Hairdressing hydrologists, digger dogs, and shrunken pods...just another day at The Compound

Good morning everybody! It’s Tuesday…I’m so happy to be here…no, really…I am.

Let’s see, where to start? Okay, well, it’s 4:45AM right now. I woke at 3:45AM to the sound of something going on out front here at The Compound. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing at first and lay there wondering what could possibly be going on.

I could hear music, I thought, just strains of tunes. There was a loud metallic clanking. And, then, outbursts of streams of profanity, the likes of which I have not before heard.

That was followed by conversation, sort of. I could only barely make out one side of the convo. That voice, I recognized. It was Cousin Fred.

I got up to go see what was going on. The mutts were all up in the front window peering into the darkness. They growled and whined willing me to let them loose, but I couldn’t do that.

I stepped out onto the front porch, fighting with the mutts to keep them inside. Savages.

From the far end of the porch I heard the raspy laugh of the Wife and saw that she was seated there, the ember glow of her unfiltered Pall-Mall illuminating her face slightly.

When I asked why she was up, she pointed toward the scene in the north pasture saying, “Who the hell can sleep with that racket going on?”

I turned my attention to the north pasture just as I heard a female voice call out, “Dig baby, dig!”

Gigi is back!

That was followed by Cousin Fred’s voice saying, “I’m digging baby, Ima digging!”

I couldn’t see Cousin Fred anywhere. Gigi’s Lexus, with its lights on, was turned in the direction of what was Lake Mountebank last year following the extraordinary spring/early summer rains we received. The radio was blasting the Outlaw Country channel on Sirius…I could hear Mojo Nixon doing a PSA for something. Gigi was lounging on the hood of the Lexus, sipping wine from a glass.

It was freakin’ surreal, I’m telling you!

As I neared the scene, I could hear Cousin Fred grunting, but still couldn’t see him.

Gigi looked at me, took another sip of wine and said, “He’s my digger dog, you know!” She laughed and emptied her glass.

And to think, I moved back here for the tranquility, well, that and the chicken fried steak.

That’s when I saw small puffs of something. I soon realized it was dirt. Shovelfuls of dirt flying up from the ground. THAT’s when I realized that Cousin Fred was in a deep hole that he was still digging.

There was an extension ladder at the edge of the hole, the margins of which I could now make out in gloom of darkness.

I walked cautiously toward the edge and peered in. Cousin Fred was naked in the hole, filthy and covered in sweat. He had a bandana wrapped around his forehead, presumably to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He had a kerosene lantern in the hole with him.

The kerosene lantern was what disturbed me the most. I noticed that he had dug deep enough that he was past a natural gas pipeline that crosses the property here. The pipeline had been abandoned years before, but still…

The extension ladder had been extended. My guess was that he was about 15 feet down. I told him to come up out of there. He grudgingly complied.

Gigi was drunk on her ass saying, “Oh, don’t stop my digger dog. He’s headed to China!”

She began laughing hysterically and rolled off the hood of the Lexus and onto the ground.

As Cousin Fred emerged from his diggings, I could hear the Wife cackling up on the front porch at the sight of the naked digger. I turned to see the glow of her Pall-Mall.

I said to him, “What the hell are you doing?!”

He responded, “Well, Cousin, it’s like this. Gigi showed up late last night. Got dropped here by a big ass limo. Imagine that? So, I told her I was going to have to work today to uncover at least one of your Brother-in-Law’s fishing boats here. That led to a whole discussion of Lake Mountebank and the fun we had last summer. Gigi pointed out that this place must be the Bermuda Triangle of the southern plains. She said we should try to develop it.”

I looked down the hole again, and responded with, “Huh?”

Cousin Fred went on to say that her idea was dig down to create an artesian well that would fill Lake Mountebank forever. I quickly pointed out that it didn’t work that way. First of all, you have to have a specific ground formation and a cooperative aquifer to have an artesian well.

That’s when he tells me that Gigi is something of an amateur hydrologist and said that the spot where Lake Mountebank was located with its natural bowl shape was exactly the kind of formation that could create pressure on the aquifer and form an artesian well.

Great, now we have a hairdressing hydrologist on The Compound? Can life get any weirder?

I looked down the dry hole again and then mentioned to Cousin Fred that first of all, the spot where he was digging - the water table is 100-200 feet down. I then pointed out, though it was difficult to see in the pre-dawn gloom that the “natural” bowl shape was because the Great Western Cattle Trail came through here. That shape came from hundreds of thousands of longhorns passing through here back in the day.

I looked over to see Gigi trying to raise herself on the Lexus’s fender. She collapsed back to the ground. The Wife, in the meantime, was howling with laughter at the sight of Cousin Fred’s somewhat shrunken pod. She kept shrieking about an overly microwaved wiener.

At that point, Cousin Fred removed the bandana from around his head to cover himself.

I told Cousin Fred to collect Gigi and get to bed. We’d discuss the artesian well idea again later.

Hmmmmm…artesian well. It has some possibilities.

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