training your dog to do agility.
Our objective is to teach the dog independent performance of obstacles and changes of direction using mostly verbal commands by the handler.
The objective defines foundation. The Joker’s method seeks to establish a foundation for independent work and verbal direction in the first year of the dog’s life. That is not to say that you’ll fail with an older dog; it will just be harder, as you’ll be working against muscle memory.
I earnestly try to make this point early in the curriculum. But as an agility instructor I know that experienced agility people are too often in a big ass hurry to inflict on their own dog traditional foundation methods which more often than not promote clinginess and suggest to the dog that he is wrong when not attending the handler closely.
Follow the Curriculum
The skills taught in the early chapters of the Joker’s Notebook are important. The lessons shouldn’t be treated as amusements or optional endeavors, no matter how trifling they appear.
The Notebook was designed to span 40 weeks of training. It’s kind of like building a brick wall. You can’t place the high bricks until you’ve set the lower bricks. As your dog advances in the curriculum the weekly exercises more and more depend on your diligent teaching and practice of those skills as they are presented earlier in the curriculum.
To give you an important “for-example” ~ a skill that is often overlooked or avoided is teaching the dog Left and Right directionals. Experienced handlers can be downright spooky about teaching Left and Right to the dog and will fool themselves into thinking they can get by without it. Before too long the curriculum homework will include proofing exercises for directional commands. And then you’re stuck. An untrained dog cannot succeed.
Recording your Homework
This is a work-at-your-own pace training curriculum presented as online text and pictures. The dog training part of the homework isn’t so tough at all. But we get to complicate your life by asking that you record your practice and homework and then upload those recordings back to the Classroom where your instructor can have a look at it and provide coaching.
The technical demands imposed by computer and camera and software can be almost overwhelming when you are first getting started. And early in your training is not a good time for being overwhelmed.
If you get overwhelmed you get behind; if you get behind you get discouraged; and if you get discouraged, you give up.
The Promise
Your Notebook coach and the Clean Run staff will be there for you as you learn the “Record your Homework” part of this training riddle. You be patient and we’ll be patient. Together we’ll figure out how to make you a homework recording specialist.
Planning your Homework
Before we leave the Homework topic, I should like to make a short list of considerations that will add value to the work you put into training your dog and doing the homework exercises.
Spend a moment each week designing your training space by reviewing the exercises and homework for the week. Equipment can typically be left in place for most of the week so that you can focus on training and practice.
Enlist someone to record you and your dog at work. Or, at the very least, get yourself a good tripod.
A homework recording should have at least three or four reps of the same exercise. Even when you made unsuccessful attempts at an exercise your instructor may see things that didn’t occur to you.
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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Some people won’t bother to vote in the up-and-coming, I’ve heard, because the Dems have disappointed their expectations; or they’ll vote for a third party; or they won’t vote at all. I’ve heard this said of “young” voters, Hispanic Americans, black men, for example. Surely a broader fabric of interests are among the disappointed.
The “independent”, third-party, or absentee voter silences his own voice and leaves the choice of law and governance to others. Political power in America is based on a two-party system. There’s the Republican party, and the Democrat party.
Seizing Power
The real answer is not to leave a party when they don’t perform; but to join the party. Only by participating in local party politics can the voter’s voice shape policy discussion.
For example, Bernie Sanders’ political views were formerly considered extreme and radical. When he joined the Democratic Party his views became a part of the discussion and earned broad popular support for himself and the Party. By participating in a power party his voice helps shape policy and legislation.
When I see Taylor Swift urging her fans to register to vote I get really excited. She urged her fans to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day. @votedotorg reported huge jumps in voter registrations and notably,18-year-olds registering. If those new voters would get involved in local politics they could literally shape the conversation about things like health care, the environment, civil rights and frankly, everything else. It’s kind of like an old lottery commercial said “you can’t win if you don’t play.”
The Republicans
Knowing the propaganda wants us to hate on each other I try to be gentle with people I knew back before they went MAGA. Remembering when they were good and smart and admirable, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and imagine that they’ll reason their way out of the cult.
