Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

The soundtrack birds are back in town (I should say in-canyon), and the moment I step outside I’m treated to a complete and overwhelming sonic range, from the rufous hummingbird soprano to the dating dove bass to the acorn woodpecker rhythm section. Just after dawn in this prematurely baking high desert forest, the groove is Trip Hop Rave. New, Climate Change-introduced species like the bark beetle have changed the vibe somewhat from the traditionally- dominant and even Biblically-brutal spring North wind.

Instead, the brilliantly scarlet-bellied woodpeckers now return from winter condos earlier and stay longer thanks to the unexpected insect bounty. Don’t get me wrong: the notorious spring gusts still carry the horror film echo of countless canyons and are impossible to ignore. They make you want to pull the sheets over your head and wish Vincent Price had never been born. But I appreciate the North wind here in the desert at his time of year. Keeps things cool and blows the poison pollen away. Sure, wind is windy. But I’m humany, and the wind is fine with that.

Competing with lulls in the wind, it’s the hummingbirds in particular, with their almost digital alarm clock wing-buzz, that are the announcers of the dawn of Breathing Season. Some call it “spring.” Some “planting time.” But I’m enjoying being outside, for the first time in more than six weeks. Actually, I’m enjoying being a respiring organism, for the first time in more than six weeks.

Suddenly things go quiet, even though nothing has changed. It’s a matter of perception. The nouveau avian symphony, so “up to eleven” loud while I was lacing my boots on the porch swing (the doves’ sexy “cooo hooo” call-and-response in particular), migrates to a background ear massage and highlights something even louder — the Absence of Loudness.

Quiet – it is such an endangered sensation in Digital Age life that even though it’s been almost twenty years since the tail end my suburban mall upbringing, it still sometimes feels like noise when I first experience it on a given day (also I tend to be blasting powerful human music inside even in my Ruggedly Individualist rural life).

Take this early April morning not yet an hour after the sun has crested over the Butte, causing the day to transform in the course of minutes from Arctic winter to Saharan summer. Even the goats are chewing their cud and silently enjoying the Deep Quiet as breathing season approaches. This is why we’re hanging out, meditating more than making progress on morning chores until the BLAZINGLY LOUD raven’s wings whissssh not ten feet above our milking heads and snap me into the realization: I haven’t sneezed more then 19 times in a row in several days.

By noon (the day already interspersed with a few writing sessions), mist is moving in and I’ve got the goat corral cleaned out, with the fecund and surprisingly un-disgusting milk dud muck loaded on to the Garden (organic, homemade fertilizer!).

And I can breathe. Sure, my inaugural smell is goat droppings and rotting hay. But I can breathe. Breathing is fundamental.

This is a pleasure so intense it overwhelms even the already Elysian rightness of the morning bird song and idyllic midday ranch scene.

I want to whoop Howard Dean-like with joy, and so I do. The North wind sends it right back, so I scream it in English.

“I can breathe!”

The goats seem happy for me (they’re nuzzling my knees), and my ten-month-old son, displaying a strong and auspicious work-is-play ethic, is now singing on my back, too, as he helps right to the end of chore-time (in this case squealing to alert me when Melissa the Goat realizes I have not carabinered her corral door and is picking the lock). It was three weeks ago now, I realize, since the day my little Elf Boy was also on my back in the garden, when, exactly like a prayer answered, the much-needed first rain in months arrived.

This was during the critical touch-and-go period about halfway into spring allergy season. I think of Kalahari tribesmen falling down in thanks for the life-giving monsoon. That March sprinkle was perfect for everything from juniper pollen mitigation to getting the soil ready for my leafy greens, which happened to be scheduled for planting the next day. Ahhh.

I would be superstitious if I didn’t mention that the March rain was just one in a number of positive portents for the garden this season, from bursting indoor seedlings screaming for transplant, to last winter’s garlic and onions springing up as reliably as bad George Steinbrenner trades after over-wintering gorgeously. ‘Course the Farmerly thing to say is, “You never know.” Witness last August 20th.

