Cabin Wildflower Report

I am happy to report that the wildflowers at my cabin are thriving this spring. 

There existed a measure of concern for them on my part.

Last fall, an adjacent land owner and I hired a contractor to spray weeds on our properties.  As much as I try to avoid using chemicals to control anything in nature, I didn’t feel I had another choice.  Over the last few years, spotted knapweed, has been marching hard against my wildflowers.  If given an opportunity, knapweed will soon create an ever-expanding monoculture that shoulders aside and soon wipes out most native flowers.

That’s not tenable in Mitch-world.

“When you spray the weeds,” I told the sprayer last fall, “try your darndest not to hit my flowers.  They are the biggest reason you are here.”

Yesterday, I and my good neighbor joined together and patrolled our properties to see if any knapweed was emerging and, at the same time, see if the native species were doing okay.

Though some collateral damage did occur, most of the flowers are fine and the knapweed appears to have had its butt handed to itself.

Posted are a few of findings from our wandering.

Fairy Slipper Orchid

Glacier Lily

Indian Paintbrush

Smooth Yellow Violet

Twinberry Blossoms

—Mitchell Hegman

Anting

I was reading about birds.  Smart ones.  In the landscape surrounding me, American crows and magpies are easily among the most intelligent.  Some research suggests they learn to recognize the faces of people they regularly encounter.  They also learn our habits and the habits of our pets.

Armed with this knowledge they generally pester us.

Both of these birds engage in a most peculiar habit called “anting.”

Anting is something of a maintenance routine where the birds will stand or splay their wings atop an anthill and allow the ants to climb all over their feathers.  They may pick up ants and rub them into their wings.

Anting has the benefit of warding off parasites.  The formic acid secreted by ants acts as an insecticide, miticide, fungicide, or bactericide all at once.  Some birds are also thought to become drunk from the formic acid released from the ant’s bodies.

—Mitchell Hegman

 

Things I Don’t Need to Hear

I recently met someone who has the kind of personality I think of as the “dispenser” type.   They want to dispense their personal views about pretty much everything within a few minutes of meeting them. 

Here is a list of things I don’t need to hear from people within the first three minutes of meeting them:

A list of famous people they don’t like

Views on education, religion, or politics

Things they don’t like about Montana

Comparisons of income

Racial slurs

Examples of why they are smarter than someone else

Advice on electrical stuff

 

—Mitchell Hegman

An After-Rain Sunrise

Yesterday, the sun appeared in full splendor after several wet and overcast days.  I and one of the local chipmunks spent a few minutes basking in the mist-lifting sunshine just after sunrise. 

I stood on my back deck, listening to songbirds calling back and forth.

The chipmunk occupied the brick ledge nearby doing quirky chipmunk things.

Good stuff for man and cute little beast.

—Mitchell Hegman

Morning Report for May 27, 2021

Inside Report:

My coffee maker has finished its gasping and wheezing in the kitchen and the television news is good.  Wait.  Clarification.  The newsbabe dispensing the news looks good.

Outside Report:   

High above the prairie, a pewter moon presides over nautical sunrise as two mule deer does dawdle about in the grass between me and the rest of the world.

End of report.

—Mitchell Hegman

 

The Next Closest Thing to a War Zone

If you drove up to my home today, you might think you were entering a war zone.  At first glance, it appears as though a bomb blew up alongside my home’s southern exposure.  There is a big hole next to my house and a far-flung mess of dirt and building materials strewn across the ground around it.  Additionally, the stucco and brick veneer are missing from a chunk of my home near the raw earth.

It’s not a war.  It’s the next closest thing to it: construction.

This is the messiest and most disruptive part of my sunroom addition project.  At present, a contractor is helping me pour in place the concrete footings and foundation walls.  All bullwork.  Heavy stuff.  Dirt work.

I like it a lot.

Mini Excavator

The Excavation

Forms in Place

Concrete for the Footings

—Mitchell Hegman

Another Notable Learning Experience

I learned something yesterday.  If your car door is flung wide-open, you cannot lock the car with your key fob from any distance.

Hopefully, you will find this bit of knowledge useful at some point.

And, finally, never mind how I learned this.

