Zombies were trying to eat my plants ...

... and naturally I had to fight back, but now it is 3am and I have to be at work at 10.

Damn zombies ... especially Elvis zombie and his band of solid gold dancers.

UN Night at the Wayside

Last night was "United Nations Visits Trout Creek Night" at the Wayside. The most innocuous incident was the French-speaking four-top who walked in after having been refused service across the street ("the kitchen was closing"). Tough ... mine was closed too, but I was still there with equipment turned on, and, of late, I relish serving people that are turned away across the street.

The French Incident:

"Can you speak enough French to help this four-top that just walked in?", asks my innocent server.

My response?

"Well ... not unless you want to say:

• I am a transvestite (Je suis travesti);
• This is military terrain (Ceci est le terrain militaire);
• Those are great pants! (Ceux-là sont de grands pantalons!); or
• Are you mental? (Etes-vous mental?).

These are my personalized phrases in addition to the more run-of-the-mill phrases that I've picked up from reading or watching (British) television."

Brave little server ... "Nooooo ... not helpful, but it sounds like there may be an interesting story there."

Ah, but it gets better. The night also involved a fair amount of Spanish language skills.

The Forest Service, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to post to the Kootenai fire crew this season a young Hispanic man who, until last night, had never set foot outside of Texas. And he landed in Trout Creek, Montana.

The newbie is fluently bilingual, but uses Spanish mostly where he lives. Poor guy - all night long his body language screamed "I'm scared to death!" When I was dispatched to take my turn on the welcome committee, I couldn't help but ask him: "¿Quién fastidia usted ser enviado aquí? ¿Está usted seguro que ellos no joden justo con usted?" Well, at least he laughed.

The group he was with took him "on tour," ending with several hours' drinking shots at Sneakers in Noxon. Then, round about 3:30am, he got to meet the Sheriff himself when their vehicle was pulled over. Is it any wonder the number of DUIs in the county dropped so markedly last year when an obvious dui/open container/etc. violation gets written up only for speeding and littering?!?

Later this week, the Forest Service is adding two guys from Arizona to the fire crew. They're rumoured to be nowhere near as ... sheltered as the kid who was saddled last night with the unfortunate nickname "The Foreign Exchange Student." That has the feel of a name that is going to stick around.

A chipmunk cried "Whiskey" ...

... and the Baroness answered "Water".

Or at least that is the story she tells.

Louise kicked off today's mushroom-hunting adventure by telling us of her dream last night: while we were out hunting mushrooms (and eating miniature-sized pineapples), she found a chipmunk who she attempted to befriend and name. Instead, she was savaged by said chipmunk.

The joke of the day quickly became anything and everything chipmunk related. Any strange sound, odd track, or random occurrence was the chipmunk's doing. Naturally, the chipmunk quickly developed a rabies affliction.

In the first location that we stopped to go a'huntin', we were all within visual range of one another for most of the time, but then suddenly, the Baroness was simply gone. She was nowhere in sight and stopped responding to vocal calls. Louise and I were turning up nothing in the way of fungus except for the lovely poisonous mushrooms. Louise was rather bang-on at finding skulls as well; she chalked up two deer and an elk. Finally we decided it was Beer:30 and trekked back to the car. Mind you, the Baroness is still missing at this point. We wandered the woods near the car, calling for the Baroness, looking for mushrooms, and finding nothing more interesting than an abundance of young fiddlehead fern tops (yummy!). We even took to periodically honking the horn, all to no avail. Ultimately we decided that it was time to continue on to our destination a bit further down the trail, so we laid a huge arrow made of tree trunks in the parking clearing and inscribed the Baroness's name in the dirt above it. There was no missing that map.

Unless the chipmunk decided to rearrange things.

No more than 50 yards down the "road", twenty feet into the woods, what do my little eyes spy, but the Baroness. She was in quite a state, running with sweat, scratched, dirty, her shoe laces untied and wrapped around her ankles a few times, clutching to her knife and her punctured bag, containing six lonely morels. The explanation, of course, was that she had been attacked by a chipmunk. She claims not to have heard any of our attention-attracting noises, but did say that at one point she heard someone yell, "Whiskey," and replied, "Water!" That, too, was attributed to the chipmunk.

At our second hunting location we finally hit the morel jackpot.


Lovely, happy clumps of morels - hidden from the campers who couldn't be bothered to step three feet off the service road into the scary woods.

Once we exhausted our mushroom hunting mojo, we parked ourselves on a cliff edge and threw rocks for Chai, who was madly swimming along in the river. She swam for a steady hour before she decided that it was time to come back to shore. The only bit of excitement there came when the Baroness reached a bit too far over the cliff for a rock and nearly went ass over elbow down the sheer face and into the river. Fortunately Louise grabbed the Baroness's bra strap, I grabbed her belt, and we hauled her back for all we were worth.

During the excitement, the chipmunk ran around and dropped bits of nature into our beers.

Louise and I couldn't decide which fate was worse: returning to the Wayside missing the Baroness because a) she wandered off in the woods, or b) she toppled over a cliff into the river. There just wouldn't be a way to explain either situation. Louise kept remembering how her family use to put a goat bell on her deaf grandmother when they went out picking huckleberries.

Unfortunately, the chipmunk was hoarding all of the available goat bells today.

A day like any other, in which ...

... our dog, Chai, loses her first bar fight, to a cat;

... a cat is 86'd from the bar for the first time in current memory;

... said cat is summarily marched off of the premises, all the while being lectured by Louise on how his starting and prolonging of fights was completely unacceptable;

... we discover that Shock Top beer and Baileys are a more efficient way of making a cement mixer than traditional recipes;

... Shock Top and Baileys create a glassful of solid matter from two liquids;

... I win the betting draw on the Preakness Stakes, my first time ever betting on a horse race in any form;

... 13 is "unlucky for some", but certainly not me;

... the word "watermelon" is revealed to be the all-purpose word to mouth to hymns for which you do not actually know the words, thus appearing to be singing with great fervor;

... a planned solo mushrooming day tomorrow evolves into an outing for three humans and two dogs;


... Louise, Wakko, and I manage to plan out all of the "Taste of ..." specials for the summer.


All of this, and more, without the presence of the Baroness.

The summer "Taste of ..." schedule at the Wayside is as follows (all dates are Saturdays):

• 20 June - Taste of Texas (featuring rattlesnake, boar ribs, and blue marlin)


• 04 July - Polynesian Night (featuring a pig roast, poi, remaining menu tbd)


• 25 July - Taste of Northwest Montana (featuring elk, moose, morels, huckleberries, etc.)


• 15 August - Low Country Crab Boil (featuring mussels, clams, dungeness crab, black tiger shrimp, andouille sausage, corn, potatoes, hush puppies)


• 05 September - Fresh Seafood Extravaganza (featuring oysters on the half shell, octopus, whatever else tickles our fresh little fancy).