Dear Rabbit

 The rabbit dumped at the park vanished into the night of the big storm we had ten days ago.  Gone.

The next day, branches strewn everywhere from the high winds, but weather clear, I searched for him, that sleek satin black bunny with the white nose.

I've done the same thing almost every day since.  

I know the dog park people who come every night, to throw balls for their dogs, while I'm there, stare at me and talk among themselves.  I feel like a freak for caring sometimes, like an outcast, trudging the edges of the berry vines, searching for sign.

What's the loss of one house rabbit to a storm?

I saw no less than 20 free roaming dogs the day after the storm.   It's common at the park, as common and ignored as the signs that say Dogs on Leash only.

I call the park "the dump".  Why wouldn't I call it that.  He was the second rabbit in a year that I know of dumped there.  Fortunately I caught the other one the day he showed up. Lots of others probably die before being seen. How many cats will be dumped there this year, is what I think and I think how it wears on me, the sadness of that park.  And to think it goes on anywhere people think they can get away with it.

I remember when my neighbor died, how the lady across the street, locked his cats out of their own house, how cruel that was to do to them.  Don't worry, I took them in and found them homes, with no help from any of the neighbors who were only thinking what they could get of his stuff.  I wonder if its different elsewhere.  Or if its a culture here.  I know in places like Turkey they are often very kind to stray cats but in places like New Zealand they kill them all.

 I've kept up thus far getting the tame ones who are dumped out of there and into shelters and rescues who find them homes and even that first rabbit, who went to Heartland.  But the wild boys....who are there too long before I find them, they need a safe place, a new home, so I can say goodbye.  Even the two originals were once tame.  

I remember how TC waited by that tree for months after he was dumped.   Like the assholes would actually return for him.

The rabbit showed up while my car was in the shop and the KATA lady and her daughter tried to catch him, knowing there was just a short window for a rabbit there.  Then when my car was back, I too tried. But that storm, ten days back now.....the day before the night it hit was the last I saw the rabbit.  The KATA lady has tried to find him too, without result.

See ya over the rainbow, rabbit.  Yeah, I know those are just stupid words without reality backup.

I didn't have a throw net or I might have caught you, dear rabbit.  I used to have one but it fell apart after years of service.  A circular weighted perimeter four foot diameter throw net is now $100, if you can believe that.  So I ordered a fishing cast net, a fifth the cost, that comes with a leash.  It will need alteration.  The leash is nice, but meant to reel it in and close the net as its drug through the water with fish line, which would tangle a cat.   So I'll remove the leash and some of the weights attached to the perimeter and pad the rest of the weights, for safety and have a throw net again, at a fraction the cost of the ones sold for animal capture.

I don't know if you can actually cast fish legally in Oregon.  I got my first taste of it in Hawaii, that glorious trip I took, now almost two decades ago.  A woman I barely knew then had an extra ticket and I went with her, although I wasn't entirely sure she wasn't going to try to stick a bunch of pot in my luggage somehow.  She got some pot somehow once over there, however, and was driving high and I tried to get the keys from her.  She stopped the car in the middle of an intersection over there and told me to get my shit and get out.  She said if I tried to go to the cops, she'd turn it on me and I knew she could.  So I was on my own then but I didn't care.  I hiked out to this remote beach, dove down into lava tubes, ended up snorkeling alone, at a spot where the ocean met an underground river, when I saw two people waving frantically from the shore.  They were motioning me in and I could hear them yell "shark".  Tiger shark!   I was terrified.  I'd seen a shadow beneath me.  They yelled at me not to kick, to roll in with the surf, like a log.  So I did.  They told me it was dangerous to snorkel where fresh water met saltwater, that the sharks couldn't tell me from anything else and that there'd been 17 Tiger sharks tagged there the weekend before. I was just happy to be alive.  

They were  a father and son, natives to Hawaii, and they took me all over, in their jeep, to remote beaches where they cast a net into the surf for fish.  I helped them pick fish from the nets.  It's something like trapping.  You have to hide, not let the fish see you.  They had expensive polarized sunglasses, which is how they had seen that shark beneath me.  They could see, when the waves break, fish in the waves and then would cast their net.

I know you might be saying you went on a trip with someone you barely knew, who was into pot, and treated you like that, and I would retort I am socially blind, in many ways, and trusting and that even though I haven't seen that person in a long time, I have a soft spot for her because I got to go on the vacation of a life time and I'd never been anywhere before or since.  She wanted me to come along with her because of cats around a beach, she'd seen on another visit.  She wanted me to somehow catch them while there and find a way to get them fixed.  However, once there, we found they'd been fixed by a woman associated with a TNR group on the island.  It was to have been a working thing for me, but I was released from that, when we found the cats already fixed.

So we had our first mass vaccination clinic in our county.  300 people vaccinated, so calling it a mass vaccination event is rather deceptive.  No further vaccination clinics are scheduled in our county according to the county health department website.  The clinic was allegedly open to only those in the health care provider, first responder group, yet the paper article about it featured a couple of near 80 year olds from another town who got their shots despite not being in the allowed group and were bragging over it.  Line cutters.  We sure have a lot of those.

Under 5000 people in our county have so far been vaccinated.  I imagine those folk are health care providers, first responders and nursing home residents.   I can't see light at the end of the tunnel at this point.  

I guess the Biden administration was shocked to discover there was actually no vaccine rollout plan whatsoever in the Trump administration.