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

My childhood morality was partly formed by a recurring theme on the M*A*S*H television series, wherein the bumbling right-wing surgeons hassled the broad-minded liberal surgeons for fulfilling their Hippocratic Oaths and treating Communist wounded. I think of these bludgeoningly-operatic episodes every day here on the Funky Butte Ranch when I face a sort of All Creatures Great and Small scenario at the goats’ watering bucket.

In nearly any other situation on this wild life’s battlefield (I mean playground), I’d happily dispose of a conenosed beetle if not a hornet (in fact I’ve been procrastinating knocking out the entire rather gentle — two stings in four years — hornet’s nest dangling from the porch roof overhang of the Funky Butte Ranch house).

But when the Communist bug, regardless of its predilection for sucking my blood, is helpless and drowning through no fault of its own, I just feel I have to rescue it. It’s become a bit of an obsession: in a high desert ecosystem, I know that any time I even pass a water source during the day, any water source, there will be six-legged drowning victims to save. Inside those two goat corral five gallon buckets, specifically, I’ll always be sure to find at least a barely-macroscopic gnat struggling and gasping, and I find myself simply unable not to check.

Sometimes I arrive too late for a particular fly or beetle. When I do, I don’t succumb to guilt but I do conduct a brief “Rest In Peace, Hope You Had a Fine Fly’s Life” ceremony. I give the other nine thousand insect mourners in the vicinity an opportunity to buzz some final reflections about the departed, and go about my day. Until I pass the corral again twenty minutes later, my wheelbarrow full of wood chips or goat poop. I briefly argue to myself that I have checked recently enough, but the Good Samaritan in me doesn’t buy it –- invariably correctly.

The first thing I realize from this compulsive and hopeless ritual is what a daunting task Mother Teresa had. The insect population per square meter of the Funky Butte Ranch during Monsoon season is roughly that of the criminal population of the Washington, DC beltway during the drafting of Financial Reform legislation. The second thing I thus realize is the sheer diversity of insect life in the Funky Butte Ranch’s ecosystem: lately I find myself singing, to the tune of “Wonderful World,”

I see scarlet tanks
With neon hinds
Deadly intent
On their minds
And I think to myself
What a parasitic world

The insects, in fact, if you haven’t seen the memo, are taking over. Many of them couldn’t care less about dirty bombs or climate change. Short of complete pulverization of the planet, they’ll be fine. Better than fine, in fact.

And yet I find myself, when confronting them as helpless individual fellow Organic Beings, feeling compassion, even if five minutes earlier the same mini-jets mercilessly swarmed my ears and thighs while I was myself defenseless during the morning goat milking.

So this is my tender side, reflective of my Disarmament Through Negotiation hopefulness, of my baseline Choose Life impulses. Lest I give an incomplete picture, however, I should disclose that more typical of my feeling about parasitic insects who are not actively in the process of drowning is the way I found myself in near total support yesterday of my Sweetheart’s intentional solar frying of large number of scarab beetles she’d extracted from our sapling apple trees.

I had to consider them enemy combatants. The battle, and I hope for my family’s nutritive sake it proves a short, decisive one in our favor, started yesterday morning when from my Sweetheart’s body language at fifty yards’ distance, even with a baby slung to her hip, I could tell that some pest was afflicting our orchard.

I’d noticed some defoliation the previous day, despite the blessed Monsoon rains we’ve been relishing. Suspicious of what could be harming the orchard when nature was being so kind, I jotted a quick note to remind myself to check if I was perhaps over-watering from the drip system given the rains. But no, this next morning I could clearly see as I approached the orchard for our morning hike that my Sweetheart was picking madly at small objects on the leaves as though our very autumnal fruit intake depended on it.

In fact, there aren’t many things that could cause a member of my clan to decline to accompany the others on a hike. But when I got close I could read in my Sweetheart’s eyes that we were into some kind of entomological Code Red. Finally I saw the problem. Every inch of the tree was covered –- our putative apple-a-day was in danger. Worse, seemingly every bug was partnered up and mating. (“These guys move fast, and are promiscuous,” my commercial organic farming neighbor Margaret told me in response to a panicky email.)

I had the sinking feeling that no Good Bugs, not even ladybugs, could save this winter’s apple pies now -– our trees, after twenty-four hours of migratory assault by what turned out to be scarab beetles, were in terminal danger. So my Sweetheart generously stayed behind (OK, admittedly in the greening-by-the-hour Monsoon paradise of the Funky Butte Ranch), so she could save the trees that would give us fresh, delicious, New Mexico apples — to my taste buds the world’s finest.

The truth is, I could tell she wasn’t looking at it as a sacrifice: she was quite visibly as obsessed with destroying these insectoid invaders as I was to rescuing drowning ones twenty yards away in the goat corral. Her method was quite carbon-neutral: when my older son and I returned from the hike with the day’s thunderclouds closing in faster than time, we found a quart-sized salsa jar filled with beetles roasting in the sunniest spot in the orchard.

My Sweetheart normally leads the way when it comes to our policy of encouraging all good bugs; to the point of elevating the status of fly-eating ranch house spiders somewhat higher than Charlotte and slightly lower than cats in ancient Egypt (she roots actively for the arachnids and continually has to remind me not to tangle myself in the ever-expanding Web by the screen door). But by this point she was inside the Ranch house, nervously pounding beakers of iced red bush tea and pretty sure she’d done the right thing out in the orchard, since as things now stood it looked like we’d still enjoy our first apple harvest one of these years (not to mention the also-assaulted cherries, peaches, and plums), instead of an orchard full of decaying climate change reminders. Even with the successful defense, though, the beetles did more, if less permanent, damage in two days than Agent Orange.

