We currently have three dogs and six cats - all strays that were found half-starved in the orchard and vineyard, most likely left there by aliens. (Where is PETA when one really needs it?) My wife saved one of our present cats after it was thrown out into the nectarine orchard; its siblings were quickly eaten by coyotes. After $200 of veterinarian care for shots, congestive heart failure and pneumonia, the poor creature is not only at home with the other adopted strays in our yard, but almost fat. Years earlier I nearly caught one woman who left a box of kittens - three dead, the other two hours away from it - by the mailbox. And speaking of this rural mailbox that I suppose has been standing by the side of our road for nearly a century, we no longer put our outgoing mad in it - having learned that the red flag is simply an invitation for someone to steal the envelopes before the postal carrier arrives. Sadly we are giving thought to ceasing rural postal service altogether, inasmuch as thieves often hit the mail as soon as it is delivered. They take parcels even without monetary value - I have had two entire book manuscripts disappear yards from our front door, including an edited draft of this book!
All the endangered fauna on our farm - red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, kit foxes - have at one time or another been shot, their carcasses left to rot as food for the coyotes, those ubiquitous survivors which intruders seem to regard almost as kin and so never shoot. On my nightly walks around our farm, I politely ask Mexican trespassers not to drink and leave their bottles on the alleyway, not to shoot their 22s at quail, turtles, owls and ducks, and not to leave their refuse in the orchards. It is sickening to see the remains of a barn owl or a Cooper's hawk rotting on the alleyway, machine-gunned for target practice. But increasingly, keeping illegal aliens and Mexican gang members off the property is a hopeless task; in the banter that follows my requests, some trespassers seem piqued that anyone in California should dare to insist on the archaic notion of property rights. One especially smart teenager told me in broken English, "Hey, it's our land anyway - not yours."
My strangest find one morning was a whole trailer in front of our house - not a two-wheeler, but an enormous old cotton model of 1950s vintage with no license plate or identification. Maybe it had once served as a makeshift neighborhood dumpster; maybe five or six families had used it for their own solid waste disposal. In any case, three or four tons of trash - furniture, garbage, wood, tree limbs, clothes, Mexican newspapers and magazines - had been collecting in it for perhaps a year. The tires were nearly rotten; one was almost flat. How it was towed there in the middle of the night remains a mystery. The monstrosity was impossible to remove. Garbage was stacked in it ten feet high. Finally, after three weeks, the county came out with a dump trunk and skip-loader and piecemeal hauled the rotting carcass away.
I couldn't help but speculate about the mentality behind the trailer. Apparently, after it reached critical mass, some people finally realized that such a stinking, noxious mess was unpleasant in their own environs - and so they decided simply to tow it out to the premises of a gringo farmer who would probably take care of it.
Three hundred yards away from our home, at the road intersection, there is a memorial to a fatal drunk-driving accident. A white cross, dry flowers and a small shrine - the Greeks call them iconostases - all commemorate the life of an alien who ran the stop sign and broadsided a truck. In fact, if one looks for such little shrines, they are as commonplace now in rural California as they are on the roads of Mexico, wherever there is a blind intersection of two rural roads. Thousands of aliens who rarely drove an automobile in Mexico are now the inheritors of America's cast-off behemoths - smoky SUVs with 200,000 miles, club-cab trucks with bad transmissions, old Rivieras that get ten miles to the gallon, or minivans with bald tires and no seat belts. Forget, as environmentalists have, about the matrix of problems with smog control, gas mileage, licensing, registration and insurance - all the protocols that cost an environmentally conscious Californian thousands of dollars each year - and simply consider that our least trained drivers are now behind the wheels of our most lethal automobiles.
Frequently right next to this impromptu immaculate holy place is a sofa, rotting and full of vermin. It would seem that if one alien can find the time and the means to erect a neat white cross at the side of a vineyard and from time to time refurbish the memorial with hand-lettered cards in Spanish, surely another can forgo dumping a sofa on the consecrated roadside. And if the keeper of the deceased's memory periodically brings candles and fresh flowers to grace the site of his lost one's death, why does he not at least remove the abandoned sofa that mars the sanctity of his memorial?
There are now calls to supply illegal aliens with California driver's licenses - a last-ditch response to the growing number of immigrants who do not always drive well and rarely do so under legal conditions, but are nevertheless on our freeways in enormous clunkers that sometimes engage in an ethnic version of demolition derby. The problem with such a statute is not its
