Taking the Alley

Yesterday, I drove down a long alley just off Broadway Street in Helena. I've always found alleys fascinating. As a kid growing up in East Helena, cutting through them was often my first option as I traveled across town.

Alleys offered the raw and ragged side of life. There you found overflowing and wholly abused garbage cans, old cars with their entrails hanging out, skittish cats, scraps of wood, and all manner of untended spaces where tall weeds could grow.

But treasure might also be found: recyclable bottles, yellow rose bushes overtaking leaning sheds, twisty metal stuff I liked, exotic beer cans for my growing collection, mirrors, and discarded junk I could use or take apart just for fun.

The jungly, narrow alley off Broadway did not disappoint. I negotiated past yellow roses in full bloom, stacks of weathered lumber, a strange bench seat made of wooden slats, leafy places where city deer bed down, one disemboweled truck, and a scattering of fly-away birds.

I'm sharing a photograph of the alley so you might enjoy it along with me. Every alley keeps a few treasures and secrets for those willing to take the long way through town.

The Alley Off Broadway

—Mitchell Hegman

Navigating Through Everyday Life

My wife has this one, I want to say, annoying habit that makes my navigation through everyday life treacherous at times. I’m referring, of course, to her ability to accurately remember everything I say or do for the long term.

—Mitchell Hegman

Snowball

In the softest light of the early evening, as waves spilled the last of their silver against the shore, I found Snowball, my neighbor Kevin’s black cat, on the concrete of my boat ramp down at the lakefront.

“Oh, hell…”

She was dead, stretched into a final pose among pinecones and thin strands of aquatic weed that had washed ashore and threaded themselves together.

Snowball made a good run for an outdoor cat. Something near 21 years. Though a couple of years ago, she lost half of her tail. Kevin told me she’d been missing for a couple of days. And she’d refused both breakfast and loving the last time he saw her.

Cats do that at the end of their days.

I walked up to Kevin’s place to tell him. “I guess you’ll want to do something with her,” I tendered.

A few minutes later, we were standing over Snowball. Her eyes were open, but dull and locked in a thousand-mile stare.

“I’m glad we found her,” I said. “It’s better to know. She was a good girl.”

“She was my friend,” Kevin responded. “One of my best friends.”

Kevin gathered up the cat and slipped her into a heavy plastic bag that once held salt for a water-softening system. And while it may not seem plausible, this was done with grace.

“I’m sorry, Kevin.”

Kevin acknowledged me wordlessly.

Some things don’t long for words.

Snowball

—Mitchell Hegman

Questions That Keep Me Awake at Night

• Why would anyone be mean to a turtle?
• If I was abducted by aliens, would they have a bathroom for me to use?
• Why is water wet?
• If ghosts walk through walls, why don't they fall through floors?

—Mitchell Hegman

Among the Fallen Giants

The two primary agents for busting down an old conifer forest for recycling and renewal are wildfire and wind. Either of these can be jaw-droppingly violent.

Wildfires are the primary agents at work here. They are ubiquitous and lurid, given the clawing flames and billowing smoke. Some are utterly destructive, leaving nothing but charred bits smoldering in their wake.

But wind can do in moments what takes a fire hours or days. A microburst can leave nothing standing in its swath. Neither trees 20 years old nor 200 years old can withstand such powerful gusts. Whole sections of forest might be uprooted and laid flat to languish and die with root balls exposed, still clutching clumps of earth and stone.

For whatever reason, mathematical or otherwise, the forests all around my cabin have recently suffered a series of devastating windstorms. The property owner adjacent to my cabin had to chainsaw his way in to his place after a storm downed over a dozen huge fir trees several weeks ago. Yesterday, on a drive through the mountains, we encountered hundreds upon many hundreds of giants that were recently ripped from the ground and unceremoniously pitched down. For several miles we crept along, negotiating our way through places where huge trees had been wrenched from the earth and flung down across the road. Somebody had opened the road long before our arrival, but in places there was barely room for us to pass. I’m sharing images of two places where we were forced to squeak through fallen titans.

A Behemoth Tree in the Road

Trees Across the Road

—Mitchell Hegman

Events: June 14, 2026

Desiree and I had a lovely day at the cabin yesterday. To begin, we found another photograph of the moose and her baby on our game camera. This one captured the pair in perfect clarity as they pranced in front of the cabin. Later, while trekking across the mountainside immediately behind the cabin, I found an edible puffball (for a fungi-loving someone other than me), one worthy of being posed beside a can of Cold Smoke beer.

The best occurrence, though, was finding the upper elevations of our mountain acreage absolutely awash with wildflowers. The lupine and arrowleaf balsamroot stood two feet tall across the mountainside and were on full display. While lupine may not be desirable for grazing animals, they do put on a righteous purple show.

Moose on the Game Camera

Puffball

Desiree Amid the Wildflowers

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Walt Whitman Said

 

— "I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.”

— "Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”

— “Be curious, not judgmental.”