Moving

I've pretty much given up on Blogger. I hate the lengthy struggle to format my images with my text and then the results aren't what I wanted. I also hate comment/reply feature. (Actually, it's the lack of a reply feature that makes me crazy.)

Hope you'll follow me to my new digs and let me know what you think.
http://rangewriter.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/moving/

Going Back: Part 2

They say you can never go back to the way things were. I say, Thank God for that! Despite the warning, despite my philosophy, I went back. A few years ago, a trusted friend shared how a visit to my mom’s old ranch property—where I’d spent five crucial teenage years—had brought her to tears. Not given to sentimentality, I assumed I would forego a trip to said property. But a bit of spare time between activities during my recent high school reunion left me vulnerable. As if my car had appointed itself therapist-in-charge, I found myself skimming the washboard road to the place where this child became a young woman. 

KOWB Radio Station 1972 (photo courtesy of John in Montana)

Much was changed, thanks to a crop of new “gentleman ranches” that have sprouted from subdivided original properties. The county road was paved all the way to the Pope Springs Road. Sailing smoothly along two extra miles of pavement, I almost missed the turn off. The familiar thatch of cottonwoods leaning toward Colorado alerted me just in time to careen left over the cattle guard. There was even a civilized street sign to remind me that this road did, in fact, have a name all along, we just never used it. Honestly, aside from the three-tower radio station and the grove of trees, there were no familiar landmarks. I bumped my way down the dusty road toward the trees.

The old place circa 1976

Instead of turning into the familiar driveway, which was locked and gated, I continued past the house and barns on a dirt road that had at one time been gated and used only by the neighbor who owned property on three sides of us. Now that gate was open and the road was well-traveled. I crept along and verified that, just as my friend had reported, the house we’d lived in had fled its foundation. Behind the nude foundation, peeked the old homestead house that my mother had always rented out. The seven-foot tall wooden snow fence that marks the northern property line was leaning dangerously with strands of stale hay escaping through gaps like spaghetti slipping through a mouthful of missing teeth. The huge old barn, sided in rusting metal sheets, sagged at the knees.

The Barn, in better days

Just past the snow fence, a barbed wire fence continued to mark the linear boundary. The wires had prostrated to the prevailing winds. I stopped, barely off the gravel road. Faded signs indignantly glared up from the downed wires, warning me not to trespass. BUT…the sky was so beautiful. My trigger finger was itching to press the shutter on my Nikon. The place looked nearly abandoned. I got out of the car, stepped across the wires and walked a few feet onto the forbidden pasture. Snap, Snap. Oh, but the barn would look better from over here…a few more feet, snap snap.

The worst of the barn's ills are hidden in this view.  7/9/2011

 I was meandering back toward my car when a figure came bolting across the corral toward me. Great, I thought, envisioning the headline: “Woman Shot Dead While Trespassing on Her Childhood Barrel Racing Turf.” I could make a run for it and be in the car and down the road… but, no. This trip was about reconciliation not about running away or about confrontation. I approached the corral and the hurtling figure, holding my camera in one hand and extending my other hand in friendship.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude on your property, but I used to live here. This was, just…you know, a bit of nostalgia? A trip down memory lane….?”

The figure, now plainly a woman, halted abruptly and swung her head like an eagle eyeing it’s prey. She glanced up and down the road, stared hard at my car, with NPR blaring from its radio.

“Hugh…I ‘bin up all night with my sick horse. I thought you were one of my damn neighbors. They poisoned my horse! I’ve been nursing the thing all night long. No, you don’t want to touch my hands, I got medicine an’ stuff on ‘em.”

A sturdy woman in her 30’s or 40’s, with a thick mane of dull straw color, and penetrating blue eyes, Remy began downloading all the travails of her life out there on the Wyoming plains. The neighbors—these new upstart city slickers on subdivided plots—she complained, race up and down that dirt road beside her property, kicking up billows of dust that disturb the Swainson’s Hawks nesting in her trees. The dust goes everywhere. She’s asked them to slow down, she’s yelled at them to slow down, she’s had words with them and now they’ve retaliated by poisoning her horses. The words tumbled from her lips in a stream that missed prepositions and linking verbs in their hurry to articulate her frustration. While mosquitoes drained blood from my bare legs and arms, I could barely get a word in edgewise as she downloaded everything she’d done to the place since she bought it nearly 20 years ago.

