Stump Rules!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

I have a complicated history with dogs. I’m not a fan of Pitt Bulls and breeds known for their unrestrained ferocity, particularly when it is directed toward small children and other human beings. I have a policy when I am in residence at Rock’s Roost of allowing domesticated bunnies to run free inside of my large fenced hillside, so I necessarily can’t tolerate Beagles either because they go absolutely insane when a rabbit hops by. And if you believe in the peaceful nature of dachshunds, never step between a wiener dog and a chicken. Your illusions will be broken almost as swiftly as the poor chicken’s neck.

Little yappy dogs, like little yappy kids, tend to annoy me – but I love Chihuahuas and my grandchildren. I also love Great Pyrenees and have written about those gentle giants in this space before. They were bred to herd and watch over sheep and goats, and their deep, cavernous howls will scare the hell out of any invader, two-or-four-legged. Great Pyrenees patrol all night and generally sleep all day. They also generate enough slobber to float a boat!

I don’t have room for a dog in my current apartment life, but I have convinced myself that I could shuffle enough stuff around to accommodate the needs of a Chihuahua. Last week I spoke with one of the ladies who work in the office at Palm Valley Luxury Rentals. I told the lady (who is actually very nice) that I was thinking about adopting a Chihuahua and asked her how it would affect my rent. She told me, nicely, that I would have to pay a fee of $300 plus $25 per month. Then she went on to talk about what a great idea it was, and how I needed a “little buddy” to share my life. Yeah, right. At those prices, why not get a couple!

With that background in mind, I settled down at 9:00 p.m. on Monday to watch the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. One of the stars of the show was Uno, last year’s best-in-show. Uno, like Miss America, had spent a large portion of his reign visiting wounded veterans, children at cancer hospitals, and doing charity appearances. He served his country and his species proudly, even if he is a Beagle.

The crown passed to a new best-in-show last night, a sexy senior citizen by the name of Stump. The 10-year-old Sussex Spaniel (that’s seventy in dog years) is the oldest champion in Westminster’s one-hundred-and-thirty-three-year history. Stump won a group title at Westminster in 2004, and then nearly succumbed to a mysterious disease. He has been a happy retiree since that time, but five days before this year’s competition, his human made a decision to enter him at Westminster one final time just so he could relive his glory days. Stump was too big to fit under the airplane seat, so he had to suffer the indignity of flying to New York as freight. His human said that the new champ will fly home first-class!

So society, be careful how you treat your seniors. That old fart gripping the steering wheel with both hands and slowing down two lanes of traffic, may just be waiting for you to make his day! Flip him off at your own peril!

Paladin and Paloma

Paladin and Paloma, a pair of beautiful Great Pyrenees, were the King and Queen of Rock’s Roost. Both dogs were pedigreed, bred to look after farm animals, and both took to the task as naturally as ducks take to water or birds take to flight.

Paladin came to the Roost as a puppy, barely weaned. When he was several months old, I brought Paloma to join him. Although he was older and more independent, they immediately formed into a playful pair of young canines. As they got older Paladin learned that no fence could keep him in. He would scale the chain-link and leave tufts of his white hair in the barbed wire that ran along the top of the fence. Once over he would patrol the yard and along the property boundaries while Paloma stayed inside watching the livestock. In the evenings I would lead him back into the barnyard to feed, but he would soon be back out in the yard. It actually worked well, because if a strange dog ambled by, Paloma (and the guineas and peacocks) would set off the alarm and Paladin was free to give chase.

Great Pyrenees are big dogs, looking much like St. Bernards, only white. They are gentle souls, but there massive size (Paladin weighed over 110 pounds) and thunderous bark would give pause to any hardened criminal. They do most of their patrolling at night and like to sleep during the day. Paladin’s favorite place to siesta was on the dirt road that bordered the farm. Fortunately for him, the neighbors always gave him a wide berth!

When Paladin wasn’t sleeping during the day, he was roaming. Most of the neighbor’s knew him and didn’t get out of sorts when they found him stopping by their dog’s dish to do some comparison shopping. One day, however, he roamed too far and got into some serious trouble. A neighbor called and said that she had seen him walking along the highway about a half-mile away and that he was bleeding. I hurried out in my old pickup truck and managed to get him loaded up and home. He had been shot in the stomach and didn’t have the strength to get out of the truck bed. After several frantic telephone calls, I was finally able to get a vet to agree to come into his office (it was a Sunday afternoon) and treat my big, gentle dog. The vet examined Paladin and determined that a small caliber bullet had passed through his mid-section and not hit any vital organs. The poor dog spent the night at the vet’s clinic and was back at the Roost the next afternoon.

