Left Coast Cowboys

California has been pounded by rainstorms this week, complete with thunder, lightning and lots of power outages. Add one nervous, neurotic terrier and it’s a recipe for disaster. Or at least a week of no sleep. Lucy would be that terrier. And from the first loud clap of thunder on Tuesday, she became the shivering, hyperventilating poster pet for animal medication.

The problem is that her fears didn’t manifest as fear of thunder, lightning or even loud noises and flashes of light. They translated into fear of anything that sounds like water — including showers and running faucets — and anything that flashes — including a light switch going on or the flicker of the television set. Her immediate response is to dive under the bed and start hyperventilating as she frantically tries to dig a hole in the floor boards. This has been pretty much around the clock behavior, although night time is the worst time. It’s safe to say that nobody has had much sleep around here for a week. Not to mention that there hasn’t been much showering going on. I have two choices for a shower. I can lock her out of the bathroom and endure her howls and cries. Or I can bring her into the bathroom and watch her completely lose it as the water hits the tile. Both options give me about a 90 second window. Needless to say, there is no hair washing.

Lucy's feeling much safer under the covers.

Now you would expect that this would be the moment for the heartwarming solution. Where little Oscar, her terrier brother, snuggles up and calms her, resolving the whole situation. But that would be the wrong movie.

Oscar, for all his pretend ferocity, is usually completely under the paw of Big Sister Lucy. He gobbles down his food because, if she finishes before him, she’ll rush over and grab the remainder in his bowl. He is relegated to one special corner of the bed. If he steps into another area, Lucy chases him right back. It goes without saying, that she owns all the toys. But there is now one terrier who is completely unafraid of storms. And he’s been leisurely eating his dinner and hers, stretching out and claiming all parts of the bed. And he now has all the toys. So much for terrier love.

Oscar is now the boy with the most toys. All the toys, in fact.

Luckily California has about one month of winter and about a week or two of it is usually extreme. That means we are getting to the end of this storm season. I can’t imagine how the balance of power is going to shift once Lucy can emerge from her phobias. It’s probably not going to be pretty.

Note: Any post that references a Doors song seems to require a hippy trippy photo illustration. I’m playing around with FX Photo Studio, an iPhone application that lets me manipulate photos in hundreds of ways. This is my “Flashback to the Sixties” style.

And speaking of The Doors, this parody by Weird Al Yankovic gave me a much needed chuckle through all the madness. Ladies and Germs, I give you “Craigslist”:

Terriers have so many uses. My macro lens is having trouble focussing. So I grabbed two of my favorite short focus subjects for experimentation. Terriers have such long noses that, if they will cooperate, you can focus on the end of their noses and at F-stop 1.8, your focus is blurry by the middle of the nose.

But, unfortunately, photos of the dogs are a sensitive subject. It just points out that, despite both dogs being descended from long lines of dog show champions, only Lucy has the correct conformation. Little Oscar? He’s all over the map. His most noticeable flaw are his ears. He’s actually not supposed to look like very small, yappy German Shepherd.

No his ears are supposed to be perfect little foldy triangles like Lucy's in this glamour shot.

I don’t even want to tell you all the regimens the breeder ordered us to go through to make his ears behave. One of them involved gluing a headband contraption to his head and folding and gluing his ears over it. Since there wasn’t much chance either Oscar or Lucy were going to be show dogs, that plan was abandoned pretty quickly. Good thing, too, it turns out there is a genetic code for sticky-up ears. And we all know how much luck you have fighting genetics.

Oscar says, "I reject Society's narrow definition of beauty."

"Wanna make something of it?" (It's not for nothing he was named after Oscar de la Hoya.)

And that short focus nose trick?

Oscar's still the perfect model for that!