In order to afford the property, she’d moved the main house to the far south end of the property and sold it along with 35 adjacent acres. She lives in the homestead house. She invited me to drive around to the front where she unlocked the gate and ushered me into her home. Her animosity was absorbed by her need to vent and by a desire to display her accomplishments, and perhaps by the sheer joy of having a friendly audience.

Although the inside of the house was so transformed that I barely recognized it, a feeling of déjà vu grew. This fast talking woman, hailing from someplace “overseas,” is uncannily like the woman whose property she has acquired. She’s independent, determined, and has an indefatigable vision for what she wants. And what she wants is not quite what anyone else might want. With pride, she showed me how she’d stripped the building inside and out, taking it down to its original round logs. Then, she’d finished the inside walls with rough wood siding, re-carpeted, and decorated the place in unabashedly western decor. Her simple but neatly made bed sits in a corner of the living room. A back bedroom houses her photography and art work, all western themed. Outside, she walked me around the grounds, lovingly stroking the trunks of the aspens and cottonwoods that she has fought to revive from the ravages of neglect in the dry, windy climate. She raved about her hawk family and asked if we’d had Swainson’s Hawks when I lived there; hell, I didn’t know what lived in those trees, all I knew is that they provided blessed shade in that pancake of high plateau. The more she jabbered, the more I felt my mother’s presence. At times, she spoke so fast that her words tumbled out incomprehensibly. I could detect some sort of accent, but could not place it. My mother, too, had an unmistakable but indefinable accent. Remy wrung her hands and lamented that if she should ever be forced to leave this place, she worried that some idiot would chainsaw all her beloved trees—an exact echo of my mother.

Before I managed to gracefully extricate myself, she told me that she thought she’d waited on my mother a few times in her store. “What store is that”, I asked?

“I owned The Darkroom in town,” she replied. “Your mom sometimes came in with a camera problem. Yry reminded me of my own mother: that dark hair, those dark eyebrows, and bright red lipstick. She just looked…foreign, like my mom was foreign.”

My Mom in 1983

Chills ran up and down my spine. I smiled all the way back to town and all the way back to Idaho, knowing that somehow my mother’s wild and oddball spirit has managed to hang onto that property she loved so much. She’s still making things happen her way. What a woman.








Note: I never could determine the new owner's name. Remy is the closest I can come to what I thought she was saying.

Going Back: Part 1

Then

They say you can never go back to the way things were. I say, Thank God for that! Despite the warning, despite my philosophy, I went back.

It was around 1992, after my mother’s death and the unseemly distribution of her property, that I gleefully slammed the door on my hometown. “That’s over! I don’t ever have to come back to that stinking hole again!” I was so relieved, felt so free—so euphoric.

But a funny thing happened. Facebook (FB). Yes, I know, social networking is an empty, vacuous waste of time. Facebook is artificial and downright dangerous. Why, don’t you know, “they” are looking over your keyboard strokes, tracking every page you open, compiling data about you—“they” may as well have your social security number and fingerprints! But I’m more curious than I am afraid. If I get hacked, I get hacked. Bad things can happen every single time I walk out the door of my home. Heck, as clumsy and stupid as I can be, I don’t even have to walk out the door for something bad to happen.

Like a stubbed toe...?

On FB I connected with friends from the way-back. I connected with friends I’d completely forgotten I ever had. I had meaningful discussions and conversations—yes, that is possible on FB— with people whom I’d barely exchanged glances with back in high school. And in those conversations I learned some things:
• FB is not nearly as artificial as high school and junior high are.
• Each on of us was wrapped up in our own petty dramas in high school, too nerve- wracked to escape from the prisons we either lived in or fabricated in our own minds.
• In high school, we were all mere babies. Yes, we thought we were grown up and brilliant—of course we were far more sophisticated and erudite than our old-fashioned parents. But looking back, there is not one of us who could claim to have been fully formed the day we walked out of that school for the last time.
• Because we were so young, so untested, so naïve, it is ridiculous to hold grudges against classmates whom we swore were out to undermine us.
• We are all mere mortals, still struggling to do the right thing: to take the high road rather than the easier low road, to think before we speak, to speak the truth rather than the pre-programmed, to accept rather than to condemn, to be thoughtful and kind rather than reactionary and mean.

