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time to visit the Lazy A Hole Ranch in the heart of the pristine, unspoiled, uncrowded, undiscovered Mosquito Grande Mountains.
    Not for tenderfeet, the Lazy A Hole is that real cowboy experience you’ve been looking for. Imagine getting up with the sun after sleeping under the stars. Imagine brushing off spiders and centipedes as you crawl behind the nearest tree to use our huge, spacious, open-air, pine-scented bathrooms.
    The Lazy A is not only fun, it’s educational! You’ll learn how to identify crawling, flying, and stinging insects, a wide variety of nocturnal rodents and multiple bird droppings up close and personal-like. You’ll learn by actually touching them which plants will sting and cut and which ones won’t; you’ll learn which ones will leave a nasty rash. No need for book learning and memorization here. Once you’ve spent an evening pulling burrs out of your underwear, you won’t never forget what purple thistle looks like.
    Then Cookie will serve you a real cowhand’s breakfast—blackened eggs, blackened toast, blackened bacon, blackened home fries, blackened orange juice. From roadkill to free-range beef, there’s practically nothing he can’t blacken, and you’ll wash all of it down with his blackened coffee. None of your citified, fancy-schmanzy latte grandes out here, no sirree.
    No fancy-schmanzy city doctors, either. Rope burn? See Cookie. Dislocated shoulder? See Cookie. Snake bite? See Cookie. Broken bone stickin’ through your skin? See Cookie. He’s got a wide variety of ointments and folk remedies that have kept our ranch hands on the job for years past their due date. Just ask One-Eye Pete, One-Arm Dave, or me, Coughin’ Bob: would we rather go to a doctor or just see Cookie? True, we did lose One-Ear Joe in an unfortunate branding iron accident but that ’twere mostly his own fault.
    At the Lazy A, you’ll be doin’ the job of a real, honest-to-God cowpoke—mine. I ain’t been able to do much since I caught that horseshoe in the head. Cookie puts a stinging poultice on it once a week made out of ground up lightning bugs and axle grease, but there are some things modern medicine can’t yet fix. You’ll cut cattle, stack hay, feed the calves, clean the barn, and mend fence in the heat and in the pouring rain, all the time waving and slapping at black flies, gnats, and mosquitoes as big as your boot.
    And don’t ignore the health benefits of the great outdoors. Some spas charge you thousands of dollars a week to take a few mudbaths and to lose a few pounds. At the Lazy A you’ll get more exercise in one afternoon slapping away no-see-um bugs than you’ll ever get at some high-faluting air-conditioned health spa. Mud bath? By the end of a Lazy A day you’ll get covered in filth nature’s way, on the back of a horse.
    You’ll feel the calories burn away after fourteen hours on the back of a sweaty horse in the blazin’ sun. Hell, if you don’t get skin cancer by the end of the week, we ain’t been doin’ our job. ’Course you won’t be gettin’ it on your inner thigh, ’cause that skin’ll all be gone by the end of the first day. When it comes to losing ugly pounds, Cookie’s food puts the Atkins, the Zone, and Sugar Busters diets to shame. I’ve been losing ten pounds a year right steady. I’m down to 130. I can get my whole body in one of my old pant legs.
    But the most important thing is the memories you’ll have for the rest of your life: discovering you’ve bedded down on top of a fire ant’s nest; nearly getting washed away in a flash flood; catching your pant leg on fire and having your new ranch friends stomp it out for you.
    If this sounds like the life you’ve always dreamt of having but never did, give us a call. It’s only $2,750 a week. Plus tax and tips. For $2,850 a week I’ll let you do my laundry, too.

Not-so-natural Disasters
    A nimals can sense it coming long before the humans. The cats run and hide; the cows in fields stop chewing and