But honestly, when somebody tells me that they want to make a ridiculous clown like Donald Trump the President of the United States… I always think to myself… “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Those Were The Days
Boy the way Glen Miller played, Songs that made the hit parade, Guys like us we had it made, Those were the days, And you know where you were then, Girls were girls and men were men, Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again, Didn’t need no welfare states Everybody pulled his weight, Gee our old Lasalle ran great, Those were the days
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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
I have a couple of blogs I would like to write. But since I’ve been away from my blog for so long I owe a discussion of my health adventures. I assume that you’d like to know what condition my condition is in.
It appears my cancer is in remission. I’ve likely bought a couple more years.
Not to be a complete drama queen about this thing; I want to back up and talk about what a near thing this was. If you’d like to skip the gory details I understand and don’t care. Skip on down to the Big Lebowski video and happy holidays to ya.
Gory Details
I spent a month in the hospital, half of that in ICU and the other in oncology daily care. I decided that I had come to an end. ultimately tired of the ignominious uncomfortable embarrassing undignified crappy life I was living… I gave up. I started refusing care and basically told them I was done with it, and to let me die in peace. I changed my status to DNR.
My oncologist, a doctor name of Cawley, is widely regarded as a saint in this part of the world. All of Dr. Cawley’s associates regard her with respect, admiration and awe. She’s the sort of doctor you’d want if you need an oncologist.
Anyhow, she used an impressive campaign of child psychology to bring me back to accepting treatment. The Keytruda infusions I had received had crushed the cancer in my lungs. But then the Keytruda attacked my lungs. It is that infection that my treatment is now designed to cure.
There was in front of me a narrow window of opportunity and hope. I privately compare it to the scene in the opening of the Matrix where Trinity is running from an Agent and the police across a rooftop and escapes by jumping off the building and diving through a very small window in another nearby building.
That is the leap I’m taking now. It is going swimmingly. My health improves daily. And I have advanced to acting very retired and wasting far too much time on streaming movies and playing World of Warcraft.
Liberating
There is something liberating about resigning yourself to being dead… then discovering you aren’t dead at all.
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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
I’ve been doing some straightening in the basement. And I’ve stumbled across a couple things worth sharing. These will be of interest to my dog agility friends.
This was my boy Bogie’s MACH bar circa 2001. Now, back in the day they didn’t give out MACH bars. So the practice was, among some of us, to snatch away the actual very last bar your dog jumped as he earned the Championship title.
This was at a club up in Pennsylvania. I remember that the equipment manager was pretty pissed at me for making off with his equipment.
It’s fun looking at some of the names on the bar and knowing who was there on that day.
After I got the MACH I pretty much stopped trialing Bogie in the AKC. I did the same thing with the USDAA, when Bogie got his ADCh. I preferred instead to play league play at my own training center. I’ve never been the kind of exhibitor that the agility organizations really love.
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I also found this polo shirt in a box downstairs. As I’ve lost a lot of weight recently (about 45 lbs); I find myself fitting in clothing that I haven’t worn for a long time.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember where the 2006 Petit Prix was held. My memory isn’t cooperating.
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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Funny how one thing gets you thinking about another thing. Sometimes it’s hard to trace back through how your thoughts trip over each other on a common thread that might not be easy to unravel. How did I get here from there?
Take this as fair warning, don’t expect the writing below to summarize as some kind of cogent essay. It’s just rambling, following the connecting threads.
Kerouac
On rereading On the Road I’m provoked to consider the color and character that America has lost in the homogenization of our culture. I expect to write about that one day soon. But forgetting that provocation I’m captivated by Jack’s prose. Consider this salvo:
“The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
I am agog.
The protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were beat generation. They softly spoke the language of the so-called beatnik. It wasn’t a cartoon-like speech like Maynard Krebs (Bob Denver / Dobie Gillis). I see them like the young people of any generation, consumed with the daily task of making a life and a living, partying at the least provocation, while soulfully searching for love and fulfillment of lust.
The portrait of America at a point in time is an abiding character of the novel: places and roads and modes of travel, how people dressed according to fashion and practicality, the discovered foods, places where people slept and ate and worked, where they drank and danced, and the music that colored their lives. And every place was unique in all those ways.
Aside from country music, and soulful Mexican serenades, the Bop was mentioned more than a few times. I had to research it a bit. This was a sound and a dance that came into vogue in the early 50’s and was apparently the sound and dance of that generation.