Okay, maybe not everyone lives up to that last item. I suppose there are a few who fully believe that they have all the answers and that their answers are the only correct answers. But those folks are the minority.

The renewed and invigorated connections I made on FB encouraged me to try the unthinkable. I decided it was time to grow up and take myself to my first high school reunion. At 40 years, the class is beginning to shrink exponentially. I’ve lost some important people lately and those losses have taught me how tenuous our connections are and what a privilege it is to push past the barriers that separate us from each other.

The Wall of the Departed (photo courtesy of Terri Johnston)

Prompted by FB conversations, I’d hauled out my high school yearbooks, desperate to remember the faces, the people whom I’d so diligently exorcised from memory. Just gazing at all those smooth-skinned faces, so serious, but yet so innocent and filled with the richness of experiences yet to come, forced me to contemplate numbers. The following statistics are relevant in 2011, but there is no reason to believe that there were any fewer of them in 1971, and this is only a list of reported cases:
• 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused by the age of 18.
• 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused by the age of 18.
• 70% of teen sexual abuse victims know their abuser. It is generally a family member, or someone close to the family.
• 69% of the incidences of teen sexual abuse occur in a residence.

The previous statistics address sexual abuse only. There are reams of other types of abuse often dovetailing with sexual abuse. Emotional and psychological abuse, neglect, and poverty augment misery. Looking at my class of about 300 students, these figures boggle the mind. In addition to the American condition of teenaged angst, some of us were further undermined by personal tragedies that were out of our control and definitely stashed in the closet.

Understanding these hard facts casts my classmates in a new light. I cannot hold them accountable for the hurts they may have inflicted upon me, for god only knows what hurts were being inflicted upon them.

And that brings up the subject of my own perceptions. How many people knowingly inflicted pain upon me? How many people did I unwittingly inflict pain upon? How long can I hold every boy in my high school accountable for the futile fact that I never had a date? Perhaps if I hadn’t been ultra-defensive, someone might have screwed up the courage to invite me somewhere. And had I been asked on a date, there is no guarantee that I would have been allowed to go, so the whole issue is a mute point. How embarrassing that it has taken me 40 years to grow up enough to accept responsibility for my lack of a social life in high school.

Photo courtesy Linnaea Kimble

I’m happy to report that I returned to this town which I had treated with such disrespect. I found the friends I’d lost, ignored, tossed aside, forgotten. I even got to know some folks I’d never bothered to have a conversation with 40 years ago. We are all just people. As my beloved orchestra teacher once said, “we all put our pants on one leg at a time.” RIP Mrs. Gillespie.

And Now   (Photo courtesy Linnaea Kimble)

 And its true: you can never go back to the way things were. But you can go back and make things better.

Sharing Paper and Ink With the Giants

Orion Magazine

A faint palpitation darts through me as I lift the richly colored cover of Orion magazine and turn its pages reverently. Names on the list of this issue's contributors leap off page four: Sherman Alexie, Gretel Ehrlich, James Howard Kunstler— prominent authors of cultural and environmental philosophy who's work I admire. I scan two pages of letters to the editor, noting what pushes the buttons of readers far more erudite than I. I turn one more page and there it is! My city. My state. My name!

I read the five paragraphs slowly and critically, wondering how they measure up, sharing the same hallowed paper as have the words of giants like Wendell Berry, Jane Goodall, Barry Lopez, W.S. Merwin, Bill McKibben—the list of contributors looks like the table of contents to an anthology of cutting-edge literary giants. Then I read the accompanying three submissions to The Places Where You Live department.

With a sigh of relief, I decide that my little 300 word essay stands solidly on its own. Whew!

Wrapping it up

Pizarro

 After Machu Picchu, the end weighed heavily. The end of a memorable expedition, the end of uniquely coalesced band of companions. The end of sea sickness, altitude sickness, and Montezuma’s revenge. We were exhausted and dreading a 36 hour journey home. We spent several comfortable hours touring Lima by motor coach, visiting the obligatory cathedrals and the tomb of old man Pizarro. But our thoughts had already turned toward home: a familiar bed, more Spartan meals, and less hectic days.

The half of our group who had started as strangers had developed comfortable friendships. We moved from train to bus to airplane with seasoned and weary grace. We looked after one another like a protective tribe.