When we first bought this land, we had nothing but a tent cabin to sleep in. Every night we used to hear the coyotes howling. However, we only saw one once. He was large as a German Shepherd, glossy and completely unconcerned as the dogs jumped up and down on the tent cabin bed barking at him. He threw them a disdainful glance and loped past us down the path. We haven’t seen or heard one since. Until, John the Baptist and Louis told me recently that they’d seen two large adult coyotes and two, maybe three, younger ones playing in the brush around the barn. We laughed and dubbed them Wiley, Wilma and the Kids.

Now the large male seems to have staked out the barn and pasture as his territory. I’ve seen him twice in this past week. Which given the nature of coyotes, probably means he’s been lurking around here all the time. Both times he’s been strolling along the dirt road from our back gate up to the vineyards. I’ve had more time to observe him than you usually get with coyote. He’s not the scrawny coyotes that I used to see raiding garbage cans in LA. Or the skittery little coyotes you sometimes see in the southern deserts of California. And, believe me, this is no buffoonish Wile E. Coyote. From his glossy pelt, bushy tail and loose-limbed lope to his arrogant glances, it’s clear, this is Coyote, with a capital C, the Trickster God of Native American legend.

One depiction of Coyote as a Man-Animal-God. Source: Wikipedia.

Coyote features in a lot of Native American myths, sometimes as a man-coyote God and sometimes even as the Creator. The local tribes that would have lived around Sonoma, the Pomo and the Miwok, especially revered Coyote and had numerous legends about him as Creator. In Miwok tradition, Coyote Man comes into the West with his son, Red-Tailed Hawk, and makes the the Pomo people from mud and the Miwok people out of sticks. In other legends, Coyote and Silver Fox sing the world into being. Pomo mythology has Coyote and Lizard creating the tribe on the shores of Upper Lake (just up the Silverado Trail in Lake County) from  sticks. Another local tribe, the Ohlone, have Coyote fathering the tribe after Eagle carries him to Mount Diablo (the tallest mountain in the Bay Area). Probably most of us are familiar with the Coyote myth from the Navaho detective books of Tony Hillerman that mix tribal lore with modern day police work on the Navajo reservation. There Coyote plays his more traditional role as Trickster, who sometimes helps man by fooling monsters that would hurt the tribe and at other times shows up man’s own foolishness with his pranks.

Here's the road to the vineyards that Coyote has claimed as his own, now looking appropriately mythological.

The bottom line: Native Americans knew their coyotes. Coyotes weren’t the biggest predators on the block (especially back in the day when there were wolves, Grizzlies and a lot more Mountain Lions.) But you could easily argue that they were the smartest. One of the blogs in my blogroll is The Daily Coyote, the diary of a woman who has been raising Charlie, an orphaned coyote pup. She reports that Charlie, now a teenager, can open kitchen cabinets, walk as silently as a cat, and figure out any gate she puts in. Add to this native intelligence, the arrogance that our coyote seems to have. Other than our resident Mountain Lion (who only seems to make cameo appearances since he has a huge State Park to roam around in), coyotes would be the biggest predators around here.

And our coyote’s done what even Pitbulls in San Francisco have not been able to do: he’s intimidated Oscar, who like his namesake Oscar de la Hoya, is usually unaware that he is not the biggest dog on the block. This morning, as Coyote loped by, Oscar jumped up on the dining table (because standing on a table makes you look REALLY BIG) and barked furiously. But he certainly wasn’t going to run after Coyote, who never broke stride, even as he gave Oscar a contemptuous glance over his shoulder.

Here's a dramatic recreation of Oscar barking at Coyote through the window from the table.

Lucy, on the other hand, is petrified.

She's spending her indoor time hiding behind the bathtub.

And outdoors, she's still always seeking protective cover.

As for little Oscar, he’s been busy marking all the territory around the barn with his own special brand of Oscar essence. He’s not ready to take Coyote on. In fact, I think there is a bit of hero worship happening. After all, here’s a pointy faced, prick eared canine who is obviously in charge.