Aunt L’Marie
A compelling family legend has my aunt L’Marie winning a Bop dancing contest in Brinkley, Arkansas. And before you dismiss this as a minor contest in a hick country town you should know that kids from all over that part of Arkansas traveled there to dance, which would include Wheatly, DeValls Bluff, and even kids from as far away as Clarendon. It was a big deal, you see.
It was L’Marie’s 15 minutes of fame.
Pleasanton
In the early 80’s I lived down in Pleasanton, Texas and commuted every day all the way up to San Antonio.
My next-door neighbors, by the way, were Ben and Mona Parker, who were quite famous and revered in the area, though I was too self-absorbed in my own life to recognize it at the time. Mona was the engineer who built KBOP AM radio transmitter.
I’m fascinated by the BOP part of the call name. I can’t help but believe that it was literally named after the favored young peoples’ dance of the era.
Along about 1983 Robert Johnson Advertising—where I worked—up in San Antonio got a contract to promote a Willie Nelson benefit concert down in Pleasanton to finance the launch of the Mona Parker’s Longhorn Museum.
Turns out that Willie Nelson worked for Ben and Mona at KBOP in the early days of the station. People in the area remembered Willie as a short-haired skinny young cowboy that wore a white suit and had a live KBOP program on which he played his acoustic guitar and sang country melodies. That’s the way the story was told to me.
In my youth, circa 1972, I took a trip to Arkansas to visit my brother who lived in a little town name of Hunters Mill. I applied for a job as an assembler over in Forest City and was hired. But I never quite made it to my first day of work.
My cousin Billie Joe and I took up a trip on a Friday night down to a dance club in Hazen with a mind to dance, drink a few beers, and maybe get lucky. On our way out of the club a police car followed us out, pulling us over before we could get on the Interstate. Having Arizona tags on the car was a red flag.
I was arrested for intoxicated driving. I’d had four beers, after all. And I was sentenced to serve six months in the Phillips County Penal farm, down by Helena.
I spent the next couple of months doing the work of the farm, which was building a bridge [impressive engineering complete with a pile driver that moved forward on the bridge as it was being built], chopping cotton, picking okra, and clearing right of way.
My mother, who had been vacationing down in Monterrey Mexico got wind of where I was when she got home to Tucson. She contacted the judge over in Hazen and made arrangements to pay off my fine. Whereupon I was released. Mom was born and raised in Arkansas and understood completely how that world worked.
I could write an entertaining short biography of that time; but that’ll have to wait. There’s another point I want to make here.
The 13th Amendment makes it unconstitution for a person to be held as a slave, with this important exception: “Except as a punishment for crime.”
After the Civil War the south with it’s shattered slave labor economy worked to recover economic viability by exploiting the “punishishment for crime” exception to the 13th Amendment. They targeted black people who were easy to demonize and were in ready abundance. Laws were enacted to make things like loitering, trespassing and vagrancy criminal offenses.
In 1972 there were roughly 350,000 convicts in American prisons.
Capitalism and Slavery
I cringe every time I hear a politician declare unwavering endorsement of the capitalist system! That system depends on the institution of slavery.
A prosperous capitalist system will thrive and grow. Today there are roughly 1,500,000 convicts in American prisons. These convicts work in conditions of slavery. We have 6% of the world’s population but 25% of incarcerated people.
Prison industries need cheap labor. Big corporations and billionaire funded think tanks (like ALEC) have played “ghost writer” to Republican legislation for more than 40 years; legislation geared to keep up prison populations to meet the production quotas of those prison industries.
Black people remain the primary target of criminal legislation to ensure a prison industries work force. Remember these bits from the American dialog: Habitual criminal; stop and frisk; mandatory sentencing; truth in sentencing; super predator; black music is criminal; drugs black people are more severely punished.
A Deferred Prosecution Agreement allows a judge to let a criminal escape punishment if he feels the person will likely forego a life of crime. A black person is 18 times less likely than a white person to be liberated by DPA.
A Premeditated Crime
The demonization of black people as human beings is objectively the same narrative as portrayed in “Birth of a Nation”.
