Three Possibilities

·         In one possibility I turn unapologetically liberal, begin reporting to various work appointments wearing nothing but a canary yellow speedo, and write-in the name “Donald Duck” on every ballot for which I am eligible to vote.

·         In another possibility I author a runaway best-selling book.  Every page of the book has only the line: “What the _____________” written at the center.  The idea is that the readers will fill-in the blank each day with a different word depending on their mood.  

·         In the final possibility I prefer the company of women.

--Mitchell Hegman

Black Widow

The spider Latrodectus, more commonly known as a black widow, is found throughout most of the Western Hemisphere.  In my view, black widows are the creepiest-looking spider around.  They are unearthly shiny and cold.  The forelegs of a black widow seem to almost telescope as they tap along their webs.  Their webs are chaotic and often cluttered with the dismantled bodies of bugs they have captured and killed.

They are junk collectors.

The black widow earned that name because oftentimes the female will kill her much smaller male partner after mating.  And the venom of a black widow is 15 times more potent than that of a rattlesnake.  Fortunately, these spiders prefer quiet and dark corners.  They are not social and not particularly adventurous.   In the fall, I often find one or two hammocked between the rake and shovel handles in my garage, preparing to overwinter.

I once bellied deep into the crawl space of a house while working (as an electrician) and found myself surrounded by more than a dozen black widows suspended in ugly webs all around me.   As luck would have it, my trouble light blinked-out just as I scuttled into this firmament of spiders.  I screamed at my partner to tape a new bulb to my cord.  I cautiously fished the new bulb toward me, fired it up, quickly finished my work, and then drove back to tell my boss he would need to fire me before ever sending me back to that place again.

I was serious.

The black widow is threat enough to workers that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) publishes a fact sheet about the spider for workers likely to encounter them.

On Sunday last, I opened my door to let 40 pounds of cat outside and found a black widow clinging to the bottom of the door along with a few fragments of leaf in her web.  I did not kill her.  Instead, I coaxed her onto a wooden dowel and carried her out for release into the wild bunchgrass.  I took a picture of her before letting her go.       

--Mitchell Hegman

A Tree Holds the Night

The photograph I am posting today was taken by me about ten years ago.  I stood shivering in the cold for twenty minutes waiting for the sky to blush on one side of the tree.  As I recall, the temperature was only about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.  

--Mitchell Hegman

List of Places Where the Sun Projects Squares and Rectangles of Light Inside My House on Sunday Afternoons

·         One square across the entry throw where my cat, Carmel, sprawls to bath in the warmth.

·         A single rectangle at odds with the lines of the faux wood floor in the room where my wife faded away from me.

·         Another cast against the recliner where I sometimes sit simply to think.

·         Two squares in the den.

·         A trapezoid in the room where my daughter sobbed when boys broke her heart.

·         A square on each side of my bed.  One on the side where my feet find the floor each morning.  The other on the side now untouched.

·         The last square of light drowning in the pure white of the bathtub in my bathroom.   

--Mitchell Hegman 

An Event unlike any Other

One morning, as I stood at my bay window looking out to assess the evolving day, I spotted a single white feather falling from the sky.  The feather was downy and descending slowly, without any lateral drift—the way a pearl might sink through a vat filled with oil.  The feather was perhaps one hundred feet off the ground when I first saw it.  In all the remaining expanse of sky I saw nothing but that feather.  Not a cloud.  Not a single bird.  And I watched the feather ease all the way down into the tawny grass, with jade-colored mountains behind, and perfect silence all around.

What meaning in that?        

--Mitchell Hegman

Twins to the Rescue

Starting up a new business is not easy.  Starting up a new business with a construction component following a total collapse of the economy is even more not easy!

Yes, I am aware that I just butchered the English language in the sentence above.

Anyhow, we have been using my young business partner’s home—mostly his kitchen—as our office for many months.  Sometimes we share our office with his small twin girls.  An actual office would be nice.  We both agree on that.  But we need to produce more income before that will happen. 

The other day I worked for several hours straight on developing a flow-chart we might use for determining the best energy-efficient “luminaires” for use in replacing old-school, magnetically operated lighting fixtures.  There are dozens choices.  Additionally, we must consider lumen outputs, starting cycles, starting temperatures, Kelvin color temperatures, ballast factors…and on until you crash into a wall.  Naturally, I developed a headache.

This is the part where working in a house with children has advantages.  Rubbing at my forehead, I plodded into the living room to clear my mind.  Here is a photograph of the scene I discovered there.

I felt better at once.

--Mitchell Hegman

Homeward Bound: The Grizzly Bear

The grizzly bears here in Montana (Ursus Arctos Horribilis) have for the last century been mostly confined to remote wilderness areas in the mountains.  They were, before white men settled the West, a plains animal.  During the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery the men in the expedition killed 43 of the grizzly bears they encountered while trekking along the rivers and streams across the plains—mostly here in Montana.  But the bears in the last couple of years have been venturing far out onto the high plains of Montana again, usually following the rivers that twist away from the Rocky Mountain front.

In a Great Falls Tribune article, Karl Puckett noted that in 2009 a young grizzly followed the Teton River all the way to Loma, Montana.  Loma is 100 miles from the mountains.  In June of 2010, two grizzlies were spotted near Floweree, again something near 100 miles from the Rocky Mountains.  In the smattering of towns only a few miles off the wall of mountains where the Rockies meet the Northern Plains, grizzly sightings are becoming downright common.

The male grizzlies in Montana average something in the range of 400 to 600 pounds.  They are much smaller than their immediate kin, the Alaskan Brown, which may easily reach over 1000 pounds.   The behavior of these bears, though, is markedly different.  The bears in Alaska seem genuinely unconcerned about sharing space with humans.  Fishermen and bears often shoulder along the same fishing holes on rivers during the salmon run.  That will not work with Grizzlies in Montana.  The bears in Montana are substantially more aggressive and may charge if you approach within a few hundred yards.  That is problematic when you consider that they have been clocked to run at 30 miles an hour.  A mother with her cubs is particularly wary of incursion into her claimed territory.

Though I suspect a reliable list of fatal grizzly attacks and maulings is available, I did not find such.  Wikipedia, yes.  Recent years have seen a few.  In 2011, two people were killed by grizzlies in Yellowstone Park.  Later that year, a grizzly, wounded by hunters on the Montana-Idaho border, turned on them, in the ensuing fight one man shot and killed his partner while trying to end the attack.  Another fatal Grizzly attack here in Montana occurred in the Gallatin National Forest near Bozeman in 2010.  The bears are expanding territory and being seen in unlikely places.  In 2007 a pheasant hunter was mauled, but survived, while hunting along Dupuyer Creek, some fifteen or so miles off the Front Range in open ranch country.  

I have a cabin deep in the mountains behind the Front.  The cabin is within walking distance of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  Bear Country.  A grizzly sow and three cubs summered in my little valley a few years back.  Thankfully, I never encountered her.  I kept an eye roving at all times when I hiked around my cabin.

But the plains are where the bears once lived.  And now that their population has started to recover a little, some are feeling the urge to return home.        

--Mitchell Hegman

From the Great Falls Tribune:  http://howlingforjustice.wordpress.com/tag/grizzlies-returning-home/