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Some background.
Ray's wife was into all this Miwok Indian stuff. One of the things she was interested in was
tanning deer hides the way the Miwok Indians had done it. She found deer hides were not readily available to
practice on. She took to carrying a tarp in her car. When she would come upon a fresh road kill deer.
She would stop, skin the deer, roll up the hide, place it in the tarp, put the tarp in her trunk and
continue about her business (engineer for the city of Modesto lots of country driving). When she got home she would
put the rolled up hide in the chest freezer they kept in garage. When she had time she would thaw one of the
frozen hides, finish cleaning it and start the tanning process.
What happened . . .
Ray and Alison moved to another rental in late April/early May. The chest freezer
with its grisly contents went out in the garage, as before. It started up as soon as they plugged
it in. They thought, like before, it was on the same circuit as the washing machine, but they were
wrong. It was on its own circuit. The circuit breaker popped, soon after they had plugged it in.
Ray told John he never heard the freezer again when he was in the garage, doing their laundry. It never
occured to him to
wonder why that was? The washing machine worked, so he and his wife were unaware of the freezer being off.
The freezer's contents fermented in the summer heat for months (107 to 110 during the day).
Three months after they had moved, Alison was finally settled in and sent Ray out to the garage to
get a deer hide, for her to practice tanning on. He lifted the lid of the freezer expecting frozen deer hides:
surprise!
What confronted Ray, was a gelatinous fluid, similar in texture to jam, made
of fermented and melted deer hides.
Ray told John that was the grossest thing he had ever seen. The only hair left was along the edge
of the opening. Everything else had 'melted' into an incredibly foul looking and foul smelling goo.
Ray dug a trench in the backyard, donned rubber gloves, a HazMat suit and, trying not to barf, used
a snow shovel to fill his wheelbarrow three or four times. He was afraid the wheelbarrow would leak,
but it held together. He wheeled this slop, to the trench and dumped it in.
After he was done. He turned the freezer on its side, hosed it out, washed off his wheelbarrow
and the snow shovel, raked dirt over the trench, scrubbed his boots, washed off his gloves,
burned the suit, dragged
the freezer to the street corner and stuck a, Free, sign on it.
In the morning the freezer was gone.
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