The Jeff and Jenny Trilogy

by Jerry Flynn

As of this writing, Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch has a single five star rating on Amazon.  The review, titled "Clean Read," has this to say: "I like that this book is godly, plus about chinchillas".  That's all.  You might notice I put the period outside the quotation mark, might think I made a mistake in doing so.  No, I did not make a mistake. That's how the sentence is written, without a period.  

Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch has a publication date listed as January 1, 1977.  That, to me, is suspect.  Not the year, mind you, but the date.  It's like meeting someone from Somalia and making the same joke: "so, did the Capricorns in East Africa all get together and take out the other eleven signs, or is there a really special holiday in late March?"  Speaking of, I've long considered starting a birthday cake company that caters to people born in Somalia, but it would be too overwhelming to do so much work one day a year, a holiday at that, and have the rest of the year pretty much free.  It would be like being Santa Claus, or a CPA.  

The reason that publication date is suspect is simply because the publication dates of the other two books in the Jeff and Jenny series, namely Jeff and Jenny at Camp Pinecrest, and Jeff and Jenny Winter in Alaska, were also "published" on January 1.  In fact, Jeff and Jenny Winter in Alaska was supposedly published on the same day as the chinchilla ranch book, in 1977, while the Camp Pinecrest book (described as "The Rollins twins begin to wonder about the effectiveness of prayer after encountering two troublemakers at Camp Pinecrest.") was published in 1983.  For an author working on a series, that's quite a gap, six years.  The kids who read the original two books were probably a little too old to appreciate the series by the time that third book came out, had probably moved on and were too rebellious or fickle to read the sequel.  I'm just saying I'm not too surprised there isn't a fourth book in the collection.  

I never read those other two books, so I can only imagine what lies between their covers.  I say that because Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch stood on my bookshelf for quite a while before I reached for it.  I think it's too trite to describe myself as a voracious reader as a child.  What does that even mean?  I did read a lot, and still do, but I can't tell you when I started reading several books at once, but that habit has worsened as I've aged.  I probably have thirty books around the house nowadays, all of them disrespected with the jacket crammed between page 123 and 124 or with some improvised bookmark, a receipt maybe, from an airport purchase in 2003, or a scrap of paper with a to do list on it.  Back then, though, in the early 1980's, I pretty much read only one to three books at a time.  I probably read Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch in 1984, but only did so as basically every other book on the shelf was either read or re-read.  That's another thing I've always done.  I've read some books dozens of times, almost like a religious zealot, reading and re-reading for no clear reason, comfort maybe, or some internal competitiveness to see how much I've retained.  It's not even good books or my favorite books I've done this with.  I've read some books five times that I didn't particularly like the first time.  Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch, though, I only read once.  

I don't know exactly where they came from, but my bookshelf as a child was peppered with these Christian fiction novels.  I suspect Fairview Baptist Church.  I'll try to be fair by saying none of the novels were really bad, per se, but the idea of Christian fiction niggles me slightly.  It's not that I am opposed to novels with a religious bent, in theory, it's just that Christian fiction is a little like Christian rock music.  I hate to come across as overly cynical, but these two classifications of art, if anything, work only in the opposite way they are ostensibly supposed to.  It's not that Christian fiction is bad because it's a wink and a nod to the parents and librarians purchasing the books, promising to avoid the subjects of budding sexuality or vengeance, it's just that the authors aren't very talented.  Much like Christian rock bands aren't talented.  They don't hamstring themselves by refusing to sing about cocaine and casual sex, they choose to avoid those topics so they can sell records and concert tickets to a captive audience.  No one, I'm saying, has ever accidentally listened to a Christian rock song and decided to convert, to stop drinking R&R and smoking Basic cigarettes because the song was so awesome, yet there are more than a few former evangelicals who realized David Bowie made them feel a way that Jars of Clay couldn't.  I'll put it another way: there's no way you can listen to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and then any album by DC Talk and argue convincingly the latter is in the same league.  

I think I gave Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch a shot because I actually kind of enjoyed Winter of the White-Tail Buck, by Jeanne Hovde, which I will summarize thusly.

Crippled by poverty, humbled by his deep set religious beliefs, a boy in the frigid Midwest dreams of securing a haul of succulent venison for his family.  He is taunted, mercilessly, by a silent, stoic whitetail deer.  The boy's goal is clear: he must kill the deer lest he and his family spend the winter subsisting on Government cheese, powdered milk, and store brand white bread (the same kind of food I was all too familiar with at the time I read this gem).  The pursuit is two pronged: first he must find a rifle with which to slay the beast.  Money is tight, and ideally he'd prefer an "automatic" but his grandfather, I believe, bestows upon him an antiquated and obsolete levergun pulled from a cloth covering deep in a musty trunk.  The rub?  This gun is so old the ammunition is no longer available, so the boy is tasked with handloading shells, and given grave admonitions that he must not leave the precious brass casings in the field.  The boy takes this counsel to heart.  Secondly, he needs a big buck to hunt.  Gun in hand, he enters the icy wilderness, stalks his prey, and like any good lad blows its lungs all over the forest floor.  Boom!  Nice shot, kid.  However, the deer is robust, and runs off, as deer are wont to do.  The boy cycles the gun's action, losing one precious brass case to the snow, but alas that is simply the price of business.  He tracks the deer, and elicits the coup de grâce.  Grateful, the boy thanks God, and then goes about his necessaries, the skinning and the gutting.  Alas, his family is fed.  The End.  There's also a minor subplot about a wealthier, less pious acquaintance who scoffs at either hunter's safety classes or wearing blaze orange in the field.  I don't remember.  I read this book something like 39 years ago.  In brief, it's a watered down version of Where the Red Fern Grows with more focus on worshiping Jesus, and in which the dogs are an old crappy gun, or maybe the cartridges, and the kid didn't have to scrimp for anything and there's no cougar and it didn't make me cry.  All told, not a bad book.  Not great, but it is what it is, and not everything is a classic.

