Last Chance Llama Ranch (5 page)

A
s you'll have seen, my faithful readers, your favorite travel series is sporting a new look as of today. Note the bold header, the change of title—my dashing new photo.

“Why the change?” you may be asking.

Well, the answer is, it's time to spice things up. After a year of leading you through once-in-a-lifetime river cruises, toting your lovely selves in my metaphorical back pocket to some of the finest restaurants, coziest inns, and palatial…well, palaces…this world has to offer, I thought it was time to take a look at the other side of travel.

The down and dirty side.

No more spas, no more beachside resorts. Instead, I'll be returning to my badass roots, charging headlong into new experiences just like I used to speed down the slopes.

What does that mean? Well, for starters, instead of dabbling my toes like a dilettante into the waters of the places I stay, I'll be getting into the nitty-gritty, taking on outlandish jobs from all around the world to pay my own way. Maybe I'll be a short-order cook in Bhutan for a week. Or a gator tagger in rural Louisiana. It'll be rough, tough, and potentially dangerous.

Hence “Don't Do What I Did.”

Pretty cool, huh?

As before, I'll be selecting my missions with the greatest care, forethought, and research. Only now, I'll be scouring the globe in search of the shit you simply wouldn't do, the shit you wish you had the guts to do, and the completely ridiculous shit that just needs somebody to do it, so I might as well be the one.

Crazy? Possibly. Unhygienic? Probably. Fun? You bet your bippy.

I'll try to choose wisely…yet in the end, gentle readers, it is you who will decide my fate.

That's right. You get to choose between two one-of-a-kind adventures, and I, ever your servant, shall undertake the winning entry with “full devout corage” as old Chaucer would say.

So what'll it be for our maiden voyage, mates? The Pit and the Pendulum? The Lady or the Tiger? (Or in this case, the llama?) Here are this month's choices, culled from real rough-and-tumble opportunities our staff has researched.

This?

Or this:

Merry took her fingers off the keys and sighed. Forget the exotic animals.
She
was the one full of shit. Her chipper, gung ho attitude? Lie. Her balls-out dedication to her new mandate? Phony as a three-dollar bill.
“Care and forethought” my ass
, she thought, finishing off the entry and hitting “Publish” only with the greatest reluctance.
But there's no going back now
. Her new job was officially a reality.

And perhaps, for someone with her physical limitations, an impossibility.

She'd never dream of letting her editor—or her readers—know how daunting she found the idea of charging into these so-called adventures Joel had cooked up, but…
yikes
. Joel thought tossing her into the pit with the lions for the amusement of
Pulse
's snarky audience would create buzz, and he was probably right. He had no idea how ill equipped she was to actually
fight
those lions. He knew she'd been injured—the whole world had witnessed her near-fatal wipeout—but she'd kept the long-term repercussions of those injuries to herself. Partly, it was self-preservation—a competitor since early childhood, her instinct was always to hide her vulnerabilities. And in the Manning family, weakness had not exactly been welcomed with an understanding hug. But the rest was pure pride.

Because if there was one thing Merry Manning hated, it was being bad at shit.

It wasn't a side of herself she showed many people—in her skiing days, she'd shrugged off her rare losses with a laugh and a wink—but inside, it rankled to be anything but the best. If she couldn't do something well…she didn't do it.

Lately, Merry didn't do a lot of things.

“Don't Do What I Did”?
she thought.
How about “Don't Make Me a Laughingstock”?

It had been uncomfortable enough learning to write for the magazine this past year. She'd taken great pains to teach herself about finding hidden gems and exclusive, one-of-a-kind events, but honestly, given her upbringing, that hadn't really been so hard. When her editor had told her of this new cockamamie scheme, however, she'd had no idea how she was supposed to find the kind of missions he had in mind. Nothing about her upbringing or experience had taught her how to navigate, as Joel so charmingly put it, “Shit's Creek.”

Her editor had been the soul of helpfulness—as well as brevity.

He'd pointed to the Wheel o' Craigslist.

This jury-rigged cardboard contraption was the
Pulse
staff's idea of a great way to procrastinate when they didn't feel like facing their deadlines. An intern with a couple of paperclips, a bicycle gear, and too much time on his hands had MacGyver'd the Wheel o' Craigslist, which consisted of an outer ring of city names drawn in Sharpie marker, taken from the many the anything-goes site served, and an inner ring of categories from jobs to housing, casual encounters to garage sales and more. A pointer made from a well-chewed pencil stub determined the result, and whoever was spinning the wheel had to respond to whichever ad was currently at the top of that category.