But a fantastic garden this year would simply be gravy (or, literally, eaten with gravy and soy sauce concoctions of various kinds). Because the real result of the heavenly lubrication was a decisive turning point my annual War With the Juniper Pollen Molecule. It wasn’t the final guarantee of victory, but it irrevocably shifted the momentum.

Sucking in my first few nostril-derived breaths now three weeks later, I’m flashing back like a stressed ex-combat soldier to early February, before the rains were even on the horizon. I knew I was entering Stage 2 of spring desert allergy suffering, characterized by the realization there was not a moment of my life when I wasn’t aware that “Junipers Have Invaded My Immune System, and They Are Winning.” Another way of describing Stage 2 is to say that not for one second of the day or night is either nostril clear.

During conventional sleep hours this means waking up every 90 minutes to soak my parched palate because both sinus passageways are closed for repairs like an Interstate Highway project contracted to a corrupt asphalt company (fortunately I was prepped for this kind of frequent waking by having said ten-month-old son). During Stage 2, though, I can’t immediately gulp my water (its surface itself greasy with drifting juniper pollen), because my shockingly red-streaked eyes are glued together. Juniper molecules rule my ocular glands, too, in February. They have by this time catapulted over my defenses. This is significantly worse than the Stage 1 suffering I have endured now since about Valentine’s Day, which was merely categorized by periodic fits of perhaps 126 sneezes in a row.

The next stage, Stage 3 (also called the Terminal Explosion Phase), if fairly immediate rebound is not achieved, is illustrated in scary medical manual photos with swollen-shut face accompanied horrified looks from non-recognizing friends, followed by death.

Make no mistake, it was me or the pollen by the end of February, and I knew it. There was no denying it, come March: it was shaping up to be a “bad year.” They say all war is personal in the trenches (or if they don’t, they should), and though seasoned Juniper Warriors recognize one another from our inflamed faces and comic-phone-operator nasal accents, we all recognize that it’s a battle of individual human and juniper soldiers; one neighbor’s mild year (aided by a quick trip to Aruba) might be discussed in the Co-op bulk aisle with a sneezing, near-comatose juniper victim who looks something like Quasimodo. And for me, this was rivaling the Bad Year of 2005, which soldiers in the War on Juniper are still commiserating about over nettles tea at the Juniper VFW (also known as Bear Creek Herb Store).

I want to be clear: by the end of February I was gleefully willing to flee my home and family, both of whom I love as much as life. But only as much as life. Not more than. It was a matter of survival. Everyone in my inner circle realized this. It was impossible not to. I couldn’t finish a sentence without erupting into violent sneezing. Bangalore customer service operators were wondering if they were experiencing a new kind of slang not covered in their “colloquial geek English” seminars. I was packing up and preparing to become an Allergy Refugee, like my friend Nancy, who I think might still be in Costa Rica. In military terms, I was in was Dien Bien Phu scholars like to call “strategic retreat.”

In the old days in these situations, they burned their clothes. In my case I was washing them so often they were mostly one molecule thick. No point really, since I had to dry them on a clothesline that was in the direct juniper line of fire. And I was gathering my belongings for a road trip that could last a month or even two. Keep in mind: home is a place I normally intensely prefer to be. Things were beyond serious.

Just as readers of Farewell, My Subaru know I don’t blame Dick Cheney the Coyote for eating many of my initial chickens (he was, after all, eating locally and walking to work), so I recognize that all the juniper pollen wants to do is catch that North wind, land in a meadow somewhere, and make more junipers. Every spring, we’re both fighting for our home turf, and as peoples from the Russians to the Vietnamese to the Colonial Minutemen have shown repeatedly, battles on home turf are not easily lost. In this war, it’s a question of survival for both sides.

But if I understood the juniper’s motivations by this spring, I wasn’t prepared to lose my life to it: the moment a few of those tiny, Chinese star-shaped pollen molecules got embedded in my sinus passages, my body’s immune system acts like my moral system does when forced to listen to five minutes of Rush Limbaugh. I nearly stop breathing. Not enough air is getting through. It’s terrifying.