 What do I take away from my first adventure south of the Equator? Besides increased knowledge and historical context, images of unsurpassed beauty and the tastes, smells, and textures of South America, I am keenly aware of new possibilities. Previously, my travel destinations were limited to northern climes. Not a fan of heat, I wrote off locations near the equator or anywhere that I perceived to be hot. It’s as if I just discovered the benefits of a sun bonnet. I now know that I won’t melt like Hershey’s milk chocolate. And seasons can mitigate the worst of the climactic discomfort. (Although a trusted Indian friend who knows me pretty well admitted that there is probably no place or season in his country that I would tolerate. This is a pity because I love Indian food and the culture and ecosystems fascinate me.)

Several of my travel companions on this trip have traveled to various parts of the African continent and they assured me that they were no more uncomfortable In Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa than they were on this trip. So…I can do it! Yes I can!



Lima, Peru

 Now, the limiting factor is merely financial. Merely. Okay— motivation to push my writing business. I also need to explore more inexpensive travel strategies—service travel, for example. And some day, when I’m no longer tied down by the guilt of abandoning my poor kitty, I will extend the length of my ventures. I miss having the opportunity to just sit and soak up a place, to observe and engage with its people. Someday I will lock the house, shoulder my pack, and use my open-ended ticket to fly away and stay away for as long as my foot itches, to head for whatever destination looks interesting, to leave the schedules and agendas behind. Life is amazing and I’m blessed to be healthy enough to enjoy it in unlimited ways.

If you haven’t had enough, you can find more photos of my trip at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rangewriter/collections/   There you will find the too many photos I took of a children’s parade in downtown Cusco.

From Sea Level to Scraping the Clouds

This was not an adventure for the faint of heart. Added to a schedule that kept us on the move from around 6 AM till well past 10 PM, was the enormous physical challenge of a 12,000 foot change in elevation. While touring the Galapagos we worried about getting sea sick. Then, one night we slept at 11,000 feet.

I was confident about my ability to withstand elevation. My childhood was spent at 7,000 feet and I frequently ski and hike at high elevations. But, the quick change from sea level was disconcerting. A few folks succumbed. I steadfastly avoided alcohol (such sacrifice!) and heavy meals. For once in my life, I heeded warnings to slow down and avoid strenuous activity. I gulped down hot Mate de Coca tea offered by the natives as protection against altitude sickness. I’ll never know if my precautions paid off or if I would have been okay anyway. I did notice that hiking the half-mile hill to our hotel in Cusco required several breathers along the way. At the hotel, I resisted the usual impulse to run up the stairs. Even at my turtle pace, I was huffing by the time I got to our room on the second floor. But I experienced no illness or headaches.

During our brief stay in Cusco we visited an amazing array of Inca landmarks: The Ancient Temple of the Sun; Q'enko shrine; Tambomachay shrine; and Pukapukara, the Inca equivalent of a stage stop; to name a few. We all suffered from exhaustion at the fortress of Sacsayhuaman which sits at nearly 12,000 feet. But by the time we were this far into the trip, we were exhausted in general so it was difficult to assess to what degree the altitude was affecting us.

Our visit to Machu Picchu required another half day of travel by bus and then by train. The train follows the Pongo de Mainique—Main Canyon—section of the Urubamba River, a tributary of the Amazon. Rock walls enclose the river and reach for the cloud forest that clings to the peaks above. I gaped at the churning chocolate of class IV rapids that actually made the renowned white water of the North Fork of the Payette River look tame.

The river was low, the equivalent of our November flow. Angry waters spill under a bridge which transports hikers on the sacred Inca Trail to the ruins—a four day trek that involves scaling an 11,000 foot pass. From the comfort of my train seat by the window, I developed a new respect for a friend who was scheduled to hike this ancient trail with his daughter a few days after my visit.

We arrived in the tiny village of Aguas Calliente in time for dinner and bed. The next morning’s goal was to be up and boarding the first of a chain of buses that snake up an impossibly narrow, dirt road full of hairpin turns to the entrance of Machu Picchu. We were stunned to find a long queue already backing up the narrow street behind the bus stop. Our disappointment was tempered by the realization that there would be no sunrise over Machu Picchu on this morning. Instead, the dark night sky slowly, almost perceptively, lightened to gray, a thin layer of clouds obscuring the sun, the blue sky, and, lucky for me, the heat.

