A Chicken, 20 Bucks, Meth Head, and a Cooler
A chicken, $20, a meth head and a cooler have nothing in common except for the fact they’re all things I found in the desert or on the streets while walking my dogs. The chicken was dead, the $20 was in plain sight while the meth addict was hidden, and the cooler held a surprise as it turned out to have a smaller cooler stashed safely inside. These are all things that would not have crossed my path and added interest and a bit of excitement to my life if it weren’t for my dogs and our daily effort to get outside, walk a little and be healthy.
Dog walking has become a way of life for me since I got my first dog, Freddie, in 2020 during the Covid 19 pandemic. Our walking pattern was well established by the time I fostered and then decided to keep Ralphie nearly three years later. I couldn’t have asked for two better walking buddies than my two boys. We average two miles on our feet each day, and often get in three – sometimes four if we drive to a mountain or desert trail. Their legs are short, but their enthusiasm for a nice jaunt is huge!
Freddie is a 17-pound Toy Fox Terrier and Ralphie is a 12-pound mixture of maybe Pomeranian and Chihuahua. Someday I’ll get a DNA test to figure out what combination of dog ethnicities blended to create Ralphie’s foxlike appearance. He’s almost pure ginger while Freddie, who is often mis-identified as a Jack Russell Terrier, is tan and white. They are the two cutest little beings and the joys of my life.
I wasn’t always a fan of walking. I used to think it was a waste of time in terms of health and fitness. There were far better ways to burn calories and stave off fatness than walking, including the much more intense jogging and bootcamp and Pilates classes. I always felt like walking just wasn’t enough and, if I walked, it would waste my time because I’d have to do something else more intense to actually burn significant calories. I preferred to jog the same distance as a walk or take a one-hour fitness class rather than hit the streets or trails for a walk.
After Las Vegas, my home city, shut down gyms and exercise facilities during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, my attitude about walking completely changed. I started walking to get out of my house and escape the loneliness of quarantine. Sometimes I’d go for two walks to soak in the sunshine and absorb knowledge from podcasts ranging from religious sermons to politics, the Law of Attraction, and health and wellness. Perhaps I would have walked or jogged more if I had realized the beauty of a commercial-free YouTube subscription years earlier. But it took quarantine to show me the way to walking while listening to intellectual podcasts . . . and dogs.
All my on-foot-action made me envious of the many people I saw walking in the company of a dog, so I got myself a dog (and then another one) and kept on walking, and the Universe has rewarded my life choice with gifts.
My first gift was cold, hard cash, and it appeared while I walked alone before adopting either of my walking buddies. It was mid-summer 2020 and the three-month quarantine in Las Vegas was over. However, the governor mandated all state workers – of which I was one – continue to work from home. Around 1 or 2 o’clock each afternoon, as my mental stability waned due to lack of human interaction and conversation, I took to the Lone Mountain Trail to escape outside and listen to the soothing voices of my podcast company.
It was a 3-mile jaunt from my front door, around the mountain, and back to my home, and took about 45 minutes to complete. It was funny that, when I moved into my house two years earlier, I had lied to myself, friends and family and said my inspiration for purchasing this house was to be close to the trail and the exercise potential it afforded me. The real reason was because the house was near an ex-boyfriend who had just rejected me and still lived in the house we co-owned together. Perhaps because I put the thought out into the ethers about the practicality of living near that dirt trail, my lie turned out to be true and fortuitous. The trail became my lifesaver during quarantine and a year of work-from-home.
Due to the intense desert summer heat, the trail was nearly always empty during my afternoon walk. After I walked out of the gate of my housing development, I crossed about a quarter of a mile of vacant desert before stepping onto the trail, where I headed north to take on the trail’s notorious hill the easy way from the top down. As the path meandered past an empty gravel parking lot that had been full of cars and hikers during cooler hours, a small rectangular object that looked like a folded dollar bill came into view and I locked onto it with my eyes as I walked toward it.
