The Camel Loop

There’s an old saying about a camel and the eye of a needle. It comes from either the Bible or Shakespeare; I get those two confused. The saying goes something like this: If you are peering through the eye of a needle and you see a camel, you must be in the exurbs of La Grange.

Last Friday was the first time I’d seen a camel anywhere other than a zoo. We were walking around the neighborhood of my brother-in-law Jens and his girlfriend, Popcorn. They live about two-and-a-half hours’ drive inland, kinda near Don Pedro Reservoir and kinda near La Grange, in the foothills of the Sierras. They moved to that area about two years ago after their dog, Hazelnut, was driven nearly bonkers by the noise from gunshots, fireworks and blue angels in San Francisco.

It’s different there in the exurbs of La Grange (rhymes with Orange), the outskirts of the gold country, named for the golden (marketing for dried up) grass and the Miner Forty-Niners (some of whom were Ejners) from the California gold rush of the mid eighteen hundreds. Grocery shopping for Jens and Popcorn means schlepping a couple of coolers to the nearest large city, Modesto, every couple of weeks or so.

Sidebar: Modesto is Spanish for modest, although their city motto, as expressed by a banner over downtown, seems to be Water Wealth Contentment Health, which rhymes

conveniently but sure doesn’t describe Modesto. End of modest sidebar.

Living in the exurbs of La Grange means hauling your own garbage to the dump. It also means that one of your neighbors has a camel.

Friday morning Jens said, Do you want to take the dogs on the Horse Loop or the Camel Loop?

Jens and Popcorn name their walks. At home I’ve been known to say, I’m walking The Dog. Because capital letters and lower case letters are homonyms, that announcement could be construed to mean I’m taking my dog, Percy, on a sprightly jaunt. But really it means that I’m hiking to and around Water Dog Park while Percy snoozes contentedly on the sofa. He’s the only dog I know who hides when anyone says, Wanna go for a walk? If you touch the leash, he gets heart palpitations.

But Percy was a new dog at Jens’ and Popcorn's house. After twelve years of doggie agoraphobia and couch-focused living, Percy discovered the Joy of Outside. He willingly followed Hazelnut past the sliding glass door to the patio, trotted through the scrubby chaparral and stood rapt, surveying the panoramic view of the valley below with joy-filled dim-sighted eyes. Jens and Popcorn thought he was a normal dog, while Beau and I couldn’t believe our senses: Percy was a new dog, a regular dog, a dog who likes the outdoors.

So Friday morning when Jens asked where we wanted to walk, Percy exclaimed, The Camel Loop! The Camel Loop! He communicated this telepathically behind closed eyelids, curled up into a black oval of fur on the orange leather couch. He’d never seen a camel. Didn’t even know what a camel was. When you’re a twelve-year-old dog, it’s high time to see a camel, if ever you’re going to see one.

Carpe camelum, my friend Lee would say. If she had a chance to see a camel in someone’s yard.

We hooked the leashes to Percy’s and Hazelnut’s collars. Jens, Beau and I set off with the dogs on the Camel Loop, while Popcorn stayed behind, waiting futilely for a new orange leather couch that was supposed to be delivered, replacing the old orange leather couch.

The three humans and two dogs bopped down a few streets, across a meadow sprinkled with yellow wildflowers, white wildflowers and a few purple wildflowers. Balance-beamed along a grassy cliff at the top of a hill, then back onto the solid ground of the paved streets.

A mile or so later, behold! And lo! A two-humped dromedary. A calm monochrome-brown Percheron of a camel, munching steadily and observing us serenely from behind a wire fence, chewing in that largo side-to-side rhythm, dried grass twitching from both sides of its fleshy lips.

Camel table manners allow food to extend beyond the lips—quite far, actually. I checked.

I can do that, too, now that I’m retired. Sometimes Beau and I declare Camel Rules if it’s just the two of us eating a salad.

The camel seemed to want nothing more than to stand tall, chew, chew, chew some more, and wait for something interesting to pass by on the street. Seeing a camel when you’re out walking your dog in the neighborhood is mighty interesting. Dunno what the camel would find mighty interesting. I don’t think us three upper-middle-aged gray-white folk with two elderly gray-black doggies offered much.

But my goodness! A camel, for heaven’s sake, sharing a plot of arid land with five tremendously ordinary cows and two ho-hum horses. You don’t see that every day.

Got me to thinking. The Belmont, California (my fair city) ordinances are mute on the subject of keeping camels in your yard. Ditto for alpacas, though llamas are given a sentence or two. I was expecting to see a catch-all paragraph at the end saying, If you have an animal not on this list, please come to the city council meeting Tuesday evening at seven, prepared to discuss.

There is one animal that gets a full paragraph in the Belmont city ordinances: the pygmy goat. While regular goats are tossed in with dogs, cats, rabbits, llamas and horses, pygmy goats seem to have outsized stature in the statutes.

If your first three Wordle guesses use the five ordinary vowels and turn up gray (or grey in the UK version), consider trying a five-letter word that uses only y vowels. Consider pygmy.

Our neighbor to the north, San Mateo, is a much bigger city with much bigger ordinances. While they neglect to pass judgement on pygmy goats, San Mateo city explicitly allows camels. You have to get a permit for a camel. The application asks you to state your name, address, and the reason for your camel.

Which gets to the real question, doesn’t it?

Jens and Popcorn haven’t been able to ferret out the reason for their neighborhood camel. They’ve seen the human owner of the property, but when they have tried to engage him in conversation, he turns away. That leaves us to wonder:

Milk? But why milk a giant hoofed scary spitting animal when you could milk a happy smelly goat? Or a dozen cute ‘lil pygmy goats? Or a couple of your cows?

Cheese? See milk.

Heck, is it even a female camel? I didn’t think to check. And even if it is female, wouldn’t she need to have recently given birth to make milk? Who gets her pregnant, with no other camels around? Does Amazon carry Prime camel-preggifier juice, same-day shipped in dry ice?

Not milk or milk products then. Maybe the camel’s human originally planned to make money by selling tickets to see the camel, but then realized that he can’t stand talking to people.

Camel hair for blankets, collected after they shed in the Spring? Tiny bit far-fetched, although I did meet a woman in San Diego who spun dog-hair and knitted it into scarves.

Bernese Mountain, in case you were wondering.

Or maybe it’s a rescue camel, saved from one of those terrible private zoos in Florida that end up on shows like that inexplicably popular Camel King.

I have only one more idea: The camel was a passive-aggressive wedding gift. The accompanying card would have read, You had camel-hair blanket on your list! I thought I’d give you something even better! A bale of hay and a bag of Purina Camel Chow are on the way!

Please leave your theories, hare-brained or otherwise, in the comment section, below.

[Photo creds: The Interwebs. I intend to post a real photo, but the only ones we have are trapped in Beau’s fancy camera. You see, he normally exports his photos to his laptop, but his laptop was accidentally drowned by an unfortunate incident involving a Christmas cactus and a full cup of tea.]