Shooting Star

My Sunday started with a quiet drive to Butte to visit with relations in from Illinois. Deadened from a week of travel and training in such things as trust fund fiduciary obligations, standards for apprenticeship, and disciplinary discharge from training programs, I simply did not feel like talking. While in Butte, we toured the World Museum of Mining, located on the site of what was once the Orphan Girl Mine—named such because the mine and her headframe (for dropping men and mules and equipment directly underground) sat so far apart from the cluster of other mines in the area. Though known mostly for copper production, the Orphan Girl expelled some 7,500,000 ounces of silver from her day of opening in 1875 until closure in 1956.

I enjoyed the museum for all the old equipment, with wheels as big as houses and gearboxes that might fill a living room. I liked walking through the old mining town, reconstructed on site, and the huge blue sky above us filled with roving clouds. Still, I remained pensive. Honestly, I felt a little empty and unable to focus on much of anything.

When I arrived home again, late in the afternoon, I gathered up the week’s worth of newspapers I missed and began to read through articles that captured my attention. Upon opening one of the papers, I saw a picture of some dear friends, Chuck and Esther, accompanied by some quotes from them. I read only a few lines, pleased to find my good friends there, talking about flowers and gardens, and then, in my excitement, I turned to my wife’s chair to share this with her.

Not there. Only an empty chair. For a brief snippet of time, for the length of time required to skip a shooting star across our atmosphere, I had my wife back with me. And I’ll be damned if that didn’t bring one of the only smiles I managed for the entire day.

--Mitchell Hegman

My Reaction to the Stock Market Yesterday As the Day Wore On

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--Mitchell Hegman

News

Military choppers brought down by rocket-propelled grenades in Afghanistan. Worldwide stock markets tumbling. The credit rating of the United States downgraded. Drought in the South. Famine in Africa. Rogue asteroids and doomsday comets streaking toward our planet from the vastness of space. Meanwhile, on my television, as if we don’t have enough to worry about, this big-eared fellow is telling me about the alarming number of right-handed batters up against left-handed pitchers in future baseball games. How shall we rest on this desperate night?

--Mitchell Hegman

Northern Lights

Somewhere above the Great Plains of North Dakota, our flight back to Montana slipped overtop a massive lightning storm. Below us, and extending northward to the horizon, black clouds pulsed and strobed with brilliant flashes of light from within, bringing startling depth and detail, in the form of white and blue thunderheads, before falling back to black again. The flashes from below caused the wings of our jet to wink platinum in varied cadence. Above the clouds, hard to our north, the northern lights appeared and rapidly fanned-out between the storm horizon and wide blast of stars above. The lights began to accordion back and forth, streaking upwards, dropping back again, dancing and swaying to sun-driven rhythms. Everyone peered out the windows.

We gradually drew away from the lightning and the aurora borealis. As the storm and the northern lights dissolved back into the night, lights below began to pool into familiar towns: Bozeman, Three Forks, and then Townsend. Our descent brought us into Helena and the mountains grew imposing as the lights rapidly gathered all around us. Home.

I woke today in my own bed with one cat sprawled on the blankets beside me, another hunched at the open door, and cool, pine-scented air spilling inside from an open window. After dressing and brewing coffee, I stood at my bay windows to appraise the coming day, as I so often do. Beyond the blonde and fading green of bunchgrass prairie, the russet-brown of raw earth where farmers have flayed their wheatfields to fallow, and beyond the up-rise of open foothills, the Elkhorn Mountains stacked together in bluish layers. Nearer, my Mayday tree seemed as if fluffing itself, shaking and preening its own branches the way a brooding partridge might. Only after closer observation did I finally see, within the thick mesh of branches and leaves, cedar waxwings, robins, and chickadees jostling back and forth, feeding on the ripening berries.

For a time, quite foolishly, I thought that I owned the Mayday tree. Not so. The tree, the soil that sifts through my fingers, my wife, now gone for these three solid months, the come-and-go storms, and the northern lights—none of these can be held for long. I thought again about the northern lights. Scientifically, the lights are the end result the place where magnetic lines of flux and charged particles dance together. Below all of that, where we live, that is another kind of dance, one where we must cling together for as long as we can.

--Mitchell Hegman

Montana

The National Training Institute I am attending is a gathering of people involved in the electrical industry from every state and much of Canada. Naturally, when you meet someone and make introduction, you tell them where you are from. I am astounded by how many people say, after I tell them I am from Montana, that if they ever moved from their present place of residence, Montana is where they would like to live.

--Mitchell Hegman

Where Clouds Are Born

I am attending a week of training at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yesterday, after eating dinner a few blocks off campus, four of us walked Huron Street back to our hotel during a rainstorm. Here, the rain falls straight down to the streets and buildings, steady and warm. As we walked, the people and small birds that perpetually fill the sidewalks, drew back under the canopy of either storefronts or trees. Above an old stone church, we saw a single cloud, much lower than the others, slowly spinning and tightening into a ball, pure white under the bruised underbelly of the stormfront. This low, treed place, pinched between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, just at the high and jumbled Rocky Mountain Front, is a place where clouds are born.

--Mitchell Hegman

Haircut

As I studied my reflection in the mirror early this morning, again trying my damndest to comb order into my hair, I realized that, as of two weeks ago, I have become living proof that a man can survive a really bad haircut.

--Mitchell Hegman