ME AND THE MINGS

I knew this day would come. I just thought I might get another summer out of it. The burgeoning beauty of my select lettuce varieties must simply have been too much for the drooling deer, who've had to live on conventionally blah weeds and good grief tree bark, and finally had it up to the antlers gazing through my not-antimonkey net fence at my neat rows of appetizing salad lettuces, top-of-the-line cucumbers, spare-no-expense zucchinis and deliciously crunchy beanpods, the apex of feral menu items. 

Seems the animals  living on the edge of civilization these many decades, deeper and deeper in the thralls of indulgence, have been getting fussier with each generation, becoming ever more accustomed to the finer points of civilized life, such as rap music and fast food. We must have had a similar experience back when we were Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons moved in next door. 

If this keeps up, pretty soon the animals will have urbs and burbs of their own, commuting to offices in their own beastly bureaucracies, the Deer Department, the Monkey Agency, the Inoshishi IRS...  For starters, though, last night one or two or three or more deer, maybe seven thousand, found a weak spot in my garden fence, widened it and partied on my lettuce, tangoed on my chard, buzzcut my chives, noshed my nasturtiums, beheaded my cukes, zapped my zukes... 

I know there's no point in putting up wanted posters on trees around the forest or even in the post office, with a deer mug shot and my phone number, so I just fixed the fence pro tem - not that it matters, there's always a weak spot in a fence, fences are all just a bunch of holes anyway. I just never had an actual fence before I moved here and took up the folly that is gardening on the edge-- this working hard to feed the wild and thankless animals.

For them, the feast was just laid out there on the carefully prepared banquet table; looked like they partied pretty much through the night; they have really quiet raves, not even a crunch... It must have gone on with subtle munching excitement until well near dawn, but I wasn't even awakened by wild belches. Not until I went out in the morning to get some lettuce did I realize I had to pick up the tab...

Right now I'm pondering new fence plans. I know how the Ming dynasty felt; it didn't work for them, but those were different times. That may sound something like Alfred’s definition of insanity, but I'm not a dynasty. My ambitions are much humbler. Like lettuce.     

THE BARON DOES A HOUDINI

Yesterday morning after getting some beans etc. from the garden, since I'd be coming back again later to plant some things I closed the upper portion of the gate - which is all netting anyway (like the entire fence) so it keeps ground creatures out merely by the troublesome look of it - I then went inside and was up in the loft wrestling with some powerful editing concepts when Echo, downstairs in the kitchen, shouted "The Baron is in your garden." Not THE garden, but YOUR garden. Impossible, I thought. The noble beast couldn't spot, let alone get through, that tiny hole among all those holes.

Nevertheless I went downstairs, just to humor Echo's endearing (note explicit avoidance of nearly irresistible pun) hallucination, and there I saw out the big kitchen window not the expected absence, but the undeniable presence, of a large and fully antlered male deer in MY garden. Fortunately, the beast had just gotten in (how?) and was sampling only some weeds near the entrance - rich lush weeds, compared to his well-used dining area outside the fence.

The last time I'd forgotten the gate at the end of a gardening day, the Baron had come in the night to partake of his royal pantry and had dined on some weeds and spinach, with strawberry leaves for dessert, then left quietly by the same fully open way. This time, though, there had been but a tiny way in; would he find it instantly when panicked in broad daylight? I couldn't just walk out there and open the gate for him; if he freaked, I'd have a powerful horned creature tangled up tightly, perhaps together with myself, in one or more of the walls of my ruined garden fence and would have to call some wildlife authorities to get him/us out of there.

On the other hand, I wasn’t about to let a savage ruminant wander my garden at will, so I opened the door to the deck and stepped slowly outside, about 20 meters from him. He saw me at once, and dashed straight away to freedo... No. Not that way. He saw me, still there, folding my arms - though I doubt that deer sense umbrage - and dashed over that way to free... No again. He ran this way then that then this again, through my peppers, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, spinach, new radishes, baby cucumbers, goya, sunflowers... much wincing was exercised. But he could not find the way out.

Back and forth he ran, more and more casually, looking for his exit while I just stood there, quietly reminding him by my inaction that he should get out, but could take his time. He seemed to be trying to gather whatever passes for deer thoughts, then finally went back to that corner and paused, head lowered...there was a memory there... pushed forward and an entire huge antlered body slipped out through a tiny hole in the bottom of the fence. He was a cervid Houdini. Taking no bows, he whitetailed it upmountain.

When I went out to view all the damage he must have done, and to CLOSE THE #%&$#* GATE, I found that despite all that running around he hadn't done any damage! The only changes were one slightly tilted potato plant and one deep hoofprint in the pepper bed. Oh, and some weeds near the gate were a lot shorter, but I'd been meaning to do that myself on a larger scale as soon as the rain stopped.

Thanks for the head start, Baron.

SURFING THE LEARNING CURVE

I haven't yet completed my anti-monkey garden Cube Noir, which I will do in a month or so when I attached the nets monkeys hate (or so it says on the label) to the tall fence posts my friend Ian and I put up last fall. At that time I'd already had my rows of winter vegs covered in hoops and nets, so I just left them that way.