To visualize what the horrifyingly-designed juniper pollen molecule wants to do in my sinus passages, I think of James Bond clamping a magnetic mine on the hull of a ship. Once attached, the molecule clings like Velcro to the inside of my head, and can attack from within. All I can do at this point is sneeze in vain, perhaps 375 times per day at peak. Sometimes more. Sometimes as many as 30 in a row. I remember finding this almost humorous the first year it happened. I’d keep count and set records for most consecutive sneezes by a non-cartoon character. But it is intensely wearing on the body. And it’s pathetic – you’re trying to shake a molecule free – a molecule that burrow deeper care of shaking.

Anybody who has seen a male juniper tree “explode” with pollen never forgets it. To the juniper-afflicted, it’s like watching a murder – your own. To anyone else, it looks like an entirely new dimension of dust has erupted out of the tree like a startled flock of birds. You realize when you watch this how plausible the Borgesian/String Theory “multiple universe” outlook is. But even in our old model four dimensions, Juniper is a semi-invasive species where I live whose stock, like the woodpecker’s, is just getting stronger with Climate Change.

I feel like I’m making my apparent defeat at the dawn of March seem a bit too black and white. There were brief rebounds, skirmishes involving bravery and give and take on all sides. For instance, I escaped for two days to a speaking event in Louisiana, which served roughly the purpose of R&R in Da Nang for Vietnam War soldiers. I came back deluded into reinvigoration (I slept for almost four hours straight in the sub-tropical moistness of Shreveport). But within half a day of returning to the Ranch, I knew I’d have to give up my home to the juniper for March. I could not breathe.

And then the rain came. I think of John Coltrane’s promise to devote his life to God if he could just kick heroin. This is the level of relief I’m talking about.

If I couldn’t yet respire the moment those rains came, three weeks ago now, I knew there was a genuine chance that change was literally in the air.

Breathing is big.

Try to live without it.

Try to struggle with every breath, for six weeks.

It’s quite an exercise.

And like all worthwhile exercises, it has its payoffs. And they’re not small ones.

Because what all this talk of symptoms and suffering, evacuation and redemption is obscuring is both the physical fact of what’s going on, and the much more important, in terms of long term spiritual health, psychological battle that Spring Juniper Season entails. Physically, if you look at the juniper molecule under a microscope, it’s by any standards a nasty, Velcro-like beast that looks like a combination of an Orc and the aforementioned Chinese star. It is ingeniously designed to latch on to and inflame the human sinus membrane – that is, if your body chemistry decides it doesn’t like it. My sweetheart? She could snort juniper tea and suffer no consequences. For her, it’s the bumblebee-yellow daisies of autumn that slay her, while I don’t even notice them.

This subjectivity in the human defense systems leads to the psychological side of the battle. If some people are immune to juniper attack (including myself for more than thirty years), why not me? Can’t I just tell my body’s defenses to decide not to treat the microscopic Chinese Stars as a threat?

Maybe so, or maybe not. Jury’s out. I’m still working this over in my mind. But for as long as I do suffer physical symptoms, a much more crucial battle is going on. The one you might call the battle for “hearts and minds.” My own, specifically.

So, yes, I wept in appreciation when the rains came. And their brief reprieve probably saved me from embarrassing refugee status. But at the same time, I’ve decided that desert spring allergy season is for me what lent is for some people: an annual six-week purge, a weakening of all bodily immunity resilience until full submission to the “fast” (that is, a forced fast from sleep and really from all pleasure including the ability to taste food) results in my submitting to the awareness that some things are out of my control.

Of necessity, I eventually let go, give into the constant sneezing. And as I dance around the periphery of Stage 3, I invariably learn something about myself, usually valuable. This year, it was the power of humility. Channeling and challenging the reservoir of it within me – working those spiritual muscles out. Body chemistry: what’re ya gonna do? Teaches you endurance when you’re the sufferer, and true sympathy when you’re the lover of a sufferer. Nothing like former sufferer status to aid with sympathy for others.

So upon reflection, I’m thankful for the mid-March rain miracle not for relief, but for saving me from total tail-turning flight – kayaking for the duration in Baja, for instance, which would be an unconscionable gesture of victimization (though at least one bedraggled resident of my county has proposed a publicly-funded cruise ship charter for juniper sufferers in February and March), and which the terrorist juniper pollen would interpret that way. No, no, I must keep in mind that the battle is within. Remember Sun Tzu. I must master myself before I master the enemy. Plus, the juniper is just trying to feed its family, like everyone else.

