RMR August 2011 Article - Dog Hair and Mule Sweat by Natalie Riehl

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Dog Hair & Mule Sweat

with Natalie Riehl

editor@rockymountainrider.com

August 2011 Issue

Toward the end of last summer, I received a gift which had been handmade by an avid RMR reader and writer. Cal Price, who has written a number of stories we ran in RMR under the pen-name Caprice, lives in Border, Wyoming , which is on the highway between Montpelier , ID , and Cokeville , WY . He crafted the not-so-lightweight gift and, at a family reunion in Idaho , asked a relative who lived in western Montana if she would deliver it to me.

He told me the stone replica was based on a larger original which had been in a street in the Old West. Yes, I do admit it took me a few minutes to figure it out… Its whimsical nature tickled me and I have placed it at the receiving end of my front walk.

Cal turned 85 this year and making large, stone monuments is more than a pastime or hobby for him. Recently he finished a monument which commemorates the Oregon Trail , and placed it with his tractor at the junction of highways 30 and 89 near his home.

He says that, “Every wagon on the Oregon Trail had to pass by this point.”

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When I first started writing this column in 1993, I had three dogs who weighed 55, 65 and 75 lbs. They were not short-haired animals. I frequently referred to them as “dog hair factories.” By 1996, I had acquired a fourth dog in the same weight range.

The old vacuum which I had purchased and used while attending college in Laramie in the late 1970s faithfully vacuumed — to the best of its ability — the dog hair which adorned the floors of my home. I picked off dog hair which had become tightly wound around the vacuum’s roller and belt.

I made plenty of jokes about dog hair in those days — back when I had a lot of energy to keep cleaning it up. I had a collection of lint rollers and “magic sponges” which stuck to and lifted dog hair off of clothes and furniture. I bought a vacuum attachment which works better off the vacuum than on it.

Now I’ve got one dog. She weighs twenty pounds, and my question these days is: “How can one little dog produce so much hair?”

I don’t really mind, though, because she’s got such a cute personality!

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