RP four of five.

Of a Monday, I set out to the east again, to prep a landing spot for all the crap finally. I cleared branches from the space, and swept it. I signed poorly constructed paperwork. I phoned when I didn’t want to and all the things. I sweated out more than I drank in.

Some backstory. When we left the homestead, thinking it would sell, we left three strays behind. Properly neutered and all, left in the place they were from, but left, and it never felt good.

She made a lot of trips up just to dump food and water. Sometimes I went too, and patched up things at the house that hadn’t ever got done. About a year ago she decided that we should trap the one girl cat and socialize her. That’s Kali’s-Mama. She’s been living with me. I posted about it once or twice. She’s sleek now and learning to love. But for a long time after we snatched her, we saw no sign of the boys.

But this day, in my muck-sweat at the end, suddenly they were both there. The estimable Mr. Orange, quite the feral lad, bitching up a storm about how shitty the accommodations had been of late. And his mate Blossom, the Possum, a far shyer and sweeter sort of boy, ugly enough to earn his nickname, all white with a raccoon tail.

I called back to HQ and received pretty joyous instructions to feed them well, and I did it. Water too. A whole round two of pouring sweat.

By now it was three-thirty in the PM and I was wrecked. So I got the cheapest room and rehydrated and stayed up too late watching Showtime.

The best thing I saw was called the Horse Whisperer, with Robert Redford in the title role. There are a lot of good things about it, from the casting to the anti-happy ending, but the best is the contrast between life as it is lived in Manhattan and life as it is lived in the far reaches of Montana. Two entirely separate Americas, and good insights into the mechanics of why and how we choose between them, which has almost nothing to do with what we want or intend for ourselves.

This trip for me is about transitioning back to a dry and broken Montana, and away again from my brush with the military-industrial-educational complex of javelina pigs that makes its living by supporting the ethos of the place where the two towers fell.