The Day of the Eagle

Majestic or not, I hate this bird!

I am not an avid fisherman.  My father was.  My mother was.  That great genetic combination wasn’t passed on to me.  I don’t mind fishing, I just don’t live for each and every day when there’s an opportunity to run outdoors with a pole in my hand to do battle with creatures underneath the water’s surface.

That being said, when I do go fishing it’s usually at a small mountain pond or lake where trout can be found.  In particular is a small body of water called Tripod Reservoir that I accidentally found several years ago.  I had often seen the sign pointing this little pond out from Idaho State Highway 55 when we’d be driving up to McCall to spend the day exploring the town nestled on the south shore of Payette Lake.

The first time I actually turned off the main road and figured out where Tripod was hidden was a great day for fishing.  Or maybe it was just a set-up – kind of like in a card game when you let a sucker win a few hands to get his confidence up and then you take him to the cleaners.  So it was that Tripod lured me in.

It was a few days before the Memorial Day weekend, when every Tom, Dick and Fishin’ Harry head up to the reservoir to fish, camp and otherwise over-populate the small pond.  But on the day when I first went there, I was alone.  Blissfully alone.  I enjoy casting with a spinner in these ponds, and that day was no exception.  On my first cast, a trout hit the spinner and my adventure had begun!

After landing the fish and placing it on a stringer, I repeated the process.  On the second cast… another fish.  This went on until in fifteen minutes I had reached the daily limit and it was time to leave.  Wow!  This place was magic!

I had to return to this pond, which I did several times over the years.  The fishing was usually good, but never as good as my first visit there.  It puzzled me for the first month or so after my initial visit as to why I did so well, so fast. I found the answer to this mystery on the Fish and Game website; the pond had been stocked just a couple of days before I arrived… and I arrived just before the Memorial Day crowd did. 

While I never experienced the same alarmingly fast rate of success that I did on my first visit to Tripod, I almost always came home with a couple of trout for dinner anytime I went back.  Until thatfateful day: the day of the eagle.

There is a small wooden float on Tripod near the dam that is fun to stand on and allows you to either cast out into the pond or back toward the shoreline.  After a few minutes of casting the spinner out and retrieving it I got a strike.  And for a stocked pond, this fish was a decent size.  I then realized that I didn’t have my stringer handy, so I walked up onto the shore about 10 feet from the water’s edge and placed the fish down (so it couldn’t flip and flop back into the water) and then went back to the float to dig through my tackle box and find the stringer. 

As soon as I found the stringer, I turned around just in time to witness something brown with white trim swoop down and grab my fish with its talons and then fly off into the distance.  America’s national bird had just stolen my fish, and he pulled off this heist within about 20 feet of me!  All I remember of this incident was that the brown coloration of his feathers was brilliant, and the white on his head was dazzling.  This bird got all cleaned up and pretty for the special occasion of fish filching.

After a few minutes the bald eagle returned and perched in a nearby pine tree to watch and wait, hoping that I’d do the brunt of the work for him and leave the next fish out on the shore for another easy meal.  But I had learned my lesson and this mistake was not repeated!

I ended up talking to someone else at the pond who knew a little more about this bird.  This bird was a professional trout-taker, and had actually been witnessed swooping down and skimming the water along the shore – grabbing a stringer full of trout that hadn’t been securely tied to anything and flying off toward the sunset. 

We concluded that if you wanted to keep the fish you caught, don’t throw them on the shore and turn your back on them; don’t put them on a stringer without securely tying the other end of it to something solid and if you happen to have a Chihuahua or some other kind of tiny dog… LEAVE IT AT HOME!

Now That Christmas is Over...

...Here’s Some Christmas Mailing Tips! 

If there’s one thing you can’t accuse me of, it’s being timely!  If I had thought of writing this back in November, it would have been a great article:  now, a couple of days after Christmas it’s just something to fill space with.  Or is it?  Maybe this is information you could use all year long, not only during the mad-mailing rush of the Holiday season.

As a letter carrier, I get to see all sorts of letters come through that leave me scratching my head.  The blame goes directly on the shoulders of the mailer in most cases.  First on the list at Christmastime are bad addresses. 

“Are you kidding me”, you ask?  No.  Somehow the magic of Christmas also brings out the magic of non-existent street numbers.  The regular carrier usually knows the right address, and sorts the card to the correct house.  This does not mean “problem solved”. 

