Otterpop found this friendly rock in the forest. I’m not sure what I think about people who decorate forest rocks with metallic silver sharpies and leave them laying around where just anybody could trip over them. It was in the rock area, so you know, all right.

Another case in point, things such as this ball. Banksy picked this up from behind a tree somewhere and walked approximately 2 miles with it in her mouth. She then dropped it into the spring box, dove into the spring box and climbed out, then became overcome with horror at having to jump back in the spring box to get it, and Otterpop was all, “Heh heh….heh.”

It didn’t seem right to leave it in there, as I have been grumbling about goddamn tennis balls don’t belong in the forest for approximately 1.9 miles, so I fished it out, personally with my long pokey fingers. Then I gave it to Otterpop who carried it approximately .5 of a mile, to where the rocks were, and then last I saw Banksy dropped it in a blairwitch pile and it was never seen again.

Usually we don’t see nobody in the forest. This is how I like it and how I like to set up my days to be optimally fantastic and if I do see somebody it’s possible that we will all fade into the background to be unseen if we did the seeing first. Which is a little tricky in a drought forest that’s bereft of almost all usual foliage except for abundantly healthful poison oak everywhere on the floor.

We did run into a guy a week or so ago who was looking for a specific tree. He was in the completely wrong quadrant and when I tried to start giving him directions to this specific tree, which is a tree of quiet notoriety of which nobody these days knows how to find. By chance he has run into me who knows where all the trees are, and I totally know this particular one, it’s easy. It was also about a 2.5 mile walk from where he ran into us, and after a few minutes of me giving directions best followed by recognizing what the trees look like where paths wind in and out of each other like maze snakes, he has realized he has run into a crazy witch dog pack lady of the forest and he’s gonna turn around because now he is so lost it’s not even funny.

Well, funny ha ha to me. But I didn’t laugh out loud. He decided to follow me out, rather than risk further lostness. He was young and skinny and had bad skin and I figured I could take him if it came to that. I told him one of my dogs bites, who was Otterpop and who I attached to me on a short little leash.

To look more menancing. Or whatever.

He asked me various questions as he tried to keep up with me, fast forest walking to the end of my walk which was at the edge of the forest where he’d be able to get unlost. I found that many of my answers did have a witchlike cackle and something like, “Well, back in the early eighties…” attached to them.

Which creeped me out even more than dragging out a poor lost little forest guy.

When he figured out where he was, he flashed me a peace sign, like they used to do in the ’60’s and he was gone. Off to find his tree. Maybe. Or maybe not.