Why we carry 200 granola bars in the car.....
I snapped the photo of this handsome lizard when he was sunning himself out on the patio the other day. I think we had a moment, I looked in to his eyes, he in to mine and suddenly I remembered something....
Once upon a time, a few years back, my husband and I drove through the desert. And no it wasn't on a horse with no name, and anyways you don't drive a horse you steer it...ride it???
What ever.
We rolled along through seemingly endless desert. Great seas of sandy rock and scrub brush. ACTUAL tumbleweeds were seen. Blackened stone that looked like it was more than done, baked under the heat of the sun.
Why is the desert hotter than other places anyways? Is it because there are no trees? If you added up all those little scrabbly brush things shouldn't those equal a few trees? Maybe the desert is being punished, or maybe we are. Maybe there's something really ultra cool in the desert if we just had the stamina to withstand the insane heat during the day and freezing temps at night. (Damn.....I wish I had me some desert stamina right about now so I could get me hands on what ever it's hiding out there........)
Anyways driving through the desert does weird things to one's mind. You start wondering how you'd survive if the car suddenly broke down, the bottles of water in the back seat suddenly evaporated and the cell phone ran away with to make sweet cell phone love with a signal it picked up in a sleazy cell phone bar......
See, desert makes a person think strange things!!!!!!!
How would we survive?
Food and water and shelter are the obvious things to be concerned with. Being found quickly is all well and good but if you're all dried up like those tumbleweeds I mentioned, drifting across the road, a dehydrated version of yourself...that's not gonna be good.
Shelter seems the easiest. I swear I could build a decent shelter better than most. Having the woods as your playground when you're a kid means a) you can curse a lot and not get in trouble cause no one's gonna hear and b) you build a lot of *cabins*.
Maybe some kids were swimming in pools, riding horses and coloring in useless coloring books (probably even staying inside the lines), but my brothers and I built cabins. Sure they were made from fallen branches and twigs but show me an adult who knows his way around a twig cabin the way we did and I'll show you the copyright paperwork on twig cabins...oh ha ha, o.k. we didn't invent making cabins out of twigs. Every one we knew did the same thing. Kids in the boonies make cabins, kids in town make gangs.
Sure I might be bragging it up now how I could survive in the desert in my lovely 3 bedroom tumbleweed cabin I could probably construct in half an hour but I'd probably be disastrous at starting a gang. Like first off I'd ask my mom to join and I'm pretty damn sure that's a gang *no no*.
Alan said we'd have to worry about food and water as well.
And that I could decorate the hell out of my multi level 3 car garage tumbleweed home all I want but if we didn't have food and water.....well........I'm basically making a kick ass tumbleweed mausoleum right? (By the way did you notice how my tumbleweed 3 bedroom cabin turned in to a multi level, 3 car garage tumbleweed home by the next paragraph? That's how expert at twig cabins I am. By the time I get through my ramblings here I'll have built a twig city and named it Ralphie the Third.)
We considered all the possible nutrition available to us in the desert. How much protein is in a rock anyways? Is it measured in ounces or grains?
Now I don't hunt, unless it's mushrooms and then it's not really hunting it's just sneaking up on unsuspecting shrooms in the woods and popping them off their little stems. I guess that makes me a mushroom mass murderer. Does it help if I say they were chanterelles, it's been at least 8 years since I went on a spree and they were soooooooo tasty? It does? Good.
Anyways I don't hunt and neither does Alan but we both agreed that if we HAD to we could do it. We could catch some wild game and make a meal, and start a fire by rubbing sticks together (I'm sure we could do this, we've watched so many episodes of survivor I could probably rub sticks together in my sleep and create a cozy fire. I've also watched politicians so I can be both president of the united states as well as Prime Minister of Canada and once I saw this dude on a motorcycle jump over a canyon so I can probably do that too. I have a PHD in watching TV.)
After miles of desert scenery whizzing by in a dully coloured blur as we both pondered what sort of wildlife lay in wait for us should we need to partake of them Alan announces "A HA!"
"NOT SNAKES!" I say.
"Oh.....oh...o.k." He says.
Silence.
Alan announces again "A HA!"
"what? You found something?"
"Lizards!"
I was impressed, I hadn't thought of them, surely the desert was ripe for picking, bursting at the seams full of ripe juicy lizards. Hey I don't wanna eat a lizard but if you're stuck in the middle of Godforsaken no where in your sprawling 2.3 acre twig mansion with built in twig movie theater and twig bowling alley you'll eat what you can get.
Alan has other plans.
"We wouldn't actually eat the lizard."
"Ummm......so we....name it and raise it as our desert dwelling child?"
"No." he says.
"Oh." I say. "Well what do we do with it then?"
You know those silences that descend like a heavy cloud of expectation? The kind that are so thick you can practically see the silence, the shape and colour. If you were to open your mouth (which you wouldn't cause you're in the desert and you can't be evaporating moisture for no reason) you could even taste the silence? Well one of those silences happened then and I hushed in anticipation.