Not too long before, I decided “found money” was going to be my hobby just to see, if I put attention toward looking for loose change on the ground, how much I’d accumulate over the years. I found a small glass jar and wrote the word “abundance” on the cap with a Sharpee because this hobby was also a mind trick to convince myself that money was always coming my way. And it did. One man’s lack of initiative to bother to bend and pick up nearly worthless coins was my reward! I started finding change everywhere – in parking lots, in coin return slots, near entrances to stores, and now my luck turned to cold hard cash on walking trails! I used my phone to take a photo of what turned out to be a $20 bill laying on the ground and texted it to a bunch of people as proof that everyone should take up walking for fun, health and money!
Not soon after, Freddie came into my life for the low, low price of $300, which I gladly paid to a young man from Craig’s list who was separating from his wife and couldn’t take my dog wherever he was going. Ralphie came into my and Freddie’s lives after I decided to foster dogs. Ralphie was my first foster and I failed. Rather than taking care of him until someone else could adopt him into their loving home, I kept him, thus failing at my foster mission. He and Freddie got along so well and played so hard together, I couldn’t imagine Ralphie was meant for some other house and not mine. So, the three of us walk together and we find gifts all over the place!
One evening shortly after adopting Freddie, I wondered while bathing him if utilizing a cup to pour water over his fur would make getting the soap out easier. My cupboards held only glass cups and wished I had one made of plastic to test my theory. A few days later, we found a plastic tumbler on our walk. Score! This pink plastic cup works well in the bathing process.
For a year I’ve used a four-foot-tall Christmas tree as a nightlight, with its sparkling strand of LEDs adding Christmas and everyday cheer to my house. Freddie and I found the tree on the sidewalk in front of a house within my housing development the day before our community’s scheduled trash pickup. I hadn’t had a Christmas tree as an adult living on my own and I was 49 at the time; I decided this free tree would be my first. I had planned over many years to buy a pre-lit tree after Christmas to enjoy the steep discount of after-holiday sales, but never pulled the trigger. This free tree was meant to be.
As a courtesy, I rang the Ring doorbell attached to the house with the garbage tree out front and asked through the doorbell’s speaker if I could take the tree, to which the homeowner gave me an expected yes. He didn’t want it anyway, and whether or not a neighbor or a garbage man took the tree really didn’t matter. I was going to ask if the tree’s attached lights worked, but decided it was a moot point because those lights were probably the reason it was considered trash, and I was right. I cut them out, ordered new lights on Amazon, and Voila! My new tree was wonderful.
In the process of cleaning the tree after I got it home, I found an ornament with three bears riding a tandem bike in the tree’s base, where it apparently fell and was close to being lost forever to a landfill. Within weeks, Freddie and I found a large, green ornament in the gutter near an elementary school not far from our home. The wind from the previous night no doubt blew it away from the holiday decoration it belonged to from an unknown yard nearby and placed it in my path. The Universe decided I needed a plan to decorate my tree and gave me the idea to adorn it with ornaments sent as gifts. It might take several years to have a fully decorated tree, but I don’t care. It’s more fun to decorate this way. One year later, my tree has four ornaments – the original bear ornament, one from an aunt, and two from the universe, including a big red ornament Freddie, Ralphie and I found in the gutter this year.
Not all my gifts from the universe sparkle and glimmer like Christmas tree ornaments. Sometimes they’re dead. The desert between my house and the Lone Mountain Trail has been very giving, but I guess with that expanse of sage brush and dirt you have to take the good with the bad, like a rotting turkey and dead chicken.
The turkey appeared over the summer and my dogs and I smelled it before we saw it. The turkey was the type you’d buy frozen at a grocery store for Thanksgiving dinner. Someone probably bought it with the intent to cook it, but time got away from him or her and they figured it would be better to throw it into the desert for coyote food rather than throw it in the garbage. The sentiment was right, but the outcome was not as I suspected was intended. It rotted out there until the smell was gone and all that remained was the plastic wrapper the bird was sold in.
