True Friend

A true friend doesn’t jump off the cliff with you.  A true friend climbs the cliff to stop you from jumping.

--Mitchell Hegman

An Experiment

I would really like to participate in an experiment where some rich guy gifts me with a bunch of money just to see what I do with it.  One thing for sure, rich guy: better Scotch.

--Mitchell Hegman

CLC

Last night, I engaged (wittingly) in what I call a CLC (career limiting conversation).

A CLC is first cousin to a CLM (career limiting maneuver). 

To my knowledge, my now deceased friend John Bedard first identified CLMs.  CLMs are stupid ideas or clumsy moves.

CLCs are my devices.  They are remarks better left unsaid.  Following is a CLC from last night:

That Girl (rising from the sofa and walking over to the bay windows):  “Let me see if I can find the moon.”

Me: “I would suggest you might try looking in the sky first.  But if you find it elsewhere, let me know.”    

--Mitchell Hegman

Love and Misery

A song by Leon Majcen.

--Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxO5pUv_MIk

Top to Bottom

Posted today are a few photographs from recent drives into the mountains.

Mountain lady's slipper orchids.

A rainbow touching the Upper Blackfoot Valley.

Cooper Lake Road.

The Elkhorn Mountains in the distance.

--Mitchell Hegman

Cat Food Accident

I had a cat food accident this morning.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

When I had 40 pounds of housecat (that’s 2 cats times 20 pounds each), they sometimes engaged in spats at feeding time.  Both of them were particularly excited when I dished out their canned food.

They were not opposed to stealing from one another.

I must tell you, based on the aroma alone, I never understood their excitement.  And after my cat food accident this morning, I can assure you, my remaining 20 pounds of housecat need not worry about me high-grading the best of his food.

I don’t think there is any best.

About the accident.  It’s a bit complicated, but the short version is this: I accidentally got a taste of my remaining cat’s Fancy Feast “Savory Salmon Feast.”

Not savory at all.

Not precisely a feast, either.

I like salmon, mind you.  I very nearly ordered salmon at a restaurant last night.  But Savory Salmon Feast tastes more like yuck, but with at least five more vowels and expletive attached to it.

After accidentally ingesting a bit of the cat food, I tried to read the label on the can to see what the stuff is made of.  My guess is salmon buttholes and slime.  The print is way too small.  Additionally, the white lettering against a salmon-colored background went all disco-lighting in my eyes.  I ended up wobbling away from the can—just like it was the 1970s—unable to read anything.

Oh, one last thing.  Water is the answer here.  If you ever have an accident like mine, drink lots and lots of cold water.

--Mitchell Hegman

Flinching at Nothing

While driving along through a pine forest yesterday, I flinched and nearly slammed on my brakes when a songbird-sized object that wasn’t actually there flew up at my windshield.  Honestly, that stuff is spookier than real stuff.

--Mitchell Hegman

A Curious Thing Happened Near Dodson, Montana

Dodson, Montana, is about as quiet as you might expect for any town with a population of 124.  Located in far-away Phillips County, Dodson is nestled along the serpentine Milk River, a perpetually tan–colored, muddy river lazily looping across the Great Plains just below the Canadian border.

The Milk River, by the way, was referred to as “the river that scolds all others” by the Hidatsa Indians.  So, now you know that.

An interesting incident occurred near Dodson the other day.   An automobile rolled over on Highway 2 just west of town.   The two occupants of the car found themselves in a Fort Belknap hospital, but survived with only minor injuries.

When dispatched to the hospital to interview the driver of the crashed automobile, Montana Highway Patrol trooper Matt Finely, heard quite a story regarding the cause of the rollover.  The driver of the vehicle informed the trooper she had lost control of her car after swerving to avoid a kangaroo crossing the road.

I’m pretty sure the trooper, just the same as me, and just the same as the last two people I threw rocks at, and just the same as all my noisy cousins, have seen the exact same number of free ranging kangaroos around here.

That number is zero.