If, when a badly numbered letter comes through and a substitute is on the route who doesn’t know the family names, it will get sorted as “No Such Number” and returned to the sender.  This, like it or not, is the proper handling of a bad number.  So if your regular letter carrier manages to deliver a card or letter with an obviously bad number, why not drop your friends or family a quick note and just ask them to check their address book and make sure they actually have the right address on file?

I’ve got one family on my route that gets a card every year from the same family member who continuously uses the same bad address!  It’s become a tradition I look forward to… how sick is that?

Hand-in-hand with the bad numbers come the cards with bad numbers and bad names.  Names like “Grandma and Grandpa”, or just a first name – gee, isn’t that adorable?  Now knock it off!  If you can’t get the address right, at least give us the full name to work with, in the hope that we can still get your stinkin’ card delivered!  Honestly, over half of the people on my route can be called “Grandma or Grandpa”.  I need a better clue than that.  Come to think of it, even if you can get the address right… you still need to use the full names. 

Why?  Sometimes “things” happen during the mailing process and part of the name or address gets smudged, streaked or obliterated.  The more information that’s left intact and readable, the better chance there is to get that piece delivered.

Use your return address – always!  If the card isn’t deliverable, we’d like to send it back to you.  In fact, you’d probably like to know that there is a problem.  It could be a woefully bad number, or that the card is undeliverable as addressed (which often means that the people have long-since moved, and their forwarding order has expired).  Sometimes it might come back as “Insufficient Address” which usually means that they live in an apartment complex and a suite number is needed.  This is yet another case where the regular carrier might know which unit they live in, but a substitute won’t… and while returning the letter as “Insufficient Address” might seem unkind to you it is still the correct method of handling it.

Still, none of this will matter if you don’t use a return address.  You’ll keep mailing cards year after year, and they will keep being sent to the Dead Letter Office instead of returning back to you to alert you of a problem. 

My last thought is directed at the kind-hearted people who like to leave an envelope out for their mailman during the Christmas season.  We love your kindness… we really do!  And we’d like to be able to say “thank you” too… if we know who to thank.  “Huh?”  Remember what I said earlier about substitutes?  They don’t always know family names, because the route is not their own.  So the same rules apply here… please put your full return address on the envelope or package!

A lot of times a substitute (usually one of the new kids that feel pressured to go as fast as they can) will see an envelope hanging on, or placed inside, a mailbox and will just grab it and place it in with the rest of the outgoing letters they have picked up, never noticing that it says “To Our Mailman” and that there’s no stamp on it.  The rest is history… it goes with all the other letters to the local processing center (which is often in another city many miles away) where it is then found, with no way to determine where it came from or who it belongs to.

We see these cards every year when a list is made out hoping that a carrier in our region might recognize the names.  “To our Mail Carrier, from Bill and Amy”.  Or, “To George, thanks for the great service!  The Smiths”.  So while a full return address might seems silly, it will certainly help if something goes wrong!

I almost sent a card meant for me out with the mail this year; there was a stack of cards in a mailbox to be picked up, and I fanned through the pile making sure there were stamps on all of the envelopes.  (Something else that happens this time of year… )  The last envelope in the pile didn’t have a stamp… but it said “To Our Letter Carrier”.  That was a close one!

So if you plan to leave something out for your carrier next year, please put your return address somewhere on the package or envelope.  Because as I almost proved this year, not only are the subs capable of putting a personal card into the mail stream – it can happen to the veteran carriers as well!

The Legend of Christmas Kittle

We once had a cat.

Or should I say,

She once had we?

(With apologies to Lennon/McCartney and the song Norwegian Wood)

Our favorite cat, although dead for seven years now (not unlike Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol) lives large in our memories.  Her legend has grown, and to us she has become the greatest cat to have ever graced the Earth.  Little wonder why we’re in no big rush to go find a replacement; what mere cat (not meerkat) could live up to such high expectations?  I’m certain that our next fur-child will be a dog, as we have no baseline to judge one by.

Kittle, whose name started as Brittany but was pretty much renamed by a friend of ours as “the Kittle”, wore many hats.  She would assume different personalities for different roles she would acquire.  We had nicknames for all of these personas, but the only one I will address today is that of “Christmas Kittle”, which is fitting being that this is Christmas Day.