The point of this—if there was any point at all—was pure fun-pokery. The variety of human experience exposed by Craigslist was eye-opening, to say the least. Some of the ads they'd found had been laugh-out-loud hilarious. Others had been dubious, even pathetic, and some flat-out sketchy. Don,
Pulse
's resident cartoonist (and donor of the masticated pencil) bragged he'd found a half-decent, bedbug-free sofa after one enthusiastic spin. Glenn, the copyeditor, had gotten a date with a woman named Beauregard, about which he had said little.

But Merry was pretty sure the Wheel o' Craigslist had never been used to send a reporter into certain career suicide before.

There's a first time for everything, I guess.
And if Merry didn't want to be out of a job, she'd be having a lot of first times from now on.

I'll be fine
, she told herself firmly.
Hey
,
I survived childhood in the Manning household, right? And I've turned disaster into triumph—or at least a reasonably satisfying substitute career—once before.
Screw the bad leg.
I can do rugged. I can do adventure. I'm the
Millennium Falcon.

Her mind flashed back two years. The mountaintop in St. Moritz. The time trials. “Don't worry,” she'd told her coach as he taped her knee that fateful day. “She'll hold together.” It was an old joke between them.

“Please, baby,” Jim had said, putting his mouth close to the joint in question and doing his best Han Solo, “hold together!”

It hadn't. But Merry would. She
had
to. She'd rub some damn dirt on this situation and make the best of it, faking fun for her fans, grinning and bearing whatever came her way. Because unless she wanted to go crawling home to Gwendolyn and Pierce, she had no other choice.

And speaking of choices…which would be worse? she wondered. Spelunking into the pestilent, guano-caked caves of the steamy Central American jungle, or hauling hay and shoveling manure at the back-of-beyond farm laborer gig? Squeaky, rabid flying rodents, or playing zookeeper to a flock of fuzzies? Fuzzies to whom, not incidentally, she was sure to be allergic. Merry and wool were a toxic combination.

Well, it was out of her hands. Within an hour of her posting, she had more than enough comments to seal her fate.

It went on like that for several scrolls of her mouse.

Alrighty then
, Merry thought, popping three maximum-strength Tums.
Wild and woolly times, here I come
.

“Yel-lo,” said a voice that sounded as if it had been dredged from the back of Harvey Fierstein's closet. “Last Chance Llama Ranch, can I help you?”

“Oh, um, hello, sir,” said Merry with all her customary grace. She glanced at the ad for the contact information she'd deliberately left off her blog. “I was looking for Dorothy Cassidy. Is this her husband?”

“I knew I shoulda given up smoking sooner,” said the voice, resigned. “No, honey, this is Dorothy her own damn self. Who's calling?”

Shit.
Way to win friends and influence people. Now, just ask her how many months along she is and when the baby's due, and you'll have this one in the bag
.

“Well, ah, my name is Merry Manning. I'm calling about your Craigslist ad?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” The gravelly voice was amused.

“Telling you,” Merry said with a laugh of her own. “Sorry about that. I'm just never sure what to expect when responding to a Craigslist posting.”

“Uh-huh. You do this a lot?” Dorothy's voice grew a bit less friendly. “I've already had about six calls from Nigerian banking magnates this morning, and I'm neck-deep in marriage proposals too. Some for me, some for my animals. Not sure if I need a shotgun or a secretary at this point, but I sure's shit am second-guessing this Craigslist crap Jane got me into. So don't be a scam artist or a goat-fucker, okay?”

Merry snarfed her Diet Coke. “Ow,” she muttered, rooting around for a napkin in her bag. Her shirt sported cola-colored spots and her nostrils stung. “No, no goat-fucking here!” she assured Dorothy. “I'm a travel writer.”

Silence.

“I assure you, it's a step up.”

“And you wanna be a ranch hand?” The skepticism was strong in Dorothy's voice.

“Well, for a little while, anyway,” Merry acknowledged. “From your ad it sounded like you're just looking for someone to fill in.”

“Right. My regular hand Luke's getting married and his gal Rosie wants him to spend a few weeks with her family down south. But the fluffies won't feed themselves, and I ain't as nimble as I used to was, if you know what I'm saying.”

“Ah…sure,” Merry said. “What exactly do you need done?”

“Mucking, fence mending, hay and regular rounds. Welfare checks, scan for bear or mountain lion scat in the far pastures. The usual.” She sounded surprised Merry should have to ask. “Plus, help my nephew Sammy with his side of the business—that's the llama tours.” Dorothy sounded proud, and Merry had a vision of a younger, cowboy-hatted Harvey Fierstein riding the range with a string of llamas in tow. Maybe the beasts would be doing a chorus number, she thought—high kicks and all.