And here is another thing.  Montana state law forbids a person from keeping a kangaroo as a pet or farm animal.   Weirdly enough, however, owning a wallaby, first cousin to kangaroo, is perfectly acceptable.

Hmmm.  Maybe a wallaby, then.

After laughing at the notion of a kangaroo as the primary cause of the accident, Trooper Finley, drove out to the scene of the accident for further insight.

You got it.  He found a kangaroo standing right there alongside the road.

Well, maybe a wallaby—our laws being what they are.  Additionally, as Montanans, we are trained to differentiate between grizzly bears and black bears; not kangaroos and wallabies.  And don’t you dare throw a wallaroo in the mix.

Trooper Finley, after talking with a few locals, was informed there is a kangaroo ranch near Dodson.

Again, maybe a wallaby ranch.

Trooper Finley made no attempt to capture the beast and also managed to keep his automobile on its feet.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Butterflies and the Bees

Mud-puddling is a behavior common to both our toddlers and Mother Nature’s butterflies.

Butterflies will often gather in large numbers at particular mud puddles.  Once there, the butterflies will poke around in the mud with great earnest.  Similarly, bees will sometimes congregate around rich, moist soils that have been exposed for them.

They have a reason.

Puddles, rich soils, and on occasion (my apologies to breakfast readers) manure are sources of nutrients not provided by the nectar of flowers.  Sodium is a big draw here.

On our drive through the mountains the other day, that girl and I met a water-filled rut at the edge of the road encircled almost entirely by dozens upon dozens of wing-flexing northern blue butterflies.  As we carefully crept past, the butterflies abruptly ascended into several frenzied blue swirls alongside us.  

Yesterday, while exploring along the edge of the Missouri River just below Hauser Dam, we encountered another cluster butterflies at a gravel bar a few paces from the river.

This gathering was exceedingly interesting.

Tiger swallowtails, pale swallowtails, a single black swallowtail, and several honeybees had gathered into a tight cluster atop one small patch of gravel.  The gathering seemed almost fluid with all the jostling between butterflies and the arriving and departing bees.

Posted is a photograph I captured of the gathering upon first encounter.  If you look carefully you can see one of the honeybees near the top of the congregation.

--Mitchell Hegman

Morel Mushrooms

If you have eaten morel mushrooms at a fine restaurant anywhere in the United States, you most likely ate "burn" morels taken from the mountainous West.   They were probably harvested by a commercial picker amid the charred and utterly blackened remnants of what was once a dense forest.

Burn morels, according Jennifer Frazer, writing for Scientific American, and citing studies following the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, are specific in their habits.  First, they appear in almost ridiculously huge numbers during the spring and summer of the first year immediately following a forest fire.  More interestingly, the study revealed that morels did not appear in plots where only 50% of the ground surface burned.  Morels only appeared in study plots where the earth was burned between 50% and 99%. 

Morels actually prefer to grow where full-on scorchers have blown down trees and swept bare the slopes, where fire bakes the earth and fizzles through the roots underground for days after.

Funny thing: morels are delicious.  They have a taste other than of dirt (as I perceive most mushrooms).  I find them to have a flavor not for removed from that of steak.

Morels are one of precisely two types of mushrooms I like.  I really like them.  I also like shaggy manes.

Sadly, my stomach does not appreciate morel mushrooms nearly as much as my taste buds.  The last two times I ate them, I found myself violently ill within an hour.  Over the years, I have been sickened by other mushroom types palatable to others. 

Yesterday, on a high mountain drive north of Helena, that girl and I came upon the remnants of a great forest converted to scorched earth and black sticks by a forest fire last year.  On a whim, we scampered lightly into the after-rain black trying not assume the same color.

Amid the broken and blackened trees and charred earth, we found a half dozen fist-sized morels.  We harvested them.  This evening I may try a very small taste.  They really are that delicious.

--Mitchell Hegman

Something Steven Wright Said

—If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?  

—Be nice to your children.  After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

—Is it weird in here, or is it just me?