As you can see in the above photo, when the Christmas tree went up in December, Christmas Kittle was reborn and would take her rightful place under the tree.  This became her headquarters until the tree would come down after New Year’s Day.

If we ever wondered where Kittle was when we came home from work, we had to look no further than underneath the tree.  When we’d plug in the tree’s lights in the dark of night, she would take her place under the tree in a spot where the lighting gave her a soft, saint-like appearance.  “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Mice,” she’d appear to say. 

And she was kind to mice.  She would bring them in from the cold, and then drop them in our nice, warm house. Then it would be up to me to chase them around with a shoe and try to bash their little brains in before they scurried under some furniture or cabinetry to take up residence in our home.  Thanks a lot, Kittle.

As I close this short post, I can’t help but wonder how many of you have your own special memories of pets and people from Christmases past? For those of you who do… hold onto them!  It’s amazing how a Holiday such as this can bring back thoughts of friends and family that you’d otherwise store deep within the memory vault.

To leave you with the words that Christmas Kittle would speak to us from under the tree, “Meow”.  I’m not sure exactly what that translated to, but with the look of contentment on her face it must have been something good!  Meow-zy Christmas, everybody!

Animal Bites

Postal workers are exposed to many elements and risks; some of those risks come directly from members of the animal kingdom.  That’s right… letter carriers do receive bites from the house-pets of the world, dogs and cats.  Huh?  Did you say cats?  What kind of idiot gets bitten by a cat?  Well… only the “special” ones… like me.

I’ve been bitten by a dog a couple of times, just minor bites barely breaking the skin.  Little itty-bitty kitty cats have also bitten me… twice.  I probably should have been nailed three times, but the meanest cat I’ve ever encountered was also the dumbest.

Kujo-Kitty wanted blood, and would attempt to sneak up behind me when I was delivering mail and go for the back of my leg.  Mind you this was in the summertime and I was wearing shorts, so there was no buffer between teeth, claws and flesh.  The only saving grace was that just before the cat would actually reach me it would start to growl and hiss, blowing it’s cover and alerting me to turn around and go into my own hissing and growling routine.  If that didn’t scare the little demon away a magazine pitched in its general direction would.

One time the owner came out and was a little upset with me for being mean to her kitty.  “He’s not mean; he’s just got a weird sense of humor” she said.

“Yeah.  Bleeding flesh wounds are hilarious” I replied, as I stomped out of the yard.

About this time another carrier was trying out one of the ultra-high frequency sonic devices used to deter attacking dogs, rather than use of the traditional pepper spray.  I borrowed this device a few times just to see if it would work on cats, and what do you know?  It did!  Kujo-Kitty hated it, which delighted me to no end.

When the cat from hell tried sneaking up on me that day, I gave him a blast from the device that sent him running for the front porch.  The porch on this older home was painted, so traction was a precious commodity that the cat didn’t have.  All fours were slipping as he was trying to run, and he was slipping and sliding into the porch furniture as he was trying to escape the horrible sound (that we humans can’t hear)!  The cat looked like a furry pinball the way he kept bouncing off one thing and into another.  A couple more “treatments” from the cat-blaster and Kujo-Kitty would see me coming down the block and go hide until I was gone.

Of the two cat bites that I did receive, one was from a cat that was normally friendly but occasionally would turn around and grab you with his paws and take a chomp.  I was trying to leave a parcel by the front door close to his napping spot, and he apparently wasn’t pleased.  This cat became nastier as he aged, and attacked a neighbor – causing an infection that required medical intervention and some hefty bills to pay.  After the incidents involving the neighbor and myself, the woman who lived there countered by placing a sign by the mailbox she was required to move out to the curb: “Beware of Attack Cat”.  That cat disappeared one day; the owner was distraught.  The neighbor and I didn’t know what happened to the cat… but we giggled with glee that it was gone!

The saddest cat bite I received was an accident… really.  The little cat who got me was very loving and friendly, but it had one “bad habit” – if you didn’t notice she was there, she’d come up and nibble gently on your calf to get your attention.  It was kind of a “Hey, I’m down here!  You need to pet me!”

One day I didn’t see the kitty and left the mail in the mailbox mounted next to the door and started down the sidewalk, heading to the next house.  The little cat came from wherever she had been hiding, apparently worried that she wouldn’t get her usual dose of attention that day.  She caught up with me as I was briskly walking toward the next doorstep and tried to nibble on my leg.  This was a tactical error on her part.

