Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...

I love my parents. While I once considered them insane because they live in a non-traditional sense, I now appreciate them for their uniqueness, simplicity and happiness.

You see, about 15 years ago my parents, dad a credit card processing machine salesman and mom a career seamstress/designer, decided that they wanted to move away from society and become ranchers. Of course, neither had any experience with any animal larger than our doberman, Bruiser, and we had always lived in trailer parks, apartments and condominiums. My brother, a closet hemp farmer, displayed the only green thumb in the family. Nonetheless, after my brother and I left the nest, my parents tapped into their life savings and bought a mini-ranch - seven acres of prime southern California real estate, complete with riding arena, two barns, and access to endless riding trails.

They started their ranch with a couple of used up horses, two fat black labs and a leftover pregnant barn cat. Soon enough they added a local llama with a pinchant for spitting at blondes (i.e. everyone in my family). The next year, when they read in the paper that the Christmas tree farm with the little train kids could ride and the live reindeer had been bought by the state and the state intended to euthanize the deer, my mother decided to begin the Great Deer Campaign of 1998. Turns out the deer were some sort of Slavakian fallow deer and no one in the great State of California had a permit to keep them so by law they must be slaughtered. Upset at this great injustice my parents devised a plan to save the deer. Under cover of darkness my parents took their horse trailer to the tree farm and deernapped the herd on the eve of their demise. The USDA, in a rare moment of clarity, decided my parents must be insane and granted them a permit to keep the deer. The permit, conveniently enough, also allowed my insane creators to obtain all sorts of "exotic" animals.

At the time I just brushed it off as a late-life crisis that would soon pass and at least provide interesting stories in the meantime. Two years later, they sold the seven acres and bought 40 out in the middle of nowhere. They said they needed more room but I feared it was more when my mother was quoted as saying, "we don't like to go out among the people". After the comment, numerous teleconferences with my brother and aunts and uncles were held, intervention was discussed, but in the end we all decided it was okay as long as they were happy.

It was only this weekend, when I went to visit them at their new 80 acre spread that I realized these two great people had reinvented themselves into exactly what they always dreamed they could be.

As I drove up the dirt path leading to their trailer I saw my father, who is missing parts of both feet due to diabetes, chugging along on his tractor, with the sheep dogs running alongside and a trailer full of hay in tow, making his rounds tossing flakes to camels, zebra, horses, sheep, alpacas, llamas, reindeer, goats, donkeys, a variety of miniature creatures, and, of course, the herd of fallow deer that started it all. As I pulled in behind the house my mother approached my truck, her hair was blowing in the wind, donning faded blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and scuffed boots. In her hand she carried some day-old rolls from the local bakery as a young mule deer and three pot-bellied pigs followed her. As she hugged me when I got out of the car the animals enveloped us in an attempt to grab a roll or two and we both just laughed. Then the goats started laughing with us which caused the donkeys to chortle and the sheep to baa. It was a chorus of chaos in the animal kingdom unlike any symphony I've ever heard.

Later, after dinner as we sat watching the sun set behind the mountains, not a power line, road, or other sign of mankind in sight, I glanced over at my parents sitting on the sofa, a small pig in my father's lap, my mother brushing her persian cat, and I realized that they had no reason to go out among the people.