"We'd suck on it."
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
But I listened as he was obviously serious and we still had some zillion and a half miles left to go before we passed through the desert back into the populated land of sanity and could get a Starbucks with a side of reality.
So I said "ewwwwwww, but please, elaborate."
"Well if we caught a lizard and popped it in our mouth we could leave the head poking out so it could breathe etc and we could just sort of suck on it. I'm sure we would gain nutrition or at least a little flavor from the skin which would slowly start dissolving a tiny bit from our digestive enzymes in our saliva and instead of consuming our most likely hard to get food supply all at once, it could last for days before we'd need to get a new one. DAYS! Kids suck their thumbs all the time and you never see them with dead thumbs. Think of it, we could survive and so could the lizards!"
"BRILLIANT!"
That's my sweetie, always thinking to the next level. Lizard lolly pops for us as we kick back in our new hometown "Ralphie the Third" waiting for help to arrive as I weave us an espresso machine out of twigs.
What ever.
We rolled along through seemingly endless desert. Great seas of sandy rock and scrub brush. ACTUAL tumbleweeds were seen. Blackened stone that looked like it was more than done, baked under the heat of the sun.
Why is the desert hotter than other places anyways? Is it because there are no trees? If you added up all those little scrabbly brush things shouldn't those equal a few trees? Maybe the desert is being punished, or maybe we are. Maybe there's something really ultra cool in the desert if we just had the stamina to withstand the insane heat during the day and freezing temps at night. (Damn.....I wish I had me some desert stamina right about now so I could get me hands on what ever it's hiding out there........)
Anyways driving through the desert does weird things to one's mind. You start wondering how you'd survive if the car suddenly broke down, the bottles of water in the back seat suddenly evaporated and the cell phone ran away with to make sweet cell phone love with a signal it picked up in a sleazy cell phone bar......
See, desert makes a person think strange things!!!!!!!
How would we survive?
Food and water and shelter are the obvious things to be concerned with. Being found quickly is all well and good but if you're all dried up like those tumbleweeds I mentioned, drifting across the road, a dehydrated version of yourself...that's not gonna be good.
Shelter seems the easiest. I swear I could build a decent shelter better than most. Having the woods as your playground when you're a kid means a) you can curse a lot and not get in trouble cause no one's gonna hear and b) you build a lot of *cabins*.
Maybe some kids were swimming in pools, riding horses and coloring in useless coloring books (probably even staying inside the lines), but my brothers and I built cabins. Sure they were made from fallen branches and twigs but show me an adult who knows his way around a twig cabin the way we did and I'll show you the copyright paperwork on twig cabins...oh ha ha, o.k. we didn't invent making cabins out of twigs. Every one we knew did the same thing. Kids in the boonies make cabins, kids in town make gangs.
Sure I might be bragging it up now how I could survive in the desert in my lovely 3 bedroom tumbleweed cabin I could probably construct in half an hour but I'd probably be disastrous at starting a gang. Like first off I'd ask my mom to join and I'm pretty damn sure that's a gang *no no*.
Alan said we'd have to worry about food and water as well.
And that I could decorate the hell out of my multi level 3 car garage tumbleweed home all I want but if we didn't have food and water.....well........I'm basically making a kick ass tumbleweed mausoleum right? (By the way did you notice how my tumbleweed 3 bedroom cabin turned in to a multi level, 3 car garage tumbleweed home by the next paragraph? That's how expert at twig cabins I am. By the time I get through my ramblings here I'll have built a twig city and named it Ralphie the Third.)
We considered all the possible nutrition available to us in the desert. How much protein is in a rock anyways? Is it measured in ounces or grains?
Now I don't hunt, unless it's mushrooms and then it's not really hunting it's just sneaking up on unsuspecting shrooms in the woods and popping them off their little stems. I guess that makes me a mushroom mass murderer. Does it help if I say they were chanterelles, it's been at least 8 years since I went on a spree and they were soooooooo tasty? It does? Good.
Anyways I don't hunt and neither does Alan but we both agreed that if we HAD to we could do it. We could catch some wild game and make a meal, and start a fire by rubbing sticks together (I'm sure we could do this, we've watched so many episodes of survivor I could probably rub sticks together in my sleep and create a cozy fire. I've also watched politicians so I can be both president of the united states as well as Prime Minister of Canada and once I saw this dude on a motorcycle jump over a canyon so I can probably do that too. I have a PHD in watching TV.)
After miles of desert scenery whizzing by in a dully coloured blur as we both pondered what sort of wildlife lay in wait for us should we need to partake of them Alan announces "A HA!"
"NOT SNAKES!" I say.
"Oh.....oh...o.k." He says.
Silence.
Alan announces again "A HA!"