The lessons embedded in the incident for me are threefold. The first is that Monsoon, that ecstatic lubricating time of year, allows everyone to thrive. Not just me, my family, and our close friends (one of whose youngest kid’s staff infection got better the morning after the rains started, rains which every day since have cooled off the world by an average of fifteen degrees).

Heck, everything in the desert is so perpetually ready to whet its whistle that if I move my dog’s water bowl a foot to the left on the porch, a wildflower’s tentacles will have found it by evening. I watch my poor canine clawing through a fresh jungle of four o’clocks and datura every morning. Gravity is no object: several miles up my canyon today, I saw mossy dangles of grass growing downward out of a rock (no soil to speak of) in what struck me as a particularly imaginative procedure for reaching a lingering creek-side pool.

Of course, upon reflection, why wouldn’t the dominant regional flora have adapted in such a way? I mean, I witness tadpoles transform into toads between hikes. And the eggs in some cases can wait years to hatch — and then pounce when conditions are right. Plus, I think my beard and fingernails grow faster this fertile time of year. Our axles are atmospherically well-maintained.

The second lesson in the Great Scarab Beetle Frontal Assault of ’10 is (insert sarcastic tone), “Oh, thank you so much, climate change, for demonstrating how viscerally you’ve even wormed your way (literally) into my sacred Monsoon.” Not for the first time I’m left wondering, why can’t bugs that, say, encourage apple tree growth be the ones benefiting from climate change?

The entire worldwide gaggle of tree beetles, in fact, might be the most visible evidence of the scope and damage of climate change thus far, alongside flooded Eskimo villages. From Alaska to Chihuahua, dry conditions are stressing trees and allowing beetles of various ilks to move into areas never before seen. Indeed, I saw them encroaching into (and killing entire hillsides) of spruce in formerly damp rainforests in the Last Frontier, and now the majestically-gorgeous ponderosa pines of my part of New Mexico are tinderbox fire dangers thanks to thimble-sized insects related to the ones that were going after my Funky Butte Ranch apples so rapaciously and with such fecundity. In fact, to get to Albuquerque from the Funky Butte Ranch, I have to cross a mountain pass that has entire brown stretches of departed ponderosa tragically waiting to burn. No wonder my Sweetheart wasn’t going to let that happen to our future jam pectin. That was why she was willing to send the morning (and miss a bliss-inducing hike) to hand-pick the little buggers off our young orchard.

The third, and related, lesson of the Beetle Battle for me, which is also an under-discussed reality of climate change, is how little we hominids can do in the face of the pending Age Of Insects. Oh, I took my pathetic steps in response the Scarab Party. I spent an hour yesterday afternoon spraying an organic Effective Microorganism mixture on the orchard leaves. This, of course, is the horticultural equivalent of the Placebo Effect. It’s primeval to spray. To medicate. It allows me to feel that I’m a factor, even in the face of hordes which outnumber me eight trillion to one. One need only to look at the Ten Plagues of the Exodus story to see that Too Many Bugs were a decisive reason why people first started praying.

Meanwhile, I know when I crunch that first Funky Butte Ranch Ginger Gold and those first nine dozen Mesabi cherries that I am going to thank my Sweetheart in as emphatic a manner as I can imagine for her hike sacrifice yesterday (never one for secrets, I did disclose that my son and I saw two baby peregrine falcons preparing to take their first flight lessons while in the wilderness, as their parents yelled and swooped threateningly at us). That’s how delicious New Mexico-grown fruit is.

I wish the Ranch’s trees, now two- and three-years-old, would start producing already, but I’m willing to be patient. No matter that my neighbors’ dense-with-fruit orchards drop more apples each September than I’m likely to eat in the next three years, I’ll remember, when I savor that initial, lusciously-sweet sensation, the pride I at this moment feel that the mother of my children spent a lovely Monsoon morning defending our fruit trees so viciously, as though Keeping the Doctor Away depended on it.

As for the rest of the Funky Butte Ranch garden, as usual by by mid-Monsoon in a family with a toddler and a newborn, it’s weedier than a reggae band’s tour bus glove compartment. (In fact, I believe that the main way to tell the difference between a ranch home with kids and one without is in allotted weeding time.) Yet at least the jungle, which comes primarily care of the alfalfa that emerges from the goat poop I dump on the garden and orchard as fertilizer, is fixing nitrogen, in addition to producing the stray tomato and ear of corn.

And yes, as I passed the goat corral this morning, I found myself still rescuing bugs, even if one of the victims was a scarab beetle, even if the needy insect’s politics were too far left or too far right for my taste. As I view things (thank you, Hawkeye Pierce), the battlefield and the medical tent represent two distinct philosophies, and the “good guys” who win wars should be the ones who show compassion to the wounded, any wounded. Indeed, I was immensely proud to skip down to the corral this morning and witness my toddler son deftly scooping a moth out of the goats’ southernmost water bucket. He was using the same long, gentle index finger sweep that I do. At what feels to me a pretty early age, he has the muscle motion and the heart motion down.

In closing, most of us recognize that some of the toughest neighbors to deal with, after the insect variety, are the human kind. In this latest clip on the Funky Butte Channel, you’ll see why, for the Ranch’s Entrance Sign, I chose a different phrasing than the conventional “No Trespassing” verbiage.

KINDER THAN YOUR AVERAGE “NO TRESPASSING” SIGN

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