To look beyond the racist viewpoint: a horrible crime has been perpetrated against more than a million Americans. Slavery is a crime against humanity. The capitalist system in cahoots with the legal system have made this crime an ongoing American nightmare.
Accessory to the Crime: The Federalists
The Federalist subscribes to the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the sensibilities and beliefs of the founding fathers, as set forth in the Federalist Papers.
That’s all a bunch of happy horse-shit.
Our “founding fathers” were for the most part slave owners. And they wrote into the Constitution specific protections for the ruling class. Make no mistake about it, when politicians or jurists proclaim themselves to be “Federalist”, they are confessing to their support for the ruling class: Rich White Men; and for the modern institution of slavery.
Accessory to the Crime: The Supreme Court
Citizens United tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations; enabling donors to buy elections, bribe politicians, and lavish gifts and money on Supreme Court justices. The law allows the donors identities to be kept secret.
The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act, weakening the federal government ability to block discriminatory voting laws. The court ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.
The Superball Bonus
An added bonus to the modern American slavery scheme is that a person convicted of a felony is apt to lose civil rights for life, depending on state laws. That would include the right to vote. Somewhere I saw a statistic that 1/3 of black men in Alabama are unable to vote, having been convicted of a crime.
BLOG1634 ~ Day 18 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Recently the dog agility community lost two pioneers and true heroes of the sport, Christine Joy Danielly and Ileana Mejias Nadal. Both of these ladies were forces of nature, building vibrant agility communities while promoting and growing the sport with their vision, work ethic, and unfailing enthusiasm.
Chris Danielly
Chris built Canine Capers, the club that hosted the very first ever dog agility trial in Georgia (USDAA circa 1990).
My favorite game for killing time (and brain cells, I suppose) is World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing for about 20 years. I started playing after hearing a fun piece on NPR describing the game.
Now I have written a guide (submitted for publication on WowHead) documenting my approach to collecting battle pets and earning heaps of in-game gold.
I’m trying to publish something everyday on my blog. So I’m attending to a bunch of back-burner writing projects. I would have published this World of Warcraft Guide much earlier… but I wound up spending most of the day figuring out how to use the damned WowHead Guide Editor.
I’d give you a link to the guide here, but it hasn’t yet been approved, yet and there is no link. So I’ll include the draft copy below to give you the opportunity to completely ignore it, and go do something productive with your day.
Introduction
Because battle pets are account-bound, this gold-making strategy envisions collecting, crafting and buying pets that can be caged, and then selling them on multiple servers. The strategy requires you keep auction house toons across (X) servers. I have toons on 11 servers!
Understanding the Battle Pet Universe
The battle pets universe has evolved over time. With each new release the crafty WoW developers have tweaked the circumstances for battle pets in that realm. The Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor releases were richly rewarding for the pet collector and, moreover, the pet farmer. But ever since Draenor the developers have backed away from exploitable drops and gold purchases. They’ve preferred instead to limit collection to rewards for achievement; boss-drops in dungeons; one-off quests; and a variety of grind-as-you-go material currencies.
Important: All of the old exploits remain. Many of them require tedious rep-grinding just to qualify to make or purchase the associated pets. But these pets will continue to be in demand. A novice pet collector might be reluctant to do a 3-day rep grind because all he gets from the work is a new pet in his pet journal. Your investment in the grind allows you to make or buy many as you want and then sell them on every Server where you have an Auction House toon.
Editor’s Note
This document has been edited for brevity. While the original vision included a lot of step-by-step documentation for earning qualifying reputation and how to gather mats that are that are pet-buying currencies, it became clear that reciting baby steps would swell this document to a dense 30 page tomb and obscure the simple explanation for the Battle Pets X-Server strategy.
Building Your X-Server Army
Expanding to a new realm means creating new toons. There’s no need to be in a hurry. Expand to a new server should be designed to exploit a specific pet or pet family. For example: I have a toon that does nothing but camp Environeer Bert in New Tinkertown for the drop of the Dibbler pet. I keep an Auction House toon in Iron Forge on this same serve.
Keep a main player for Alliance, and a main player for the Horde (on a different server). You’ll use these for rep grinding and traveling around for more advanced Pet tamer battles. The toons on all other servers are intended for working the auction house and camping pet tamers that drop pets.
