Escape to Frog Land: Geese in a Pond, Cattle Grazing in a Field and Deer Behind a Tree

July 2024. Morning. I’d been watching the army of construction workers wearing grimy t-shirts, faded jeans, and well-worn tennis shoes for going on a year buzz and build a multi-million-dollar edifice that wasn’t close to being completed.

I’d been walking past this Monster Mansion every day on the way to the dog park where I’d let  my two dogs, Maddie and Annie run free. On the way I got to be good at dodging a line-up of ear-splitting concrete mixers and commercial rigs unloading lumber not to mention the lineup of beat-up cars that belonged to the workers.

I’d given up grousing about the time and dexterity it took to bypass this jumbled construction mess with two dogs, but one day after I’d successfully managed the dodge a thought occurred to me that I shared with my dogs.

“Who the hell deserves to live in a house that will take two or three years to build, cover one acre and will be eight-thousand square feet?” I said to my rapt audience. “What used to be a stirring view over lemon and orange orchards all the way to the Topa Topa mountains has been transformed into two golf courses, innumerable oversized houses now blocked by an eight thousand square foot stucco monstrosity capped by a tile roof. It’s insane.”

Annie and Maddie looked at me in what I assumed was complete agreement. Maybe they remembered a time when there were no cement mixers or delivery trucks. There was only a thriving orange grove, a small wood-frame house and the soft hills of Camarillo as a backdrop.

I took a last look at the House of Horrors and thought about how much I treasured the serenity and quiet beauty of our mountain house/refuge in the Sierra Nevada: Deer Trail.

I remembered the last time Jim and I spent three weeks at Deer Trail – a house with the look and feel of a getaway lodge built on a hillside with a commanding view of the Feather River. Our evening ritual is a glass of wine on the deck while we listen to the whoosh-whoosh of the river and (if we’re lucky) the clank-clank sound of the Union Pacific freight train rolling past.

I trade my tennis racket and walk past the Monster Mansion for hiking boots and an evening at the Cowboy Poetry Show.

A night out in Camarillo might be dinner at one of forty or fifty restaurants – all featuring different menus for different tastes – but none with the country ambiance and footloose feel of the Grizzly Café.

Every morning in Camarillo when I open the door to our backyard aviary and experience the chirp-chirp of one hundred Zebra Finches hungry for seed and millet, it’s a symphony that gives me goose bumps.

Every morning in Deer Trail when I put peanuts out on the guardrail for a tree full of sassy Blue Jays I smile when I pick up the peanut shells admiring their brilliant blue feathers and top notch.

When I hear the deep-throated croak of a frog in the Millpond Pond, watch a flock of geese floating in the river, watch a herd of cattle grazing in open pastureland and marvel when a doe and I exchange a stare long enough for me to catch it on my camera – I’m where I should be.