So, purging, self-exploration. Respiratory system lent. That’s how I like to interpret this annual period of known agony, near-total incapacitation and near-death. One of the few strict rules I have here on the Funky Butte Ranch is “no whining,” which tends to inspire an “Always Look At The Bright Side Of Life” outlook. I’m no pharmaceutical company-bribed allergist, but my theory on the sudden arrival of my massive juniper allergy five years ago after a lifetime of peace with all pollen (and an inherent lack of sympathy for allergy sufferers and anyone claiming an “environmental” or “chemical” sensitivity) has to do with returning from climbing Kilimanjaro in 2005. I landed back here in the desert just when the pollen was raining down into every pore of New Mexico while I was dosed on powerful dysentery-prevention antibiotics and editing my first book in a friend’s long-unused guest house so full of dust, mold and pollen that I was nearly embalmed in it when I woke each morning to blaze toward my literary deadline.

Whatever the cause: no whining. The juniper is a phase. Ecclesiastes tells us there’s a time for war, and if I have to fight a war, I intend to win it. It’s war for a month and a half so I can appreciate the value of 46 weeks of pursuing peace, love and joy. If this is a rationalization, so be it. Because if you’re wearing a surgeon’s mask just to go outside and milk the goats (the modern atmospheric equivalent of a suit of battle armor), you might be engaged in full-scale war. Accept it and win, is my motto. Eventually, even in the worst years, the pollen will spread, settle, and blow away in the spring winds.

I recognize and even appreciate that I pay a price for level jumps in awareness, and juniper is an honorable and formidable foe. We’re dependent each year both on our own reservoirs of inner resilience, and, much more crucially, whether it’s a wet or dry spring. Increasingly in the Climate Change Era, even non-self-identifying environmentalist old-timers say, we have dry years here in the Land of the Anasazi. Unprecedented dry year after unprecedented dry year, in fact, until we wash away in the second or third “Millennial” flood this decade. So with weather as the referee, it’s at least a fair fight.

Oh, sure, I take medicinal steps, starting in January (which is a month before the symptoms show once the first juniper pollen of the year hits the air, give or take a week or two). I learned the very first year of juniper sneak attack (on a horribly congested and nearly-blind river trip down the Class IV rapids of the Cataract Canyon) that the over-the-counter stuff doesn’t work for me – the Claritons and related concoctions with the fantastically lucid commercials. But I do find that dosing myself with a cocktail of the accepted naturopathic remedies actually has an effect: daily infusions of nettles, quercetin, and Vitamin C start to build up in my system and control the histamines. I do everything the herbalists say except reducing simple sugar in my diet (I’m too addicted, and this time of year is not the time for that cleanse). Then there’s the behavioral steps: twice daily netti potting, keeping the dogs (AKA JTMs — Juniper Transport Mechanisms) out of the bedroom, and showering before bed following the evening milking.

Springtime Desert Allergy suffering, if looked at property, becomes a way of life. By Valentine’s Day, every conversation is sprinkled with allergy talk, the way a sprained ankle has to be considered before scheduling a marathon. I called my sweetheart on a February 13 town run to see if we needed anything at the miraculously-open Valley Co-op. Before answering, she asked me how the juniper were treating me this day. I told her that I thought that allergies –- at the moment overwhelming –- were in the end a case of mind over matter.

“Plus cut out all the sugar,” she added.

“Who’s eating sugar?” I asked, setting down my 71% cacao chocolate bar on the dashboard. “And anyway, I’m drinking so much nettle tea that I’m sprouting thorns.”

Sucrose, my sweetheart felt, was the vehicle allowing the juniper pollen to hitchhike through security into my inner defenses despite my homeopathic herbal onslaught.

“So,” I said, trying to get back on-topic. “Do we need anything from the Co-op?”

“More chocolate!” she shouted into the phone, our sleeping son cackling in the hammock beside her. Joking but not. My sweetheart, a fellow addict, is a sugar enabler.