I'll paraphrase someone I've long admired and say in my mind the details of Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch have been lost to time, but I remember reading it feeling the creeping tentacles of something dark and chilling coming from the page.  Since the book is out of print, and not worth looking for at Powell's or buying from one of the hyenas on Amazon, I'll spoil it for you: the chinchillas die.  I remember reading it thinking, "why is this ranch even there?  Why is this rancher raising chinchillas?"  To me, a boy growing up in a small city surrounded by wheat fields, it didn't make much sense.  It seemed about as practical as having a hamster ranch, or a ranch for turtles, both of which I would have loved to visit if I hadn't known any better.  All the ranchers I knew felt differently about animals than I did.  Cattle weren't pets.  They were "money."  That's what people said instead of gagging when driving past a feedlot, "smell that money," which makes no sense at all because you never hear anyone hooting and hollering when passing a Wells Fargo.  I asked someone, my father maybe, why there would be a chinchilla ranch in Wyoming.  I'm almost certain it was him who told me, "coats.  They make really nice coats out of chinchilla furs.  The fur is really soft."  I did not need to be told that these coats were not made from chinchilla wool, gently shorn from the little rodents with miniature shears, but rather from their pelts, which of course the animals weren't living without.  "Oh," I probably said.  So that's what happened to the lucky chinchillas, mind you, the ones that were healthy and hale and sleek, they were butchered and turned into coats.  It gets worse.  While Jeff and Jenny are on the ranch, an epidemic disease breaks out, killing at first a few chinchillas per day, then scores of them.  The ranch, it seems, goes from a thriving enterprise to the brink of bankruptcy over the course of one summer vacation.  You have to remember this was at the same time as Farm Aid, at the tail of a deep recession when people in debt, which was everybody, were forced to pay interest rates that seem hard to fathom decades later.  Add to that, at that time my great-grandparents lived on a decaying farm in rural Montana, with no hope of being able to maintain it due to their age and frailty.  It was, to some of my relatives, my aunts and uncles and mother, romantic, but reality was harsh, and I was too young to delude myself with nostalgia.  There was indoor water, yes, but it came out of an awkward black pipe jutting from the wall, landing in a basin with a dipper.  The toilet was in an outhouse, dark and splintery and foul smelling at best, twenty degrees below zero at worst.  The temperatures inside the farmhouse ranged from sauna-like within ten feet of the coal-fired potbelly stove in the living room, to near freezing anywhere else.  If there was a zone of comfort in that house in winter, neither I nor my siblings ever found it, and not for lack of trying.  My family went out there every Sunday after church, and sometimes, on the worst days, my father had to shoot cats.  

I remember being told to go inside, to stay inside, and feeling a firm social pressure to pretend I couldn't hear the little pop from the .22 that meant another cat, half bald from mange, was dead.  I don't really know why my parents thought seeing a sick cat get shot would be scarring, but that once they were dead, that pathetic dusty yard splotched with blood, it would be fine for a seven year old to help pick them up and go bury them or burn them, I can't remember which.  I think it was both, actually, burn them in a pit and then bury what was left.

We did that twice, I remember.  The first day was worse, because it was novel and because of the sheer number.  Perhaps I'm lying to myself, and perhaps the number has grown over time in the fertile imagination of my mind, but was it twenty?  Thirty?  I don't know.  I remember the blood.  Loads of it.  It was everywhere.  The next time wasn't so bad.  My father was just picking off the stragglers, the sick cats that had been wily enough to run and hide.  In the end, he got them all, all the mangy ones.  My brother probably remembers this better than I do, but I remember him carrying a plastic grocery bag with one or two dead cats out to where we were getting rid of them, and the bag gave way, splooshing him with blood.  I remember that moment, and how grossed out he was, us out in a field, not even a rag to wipe his leg with.  

So that's what I think was on my mind when I read about this chinchilla farmer strolling through his barn, checking the cages for carcasses, the air tainted with death, all those dead cats.  I honestly can't remember how Jeff & Jenny on the Chinchilla Ranch ends.  The epidemic was probably brought under control somehow.  I don't remember how.  Probably by prayer. 

Jerry Flynn is a writer and physician living in a small town in Alaska on the homeland of the Sugpiaq / Alutiiq People.  His work has appeared in Herald and News, Tissue Engineering, and Journal of Investigative Medicine.  He was the coauthor of The Ghana Red Cross Society's 2005 Malaria Education Guide for Community Educators.