While Paloma was kept away from her partner by a fence most of the time, Paladin would make the occasional conjugal visit, and Paloma was blessed with several large litters of puppies. I came home one day for lunch and found Paloma in the barn dug into the straw and just beginning to deliver a litter. When I returned that evening, I went out to check on her and was met by quite a surprise. The weary mother was laid out in front of a pile of squealing puppies. I had expected that. What I hadn’t expected was to find a dozen or so little white puppies with one that was solid black! I soon solved the mystery when I noticed that Mama Pot-Bellied Pig had also burrowed into the straw and delivered a sizeable litter of little black piggies. One had gotten adventurous and crawled over and joined the puppies! The guys at the feed store had a good laugh over my black Great Pyrenees!

Paloma had one other suitor besides Paladin. A young motherless goose decided early on that Paloma was his girlfriend. He kept constant company with her, napping where she napped, sharing her food, and being a fixture in her life. If Paloma ran to the fence to bark at something, the goose would be right there with her flapping his wings and honking at whatever had alarmed the big dog. The goose could be quite mean, as Paladin found out when he tried to visit, but the goose also looked after the puppies as though they were his responsibility. The goose would preen Paloma, picking ticks and burrs off of her with his beak. It was a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

I had done a lot of research on Great Pyrenees before bringing Paladin and Paloma to the Roost. One thing that I learned was that they were loyal, but the males would occasionally move on. My dad became ill and I started having to spend more time with him. I began to stay in town and come out to the Roost twice a day to feed. One day Paladin was gone. I like to think that he just walked on down the road and moved in with a good family who were able to give him more attention. When I finally closed the Roost, I gave Paloma to friends. Her goose, of course, went with them also.

Rock's Roost

Rock’s Roost is a small piece of heaven in the Missouri Ozarks. It is a cabin, of sorts, sitting among tall pines on a very rocky patch of ground. Right now it is in hibernation mode because the owner, yours truly, suffers from wanderlust. But when Rock’s Roost is awake, it truly rocks!

It has been four years or so since the Roost was functioning as a farm, and even then it barely resembled anything that a real farmer would brag about at the local coffee shop. It was an enterprise that was all expense and no profit (all hat and no cattle), yet I profited considerably from the experience.

When Rock’s Roost was at the pinnacle of its glory it was home to a dozen or so pygmy goats that frolicked on their own playground. The large truck tires and painted barrels that I set up for their amusement, and my own, are still there, though they look somewhat sad without the goats. Little goats must have invented the game “King of the Mountain,” because they would spend hours upon hours knocking each other off of those tires and barrels! The pygmy goats seemed to be always giving birth. Sometimes they did just fine on their own bringing twins or triplets into the world, and at other times I would find myself up to my elbows in pulling goats. One spring day I came home after being gone for the weekend, and there to greet me were seven new baby goats and three very tired nannies!

Five or six domestic rabbits ran free, and several times a year they would bring out their baby bunnies to meet the other creatures that called the Roost home. There were also three pot-bellied pigs whose main goal in life was to find a cool place to sleep in the summer and a warm spot for slumber in the winter. In the winter I would usually get home after dark and have to roam out to the dark barn to feed – where I would invariably trip over a pig or two!

A large contingent of fowl made their nests at Rock’s Roost. A flock of noisy guineas worked the grounds during the day looking for ticks, and at night they would nest in the tree tops ready to sound the alarm whenever anything unexpected happened in the darkness. For awhile there were also peacocks, two males and two females. They would nest in one very tall pine right next to the cabin. Whenever something would set the guineas to squawking, the peacocks would chime in with their distinctive screams. All of the dogs in the neighborhood would then add their howls to the chorus. Nothing went undetected at Rock’s Roost, even on the darkest of nights!

Other feathered residents included a tom turkey, a cranky goose, and two dozen or so hens of mixed varieties that always provided an abundance of eggs - and all of my friends shared in the bounty! There were also a few roosters who liked to make noise and fight. The best birds on the little farm were four large emus. An emu is a three-toed, very large bird, similar to an ostrich only somewhat smaller. My emus loved to be hosed off on hot days in the summer, and they would sit in mud puddles and visit whenever the opportunity presented itself. One of the emus would reach over the fence with his long neck and feast on the cherry tomatoes that dangled close to their enclosure. Another was always underfoot whenever I did any cement work because she considered wet cement to be a delicacy! A large male ostrich also lived at the Roost for awhile, but he was as mean as the emus were sweet, and we soon had a parting of the ways.

But it was the dogs that were the King and Queen of the Roost. Paladin and Paloma, a pair of beautiful Great Pyrenees, ran the place by day and night. Those dogs were so special that they deserve their own post on this blog. It will be coming soon!