Steven Wright

Flamingo, Birdy, Penguin

Birds are important to me.

Gulls and ravens have flown through my poems for all the years I have written them: “One white bird, two black birds...”

Every year, for the last twenty-five, I have marked down the date of my first bluebird sighting.  They are my official harbinger of spring.

I regularly talk with my magpie neighbors.

On my recent trip back to Ohio, Mackenna and I played sticker book regularly.  Finding a good placement for the white mama duck was always our first priority.

We are all about the birds.

Little Mackenna, though having just this month turned two (with a little help from her mother), sent me a Father’s Day card.

Today, I am posting a photograph of the card.

These birds are the rarest and most beautiful.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Right Path

I think it’s obvious I’m on the right path.  I’m still finding single malt Scotch and good friends along the way.

--Mitchell Hegman

Traffic

On our recent cross-country drive from Ohio to Montana I was struck by the slowly changing landscape.  I watched as the leafy trees of the Midwest melted away to open plains.  The plains then ascended into tall mountains with dense pine forests.

I was similarly struck by how four and five crowded lanes of traffic gradually diminished down to two mostly quiet lanes.  By the time we reached Wyoming, we often found ourselves driving stretches of interstate highway without another car in sight.

It’s somewhat shocking to fly out from Montana and find yourself immediately plunked down amid the heavy traffic in Ohio’s cities.  As I have told that girl on several occasions, I feel as though I am constantly “merging with traffic” on my visits there.

Ohio has quite a history with automobiles.  

The world’s very first automobile crash occurred in Ohio City, Ohio, in 1891.  The accident occurred when John W. Lambert’s single-cylinder car sideswiped a tree and then careened into a hitching post.

There is also that tenacious, though undocumented, story that in 1895 a total of only two automobiles were on the road in the entire state of Ohio…and they somehow managed to crash into one another.

And there is this: The world’s first electric traffic signal was installed at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105^th in Cleveland, Ohio, in August of 1914.

Things have been on a steady downhill ever since.  

--Mitchell Hegman

Scary Stuff

—Finding images of giant spiders captured by the trail camera you placed on a tree near your house.

—Watching the Weather Channel.

—Announcing that you like a song you just heard on the radio, only to be told Justin Bieber performed it.

--Mitchell Hegman

Home

We entered Montana at midday yesterday and drove through 340 miles of my river and mountain home. 

Give me the West.

--Mitchell Hegman

Iowa and Beyond

I spent time in Iowa for the first time in my life yesterday.  To be precise, I spent somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes there.  That girl and I managed to drive through the bottom corner of Iowa where it adjoins both Kansas and Nebraska.

The bottom corner of Iowa is not particularly scenic or memorable in any manner.

Farmland for the most part.

Notably, however, we bridged-over the Missouri River one more time where it defines the border between Iowa and Nebraska.

For the rest of our drive, which ultimately landed us in Morrill, Nebraska, the landscape around us gradually shed trees and yielded to grass and tilled earth.  The sky expanded.  Clouds tore themselves apart, then began to billow higher.

We whisked by the world headquarters for Cabela’s in tiny Sidney, Nebraska.

In March of this year, some 700 employees were forced to leave Sidney or sever employment following a buyout of Cabela’s by Bass Pro.

The landscape changed more rapidly in the western half of Nebraska.  The flat to gently rolling terrain gave way to escarpments, weather-carved walls of stone, and shortgrass prairie.

I find these landscapes as handsome, though I suppose others may not.

I like a place where sky can jump from a cliff.

We ended a ten-hour drive in Merrill (at the very edge of Nebraska) and ate our supper in a shiny diner under sunset skies.

Today, we go for home.

--Mitchell Hegman

Good Dirt and Sapphires

After driving the last few gently rolling miles of Missouri, we glanced off downtown Kansas City and landed in Olathe, Kansas, U.S.A.

Here is the interesting thing.  I sent a box of dirt to Olathe by mail a few months ago.  A Christmas present, actually.  And not regular dirt.  We are talking pretty good dirt.  More precisely, gravel concentrate from a sapphire mine located on the shores of the same lake upon which I live.