 

—Mitchell Hegman

These Are the Things You Don’t Say to Your Wife

A lighthearted video to start our week.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpFD-kgQxnI

With Winter Stuck To Its Shoes

If you live in Montana for any length of time, let’s say for three weeks, you will discover this is a state that walks around with winter continuously stuck to its shoes.  Yesterday proved a fine example.   At midday, I attended a retirement party for my friend Tom Russ.  I caught a ride up to his ranch in the Elkhorn Mountains with my sister and brother-in-law.

Posted are a few photographs from our “springtime” drive into the Elkhorn Mountains and one photograph of Kimber, the 4-R Ranch cattle dog. 

    

Gaining Elevation

Into the Leaning Trees

Tom and Patti’s House

Kimber (The Cattle Dog)

—Mitchell Hegman

Descriptors of People, Part Two

He’s a big, but mostly empty, box.

She’s a sledge hammer covered with in silver filagree. 

His arrival feels like the first day of vacation.

She’ll always be there on time.

He’s dirty dishwater filled with knives.

She’s the dead end where people illegally dump old furniture and mattresses.

He’s the smoke that always seems to follow you around the campfire.

Her instincts are good but rest of her isn’t paying attention.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Gulls

The gulls, crying in this early season at the lake, sound like cars crashing into soft bluffs of clay.  My love for birds runs deep.  Gulls, though, are something of an exception.  My love for them is conditional.  For one thing, they make a lot of unnecessary noise.

And gulls are eaters of garbage.

I recall gulls swarming the parking lot and chasing windblown garbage at my high school.  Hamburger wrappers and French fries were a particular draw for them.

Of course, I am familiar with the “miracle of the gulls,” where gulls are said to have saved the crops of early Mormon settlers in Utah from a swarm of plant-raiding insects.  Just the same, I am rather all about me in this.  

A better bird would sing a catchy song and take seeds from the palm of my hand.

—Mitchell Hegman

An Observance

I just got to looking around my house and I noticed something.  If you spend your time looking at the ceiling, my house looks pretty clean and orderly.

—Mitchell Hegman

Holding my Tongue (Not Literally)

While talking with a man the other day he said, “I tend to take things people say very literally, which can get me in trouble.”

Given his statement, it’s fortunate I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was: Great, I have people like you coming out my ass. 

—Mitchell Hegman

They All Fall Down

Posted below is a video of 32,000 dominoes set loose on an amazing cascading event inside a smallish apartment.  I am most impressed with the beautiful patterns developed by some of the falling dominoes.

Considering I cannot even wash dishes without stabbing myself, breaking something, or splashing water all across the kitchen, there is no way I could successfully fill my house with such a fragile display.  Plus, I have a cat.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgH0hXZKrE

Along the Creek

After helping my brother-in-law load his truck with cordwood sawn from two previously felled trees along the meadow at my cabin property, I wandered about in the sunshine.  I appreciate the sun this time of year.  Full sunlight is pleasant in the month of May.  It feels like a warm cheek pressed against me.

In my wandering, I found a small patch of snow still reaming on the shadow-held side of my cabin.  Maybe not so surprising a swatch remains when you consider how snow, shed from the cabin roof, reaches a depth of five or six feet by late winter.

I also found slews of glacier lilies where the sun has had time to poke around with the most urgency.   The lilies are pretty but exceedingly hardy specimens.  They are capable of shouldering up through snow if called to do so.

My walk along the creek was most interesting.  The beavers have been active this spring.  They constructed a series of small dams in the upper half of my meadow.  The dams have created calm terraces of water in many places.

In the end, all things are reduced to needing sun and water.

Glacier Lily

Last of the Snow Beside my Cabin

One of Many Beaver Dams on the Creek

An Arm of the Creek Extending Across the Meadow

—Mitchell Hegman

The War of the Worlds

I started watching a strange new Netflix series called Love Death + Robots.   The series consists of a collection of animated short stories.  Some animations are relatively humorous.   Others are graphic tales of horror.  A few are dripping with sex.  The animations also range from cartoonishly rendered to seemingly impossibly realistic.

All of the stories are strange, but I find myself enjoying most of them.  I appreciate the originality and absurdity allowed by the animations.  I am, in particular, astounded by how lifelike some of the human animations are.  The line between reality and fantasy is being erased.

Following one particularly brutal but realistically rendered episode, I had to stop watching for a while.  I was a little rattled.  I thought about how, in 1938, Orson Welles caused a real-life panic with a radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” a radio dramatization about Martians invading New Jersey.  Some people tuning in to listen to the program thought the invasion was real.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Strange Passenger

I am willing to kill invasive weeds.  They are weeds.  They are invading my country.  They don’t scream.  I can do it.

