NOT! The hopeless, miserable bastards in our society need a life sentence of their own poison. It takes a certain class of people to destroy something for everyone, but they’re out there, disguised and lurking as your next door neighbor, your boss or coworker, even your relatives…but let’s hope it’s not you. Read on, you’ll get the picture.

The desert out in my section of life is only a few hundred yards away from my front gate. I’ve been here for over four years and taken many a hike out to the mountains that are stark and unfriendly looking but they have their own style; if you’re into green, you’re in the wrong place.

In the images, the 1st is a view from Murphy Street that borders the desert, the second is to give an idea of the dense thicket of mesquites and brush at the foot of the small mountain in front.

My neighbor and friend, Amy, and I have put in more than a few miles trekking out and around, viewing the sinkhole and watching it grow deeper each time there’s a big rain that sets in,  seeing the dumping and crap that humanity tosses out into the wild zone, catching the full brunt of the macabre Christmas in the desert, finding a safe in the desert, along with getting an introduction to the California Dodder, seeing coyotes, hawks, lizards, ravens, quad runners burning up the trails and an occasional truck or car that can make it through the 4X trails that criss-cross certain areas, an old, wood boat long abandoned and breaking down, a burrowing owl coming out of a den, and garbage and more garbage and more garbage.

The garbage is ugly and dumped in certain spots over my four years of hiking out there, I’ve made many treks by myself but since Scout came to live with me about 19 months ago, her and I hit it pretty regularly.  It’s barren, harsh, dry (unless we have a huge rain that lingers), and can be unfriendly if you reach out to touch anything – everything in the desert appears to be designed to puncture or tear your skin and clothing. But I LOVE IT!  I love walking it to discover something new that hasn’t popped up before, like the Dodder, the first two years of hiking it simply wasn’t…now it is.

When we found the safe, I found a phone number, called it, and got Pahrump Valley Disposal.  They knew the guy that owned the safe and he was in California but no longer worked there and they told me then that they occasionally cleaned up that area; it’s BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property.  Well guess what?  They need to hit it again, long and hard.

This is a tale that has entwined with part of loss and sadness for my friend Amy.  She is a ‘cat mom’ – all of her kids have paws.  She had four, one of her cuddly buddies that had been with her for years, Moses, developed a cancer and though she thought it might live comfortably for a bit longer (Vet advice), it died rather suddenly.  She was obviously heartbroken and missing the warmth and affection of the furball that would come and sit on her lap and cuddle next to her. So begins the tale of how life changes everything in a heartbeat.

I went hiking with Scout one afternoon and came across a massive dump of tires that had been strewn throughout the mesquites – I would guess about a 100.  They are not only in the mesquites but around the base of the mountains in clumps – along with old couches, broken bottles, weathered shoes, bags of garbage that have been ripped open by the wild creatures and falling apart due to weather exposure to reveal more stinking, shitty, refuse that mankind chose to throw out.  Yes, we have a dump where everyone can go for FREEEEEE and dump their household slop but it must be too much of an effort for the fuckball idiots that choose to throw it out into nature.

The first picture would lead one to believe that all is as nature intended it to be. The others reveal what it is really like once you get into the mesquites.

I usually hike alone with Scout.  Amy doesn’t find it as intriguing as I do or I’m more in shape for it…but on some days she chooses to go with.  After seeing the new flood of tires and garbage, I chatted her on IM complaining about it. On the following day she decided she would  walk with me. We headed out about 5:30 p.m. and I took her to the tire dumping ground, Scout was off on a run in another direction (good thing), and as we approached the following spot, the sound of our voices sent three little furpaw kids out of the stacks of tires and mesquite filled garbage.  As soon as I saw the first head I went, “OMG! cats!”

They were afraid and timid and could barely put any speed in their gait, I guessed them to be under five weeks old.  I ran a quick “Linda, figure out how to do this,” through my thoughts and told Amy we should get some food and water to lure them out. We were both talking, trying to get a plan on what to do.  She had a crate for her other cats and we could put them in that.

