The Dawgs of Narcoossee

Rummel Road connects Greater Narcoossee with St. Cloud, and this was the way we found our home for the next nine years- in three different dwellings in St. Cloud. When we first moved there, at the end of March, 1987, we rented half a house on Tennessee Avenue. Carmen was working at Land Title and Survey in downtown St. Cloud. I found a job at Raintree Forest Nursery at two locations in...Narcoossee. This was where I learned that Narcoosians, when they go into town, go to St. Cloud.

I began life there as a bicyclist, riding an old beater one-speed Schwinn with a kickstand that wouldn't stay up, so it went "clink...clink...clink" all the way there and back. I passed a house on Rummel Road every day, with two big doberman pinschers in the fenced yard. They heard me coming for a mile, "clink...clink...clink" and waited at the west corner. As I approached, they began snarling and barking, following me as I continued along the fence, to the east corner, where they snarled and barked until I was out of range. Then one day I approached, and the dogs weren't out there. I called out, "Hey, Dobies! Dobie Dobie Dobies." They came running from the back of the house, snarling and barking, following me along the fence. Then I looked ahead. The front gate was open. My blood ran cold. Oh, shit, what am I gonna do now? There was nothing I could do but fight them off as best I could. The dogs were running down the fence. They came to the open gate and stopped, obviously puzzled by this new development. Then they started up again, snarling and barking, running along the inside of the fence to the end. Whew!

Going to Nursery Number One, on John Geip's property, was much more of a trip. I was glad to buy a motorcycle in June for that trip down Jones Road to the nursery. At one point, the dirt road was a deep pit of sand as wide as the road and about ten feet across. In the morning it was soft sand. In the afternoon, after the rain, it was mud. Either way it was treacherous. So there was this big German shepherd that lived there. He was the troll of the sand pit. He heard my motorcycle coming and waited for me to hit the sand and get bogged down and struggle through it. He'd snarl and bark and dance around me and nip at me. Until the day he was dancing around and mis-timed it so that the front tire hit him. He yelped and ran home and I never saw him again.

John had a German shepherd, too- a nice one. I'd say that she followed him wherever he went, but that would be grossly inacurate. She ran about twenty feet ahead of him as he walked around the property. This was handy for us. When we saw the dog, we had about ten seconds to stop whatever we were doing and get to work.

The greatest adventure I had at Raintree was the time I was building platforms for plants, with wood framing and wire fencing on top to hold the plants and allow drainage. John told me to get somebody to help me carry the big-ass roll of fencing in to where the frames were set up on concrete blocks inside a greenhouse skeleton (which would be covered with plastic sheeting November through April) but I was even stupider then than I am now. I carried it by myself. Well, I lost control of it and it crashed in the corner where all of the irrigation pipes were clustered. I broke two of the pipes and the shut-off valve. It was approaching time to go pick up Brandon at Day Camp. So I scrambled around for some parts, fixed what I could, and told the boss lady that I would finish it early early in the morning. The next day I showed up two hours early, found the parts I needed among the steaming heap of PVC irrigation parts, dug down to the deepest breaks, and began cutting and cementing. I filled the hole pretty, and tried to remember which way the valve had been set- on or off. I couldn't remember. I figured I'd ask Boss Lady when she came in. Meanwhile, I began rolling out wire onto the frames and cutting the lengths. John came along. He nodded approvingly at what I was doing, and went straight to the main water controls by the office. In a moment he was standing by the house I was working in. "I can't get the water to come on." he said, scratching his head. I went straight to my new valve and turned it on. The waterworks were working again! I got a nice big "Atta boy" for that one, and another big "Whew!"