Beyond weeds, I struggle with killing stuff.

As a kid I was filled from head to toe with bloodlust, but all of that drained from me as the years drew on.  I am not talking about hunting.  I understand the need and validity of that.  I am talking about killing simply because a critter has transgressed me in some small way.

I try to allow room for most every living thing around me.  I won’t kill a rattlesnake just because it’s a rattlesnake.  If I find a bug inside my house, I try to catch it and then release it outside.  All of this might go a long way toward explain what happened at 4:07 AM yesterday morning.

Over recent weeks, mice have been making their way into my house.  I caught two them in live traps just last week.  After catching them, I marched them out onto the prairie in front of my house and released them.

I woke early yesterday morning and, upon stepping into the kitchen to throw together a batch of coffee, noticed I had caught another mouse.  And then I got to thinking about releasing this one.  I have not been taking the mice very far from my house.  What if the same mouse has been working its way back?

After my coffee started evolving, I grabbed the live trap.  “Well, buddy,” I said to the mouse inside,” You and I will be going for a ride in my new automobile.”

Three minutes later the mouse (inside his trap on the passenger seat) and I were speeding away from my house on our country road.

At the intersection where my spur meets the main road, about ¼-mile from my house, I stopped, grabbed the live trap, and carried it out into the juniper and sage.  “This is good country for a mouse,” I announced.  I opened the trap and shook the mouse free.  “Have a weird day,” I called out as the mouse zig-zagged out into the dark landscape.      

—Mitchell Hegman

A Late Bloom

As luck would have it, my Mayday tree opted to bloom one day after I had hoped it might.   By yesterday afternoon, the entire canopy was filled with clusters of white blossoms and honeybees.

Mayday trees are first cousin to chokecherry.   I have both species in my yard.   The Mayday tree fills with blossoms a week or two ahead of my chokecherry bushes.  While the blossoms of the Mayday are exceptionally fragrant, the fruit of the tree is unpalatable to you and me.  The berries do serve as late summer provender for birds.

Each year, since the mid-1990s, I have noted the date of my first bluebird sighting in early spring.  Bluebirds are the surest harbinger of spring.  In my mind the blooming Mayday occupies a similar station.  To me, the Mayday’s sweet canopy of blossoms is the surest sign everything will renew in the north where we live.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a few minutes standing under the Mayday tree; admiring the flowers and the honeybees dancing handsomely among them.

The scent so sweet it must be vital.

Mayday Tree and Sun

—Mitchell Hegman

Stealing Rocks

Stealing rocks is a thing.

Well, it’s a thing where I live.  My property, and that of my immediate neighbors, provides for an amazing array of pretty rocks.  I regularly pluck rocks from my neighbors’ ground as I wander around. Some of my neighbors pick up rocks from my property, too.   

This is expected behavior.

Yesterday, upon detecting some unusual motion outside at the front of my house, I found my neighbor, Kevin, loading rocks into a small trailer attached to his four-wheeler.  He wasn’t actually stealing them this time.  These were rocks displaced by the addition of my sunroom.   I had invited him to grab them some time ago. 

Just the same, I ran out front and yelled at him.  Following that, he invited himself inside for a drink.

“Okay,” I said.

Posted is a photograph of Kevin and the Guinness we shared.

A toast to lifting rocks!

—Mitchell Hegman

Richard Brautigan Versus Feeding the Birds

Richard Brautigan proposed writing at least one poem for everyone.  I suppose that might have been somewhat ambitious.  And, frankly, not everyone appreciates poetry.

I am more modest in my thinking.  My plan is to feed any birds that find my front yard.  Each day, I broadcast seeds across the ground for the mourning doves and jays.  I fill my birdfeeder with chipped sunflower seeds.  Crossbills and house finches use the feeder.  Chickadees take seeds from my hands.       

I am mostly satisfied with my work on feeding the birds.

In 1982, I spent a few afternoons and evenings drinking beer with Brautigan in Bozeman, Montana.  We talked about writing—poetry included.  Wallace Stevens wrote a poem entitled Poetry Is a Destructive Force.  The last line of the poem is this: “It can kill a man.”

