Left Coast Cowboys

Back at the Barking Dog Cafe, (”More Bark, Less Bite”) the only place I can find in Sonoma with free Wi-Fi. I tell you, it’s like being in the Old West trekking two miles into town to hook up the old laptop and start uploading! With a bunch of chores done around the ranch, we started our reconnaissance around the Valley for good ideas on equipping Two Terrier Vineyards — beyond the hand crank machines and food grade plastic buckets that comprise our operation so far. Our first stop was Truchard Vineyards, which a friend had told us was a small enough operation (by appointment only) that you could chat to the winemaker and take a tour of the equipment rather than just the tasting room. Truchard turned out to be just what we were looking for.

First of all, we had a hard time getting to the tasting room, as distracted as we were by the goats staked out in the yard. For some reason, I’ve gotten fixated on goats as the perfect livestock. I guess I have unrealistic visions of them selectively eating only the weeds, scrubby Chamise and poison oak, while leaving alone all the wildflowers and oak trees on our pasture. Especially if you’ve ever encountered Chamise, or worse yet, had to try to get rid of it, you’ll see how seductive a dream this is. You know how George Bush is always talking about all the “brush clearing” he’s doing up at his Crawford ranch? If he’s cutting Chamise, I could even find a grudging respect for him. If he would come and cut down MY Chamise, I’d even vote for him. Termed out? I’d lobby for him to have an extra term. Well, not really. But easy Chamise eradication is a powerful dream. It makes one contemplate strange things. Like owning goats.

And goats are apparently more complicated than you would think. First of all, the goat owners I’ve spoken to make goats sound worse than our terriers in terms of neediness. Apparently goats crave love and attention. If you don’t give them enough, they can even get the vapors and literally die of broken hearts. Now I don’t know if this applies only to delicate pure-bred goats or if the hardy goats I’d like to get would be this susceptible. But given that I have two needy terriers who need massive amounts of cuddling and cookies at all times just to maintain equilibrium, I’m not sure I’d have enough emotional reserves for a goat.

Or goats. Like terriers and horses and other herd and pack animals, I’m told, you can’t have just one. They need friends. Otherwise I guess you’ll be calling the goat vet for a prescription for Goat Prozac. Given that we’ve got one terrier on her meds, I wouldn’t look forward to that possibility.

But most daunting is the problem of keeping goats confined. Goats, I hear, are escape artists. They’ll dig under, jump over, chew through or destroy almost any fence you can imagine putting up. Since we’re trying to maintain wildlife right-of-way, with fencing that deer, foxes, bobcats, coyotes and even our resident Mountain Lion, Leonard, can get through, a goat-proof fence would seem to violate that access. This isn’t just crunchy granola “save the fuzzy creatures PETA” thinking. Despite their fearsome reputation, bobcats, coyotes and even mountain lions get a lot of their protein from rats, mice and little varmits. Exactly the sorts of critters you don’t want to have a population explosion as a result of removing their predators. In other words, it scares me less to think about Leonard stalking around the property than it does to imagine hordes of rats boiling over the hill toward the barn. Judging from the scat I’ve seen, our coyotes and the bobcat are munching on a LOT of mice. And judging from the infrequency of tracks and the only occasional deer carcass, Leondard the Mountain Lion only drops by every other quarter or so.

So again. Goats. How to keep ‘em and keep the wildlife corridors open. At Truchard, they had their goats tethered out on the front lawn outside the tasting room. Which was not perhaps the best of ideas, given the smell. There’s a reason we’ve developed the word “goaty” to describe something not exactly redolant of lilacs and lavender. But the idea of staking suddenly made goats seem like a possibility. And an interesting possibility if I could stake them to a particularly nasty clump of Chamise, with the happy expectation that they would munch it down to the roots. I’d be counting on their famous neediness to keep them from trying an escape if horses were also out in the pasture with them. Perhaps they’d be so concerned about staying with the “in crowd”, they wouldn’t chew through their tethers and go walk-about. And there would be all that tasty Chamise.

But I started out talking about wine equipment. Yes, Truchard did the trick and before we’d driven out of sight of the winery, Andy had formulated a workflow and complicated equipment plan relying on the natural gravity of our hill for most of its power. Don’t ask. I didn’t get into details. But it’s good to have an engineer on your side. Especially one who works on cars and machinery. They can build stuff.

It’s been so long since we had a vacation that Andy’s own company had to tell him that, even though he’s CEO, he can accrue no more vacation until he uses some. But with business at a critical juncture, taking off to the Caribbean or trekking in Tibet just couldn’t happen. The solution: a week at the ranch in Sonoma. Especially since just recently, we completed the living loft above the barn, making this the first habitable building on our land. That is if you don’t really count the tent cabin with the Incinolet (“Turns your waste into harmless ash!”) and the outdoor shower.

