I believe in the bucket

(Addressing the porcelain goddess.  Do you sometimes feel like this guy looks?)

Vomiting is not one of my favorite activities.  I'd rather spend my time doing something more constructive than emptying my stomach via my mouth.  But there are times when your body can not be deterred.  When my brothers and I were ill as kids, we would commonly lie in the living room on the couch and watch tv until the disease passed.  My mother always put a bucket next to the couch in case we had to barf.  This was not exactly the same as "praying to the porcelain princess", but it was effective.  Many a messy cleanup was avoided because of this vomitus catchment that was strategically placed within hurling distance.

The first time I was ill with nausea after I was married, I called to my wife to bring the bucket.  My wife did not grow up with this bucket thing in her home, and so she laughed hysterically at me for thinking I could not make it to the bathroom when the time was ripe.  I pleaded, but to no avail.  Some Emergency Room RNs (which my wife was at that time) have little empathy for those of us with sensitive stomachs.  If it's not a heart attack or an amputated limb, get over it!

Then, in the summer of 1969 when I was stationed with the army in Baltimore, my mother and her good friend Rose came to visit us in our small apartment for a few days.  We decided to drive to D.C. to see the sights and to have lunch.  I can't for the life of me remember what it was we ate, but on the hour drive back to Baltimore my mother and I got violently ill.  Obviously this was food poisoning, although my wife ate what I had and Rose ate what my mother had and neither of them got sick.

The Baltimore-Washington Parkway was a busy highway that day, as usual, and there was no easy place to stop or pull over.  My mother was in the back seat with Rose and I was in the front while my wife drove.  My mother and I both felt as though we were going to heave any minute.  What to do?  What to do?  Then, my mother discovered some old newspapers in the back seat.  In what was a more creative move than making an origami stork, and far more practical, my mother quickly rolled up some newspaper into a very tight cone with no hole at the bottom.  She made two of them, and passed one to me in the front.  For the rest of the trip home, my mother and I held this ridiculous 18-inch long funnel of newspaper in front of our faces with our chins perched on the edge of our respective cones, and braced for what we thought was the inevitable.  My wife, the empathetic nurse, and Rose were laughing so hard that Management almost drove the car off the highway twice, as mother and son buried their faces in yesterday's sports page.

We finally managed to pull up in front of our apartment located in a rather large complex, having held the problem internally for what seemed like hours.  My mother rushed inside to lie down on our bed, and immediately called for the bucket, but I couldn't make it.  I held on to a small tree in the yard and began heaving violently, all the while making a roar loud enough to cause the starlings in the tree above me to drop to the ground as if dead.  Neighbors began looking out of their windows on all sides, assuming that the drunken soldier was now paying the price for a well-lubricated lunch.  I had no energy to explain, and all I could think to do was to put as much distance between me and that little tree as possible.  In hindsight, it was a good thing I stayed outside to "pull the trigger", because we only had one bucket in those days, and that one was now assigned to my mother.

People have different thresholds that need crossing before they "liquidate their assets", but my advice is simple.  Lie down flat on a bed or couch when you are really nauseous, avoid watching the Republican presidential debates, and have lots of buckets on hand.  This strategy should get you through.

Car Rider: the deer who liked to ride in cars

(Would you share a ride with this deer in your Volvo?)

We have had many different kinds of pets over the years. I use the term “pet” very loosely, because many of these critters remained with us for a very short time, and they were not pets in the normal sense of that word. I will write about some of them in the future, if all of you behave yourselves.  During the past 40 years, we have had hawks, owls, foxes, rabbits, kangaroo rats, deer mice, gray squirrels, various salamanders and snakes, a red-eyed vireo, a black bear cub, and a black-tailed deer. And it is the latter animal that is the subject of this brief anecdote.

When I was studying Columbian white-tailed deer in southwestern Washington during grad school, Fred Lindzey, a fellow grad student, called me up and asked me to come over to his study area on the Washington coast. Fred was studying black bears on an island just off the coast adjacent to Willipa National Wildlife Refuge. Apparently, someone had raised a black-tailed deer fawn to yearling age, and it had become too much for them. The deer was hanging around refuge headquarters, so the personnel there thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the animal somehow. Fred immediately thought of me. I was only an hour away, I was studying a closely related species of deer on a deer refuge, we lived on the refuge, and there was plenty of space to turn the deer loose. Plus, he thought I might learn something by watching a black-tailed deer amidst a population of white-tailed deer. Sounded reasonable.

So I drove over to Willipa to pick up this deer in my Dodge truck. Now, this deer thought it was a dog or something, because it tried repeatedly to get through the front door of any house and, most curious of all, it would jump into the front seat of a car or truck if the door was left open. It actually liked to ride in moving vehicles. Thus, it was given the name “Car Rider”. In this instance, we encouraged the deer to jump into the back of the pickup truck and I drove it back to my study area on the deer refuge.

When I arrived back at the refuge, I promptly put a neck collar on the young male, similar to the one I used on my study animals. After a few hours of entertaining ourselves with this weird deer, I decided it was time to introduce Car Rider to his new home. I put him in the back of the truck and drove down the gravel road to the center of the 2,000 acre deer refuge, and released him. I began driving back to my house and after about 100 yards, I looked in the rear view mirror only to see that Car Rider was chasing after the truck and was only a few yards behind me. I couldn’t drive fast enough on this rough road to distance myself from him, so I ended up back at the house with a winded deer. Introduction of black-tailed deer to white-tailed deer population = failure!

The next morning I received a call from the refuge manager who wanted to meet with me in his office, which was about 3 miles on the other side of the refuge. I got in the truck, and drove about 45 miles per hour to his office. The road made a bend about half way there where I needed to bear right to get to his office; another small road took off to the left at the bend, and this was the only other road that intersected the route I took. About 20 minutes into our meeting, we got a phone call from Hobie's grocery store in Skamokawa, the tiny town nearby, that they had a very hot and tired deer standing in their store with a white collar around its neck. Damn! Car Rider had apparently tried to follow my truck, unbeknown to me, but I had been able to drive fast enough to put enough distance between us so that when he got to the bend in the road, he went left instead of right and ended up at the store.

Needless to say, my cohabitation with this deer had already become an untenable situation. At this point I was cursing Fred Lindzey, because I had little time for all this. In the end, I found that research biologists with the Washington Department of Game needed a trainable deer for a food habits study, and that is where Car Rider was sent. What a dear.