"what? You found something?"
"Lizards!"
I was impressed, I hadn't thought of them, surely the desert was ripe for picking, bursting at the seams full of ripe juicy lizards. Hey I don't wanna eat a lizard but if you're stuck in the middle of Godforsaken no where in your sprawling 2.3 acre twig mansion with built in twig movie theater and twig bowling alley you'll eat what you can get.
Alan has other plans.
"We wouldn't actually eat the lizard."
"Ummm......so we....name it and raise it as our desert dwelling child?"
"No." he says.
"Oh." I say. "Well what do we do with it then?"
You know those silences that descend like a heavy cloud of expectation? The kind that are so thick you can practically see the silence, the shape and colour. If you were to open your mouth (which you wouldn't cause you're in the desert and you can't be evaporating moisture for no reason) you could even taste the silence? Well one of those silences happened then and I hushed in anticipation.
"We'd suck on it."
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
But I listened as he was obviously serious and we still had some zillion and a half miles left to go before we passed through the desert back into the populated land of sanity and could get a Starbucks with a side of reality.
So I said "ewwwwwww, but please, elaborate."
"Well if we caught a lizard and popped it in our mouth we could leave the head poking out so it could breathe etc and we could just sort of suck on it. I'm sure we would gain nutrition or at least a little flavor from the skin which would slowly start dissolving a tiny bit from our digestive enzymes in our saliva and instead of consuming our most likely hard to get food supply all at once, it could last for days before we'd need to get a new one. DAYS! Kids suck their thumbs all the time and you never see them with dead thumbs. Think of it, we could survive and so could the lizards!"
- Please note we don't suck on lizards. we don't even eat them. We don't get lost in the desert and we dont build mansions out of twigs....though I could build one so fast your head would spin. Also this is an idea from a former vegan so you know how unlikely lizard sucking really is even if we were stuck in the desert. By the way lizard sucking is copyrighted by me....yeah......uh huh, I keep them papers right next to my imaginary twig cabin copyright papers.
"BRILLIANT!"
That's my sweetie, always thinking to the next level. Lizard lolly pops for us as we kick back in our new hometown "Ralphie the Third" waiting for help to arrive as I weave us an espresso machine out of twigs.
(please note that I note that some people might find the fact that I had a mini breakdown....er..rant about gross bacon ice cream sort of conflicting with my whole sucking on a lizard plan should we get stuck in the desert. Some might say, gross is gross right? Well all I have to say is I wouldn't put the lizard in ice cream, cause that would be wrong. It makes sense in my head....Also the circumstances are different, if I was in the desert with nothing to eat I might eat bacon ice cream if it was the only thing available, it might even be preferred over lizard.....depending on the lizard.)
8 Comments:
hi, Tace! Thank you for your comments on my blog! I like your blogs! Especially the photos of the flowers and gooseberries! How big was this lizard? He/she looks pretty tough! We used to live in Sarasota, Florida and there was an adorable lizard that lived in a hole in the wall. I had to strike a deal with the bug guy so that he'd never spray near that part of the house. Well, best wishes!
Chris Browne
Chris, Thanks for your visit/comment. This lizard was about 5 inches long. There are a few kicking around that might be about 9 inches long. That sounds big but they're all tail and skinny legs with wee little pot bellies. This year we seem to have a plethora of lizards...There is no shortage of fellows out there for me to snap photos of.
What's a group of lizards called? A scurry? A skitter, I like skitter. We have a skitter of lizards around.
Great post! If you ever manage to weave an espresso machine out of twigs, I'll be your first customer.
Kieran, thanks for the visit, you can be my 4th customer when I finish the art of weaving an espresso machine out of twigs, first is gonna me, second is gonna be for me so I have a back up and the third I will donate to charity but the fourth will have your name on it....hahahahaha
I am going to leave a comment, but wait...I am stuck on the vision of what goes on inside that imagination of yours. I love reading your blog!
When I was a young girl in CA, my dad would take my brothers and me "hunting" in the desert. All we ever aimed at and killed were beer cans. Not too much nutrition in those, though.
Ginny, Oh nooo not my imagination my sweetie's! Sure I might embellish a little with my woven twig shanty ideas but he's the one who came up with the original thought of lizard sucking....IF we were stuck in the desert that is...IF.....hunting beer cans sounds interesting, do they run very fast?
If you put those beers cans in this desert wind on a windy day they will run like the devil is chasing them and that is pretty fast. Gets hard to catch one.
And tons of twig house here in the desert. Don't tell anyone but that is where I saw the bunny coming from, don't know if it was the easter bunny or not. We were in a hurry so I will slow down next time and check.
hugs toujours moi
Anonymous, this beer cans in the desert thing just sounds better and better all the time, do the cans have to be empty? Hmmm..........I'm not sure chasing empty beer cans through the desert on a belly full of beer sounds so hot though...
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