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

Fragile Beauty

If you are seeking something to worry about, choose fairyslippers.

Yes, the flowers.  Calypso, in scientific terminology.

Though distributed in circumboreal fashion (in a band of boreal forests circling the Earth), fairyslippers are considered endangered.  A member of the orchid family, they are small and equally as finicky and fragile as they are beautiful.

From the very start, fairyslippers have a tenuous grip on life.  They have but a single leaf.  They also require a specific fungus in the soil in order to survive.  A cool and moist environment is another must.  Finally—because fairyslippers possess no nectar, they attract pollinates by deception.  Their vanilla scent and shape fools pollinators who land on the flowers and bumble around without gain just long enough to get the job of pollination done.

A fairyslipper plant, under the best of conditions, will last no more than five years.  They do not tolerate pulling, trampling, or transplanting.  More alarming, fairyslippers do not endure logging or any other such wholesale disturbance of habitat.      

My cabin property boasts a fairly large population of fairyslippers.  Having learned more about them, I guard them jealously.

If you find fairyslippers in your travels, talk nice to them, but leave them be.

Posted are a couple of (surprisingly sharp) photographs of fairyslippers I captured with my new smarter-than-my-phone on a recent trip to my cabin.

--Mitchell Hegman

By Definition: The Middle of Nowhere

There is, by definition, a town in middle of nowhere here in the continental U.S.

Turns out the town is in Montana.

First off, we have to establish the metric for determining nowhere and then find the center point.

Okay, it’s a bit easier than that.

The Washington Post wanted to find the small town in the continental U.S. located the farthest, in any direction, from any metropolitan area.  A metropolitan area being defined as a city with a population of more than 75,000 people.

Glasgow, Montana, population 3,300, is the very town they were seeking.

The nearest city to Glasgow is Billings, Montana.  Billings is 277 miles away.  A drive of well over 4 hours is required to reach one place from the other.

If the distance from cities is not enough to give you the impression of being in the middle of nowhere, there is also an abandoned Airforce Base near Glasgow.  The base operated during the height of the Cold War, but was utterly abandoned in 1976.   

I previously read where Circle, Montana, was determined as the town farthest from the nearest Starbucks of any town in the continentals U. S.  From Circle, you need to drive 192 miles in one direction to reach the nearest Starbucks.

Both of these towns occupy country we often refer to as the Big Open—the last of the Great Plains flexing flat belly muscles across Eastern Montana.

The most important thing to know about these two towns is that the folks in both places feel pretty good about living in the middle of nowhere.  They can make their own coffee and they have no immediate need for traffic.

--Mitchell Hegman

Abstract Conditions

I have previously expressed my love for photographs of mundane subjects that, by point of view or tricks of light, are transformed into beautiful abstractions.

Posted today are two such photographs.

The subjects: collections of rainwater on the surface of my new propane grill.

I captured the photographs in first light.  The directional nature of the light and the tight field of focus add greatly to the obscurity of the photographs.  I created the red spot on the second photograph by “flashing” through the palm and fingers of my hand. 

--Mitchell Hegman

My Body is My Temple

When a person is in their twenties or thirties, making the statement “My body is my temple” makes some sense.  But at this later stage of my life I have a kind shack thing going on over in my direction.

I have crooked window shutters and weathered siding.  My roofing is looking a bit battered.  Inside, a few paintings are hanging crooked.

I am not complaining.  I feel pretty good.  Yesterday, between rain showers, I even managed a four-mile hike on Mount Helena with my friend Jeff.

I think, at this point, I will go with this: “My body was earned.”

Me.                                                                                      

Jeff.

--Mitchell Hegman