Stevens proved correct.  Richard Brautigan commuted suicide in 1984.  He was, at the time, 49 years old and a writer published in some 30 languages. 

Poetry kills.

Feeding the birds is impractical, but is does not kill.  And even though I am harmless, the birds scatter if I get too close.  I think of Brautigan as they do.      

—Mitchell Hegman

Uyen Hegman, Ten Years Gone

The Mayday tree let me down.  I had hoped the tree would be in full bloom for this day, of all possible days.

No such luck.

Ten years ago, on this calendar day, Uyen left us behind.  I had hoped the tree would see fit to celebrate her life in flowers.

The Mayday tree is big now, but it was no more than a pliable stick when we brought it home from the nursery crosswise in the back seat of Uyen’s car.   We worked together to plant the spindly thing.  That, almost thirty years ago—nearly half of my life ago.

Though the Mayday tree has failed me, I have my good memories and images of Uyen painted by light.

Today, I share three of those:

Uyen on the day she became a U.S. citizen (July 3, 1986)

Uyen and her catch on the coast near San Diego (1987)

Uyen fishing “her” creek (June 25, 2002)

— Mitchell Hegman

Six Rules of Thumb

1. In the forest, following the well-traveled path may get you runover by a moose. 
2. Group decisions normally favor inaction.
3. Old homes provide for an abundance of new problems.
4. If it was easy, I would be doing it.
5. You cannot underestimate the power of Murphy’s law.
6. If a fire department, three paramedics, four ER nurses, three ER doctors, and a new procedure saves you, it might be slightly disingenuous to say God saved you.

— Mitchell Hegman

I Have an Explanation

I’m not confused all the time.  I’m just buffering like any electronic device does when a large file is collecting for launch.

— Mitchell Hegman

The Mayday Tree Problem

I am having problems with my Mayday tree.  For one thing, the tree is late in blooming.  Yesterday, the very first handful of blossoms opened up on a couple low branches.  Normally, the Mayday tree is filled with blossoms by this date.

But my biggest problem is memories.  We are only four days from what will mark ten years since my Uyen passed.  Even though I am now in a deeply satisfying relationship (although long-distance at the moment) with the most beautiful woman in the world, the ten-year mark has a certain added weight to it.

I don’t know why.

On Uyen’s last good day, I eased her into a wheelchair and pushed her out into the sunshine near the Mayday tree.  The tree was puffy with white blossoms and filled with bees.  The air pleasantly perfumed.

Sweet, sweet spring.

This year, I have thought about that last good day each time I stepped outside to check on the tree’s progress.

Ten years is a lot longer and a lot shorter time that you might think, and soon the tree will bloom in full.

First Mayday Blossoms

— Mitchell Hegman

The Caulking Gun Problem

After recent scientific evaluations, it has been determined that caulking guns are the most readily displaced construction tool.  This is due to several factors, including: infrequent use, the ability to hang them on trusses and forget them, and a natural tendency to store them away in “catch-all” boxes.

Okay, I made-up the stuff you read in the paragraph above.  There has been no scientific study.  I merely expressed some observations from my own experiences.

At present, I think (not totally sure) I own something near eight caulking guns.  Posted at the end of this blog is a photograph of a new one I purchased a few months ago when I was unable to locate one at the house.  Not long after buying the new gun, I found one in a cabinet in my garage.  A bit later, another two turned up in closet storage bins.   I also have at least three caulking guns at my cabin.   And I just know I have more guns somewhere.

There is a maxim that goes something like this: “You can’t have too many __________.”  The idea here is to fill the blank with something good.  Caulking guns don’t qualify.

— Mitchell Hegman

How Did That Get There?

Some things are a mystery to me.  Most tax forms are a solid mystery to me.  Why someone would buy liver on purpose and then eat it qualifies as a mystery.

As of yesterday afternoon, I have a new mystery.   This one involves Scotch. 

Wait.

I am not one-hundred percent certain it involves Scotch.  But a Scotch glass is definitely involved. 

So, yesterday afternoon, when I stepped out my back door to stretch a little after shuffling some papers around, I spotted one of my Scotch glasses in the flower bed just off my back deck.

Weird thig is, I have not been outside with a Scotch glass for a couple weeks. Not that I recall.  And the glass was not there yesterday.  Also, me, my 20 pounds of housecat, and a skinny chipmunk are the only ones regularly hanging out on the deck.