My sister Brenda and family live in Olathe.  The sapphire gravel was a (somewhat unusual) gift for her grandchildren.

Yesterday, at midday, we stopped in to visit with Brenda and crew.  While we were there, we processed the gravel and gleaned a few gems from the concentrate.

Mostly, though, we were there to hear our voices mixing together.  For a good part of the day, we had the same sun shining on us.

This is why we cross the Missouri River along its wending course.  Just as we did once yesterday and once the day before.

--Mitchell Hegman

Crossing the Missouri River

Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois quickly fell through the rearview mirror of our car yesterday.

Hard rains struck near Columbus.  Well-tended farmer’s fields expanded and began to displace leafy trees in Indiana.  Green rows of corn marched against us in Illinois.  Thick traffic slowed us on the St Louis bypass.

As we crossed the muddy and rolling Missouri River, I said to that girl, “Think about that river.  It starts at your sister’s back door in Montana.  That’s something.”

That girl’s sister often takes her morning walks at the Missouri Headwaters near Three Forks, Montana; where the Gallatin River, the Jefferson River, and the Madison River twine together forming the Missouri among cottonwood trees and mountain backdrops.

Consider.  The Missouri River is the longest river in North America.  From the point where it merges with the Mississippi near St. Louis to its headwaters in Montana, the river twines through some 2341 miles varied, often rugged terrain.

Exploring the West by way of this river, The Lewis and Clark expedition departed from St Louis on May 14, 1804.  The expedition—pushing up the river itself—did not even reach the present day state of Montana until April 27, 1805.  This, after overwintering with Mandan Indians along the river in what is now present day North Dakota.  Some 2341 miles upriver, on July 17, 1805, the Corps of Discovery finally camped at the Headwaters of the Missouri.

I have crossed the Missouri River—quite literally—hundreds of times in Montana.  My “lake front” is actually the waters of the Missouri River having been backed up into the Prickly Pear Creek drainage by Hauser Dam a few miles downstream.

By land, I have crossed the river outside Montana less than a dozen times.

--Mitchell Hegman

Westward

Last night we sang our last goodnight nursery rhymes to Mackenna and drove rain-black highways from Akron to Medina. 

“Papa be right back?” asked Mackenna.

“Papa will be back,” I answered.

“Papa be right back?” she asked again.  Her big eyes fixed on me.

“Papa will be back,” I repeated.

Inside me, I felt yesterdays melting into tomorrows.  I felt stuffed animals nudging at my feet. 

This morning we are heading across the into-rain and after-rain Midwest.  We will tree our way, traffic our way, dark sky our way, and map our way west.  Back to the open lands.  Back to Mountains holding snow. Back to skies where clouds have room to tumble across.

On one hand: Mackenna.

On the other: the West, my home on this Earth.

This is not a perfect balance.

--Mitchell Hegman

Photographs from Mackenna’s Second Birthday Bash

Mackenna turned two yesterday!

--Mitchell Hegman

Hedgy and the Birthday Song

Hedgy the hedgehog could not remember any of the days before Princess Mackenna was born.  But, to be fair, Hedgy seldom remembered where his nose was.  And he sometimes said “hello” when he should say “goodbye.”  And sometimes he said “hello” and “goodbye” at once, just to be sure.

Hedgy sat all day and all night just outside the door of Kindly Castle.  In the early morning, small birds bounced in the grass all around Hedgy.  Yellow flowers grew tall in flower beds beside him.  Ducks sometimes waddled by, quacking. And, once, a momma deer left her baby all day right there in the flowers beside him.

But today, Hedgy remembered something.

He remembered his nose.

It was right there on his face.  Just below his eyes and just above his mouth.  He could not see his nose—not even if he crossed his eyes hard and looked down.  But he knew it was there because Princess Mackenna touched his nose and reminded him, “This is your nose,” each time she came and went from Kindly Castle.