Mystery shrouds these ruins like the clouds that hover around the 20,000 foot peaks surrounding the sacred village. Our guide—Ramiro III—explained his theory that this place, located in the heart of the jungle and situated to align precisely with the sun, the moon, and geographic landmarks, was used as a holy sanctuary and academy for high priests of the Inca civilization. While the capital city of Cusco may be considered the brains of the Inca culture, Machu Picchu was the heart and soul of the civilization, and the Inca Trail was the artery that connected these two essentials.

Built between 1430 and 1530, the stone walls and construction are typical of Inca architectural genius. Without the use of metal tools or wheels, granite monoliths were cut to nest together as tightly as a three-dimensional puzzle. Without the benefit of mortar, the rocks are sealed by virtue of their precise measurements. Broad-based, trapezoidal geometry defies the frequent shuddering of the fault lines beneath the Andes. An integrated system of drainage and plumbing is build right into the granite structure of the city in the sky. It is believed that 90% of the inhabitants of the self-supporting sanctuary served the other 10% of the holy or royal residents. Agriculture, stone masonry, food storage and preservation, and the crafts necessary for living were all accomplished on site. It was a city built to support the sacred.

The Mystery
Why was the sanctuary suddenly abandoned? Why did the Inca civilization, so large, so spread out, and so scientifically advanced, disappear without a trace? Theories abound:
• Resource depletion
• Discontent among the lower echelons of the hierarchy
• Sudden climate change, possibly due to a major geological event
• Disease and epidemics—exacerbated by the presence of Spanish conquistadors
• Introduction of metallurgy in war—until the Spanish arrived, silver and gold were only   used ornamentally

It is likely that all of these possibilities and more converged in such a way as to weaken the nobility’s power over the people, thus providing the heavily armed Spaniards enough of a chink to overpower the decentralized populace.

What is most astounding about Machu Picchu is that while the Spanish conquered the Inca, this sacred sanctuary was reclaimed by the jungle before the conquistadors learned of its existence. The ruins lay buried under the jungle carpet for nearly four centuries before Yale archaeologist/treasure hunter, Hiram Bingham, stumbled upon it quite by accident as he was searching for a different set of Inca ruins. Bingham was led to the base of the mountain by indigenous farmers who used some of the terraces for their own crops.

Standing beside any of the massive temples within the complex of Machu Picchu, one feels small, insignificant, and—if you are like me—not well versed in mystic arts, astrology, astronomy, or religion—you will feel uneducated. Those who existed here so long ago understood the cosmology of our planet far better than I do. The temples are carefully aligned to the sun at solstice points. There is another layer of learning and of understanding that existed here in the days of its glory. It is a place that exudes an aura of penitence and humility. It is a place for reflection and meditation. There are so many wonders and curiosities associated with Machu Picchu and the Incas that it is impossible to do more than skim the surface in a forum of this nature. My only misgiving is that my journey was too brief, too hurried.

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Local Commerce and Haute Couture

We flew back to Quito and then to Lima, where we spent the night before boarding yet another flight. Stepping off the plane in Cusco, we sucked in our first breaths of 11,000 foot air on the way to a bus that would deliver us to the hotel. On the tarmac along with a phalanx of street vendors, a small, middle-aged Peruvian man darted amongst us, furiously snapping photos with what looked like an old manual film camera. I assumed he was an employee of the tour company.

The next day I discovered that the little camera man was just another entrepreneur. While we toured downtown Cusco and ate a fine dinner; slept in comfy beds and devoured a lovely hotel breakfast buffet; our little business man was busy developing film, gluing the images onto pre-printed postcard stock, locating our hotel, and figuring out when we would next be huddled en mass, awaiting another group outing. So there he was, at 10 AM, trying desperately to match the printed gringo faces to the real gringo faces before they disappeared into the bus. All that work for the equivalent of 60 cents per postcard! They are hard-working, these South American street vendors.