After a while, with the growth under the nets not bothered by deer or monkeys I began to think that maybe after all I might possibly be able leave the garden that way (except maybe for tomatoes), rather than carry out Cube Noirization. Then a few days ago I was at home when a horde of monkeys were wandering by on their way to their upmountain fastnesses, most of them youngsters gamboling free range in the natural setting, picking up random thieving skills from their unscrupled parents.

One large male professor of brigandage invaded my garden while the simian university students watched from afar on their big campus. I watched from the kitchen window to see what the alpha guy would do about the nets-- if he would know that they were nets, what was under them and how to get at it. This was the crucial moment: if he noted no onions - monkeys most beloved food in my garden, as chronicled at length herein on several occasions (one of the nets covered three rows of onions) - then I might not have to go all Cube Noir on their simian butts.

The Prof swaggered into my garden like a simian John Wayne into a Dodge City bar, took up a key position and scanned the scene, locked on to the nets, pondered them, hand to chin like the Thinker with fur and a red face, then walked to one and grabbed at it, hefted it, fingered it, ran it through his simian databank, looked though it, tried to lift it (pinned down with logs and rocks), found the edge, found where he could create just enough of a gap to get his hand through and bring me charging out from the kitchen door shouting with a rock in my hand inspiring him to reflexively dash to safety with a handful of something maybe some cabbage but not onions, as I pointed out loudly to his fleeing back that this was my garden, I'm in charge here and he shouldn't forget it, he and his students know what will happen if I ever etc., but the students in their big amphitheater just yawned like this was Economics 101 after lunch, some lessons just get no traction.

So it looks like the Cube Noir for me, but I already suspect it won't work. It sure as hell wouldn't keep me out if I was hungry, homeless, characteristically unemployed and covered in fur. Also, I had seen the beast thinking. But if there's one thing we self-named sapients know for sure, it's that even if we don't know beans at the moment, in one way or another we can figure things out. All we have to do is get out there, get the right perspective and scan the scene, find the edges and give it a try, yes, even Cube Noir the place-- so what if we get a handful of nothing; taking action is the whole point.

Great discoveries lie ahead; the simian life is just one big learning curve.

INTEGRITIES

Call me Ahab.

Well, the day finally came when with the help of a friend I erected the structural framework of the anti-monkey infrastructure project I have at last initiated in my garden. As I expected, it is an ongoing - not to say obsessive - discover-as-I go process, an ad hoc learning curve that ominously approximates the trajectory of a boomerang.

But as the short snake said, you've got to start somewhere. So I took as my parameters the dimensions of my garden and the dimensions of the patented anti-monkey netting that I planned to use since it was the only product that expressly depicted disappointed monkeys on the label. I know better than to trust mere advertising as a general thing, but when it comes to outwitting monkeys, advertising may be all we have.

Whatever. I ordered the framework piping a few weeks ago, bought the clamps and netting myself, pondered the vertiginous undertaking for a week or so and then my friend Ian came out on Saturday afternoon and we set to work achieving what in the case of Stonehenge, for example, took a millennium or so, and was a bit larger, but then they had to use stone didn't they, as with the pyramids-- and after everything has tracked out, my fence may take a millennium as well, who can say-- Not me, I won't be here, I don't really care beyond a few decades, maybe a generation or two-- after that, it's all in their hands, if the monkeys haven't taken over completely by then in accordance with their long evolutionary plan. Look what they've already done to the world financial system.

Anyway there I was, thanks to the history of monkeys, at the end of a fine afternoon teetering atop a tall ladder, one hand clutching a tall and similarly teetering metal pole, the other hand grasping at the end of a long horizontal metal pole that I intended to attach to the teetering pole with the flexible two-part clamp I held in my third hand while tightening the nuts thereon using the pliers in my fourth hand. It was a clearcut procedure-- not really designed for humans, monkeys would be good at it, but I'm nothing if not idiotic enough to try anything several meters in the air in a darkling wind.

We had earlier (I know I'm going backward in time while going forward in the story but if you think I'm going to rearrange all this you can go tweak my anti-monkey infrastructure; I'm going to take a nap) driven a wooden post into the ground with a major mallet at several points (8 in all) around the garden perimeter; into these holes we inserted the poles to an ultimate depth of 80cm, leaving 3.2 meters of pole above ground, slightly less than double my height. Each of these was but a single example of the aforementioned poles teetering in company with yours truly. When the last clamp was clamped, the whole thing took on a unified integrity and became a strong solid structure of nonetheless questionable character.

It was hard to see Monkeyhenge from closeup in the dusk. The next morning I looked out the window into the morning sunshine falling golden on the garden and there beheld a structure that needed... my first reaction was Removal, but then the monkeys would love that wouldn't they, so onward we Ahab in our ways. Tweaking is maybe what it needs, some nice blue stones from Wales, perhaps, maybe a point on top...

I am so glad I do not have a large garden. This is just an experiment, anyway, it's not exactly a Tower of Babel yet, but who knows where it will lead, I'm not putting any photos in here because the structure is going to change from day to day, week to week etc. as I steadily approach the ideal form of antimonkey perfection, or maybe wind up replicating the Eiffel Tower.

Some of my more questionable acquaintances seem to share the delusion that this whole protogeodesic affair has affected my mind, simply because I've said a few dozen times or so that I might give up this vegetable obsession and enjoy a rock garden instead... Thinking I might go into rock gardening at some point is no reason to question my mental integrity; fact is, I think I could raise rocks rather well... I wonder where I could buy some seeds...