Sometimes, Princess Mackenna played the head, shoulders, knees, and toes game with Hedgy.  She would touch his head, and then his shoulder, and then his knee, and then his toes, and say: “This is your head.  These are your shoulders.  These are your knees.  And these are your toes.”

And when she finished she always touched his nose and said “This is your nose.”

Today, Hedgy also remembered something special.  Today was Princess Mackenna’s birthday.

Hedgy had even made up a birthday song for Princess Mackenna.  The words to the song went like this: “Hello, hello.  Happy birthday Mackenna.  Happy birthday, to you!  Hello, hello.”

So, when Princess Mackenna opened the door and came outside from Kindly Castle, Hedgy got very excited and tried to sing his song.  “Hello or goodbye.  This is my birthday nose.  Happy birthday to you!”

Princess Mackenna touched Hedgy’s nose.  “Thank you,” she said.  “What a lovely birthday song.”

“But I sang it wrong,” Hedgy admitted.

“Happy birthday is never wrong,” said Princess Mackenna.  “And I am no longer one.  I am two.”

“Hello.  This is my happy birthday nose,” said Hedgy.  Happy birthday nose, to you!”

--Mitchell Hegman

One Day from Two

Apparently, nobody told Princess Mackenna she should be speaking in two or three word sentences at this point.  This point, specifically, for those of you not completely in the loop, is one day from her second birthday.

And about the two and three word sentence thing.

Princess Mackenna is speaking in full paragraphs.

She whizzed right through the two and three word sentences some time ago.  She sometimes tells elaborate stories.  Mind you, she often speaks so fast, it’s a bit hard to keep up.

I have been spending the last few days with Princess Mackenna.  We have been out walking among the mommy and daddy trees.  We have been putting stickers in books.  We smell flowers and blow on bugs.  We call Gentle, the dog, a “good boy.”  We feed the fish and ducks in the pond.  We play in the park.  We sing nursery rhymes.  Most importantly, we wave furiously and say “hi” to everyone we meet.

--Mitchell Hegman

About Your Skin

It’s important to get comfortable in your own skin while you are young.  As you get older—either by form expansion or sagging—you get a lot more of it.

--Mitchell Hegman

A Few Observations

I have been provided an opportunity to make a few observations.  Or, in more practical thinking, you might say I’m stuck in the Minneapolis Airport on a two-hour layover. 

Here are a few observations:

1. Tall, gawky men dragging along carry-ons by the telescoping handles are at least forty percent gawkier than normal.  And that’s an awful lot of gawky.

2. Some of the restrooms in concourse F also serve as “severe weather shelters.”  I am assuming a persistent blizzard does not qualify as a reason for everyone to muster there.  Finally, if I were an architect, I would, as a faithful Montanan, make the bars in each concourse also serve as severe weather shelters—not the bathrooms.

3. The key for my 2004 truck works well for stabbing open shrink-wrapped cheese snacks.  The fob for the new car is of no help at all.

4. It is possible for a girl of twenty-something to look compellingly similar to your male neighbor of eighty-something.

5. As you “people watch” in an airport and begin sorting people into “types,” it’s important to recognize that someone is doing the same to you. 

--Mitchell Hegman

Our Just Reward

I am about to openly steal something from my sister, Debbie.

I am stealing a line from her.  Or, more aptly, a line of thought.  She responded to a photograph and text I had sent to her of a proliferation of bitterroot flowers near my house with this: “Wow!  This winter did bring us joy.”

I am going to take that and run.

Make no mistake, we had a brutally long, cold, and snow-filled winter.   We followed that with heavy rains and rivers that remain swollen to this day.  My road washed out.  Trees have toppled over. 

But, dammit, we have some pretty spectacular flowers to show for it this year.  The Rocky Mountain Front was as spectacular as ever.  Near my house, our state flower, the bitterroot, is blooming in unprecedented numbers.

I don’t much appreciate winters like the one we recently suffered, but, in the long run, it did bring us joy. 

--Mitchell Hegman