How in the hell did the glass get out there?  I am a little confounded.  What does anyone know about chipmunks?

— Mitchell Hegman

Good Stuff

Good stuff (another list):

Polite store employees

Having enough air in your tires

Flaming battle bots

(As a kid I never imagined myself saying this, but…) Broccoli

Ignoring your cat long enough to annoy him

Salma Hayek (still makes the list)

Change back on your dollar

Crushing aluminum cans by stomping on them

First light in a mountain valley

Watching the shadows of clouds rove across open landscapes

Dill pickles

— Mitchell Hegman

Homewrecker

Birds can be lowdown, dirty bastards.  I have long known the Corvidae family is filled with birds willing to bluster and bully.  Members of this family include ravens, jays, and magpies.

And then we have cowbirds.  These sons-a-bitches, displace eggs from the nests of other bird species and replace them with their eggs so the other birds will raise and care for them.

Until recently, I considered woodpeckers a nuisance in only a marginal sense.  They made a bit of noise at times.  That changed this spring.  About a month ago, a particular (bastardish) northern flicker decided it might be fun to the rap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap against the sheathing I exposed on my house for the purpose of attaching my new sunroom.

Every few days, usually around 7:00 AM, the flicker takes a few raps against the house.

I rush outside and curse at him.

While all of this has been going on, I have enjoyed watching a pair of bluebirds flying in and out of the nesting box I fixed to a post just in front of my house.  They have been getting the nest inside the box in spiffed-up for a new brood.

No more.

They are gone, thanks to the northern flicker.

Following are two photographs of what the flicker did to the bluebird box.

Left Side

Front and Right Side

— Mitchell Hegman

Reading the Local News

Every day can’t be a good one.  Somebody famous didn’t have to wring out calculations to prove this to me.  I just know it instinctively.  

All day, ravens have been crashing hard against our sky of windblown clouds.  Greasy-birds, we have come to call them.   So annoying how they squawk.  And they flap too much.  A better bird would glide.

Yesterday I had an answer for everything.  The sun felt like my best pal’s arm over my shoulder.  I swear it did.  I wanted to prance a little.

Today I want to swallow a pretty rock so I might feel like there is something of worth inside me.

Foul weather.  The wrong teams winning.  And I don’t want to read another of those jarring obituaries carrying the names of people know.

— Mitchell Hegman

Plains Milkvetch

You have to admire a flower willing to grow in an exposed pile of rocks.  Plains milkvetch is just that kind of flower.  Sometimes called cushion milkvetch, this a Montana native.  It’s a markedly tough plant, preferring to grow in dry and gravelly locations.  This makes the edge of the road leading down to my lakefront perfect habitat for the low, tufted plant. 

Though not exceptionally showy, plains milkvetch in bloom are attractive enough, and the local bees most certainly appreciate them.  They are among the first wave of prairie flowers to bloom.  I often find them sharing rocky shoulders of earth with tufted phlox.

The bad news?  Plains milkvetch is poisonous to both wildlife and livestock.   

Posted is a photograph of plains milkvetch I captured on a walk down to the lake yesterday.  The dandelion gives some idea of size.

— Mitchell Hegman

More Water, More Ponds

A water storage system is currently under construction in the meadow at my cabin property.   The work is being performed by known experts: beavers.

I have a bit over 600 feet of meandering creek and thickets in my meadow.  Last Year, beavers produced a few ponds and still-water runs on the lower half of my property.  They advanced upstream this year.

I am happy to have fishing ponds and lots of water.  Not long ago, I read an article about how the reintroduction of beaver into a valley suffering from poor grass production for cattle, saw dramatic improvement in grass and forage as the groundwater levels spread from the water held back by the beavers.  They also reduced damage to the landscape from torrential runoffs.   

Beavers have a place in the scheme of things.

Beavers are interesting, too.  They are the largest rodents in North America.  They mostly operate at night and are capable of remaining underwater for up to fifteen minutes.

A beaver's teeth never stop growing.  If you somehow provided all the food a beaver needed for survival but disallowed it from chewing on wood (a practice that wears down its teeth), the beaver's teeth would rapidly grow and deform to a point where they could potentially curve in and puncture the creature’s skull.  At the very least, the teeth would soon become useless and, if left to itself, the beaver would starve to death.  In a sense, a beaver is for its entire life stalked by its own teeth.

— Mitchell Hegman