Enterprising photographer

 Another enterprising fellow, Julio, tagged me in the town plaza a half mile from our hotel. He flipped through his portfolio of watercolors as he trotted beside me. I kept saying, “No, gracias Senor, no!” But he kept smiling and showing me more. By the time I reached the hotel, I could resist him no longer. I negotiated a ridiculous price and he rolled up two of his masterpieces in a hard cardboard tube so they would pack well. He gratefully accepted my American dollars and entreated me to tell my friends about Julio! Of course, he was waiting for me each time our group assembled at the hotel. Their communication network is uncanny. Another time when I came out of the hotel with some friends he was there again, waiting to follow me once more.

Julio

I pleaded with him. “No, Julio. Muy bonito, pero no comprarlo.” He grinned and stopped pushing his art, but he followed me, nevertheless, and began asking all sorts of questions. He apologized for his poor English, which was far better than my truly awful Spanish. We were quite involved in our bilingual conversation when one of my friends stepped out of a shop just ahead of us and asked Julio if he could change her $20 bill into local money.

“Oh, Si, I can, I can!” he announced as he darted down the street clutching her money.

We stood in a clot and looked at each other.

“Sue, you know, you may never see him again,” I murmured, feeling somewhat responsible.

“Well, if I don’t see him again, I’m sure he needs that $20 more than I do,” she replied.

I could have kissed her right then and there. We were about to give up when I saw Julio’s head bobbing through the crowded street. He was racing back uphill to deliver Sue’s $20 worth of Peruvian soles. She tipped him $5 for his efforts.

The street vendors were ubiquitous and persistent to the point of annoyance. I tried very hard to be kind and polite, but after days and days of heckling, it got harder and harder to deal with them. I began assuming the typical defensive tourist pose: stony-faced, tight-lipped, eyes focused anywhere but on the faces of the poor. The saddest of the bunch were the Chiclet chics: young women with infants strapped to their backs or clutching their serapes who carried a tray of mints and chewing gum. They were experts at presenting the poor-me, poor-baby façade. When rebuffed, their faces and demeanor changed like a dynamic digital billboard. But I never saw an empty-handed beggar. It was strictly quid pro quo.

As I reflect on this incredible network of street vendors I am in awe of their wit and adaptability. Like life forms on the Galapagos, these people have adapted to new circumstances. Those who can learn the basics of several languages will succeed. In addition to linguistic skill, they exhibit lightening quick math and finance skills. Without the use of a calculator, they know the exchange rate and spin out prices in both dollars and in soles; Then comes the bargaining: One for $10; two for $15; four for $34. But is that dollars or soles? They cleverly skip back and forth between currencies with an alacrity that leaves mere mortals in a dizzy spiral. I think most of us gringos thought we were getting a far better “deal” than we were really getting. That said, most of us didn’t mind. We felt a bit guilty about begrudging these impoverished people a few extra soles or dollars.

Another fascinating aspect of the street vendors is the incredible talent that some of them have. Everything from textiles to jewelry, tamales to wood carvings, whistles, key chains, stone and gourd art, there was beauty everywhere. And even without bargaining, the prices were outrageously low, which prompted nagging doubts about the veracity of the “artisans.” There are officially sanctioned markets where artisans contract for a booth. The freelancers roam the streets and sneak under the radar of the authorities. From one of the official sites I bought some carved gourds from a beautiful young woman who was intently carving while she waited for customers. Those are the only items I know to be hand made by an actual artisan. Rumors abound about factories that pump out tourist goods and farm the sales out to peasants to pass off as their own. One can never be sure.

Gourd carver

I can’t speak of the local people without also addressing my most surprising observation. Haute couture dogs! No…not hot dogs, well-dressed dogs. First of all, dogs of all sizes, shapes, and colors roamed the streets at liberty—solo or in packs of three or four. They were all friendly and appeared to be well fed. Some seemed to have a regular circuit: cruise the market, swing past the master’s hole-in-the-wall store for a brief acknowledgment, then back out again to find the buddies, enjoy a siesta in the cathedral’s courtyard, then out for evening rounds. During the night the strays behave like college kids: raucous, roaming, and looking for adventure—found, of course, in sacks of garbage in the alleys. With all these happy hounds dropping doo where ever they happen to be, you might expect to be dodging piles on the streets, but diligent street sweepers armed with brooms and dustpans roam the streets as ubiquitously as the dogs. I never once stepped in a dog mine. Contrasting these happy-go-lucky mutts, were an amazing number of highly groomed and over-dressed dogs. I never got over seeing these pooches stuffed into warm dog serapes or hot pink rain coats.

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