So here's Oscar, in a Native American patterned chair, practicing his best Coyote look.

Just got a note from the city informing us that we are being cited for owning an illegal dog. Seems little Oscar de la Hoya the Terrier has not had his license renewed on time.

Poor Oscar. Just another illegal immigrant in San Francisco with a Hispanic name.

This latest news just adds insult to his most recent injury. We’ve Oscar-proofed all the drains in Sonoma to stop him from chasing critters down them and getting stuck.

Oscar contemplates a terrier-proofed drain.

It’s been a scary few weeks for grape growers in Sonoma and Napa Counties, what with two long-lasting, drenching and unseasonable storms hitting us at the end of growing season. The problem with late season rain on vineyards is that, just when you are trying to get the grapes to concentrate their flavors (most of us have turned off irrigation for the last month or so), a sudden downpour causes the grapes to swell with water. The best case result: watery, less concentrated juice. Worst case result: the grapes swell so suddenly they burst, inviting mold and insects. Faithful readers will already know that we did a panic harvest of the Grenache and Mourvedre, finishing just hours before the last huge rainstorm hit us. Luckily the Cinsault was already in primary fermentation. The Cabernet was nowhere near ripe enough to harvest. And even with rain threatening, if the grapes aren’t ripe — well picking is useless. But we’ve been advised that Cabernet grapes are tough as old boots. Barring precipitation of Biblical magnitude — we’re talking frogs, toads and bearded prophets throwing burning bushes — Cabernet can take anything. Never willing to accept such things just on a say-so, I went into the vineyards to assess the damage.

Actually, my first step was to bring out the Big Guns. Not that I actually wanted to stop rain. In semi-arid areas like California, where we’ve been known to have seven year droughts, you never pray for rain to stop. But you might want it redirected somewhere else, such as the Sierras, where the snowpack really determines our water situation. So again, the Big Guns. That means the Kachinas. I put them out, faced them to the rain and made my request. Next day the skies cleared. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Behold the power of the Kachina. This is Eagle Dancer from the Four Corners area of the Southwest.

So out into the vineyards. And yes, there was damage. Not as much as I had expected. And most of it concentrated at the end of the rows.

Here's a bunch with some burst grapes. You can see the wasp already on the job.

Whew! Look at this wasp food fight.

So next step: walk the vineyard, row by row, gathering a berry from almost every vine, and putting them in a ziplock bag.

Grape ripeness can vary so wildly throughout a vineyard, and even throughout a row, that you really need a representative berry from almost every vine to get a real sample.

Then smoosh with the fist.

And mash with the foot.

You need enough juice to do your battery of tests.

So here’s the good news: the pH is at 3.66 which is pretty close to the acceptable level. The Specific Gravity is 1100 which is just about where you want to think about picking the grapes. And the all important BRIX level is 23. Cabernet is typically picked at anywhere between 25 to 29 BRIX. So what our readings tell us is that our Cabernet is just getting ripe enough that, given the current weather report, we should be able to get it dried out and ripened a bit more then picked before the next expected rainstorm. We’re estimating next week around Thursday for the harvest. Given some warmer weather — hopefully at least a few days in the 80s — and we should be able to salvage this.

John the Baptist took a few damaged bunches home to his horticulturist wife. She diagnosed them with a certain kind of mold with a long Latin name. John couldn’t remember what it was. Thanks, John, but it doesn’t matter the name. There is NO mold that is a good thing for wine grapes. The trick is going to be to harvest only the undamaged grapes and let the rest just stay on the vines for the birds and the wasps. Explaining that to the Mexican crews should put a good strain on my first year Spanish.

And in a final positive note, at least from Oscar’s perspective, the rains didn’t wash away the latest baby deer carcass he buried somewhere in the vineyard. In fact, he thinks it improved the flavor.

But just to be safe, Oscar dragged it into the living loft of the barn and hid it under the bed. Nice one, Oscar.