Although, we’re about five minutes outside the square of downtown Sonoma, so near has never seemed so far.
First of all, we’re just about completely unplugged. We’d made a conscious decision to have no TVs in Sonoma, at least until we live here permanently. And, with the barn tucked into a mountain that stands between the us and the town of Sonoma, cell phone and Wi-Fi access are pretty tricky. I can run a half mile up to the top of our hill and get sporadic cell access. Just like the pioneers! And over at the tent cabin, Andy can use his cell card to get an occasional Internet connection. I’ve heard that Internet cafes are all over the most remote towns in Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, but the only one I knew of in Sonoma seems to have gone out of business. I finally located a free Wi-Fi spot at the Barking Dog Coffee Shop, so I’m plugging in once every two days when I can get to town.

How are we surviving without any electronic connections? Seems like we’ve never been busier. And that’s just tending to a George Bush style of ranch – defined as out in the country but without any real livestock and therefore not any kind of ranch a real cowboy would recognize.

But we’ve never let things like that hold us back. We do have two terriers and, in the absence of sheep, cattle, goats or horses, they were livestock that had to be tended to. Andy wrestled them down this morning, shaved their bums with clippers, trimmed their toenails and stripped out their dead fur with a curry comb. We stopped short of branding, but only because we haven’t had our favorite graphic designer come up with a brand for us yet.

Now we’re on to tackling some of the more dangerous ranch chores. Like cleaning the grill that was last used for a Cinco De Mayo wedding – last year. I went up to inspect it and backed off as it smelled like something had crawled under the grill cover and died. I’m hoping we just left a piece of meat on it for a year. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. When the temperature dips below 85 degrees, I’ll have to go back up there with the trailer to haul it down to the barn for a thorough cleaning.

The rest of our days so far have involved taking inventory of the grapes, olives, orchard and other plantings that have finally matured enough to be doing something. Looks as if this could be the year for an actual grape crop, which is easy enough to sell. But I’m hoping I have lots of friends who are mad about olives as, by the look of the trees, I’m going to be hauling a few tons to the local olive press and still have barrels left over for brining.

The last chore has been inventorying our local wildlife. Unfortunately, the coyotes, foxes, bobcat and mountain lion who used to keep us huddled in our tent cabin as soon as it got dark, seem to have moved on due to the construction on the barn. We’re hoping they come back as our local naturalist keeps assuring us they will once power tools are out of the equation. Furry varmints will be more welcome now that we have solid walls between us and them. Although for now, it feels wild enough when I take the dogs out for their midnight walk. Shining a flashlight up the hill, I’m always met with dozens of red shining eyes peering out at me. Luckily, they just seem to be deer. Unluckily, they seem to be trying to find a way to push through the protective netting and eat our olives. I guess we’ve got enough to spare. I’ve also noticed that our pond, which is full of a deafening chorus of frogs, suddenly goes silent at various times during the night. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to investigate, but I’m assuming that’s because some large animal has stooped to drink from the pond. Since the pond is on the way to the Mountain Lion’s den, I haven’t yet thought it was a good idea to go out in pajamas with a flashlight to test my theory.

Next on the agenda: clearing brush, limbing trees, building beds and planting an organic garden. And we’ve just started our week.

Note on picture: This is a sunflower related plant called Mule Ears. The woman who’s helping us landscape dismisses them as weeds, but a knowledgeable friend from my Flickr group says they shouldn’t be called “weeds” to their faces. Since they outnumber us and are multiplying, that is probably wise counsel. Anyway, I’m deciding that I like them and I’ll call them flowers.

Today was my day to become part of the permanent collection at the De Young Museum. Seriously! I detailed how I was approached for this project in the last post.

But I honestly didn’t think it would come to anything. Then last week, the De Young Artist in Residence, Shimon Attie (read more about him here) contacted me and said he was ready for my close-up.

He’s working on a multi-media installation for the De Young that will include museum patrons interacting with pieces from the permanent collection. He found me as I was laughing my way hysterically through the Gilbert and George collection, so obviously, he must have thought I had a unique approach to Art.

So armed with the required several changes of wardrobe, I showed up at the De Young for a four hour session “interacting with artwork”. He had told me that the premise was to match specific patrons with artwork that “spoke to them”, and since he’d seen me laughing hysterically at Gilbert & George, I thought for sure I’d be “interacting” with a huge piece of poo. Or maybe a Gilbey’s Gin bottle.

Instead, my “piece” was a giant mastodon’s tusk that had been carved by Inuits sometime in the early 1800s. That’s what you are looking at in this picture — and I apologize for the quality. It is completely VERBOTEN to photograph the artwork, so I had to whip out a point and shoot camera and grab this shot when Shimon and his camera man had their backs turned. (You can see the camera crew in the background.)

Anyway, my “part” consisted of me and the artwork in a velvet lined room, standing on a giant turntable which slowly revolved as I contemplated the artwork and responded to Shimon’s directives to “apprehend meaning NOW.”

Weird and fun and the big gala unveiling is October 17th.

In the meantime, if you go to the De Young and see a giant carved mastodon tusk in the Native People’s Collection. Hey, that’s MINE!