Connecting Realms
Warning ~ Connecting servers are essentially the same server for the purposes of auctions. You’ll waste time getting established… just to find out that you are competing against yourself.
Follow this link to see a diagram of Connected Realms
The following list comes from a spreadsheet that tracks the pets I sell at auction. The table points to where the pet comes from and the purchase price of the pet .
Purchase Veilwatcher Hatch 950 Gold Vesharr Sprires of Arak
While technically not camping, you should run these:
Beasts of Fable Book II ~ Defeat Lucky Yi, Greyhoof, and Skitterer Xi’a; chance to drop: Mountain Panda, Snowy Panda, or Sunfur Panda. This quest available in Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria from: Sara Finkleswitch (/way 84.4 40) for Alliance, or from Gentle San (/way 60.8 23.6) for Horde.
Darkmoon Faire ~ Pet tamers Jeremy Feasel and Christoph VonFeasel. The Faire is typically up one week a month. Each day you can earn 15 Darkmoon Prize Tickets. 90 of the Prize Tickets allow you to buy—from Lhara—one of: Darkmoon Monkey, Darkmoon Turtle; Darkmoon Tonk; Darkmoon Zeppelin; Darkmoon Cub; or Darkmoon Hatchling.
Pet Battles
Doing pet battles to win dropped pets gives you the opportunity to level up your more valuable and useful pets. A level 25 pet might earn 2K more gold in auction than a level 1 pet. So, get in the habit of carrying a level pet when you battle.
Currencies
A part of your day will surely involve gathering the currencies you need to purchase pets to sell. This activity can be serendipitous with questing to stay up with the current Expansion.
At the end of the day time is the most valuable currency in World of Warcraft. While you might make a heap of gold, it’s worth remembering that it’s not real gold. Go outside sometime and get a little sunshine, take a walk in the snow, or reacquaint yourself with your family.
Design your daily activities in Azeroth to be time-efficient. This shouldn’t feel like a job.
The XServer Auction House
Keeping an inventory of 20 or 30 different pets, spread over any number of servers means that you will spend a lot of time refreshing auctions. But it’s worth noting that this strategy doesn’t work if you don’t keep your inventory in the Auction House. So don’t get lazy and put it off ‘til tomorrow.
When you do sell a pet you cage the same pet from your pet journal, and stick it right back on auction. If your pet journal is empty of that pet, then you have to go out and make or buy more of that pet to restock your journal. It’s harder to restock drop pets because most don’t drop often enough to have one to sell on all of your servers.
Buy Low Sell High
Check in the Auction House for pets that aren’t in your collection; There’s a filter for that!
The basic strategy is to make a list of maybe 20 pets you’d like to buy. Then go check the price for those pets on every server where you have an auction house toon. You want to identify pets on servers that cost half as much as they do on most servers. I will typically buy only about half that are on the list, and only those
Then you buy two or more of each, level them up, and sell them on the servers that have the higher prices. You will usually wind up having those pets for free for yourself, while still turning a profit on the extras you bought.
New Expansions
If you have a full collection, then the best time to buy more will be after an expansion, and WoW has added a couple dozen that aren’t in your collection. I typically wait about a month after a new Expansion release so I can do some intro questing, maybe do a few dungeons, and, regear my toon so that I don’t get killed by trash while I’m out collecting wild pets.
And, if you wait a month, the prices will settle down a bit and begin to regulate; and you’ll get burned less often by paying more for a pet than it will ever earn on Auction House. It’s a good idea when planning a gang purchase to wait for the beginning of a Pet Battle Bonus Event. This will allow you to quickly level up some or all of the new pets.
Summary
I started playing with WoW Battle Pets motivated mostly by profit. Over time I learned to be more legitimate and spend much of my time seeking out rare pets that aren’t drops and you can’t buy. Right now I’m closing in on that magical 1600 number.
This guide is documents a gold earning strategy using the XServer approach. For two to three hours a day the Auction House income is typically a minimum of 40K gold. And that’s not a bad rate of income.
Acknowledgements
WowHead is the invaluable research tool that informs my understanding of pet battles, quests and achievements. While I have left many elements of this Guide to your research labor, I am positive that you can and will use WowHead to find your way forward in implementing this methodology.