The plan was set but I made one huge mistake.  I should have just left her there and she could’ve sat down and talked to them; they would’ve come to her but I was thinking, “grab some food, get the crate, get a car and come back, blah, blah, blah.”

I got Scout right away and slapped the leash on her so she wouldn’t put an end to their lives, and we headed back – over a mile – to get what we needed.  The problem was that Amy was suffering horribly with it.  She doesn’t hike enough to be able to pick up speed and maintain it and she’d already been hiking which expended quite a bit of her energy and strength; plus she was emotionally distraught that some fucking retards would just take baby kittens out and dump them like garbage to be devoured by coyotes, feral cats, ravens, hawks, and leave them to die.  I had the same emotional issues and anger that she did except I could make the trip much faster without it taking a toll.

So we went, I had bags of Starkist tuna in sunflower oil, grabbed one and two paper bowls – one for water, one for food.  I left Scout at home and raced to her house, she got water and the kennel and we took her rig back out.

We pulled in about 30 feet from where the kittens had first appeared and two of them came out, one was much braver and as soon as I set down the bowl with tuna in it, started devouring; the second one took a little longer before it started feeding.  They were ravenous.  The third one kept crying and crying but it wouldn’t venture out of the mesquites.  I set a bowl down with more tuna about three feet from the mesquites and it came out and continued crying but went past the bowl and then right back to the mesquites.

Amy managed to grab the two that were feeding and get them in the crate with the food bowl and a bowl with water.

We tried in vain to get the third one.  It was getting dark.  It crawled into the base of this mesquite.

We tried everything to flush it out, using a stick to shake up the bush behind it, almost got it when it went up a branch inside the thorn filled branches of the mesquite.  I had a flashlight on it, Amy reached in and barely got a grip on it but it just let go of everything and she was forced to let it go.  We couldn’t save it.  We even went back the next morning in hopes it would still be there alive.  It wasn’t.

At the time all this happened, Amy wasn’t sure what her move would be with the kats, she had three adults and didn’t want to chance any disruption in her own home world but if she opted not to keep them, she would foster until she found them a home.  She took them to the vet and had them checked over, they weighed right around a pound apiece and were guesstimated at being close to five weeks by our vet.

Amy fell in love with them and they are attached by an invisible umbilical cord to each other and her.  She set everything up so they were in their own area for awhile just to make sure there was no problem with the established cats and then gradually moved them into the family setting.  They ate like crazy and are growing like a weed and she allowed me and my buddy Riot to come over and visit so he could see them.  Riot loves animals and he was so shocked we had found kittens in the desert. He wanted to go find some too…Kee-rist!  I hope not. Meet Thelma and Louise.

So…Amy’s cuddler, Moses, had moved on to the great cat land in the sky, she now had two massively energetic eating machines that started to help fill the void.

Recently I went to her place to dig some holes and do some planting for her.  While we were outside, another one of her cats, Kelly, died – apparently in his sleep.  Figure that one out!  She lost two of her furpaw kids and found two more and it all happened in a strange turn of events where the universe aligned the energy flow of life to converge with our existence.

The truly saddest part of the whole thing is that people choose to discard their pets and animals when they don’t want to deal with them any longer and they do it in such horrible ways.  We have an animal shelter where they could have left the kittens and they would’ve possibly been re-homed.   These were not feral cats, they knew human voices and responded, they were not there the day before or Scout would’ve been all over them, they were just dumped out like yesterday’s garbage.  There may have been others dumped with them that were taken by the desert creatures.

Between the garbage dumped in the desert and the disgusting treatment of dumping pets out there, it makes one want to patrol the area with a paintball gun to zap the freaks and their rigs so they could easily be picked up by the police.

There are signs around Pahrump that say  dumping pets is illegal and fines incurred.  Since this is on BLM land, I don’t understand why there are no ‘no dumping’ signs out there.  The public dump is closer off of highway 160 than it is to drive out here and dump so it must be people that live in this area.  Fuck you lazy, piece of shit, earth and wild life destroying bastards…fuck you in the heart.

Happy ending for Thelma and Louise…and Miss Amy.