The Wild East

Yesterday, after winnowing through the National Electrical Code while teaching an exam preparation course for some journeymen about to take the master electrician’s test, I came home and melted into my sofa.

This teaching stuff is hard work.

As my teaching buddy, Steve, always expounds: “Electricity is hard!”

For some strange reason, I am one of those fraction-of-a-percenters who really enjoys the Code.  To me, the provisions written within the Code range on a scale that starts at confounding but ends at Shakespearean.  Between the ends of this spectrum, I truly enjoy the knitting of shalls and shall nots, the formalized structure.   I even enjoy the run-on sentences dragging ahead like heavy freight trains.  And, in the end, I enjoy toying with my own plain English conversions for better understanding.

Crazy, thick, and perplexing as the Code can be, I think we really need it in place.  I can express why we need it in photograph after photograph.  Today, for example, I am posting a couple photographs I captured in Vietnam in 2009.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Clutching an Elk Antler (A Sure Sign of Spring)

The arrival of spring is marked in different ways from place to place.  In Washington, D.C., spring is official when the city is awash in cherry blossoms.  In Hinckley, Ohio, it’s the arrival of buzzards.  In Chicago, the gunplay moves outdoors.  Here in Helena, Montana, the surest sign of spring is seeing people standing outside clutching elk antlers. 

I can explain that.

Elk antlers are a big deal.  First of all, they are pretty cool to look at.  You can make artsy stuff out of them.   Also, they can be sold.  Fresh brown antlers can fetch something like $12.00 a pound.  Sun-bleached antlers rake in about $8.00 a pound.

This time of year, people from around here begin probing areas of receding snow in the nearby mountains seeking antlers shed by elk and deer.  Yesterday, while visiting my sister, a mutual friend stopped by to show us a nice elk shed he found north of Helena.  We all went outside and took turns clutching the thing.

Elk antlers are astonishingly heavy; as if made of stone.

As I mentioned, elk antlers are a big deal around here.  People pay attention to them—especially how many points they have.  Years ago, a story appeared in our paper about a man in Bozeman who beat his girlfriend with an elk antler.  As I recall, the woman did not experience any long-term injury.  But quite a few people I knew were upset because the article failed to mention how many points the antler had.

So my blog will not suffer a similar fate, I have posted a photograph of that girl clutching the antler we saw yesterday.  You can count the points for yourself.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Banging Your Head Against the Wall (Some Odd Facts)

—The letter “Q” is the only letter of the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any state.

—Similar to humans being right-handed or left-handed, most dogs use their right ear when listening to humans and use their left ear when listening to threatening sounds.  Additionally, most dogs use their left nostril for “good” smells. 

—Your nose and ears will grow long after the rest of your body has ceased growth.  They will continue to grow throughout your life.

—Heat expansion on a hot summer day can cause the Eiffel Tower to grow six inches taller.

—Banging your head against the wall for an hour will burn 150 calories.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Sources: Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, The Fact Site

Pairs

Sometimes, I think we care about beauty only in an over-defined sense.  We will, for example, drive for miles to stand outside in the night and watch a fireworks display where bright pyrotechnic blossoms explode against the sky one after another.  But, at the same time, we may not bother to step out our back door to witness a meteor shower when shooting stars flash above us only every few minutes.

Last night, I experienced something unusual.  Something small and beautiful. 

It is said that Canada geese are monogamous.  They will mate for life once they pair up in their second year of life.  This time of year, huge flights of geese fly overtop my house in northward migration.  More notably, the pastures and grain fields in the surrounding valley fill with flocks of geese resting or feeding.

Last night, just before dusk, I sat out on my back deck to take in the last of a warm and sunny day.  As I sat there, pairs of geese, having lifted from nearby pastures, began to fly over my house.  Not whole flights.  Just pairs.  Most of them many seconds or minutes apart.

They were often no more than a dozen feet above my house as they flew off in the direction of the Big Belt Mountains.  Often, I could hear the soft whistling of air through their wings.  Some pairs were gabbling back and forth in their unintelligible language.

This was no explosion of geese above my house—just the passing of pairs.  I didn’t count the pairs, but I am guessing somewhere near a dozen flew over me.  A dozen pairs of life-mates, on their way to spring nurseries.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Reality Sets In

I stepped outside and slipped into my hot tub early this morning.  In the calm and relative silence of predawn I contemplatively imagined I might hear the stars and planets jostling about in the royal blue dome of sky above.

After no more than a minute or so of soaking, reality, in the form of a garbage truck, set in.  With headlights scouring the hills and scattered trees beyond my home, and a single orange light strobing on top, the truck rattled and clanged out to the far reaches of Dana’s Point.  For the next few minutes, my only significant input was the advancing and receding sounds and the occasional beeps of the backup signal of the garbage truck making predawn rounds through country homes.

Oddly enough, I found a certain pleasure (if not reassurance) in the rumblings of the truck looping through the hills.  We are never fully alone out here.  You can always count on the garbage truck making the rounds on Wednesdays.  

-- Mitchell Hegman

A Half-Reminder

In a very real sense, life on our blue planet is founded upon savagery.  We are surrounded by predators.  Consider the hawks in stiff circles above.  The leggy spiders bursting from shadow to light as they ambush hapless passersby.

Big fish eat little fish.

And, of course, we fully acknowledge the apex beasts afield: wolves, bears, big cats.

Our own pets—sweet as they seem—are predators just the same.

On occasion, a field mouse will somehow gain entry to my house.  My 20 pounds of housecat is first to notice such events.  He immediately switches into hunting mode when he detects a mouse.  I will find him hunched at various places around the house watching corners or peering under furniture.  I might notice him sniffing along the floor.

The day before yesterday, my cat switched into hunting mode.  I saw him sniffing at the space under the range.  He lingered near the toe space below the kitchen sink.  While I was in Missoula teaching a class yesterday, that girl texted me a photograph of what she found on the living room floor.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Door Check

I’m not sure what the deal is with my 20 pounds of housecat.  He’s developed a new quirk.  Now, when I find him at the door and try to let him outside, I am required to open and close the door three or four times before he will actually walk outside.  He sits there watching the door (not looking outside) with great interest as I conduct the “practice openings.”

It’s as though he is some kind of building inspector making sure the door is in perfect working order before he will use it.  Or, perhaps, my cat has developed obsessive compulsive disorder and I and the door are caught up in one of his OCD loops.

 -- Mitchell Hegman