Weerd Horde Mage Zuluhed server
Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com; Include in the subject line “Battle-Pet Xserver” to get my attention.
BLOG1632 ~ Day 14 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
It is the Cholla cactus I’d like to talk about. If my anecdotal observations are of any use to scientists who research and care for the delicate riparian habitat, I would be gratified.
Overview
I grew up in San Manuel, Arizona in Pinal County a town built for mine workers in the southwest desert. Our house was on the west side of town, right up against an amazing forest of Cholla cactus.
Before I drift away talking about the cholla forest, I have to mention the smelters, with two smoke-stacks, right next to town that constantly (24×7) belched out smoke and ash. On some days the wind would blow the smoke through town at ground level. It was an acrid, foul stench that watered your eyes and choked your lungs.
This smoky pollution, I believe, in the few short decades that the smelter operated completely destroyed the cholla forest surrounding San Manuel.
The Story
Our house was up at the end of 4th Avenue with nothing but desert all the way up the backside of the Santa Catalina.
My brothers and I were complete desert rats. We had a regular hiking path through the desert that changed sometimes to investigate some critter or artifact.
We lived in a magnificent forest of cholla. While there might be the occasional occatillo or saguaro or ironwood tree, this was a cholla forest. There was Teddy Bear, Barrel Cactus, those little Buckhorns, and lots of Jumping Cactus and Staghorns and Cane Cholla. There was another kind, a lot like the Cane cactus but was colored purple, with a touch of burnt umber. And there was a knee-high cholla that had little red berries in the winter.
The cholla forest had a magnificent smell. It is a unique and poignant fragrance that exists nowhere but there, in the cholla forest. I could smell when a jumping cactus had loosed little land mines across the ground, primed to stick and cling to you if you brushed by.
When the desert blooms and the summer storms roll down from the mountain the desert air is sweet and earthy and full of promise.
The desert rabbits would make their burrows in the jumble of fallen parts at the base of the cactuses. These made for a formidable stickery defense. On many days our romp in the desert would have me pulling cactus stickers out of my dog Smokey’s muzzle when we got home. Smokey was a stub-tailed Black Lab that loved chasing rabbits.
Us kids were experts at removing jumping cactus stickers. Usually it was one pod that jumps up and fixes to you with dozens of sharp clinging needles. The trick is, get it off all at once. You put a stick up under it and you flick it away. Sometimes you get “the big one”, where you get a pile of cactus stuck on you from ankle to hip. Ouch! You gotta flick them, one pod at a time.
At our fort, in the relative shade of an ancient Palos Verde tree, we erected a statue made from fortuitously shaped cholla wood. The cholla skeleton is shaped like any tree, except the trunk and branches have a hollow center and a honeycomb of M&M-size holes that drill right down to the center. It’s like a big sieve.
On top of our cholla golem we put a couple mean looking devils’ thorns, sending a clear signal to the world that the 4th Ave gang is boss of the wash.
The Disappeared Forest
My family moved away from San Manuel when I was old enough to start high school. I didn’t return to San Manuel for twenty years.
But when I did, I could not resist a trip back out into my beautiful cholla forest, right up at the end of 4th Ave.
The forest was gone… disappeared.
And it had been gone for a while because there wasn’t so much as a cholla skeleton littering this pale ghost of the desert I grew up in. And the aroma of the cholla forest was gone.
It was a sad time for me. We’d grown up with a real relationship with that desert, a world of beauty and wonder. And it was just frigging gone. On that day I became an environmentalist.
Summary
I get that this accounting is anecdotal ~ one old man remembering a sliver of his childhood. But I witnessed the world changing. My belief is that the clumsy thoughtless pollution of the copper smelters very likely poisoned the world around them. Who could have foreseen the fragility of this habitat?
If you can pass this history on to your researchers I would be gratified. I am a witness.
Post Script
I found this picture on Google Maps Street View. Ours was the house with the pick-up parked in the lawn. I am happy to see little stands of Jumping cactus out in the desert. This might indicate that the Chollas can return now that the Magma Copper Co smelters are no longer active.
BLOG1631 ~ Day 12 of ?
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