If the Roost was a comforting retreat on most days, it was magical during storms. A good spring or summer storm drove everyone together. The creatures of the Roost would gather in the barn, an assembly of friends waiting out the downpour and quietly tolerating the farmer as he fed the group and talked incessantly of things that were of no import to them. Life was beautiful, and everyone in the barn reveled in it. It was the very best of times!

The Road to Arizona

Each Christmas over the past four years has found me residing in a different state.

Christmas 2004: I was living in Missouri and finishing out a nearly eleven-year-run with the Missouri Division of Family Services, later renamed the Missouri Children’s Division. I joined the Division in April of 1994 as a Children’s Services Worker. My main duties included conducting child abuse investigations and working with children in foster care.

After being with that state agency just a few years, I was selected to attend the University of Missouri on a Title 4-E Scholarship where I obtained a Master’s in Social Work. In return for accepting a wonderful 2-year education, with pay and benefits, I had to promise to work for the state an additional four years. That wasn’t a problem to me because I loved my job and intended to keep doing it forever.

I completed the graduate program and returned to work at the Division. There I was promptly promoted to the position of Social Work Specialist where I handled “special” cases in seven counties throughout southwest Missouri. Fortunately, I loved that job as well, and things were good. I made many great friends in my travels and was able to do a lot of positive work for the children and families of that corner of Missouri.

My love affair with state employment ended after I became the Circuit Director over two of those seven counties. I had quite a lot of unhappy experience as a school administrator, and somehow I had forgotten how truly miserable life could be for the boss. But, even with that background I managed to maintain a cheerful attitude for several months until my boss was replaced by someone who was not known for her people skills.

During my last, very unhappy, year with the Missouri Children’s Division I was able to complete my social work licensure and finish my payback time to the state for the scholarship. It was time to move on, and I was surprised at how readily employable I was as a newly licensed clinical social worker. I was soon able to line up a position as a social work therapist with the U.S. Army at Ft. Leavenworth. As I was preparing to move at the end of December, 2004, the Great Tsunami hit Indonesia and George Bush was busy shuffling cabinet members and writing his 2nd inaugural address.

Christmas 2005: I was just completing my year at Ft. Leavenworth and preparing to move to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, within the next couple of days. My pay as a new therapist had been more that I made as an administrator in Missouri, and it suddenly increased again by 17% in November of 2005 to counteract the flight of social workers into the private sector. Unfortunately for me, the raise was funded by a deletion of some positions, including mine at Ft. Leavenworth. My contracting agency came to the rescue and found a placement for me at Ft. Campbell.

Leavenworth had been a great place to work, so much better than my previous position. Our caseloads at Leavenworth were small (which is the main reason that my position was deleted), and it was an excellent place to learn clinical skills as well as the operation of the Army’s Family Advocacy Program. Our mission was to work with victims and perpetrators of family violence, something for which my background with the Missouri Children’s Division had prepared me well.

Leavenworth was also good from a family perspective. I was able to get back to the Ozarks to check on my Dad and my little farm, Rock’s Roost, every other weekend, and I was able to see my son Tim, who lived just down the road in Topeka, on a fairly regular basis. Up until that time it had been several years since I was able to reside in the vicinity of any of my children. It was poor Tim who had to help me pack up my apartment and drive the U-Haul to Kentucky.

Christmas 2006: I was well rooted in Kentucky by the holiday season of 2006, having already been there for nearly a year. Ft. Campbell is home of the 101st Airborne Division, most of whose members were fighting in Iraq at the time I arrived. The majority of my duties there involved working with family members who were left at the base during the deployment, and then helping with family reintegration as the soldiers returned. My most emotional experiences working at Ft. Campbell centered on meeting returning troops as their planes arrived at the base airfield – the bands, the speeches, the joyous family reunions! Those memories will be with me forever.

The first couple of years that I worked with the military were as a civilian contractor. The pay was great, but contracted employees receive less time off than federal employees and have no retirement system other than a 401-K plan. I applied for several federal social worker positions, but wasn’t experiencing much luck in that department. Then in July of this year I found an Air Force opening at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix. I wasn’t overly anxious to move to the desert, but my daughter and new grandson were living there, so I threw my name into the hat. Much to my surprise, I was hired through a telephone interview and was on station at Luke on October 1st. Now, at long last, I was an official federal employee.

My oldest son, Nick, flew to Kentucky and helped me pack and move to Arizona. He and his brother both say that their sister, Molly, has to help move Dad next time!

Christmas 2007: I am at Luke preparing to start a new year. I like my job and have wonderful co-workers (as was the case at Ft. Leavenworth and Ft. Campbell), and I hope that I will be able to drop anchor here and stay for several years. It is also fun getting to know my little grandson and watch him grow.