If this is true about sugar vis-à-vis juniper allergies, I have a Ray Charles-like road ahead of me, because I am as addicted to sweets as any junkie is to heroin. I’m high functioning, to be sure, but an addict nonetheless.

But you know those “I am not my mental illness” public service spots these days? Well, I am not my allergy.

Oh, who am I kidding? For a month and a half in bad years, I am.

“Don’t let me rub my eyes,” I demand of my sweetheart, as though it’s her responsibility. “It’s just what the juniper wants me to do.”

She obliges, but rightly points out that she can’t watch even my pretty-to-her face 24 hours a day. “I don’t think it’s what the juniper wants you to do,” she said. “How does it benefit it?”

“It weakens my resolve – it feels so good, but it’s so bad for me – it pushes the pollen in further. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

So I hope it’s clear now why I sent whoop echoes across the canyon today in celebration of the end of allergy season.

I’ve since been breathing exuberantly all afternoon and talking ceaselessly about it.

“Loving this respiration,” I heard myself say to my sweetheart as we made lunch.

I haven’t sneezed more than 7 times in one single fit all day. Breathing is fairly fundamental, after all, given our structural biology. Ah, respiration. So often taken for granted by mammals. But not by we who battle the mighty juniper pollen molecule.

* * * * *

My buddy KB asked me on a hike this afternoon how I’d “rate” this allergy season. This is a common question among juniper veterans, because it’s specific to individual soldiers and based on variables like body chemistry, well-timed miracle micro-climate rainfall, ability to flee the battlefield for periodic R&R, true parenthood exhaustion, actual effective medication and good inside anti-pollen procedure. In the same World War Two battle, for example, one infantryman might have moseyed through under good cover, while another could have been bogged down for hours by a machinegun nest.

So I told KB, “Partly how I answer that is a question of memory. I was nearly an allergy refugee at one point, fully willing to flee my home as a matter of survival. But that was weeks ago now. I hardly remember the suffering.”

I thought about the question some more as we hiked. “I think I’ve come to feel that this season,” I finally told KB while a red-tailed hawk dive-bombed a rodent nearby in the breezy ponderosa glen we were traversing, “Has helped me understand what gets some people so excited about ‘March Madness.’ It was a great battle. What can I say? The juniper put up a great fight. It was touch and go for a while there, for both sides, pretty much to the wire, really. To the buzzer, in basketball terms. And only Mother Nature decides if there’s to be OT. In the Final Four, it was my two nostrils against three million exploding juniper pollen molecules. But it’s over now, and Stage 2 seems like it was in a different life. It’s a kind feature of our brain’s evolution: this is how we transcend.”

“What was that last part?” KB asked. “Something about basketball?

He couldn’t hear me because I punctuated my explanation with a 5-sneeze legacy fit. “Yeup, I really got on top of it this year,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

It really is over, though, which I can tell because my dog has decided that as of tonight Indoor Allergy Procedure is over for the year. That is to say, she leaped up on me on the bed while my family and I slept.

I can’t believe I can even write that: I slept. For nearly five straight hours. And when I woke, neither my eyes nor my lips were glued together. Nor was my body devoid of moisture and totally exhausted.

What allergies? The memories are already so distant that I can joke about it as though reporting on someone else’s suffering. Living in the now – it really is one of DNA’s shrewdest and trickiest adaptations. Would it be better if I lived all year in allergy PTSD? Maybe it would help me start my nettle tea infusions earlier next year – by December. But I have calendars for that. Hands down, I’m grateful for forgetting. For the blessedly flawed human memory already allowing me to think I live a regular life not dominated by pollen. Still, I’m not totally amnesiac yet. Like overpriced members of a Yankee team reminding fans that they have failed to buy the Bronx Bombers into the playoffs, every legacy juniper explosion, every lingering sneeze that wakes me in the night, seems to be saying, “Wait till next year.” That scares me. Let’s get cracking with the forgetting, brain. I can’t wait until this Dispatch looks foreign to me.

* * * * *

In closing, I’m pleased to report that the Farewell, My Subaru has been translated into the world’s most commonly-spoken language. Carbon-neutral or bust, China! And please take the Wal-Mart disses lightly!

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