The chicken was a victim of homicide. It was a rather small white bird that didn’t quite look big enough to lay a decent sized egg. Maybe it was a juvenile or maybe it was just a small chicken. I decided somebody had got a bright idea to get a backyard chicken for its egg laying potential, only to be thoroughly annoyed by the stinky bird and its poop. Whatever the case, it didn’t deserve to have its throat slit. It wasn’t a clean cut either as it looked like a very dull knife had been used to bring about the poor chicken’s demise. I bet a post to Facebook Marketplace would have yielded a new home for that bird if the owners had just tried a little to find it a new home.
But those two dead birds weren’t as freaky or fear inducing as the meth addict hidden behind a row of oleander bushes in a residential area. Freddie found her and freaked out with obsessive and loud barking. I bent down to look under the oleander bushes, half expecting to see a cat or maybe a lost dog that I could save, but instead found a scrawny drug addict.
I thought she was a 14- or 15-year-old girl at first, but then realized she was a lot older and very thin and gaunt from drug use. She had tear stains on her face and I asked if she needed help in the form of police or an ambulance. She insisted she was fine. She had gotten in a fight with her “friend” and left his house without her phone. My boys and I left her in her hiding spot and walked a short distance away. My conscience got the best of me and we returned to her perch. She declined my offer again to call for help and the three of us left her for a second time. I hope she got her phone back.
Another time, the desert gave us a hummingbird feeder, and a nice glass one at that! I had been thinking about getting one, but I worried about the work involved with keeping the nectar fresh during the summer heat. I follow several garden groups on Facebook and people routinely post memes and advice on the many ways you can hurt a hummingbird if you let the nectar go rancid, which can happen in just a few days in the desert heat. My hesitation became moot once that feeder wound up in my path. I took it home and have kept it clean and full of homemade nectar since. I have many hummingbird friends who add joy to my life as they flit across my yard to my feeder.
Our most recent gift, a nice-sized gray cooler with a collapsable handle and two wheels, similar to the setup of most modern pieces of luggage, was also abandoned in the desert, in the same spot where I had found a bike and then lost it again. Runoff water from homeowners overwatering their landscape in my housing development drains down the gutters, across the street, and into the desert. That runoff has formed a small ravine about four feet deep and two feet wide from 20 years of moving water. From the road as you drive by, you cannot see the ravine or the items that people put in it, like the bike. I only saw it because I walked by it with my dogs. I wanted to take the bike right then and there, but thought it might belong to a kid who left it temporarily hidden for some reason he only knew. I decided to wait until the next day to see if it had been claimed and then promptly forgot about it for a few days. When the dogs and I remembered to check on it, as expected, it was gone. The same thing wasn’t about to happen this time with the cooler!
My first thought when I saw the cooler in the ravine was that it held something dead. The chicken with the slit neck had been left in an open-air burial approximately 5 feet away. That chicken, by the way, disappeared soon after I discovered it, probably much better coyote food than the thawed, rotten turkey. I lifted up the cooler, which was remarkably clean for being tossed into the desert, by the handle and shook it. To my surprise, it felt empty. I didn’t know how much a human head weighed and, despite the fact it felt as if there was nothing inside, I cautiously opened the lid expecting to be punched in the face with the smell of death. Instead, a smaller blue cooler with a collapsable handle and two wheels was nestled inside.
I thought the same thing about the cooler as I did about the bike – it must have been placed there by someone who was going to come back for it. The boys and I had just started our walk, and I decided to leave the coolers in the little ravine and check back in a day to see if they were still there. By the time our walk was over, I came to the conclusion that the Universe wanted me to have those coolers. It was Christmas Day, after all!
As the old year approached the new, I decided the new year was going to include road trips with my dogs, which would necessitate carting along a cooler filled with food for me and them. My dogs and I avoid sugar and processed food because, as a health expert asserted in one of the many podcasts I’ve listened to, only humans and domesticated animals get cancer due to the fact we eat food our bodies are not designed to process. Until that fateful walk, I didn’t own a cooler, but I planned to buy one soon for our future road trip adventures. Apparently the Universe approved of my road trip plan and showed me by placing the coolers where I could find them.
Thank you!