I was about ready to move my leg forward for the next stride as she set her jaw into the spot just above my ankle to let me know I was ignoring her.  As I moved my leg forward one of her fangs got caught in my sock and, much like setting a fishhook, I drove her teeth into my leg as I took the step.  I yelped with surprise upon the initial feel of teeth penetrating skin.  This in turn scared the cat, which jerked a couple of times trying to free her fang from my sock so she could run and hide.

As I previously said, this bite was an accident and there was no way I could be mad at the cat.  It was a little hard at first convincing her of that, although she finally came back and we made up.

So you see, any idiot can receive a dog bite.  It takes a special idiot to get bitten by a cat.  Twice.

Our Very First Tandem Rally

This photo was not taken at the Northwest Tandem
Rally in 1992, but at the NWTR in Bend, Oregon
in 2005.  I could open my eyes at this rally!

Tandem bicyclists often feel like it’s them against the world; all too often there’s only onetandem on the road, and brother – you’re it!  Sometimes you’d just like to go on a group bike ride with other like-minded tandem riding folk, ones who appreciate the “proper” seat-to-wheel ratio (1:1).  But where, oh where, could such a utopia be found?  Why, at a tandem rally of course!

A tandem rally is a social gathering usually held over an extended weekend, where tandem cyclists from a region gather to socialize and enjoy organized rides.  As we live in Idaho, the Northwest Tandem Rally is the event that’s closest to us (although there are many other rallies held throughout the United States, and in other parts of the world as well).

We first attended a tandem rally that was held in Albany, Oregon in 1992 over the Memorial Day weekend.  We were fairly new to tandem riding, having only been riding for about a year, and this was quite the adventure for us.  We drove a Honda Civic hatchback at that time, and with the tandem rack mounted on the roof the bike looked almost as long as the car.  With much anticipation we loaded the bike, packed our bags and hit the road to find whatever adventure waited for us in Oregon.

Albany was beautiful, so I’ve been told.  Situated in the Willamette Valley, it apparently has also been referred to as the “Hay Fever Capital of the World”.  For me, at least, this was an understatement. 

I honestly don’t remember much about the trip.  We arrived without incident, and rode the first day.  There was a little sneezing and a runny nose… nothing serious.  Day two (of three) arrived and I was much worse.  My wife was feeling great as the grasses that were blooming in the Willamette Valley didn’t affect her whatsoever.  I was a different story, and could barely keep my eyes open as they were itching terribly and watering profusely. 

We came to a rest stop and I wanted to quit riding.  She wanted to continue.  At some point I finally won out, due to my irritability and my inability to keep my eyes open.  If you can’t see where you’re pedaling, you won’t stay upright on the bike for very long.

At some point I had tried some Benadryl^®and passed out after taking it.  Turning into a genuine whiner at some point I convinced my wife that we should just leave and get me as far away from this place as possible.  She would have to drive, as I was still unable to keep my eyes open. These were allergies like I had never imagined!  As we drove away from Albany, I once again dozed off from a dose of Benadryl^®. 

It was perhaps an hour or two later, as we were a good distance away from Albany and heading inland that I woke up.  I could see, my eyes didn’t itch, and my nose wasn’t running.  Getting away from the Willamette Valley was apparently my “miracle cure”.  I’m sure that one of us must have come up with the remark, “if we turn around and go back now, we can still get in on the third day’s ride tomorrow!”  But we’d already left in shame once; going back would only lead to another allergic retreat.

In the summer of 2015 we attended the Northwest Tandem Rally in Bellingham, Washington.  I lasted all three days without nary a sniffle.  We were planning on staying a few extra days as the area was gorgeous and absolutely wonderful for bike riding, but as luck would have it some forest fires started up in the northwest and smoke started filling up the skies around Bellingham.  We drove to northern Idaho and finished up our vacation riding on the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes instead.

The next Northwest Tandem Rally is being held in Klamath Falls, Oregon… which is further inland and much further south than Albany.  The rally is also being held over the Fourth of July weekend, so if there were any blooming grasses there they’d hopefully be over that phase.  There’s only one thing that’s keeping me from trying to ride in Oregon again – with any luck, we’ll be living in (or moving to) Florida by then!