The Elephant Graveyard

New cupboard that holds our printer and iPod music system at the front of our rig.

I've been working on a motor home project to improve the way the front interior of our motor home works. We decided to mount our TV on the side wall of the rig and that left a big hole at the front. Solution: Let's build a bookcase-cupboard up there.

I found an old desk at an auction that I purchased for $3. It provided me with makings of a nice wood-grained interior bookcase after I sawed it down to size. I was not so lucky with the finding a solution with the doors. I got some help from a carpenter camper who had access to his father-in-law's table saw. But my plywood doors looked cheap and plain.

When we moved up the road 70 miles, however, I went onto the Internet and found an RV salvage place was nearby. We drove over there and the greaseball guy behind the counter said he charged $2 per person to go into the yard to look for stuff. I said I would go on my own and he relented and allowed Jo to accompany me at no extra charge. We wandered through this unbelievable elephant graveyard of motor homes. Many of them were burned out (a sobering sight). Some were old and completely gutted. The transmissions, storage tanks, windshields, skylights and other parts had been stripped, leaving the carcass bare. But we came upon one with cabinets still intact.

We carried along a tape measure since there was little wiggle room for the size of the doors. Two doors met our requirements within a quarter inch. Now we had to find a screwdriver to allow us to remove them from the rig. Jo found a Philips head screwdriver lying in the debris and we knew it was our lucky day. We brought them back to the shop and haggled the price down with Mr. Greaseball.

When we got back home, they fit the bill perfectly. A little coating of Liquid Gold brought the wood back to life and we now are in business with a nicely enclosed front area for our books, the computer printer and our iPod music system.

The Bird Whisperer

Great Horned Owl, perched in Wauchula, FL, at sunset, with the moon rising full.

The park ranger knelt on the sand, under the trees in the darkness. She turned on a tape recorder and the click-click-click and then a screech cried out into the woods. There was silence. She played it again. Still silence. Played it one more time and we heard a response call from the woods around us. In another minute, three Eastern Screech Owls swooped among the trees over our heads. Now they answered almost immediately when the tape cried out.

Ranger Stephanie was beside herself with delight over the success of her expedition. She had invited the campers in Little Manatee River State Park to come with her to “Call out the owls” – as she called it. Before we wandered in the woods, the ranger showed a slide presentation about the owls that lived in Florida. She talked about the Great Horned Owl, the biggest predator in the park. She said she would not try to call him out that evening. If she did, no other owl would come for the Great Horned Owl will kill an Eastern Screech Owl.

Late last year, while Jo and I were living in Wauchula, in the center of the state, we had three Great Horned Owls in our resort. I’d even, in a great stroke of luck, been able to photograph one as he sat on a telephone pole with a full moon rising behind his body. The setting sun cast him in a golden light with this enormous disk of the moon rising in the east.

Ranger Stephanie had arranged a visit from an animal rescue operator from Bradenton Beach. He brought out the Eastern Screech Owl, tiny, along with the Great Horned Owl and then he produced the Barn Owl, with its flat, heart-shaped face.  He explained their range and what they are likely to eat. The Great Horned Owl is powerful enough to pick up a cat and carry it off for dinner, he said. The Screech is a little thing. He demonstrated how the Barn Owl uses its flat face as a dish. He has ears, one higher than the other, that are so sensitive that he can hunt prey even when he cannot see the prey. He told us this had been demonstrated by blind-folding a Barn Owl. He still was able to locate and kill his food.

Jo and I were so intrigued by this mini-adventure that, the next night, as dusk drew close to us at our campground site, I brought out our iPad, with its Audubon book about the birds. The beauty of the electronic version of the book is that you can click on a bird’s sound. I clicked on the Eastern Screech Owl and its chatter spread out across the area.  After three plays, I was attacked by a Red Cardinal that swooped down on me, angry about the sound it was hearing. He (for he was flaming crimson) sat on the roof of our motor home and, when I played the owl’s voice again, it sent him into another swooping frenzy.

I switched over to the voice of the Red Cardinal and that brought a female Cardinal out of the woods to perch in a nearby branch and survey the marketplace. Now the male Cardinal was in a bit of a pickle. He had competition that he couldn’t actually see. So he returned to the branch, near the female, to chatter with her about not bothering with the unknown, unseen, competition.

We’ve tried this since then, and we always seem to be able to call out the birds in the evening. Now I’ve decided to call myself the Bird Whisperer!

And Now, We Begin in Print

So many folks wrote me kind words after I alerted them to the fact that my first book, Now, We Begin, was available as an eBook. After the congratulations, many said they would like to read the book as a printed version. Well, friends, your wish is my command!

 I went back to the drawing board, for a printed version is a completely different kettle of fish.

Both ePublishing and Print Publishing have their up and downsides. eBooks require you to become a whiz at formatting and knowing all about hyperlinks and such stuff. Print publishing requires you to design the book in a completely different way. You need to become an expert at software like InDesign. All of it is a brain stretcher for old geezers.

But I set about learning (or re-learning, really) how to create a physical book that could be printed on paper with ink. That task came to fruition with the New Year!

After going through a series of frustrating rejections of my file from my online publisher because my design did not fit the parameters that I'd set up, I figured my way through the maze and was rewarded with an email from CreateSpace (my publisher) telling me I'd jumped over all the hurdles and my book now was up and available for sale at

https://www.createspace.com/3728363

In another 5-10 days, the book will appear on Amazon.com. Then, it spreads to Amazon in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and some other countries. The printed book is different in many ways from the eBook. The cover, for one thing, had to be changed because the picture of me perched on a sand dune in the Namib desert was simply too low a resolution for print purposes.

So I rummaged through my thousands of pictures, looking for something that would permit high resolution printing. That took me all the way to my favorite country in all the world: Bhutan. In addition, I was able to design many more pictures into the body of the book. Thanks for all the feedback - and for all the sales. It makes my day...and, maybe, my year.