Stick of Paradise

Living in Montana is not for everybody. This especially applies to a host of exotic plants. Honestly, it’s a narrow range of plants that can survive our long months of winter, replete with arctic impulses and their sub-zero temperatures.

We can lull some of these soft-natured plants into growing here by providing space in places such as our sunroom. But even the sunroom trick fails from time to time. Perhaps our low humidity squeezes them a bit too hard. Or the intense and unrelenting midsummer sun slaps others silly.

Now enter a bird of paradise stage right. The plant kind, I mean. After brief deliberations, Desiree and I had a “bird” shipped here. We immediately unpacked the thing and placed it in the sunroom.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the plant gradually shriveled and died as an upright stick.

We now have a stick of paradise.

A Healthy Bird of Paradise

New Bird (Our Plant Arrives)

Stick of Paradise

—Mitchell Hegman

Possible Outcomes

Listed today is a run of possible outcomes for following your first instinct:

• You invent a new tool for extracting broken bolts.
• You end up flailing in mid-air and seeking a soft landing ten feet below.
• A new nickname is born: Smooth.
• Thirty years later, you remain perfectly happy in marriage.
• You find yourself pacing back and forth in a jail cell.
• At least your smartphone case proves its worth.
• You become briefly famous for something you would rather not have become famous for.
• You accidentally start a chain of events that ends with you owning a three-legged cat.

—Mitchell Hegman

Bands of Light

The narrow mountain valley in which my cabin is located forces the sun to work for proper access. In the morning, the sun must clamber up the eastern flanks of the mountains before peering in. In the evening, it must hang on for as long as possible before descending the west slopes and finally setting. But in the rarified minutes immediately after cresting the mountains above us in the morning and just before slipping away in the evening, the most extraordinary event takes place. In these fleeting minutes, bands of sunlight extend long across the forest floor alongside hard shadow.

The light ignites all the colors and details amid the understory and sends all manner of birds and insects strobing through the bands.

In these brief stretches of time, both the fragility and strength of the forest are on full display. I love no other time of day better.

Morning Light

Evening Light

—Mitchell Hegman

A Woman, a Mouse, and a Shrew

Held between my hands, my face feels thin as a comb.

And cold.

I’ve been thinking about All the Dead Dears, the uneasy poem Sylvia Plath penned following a visit to the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge. The poem details a stone coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew. The ankle bone of the woman has been slightly gnawed. Plath’s lines make it clear she found no closure in death.

Consider: Sylvia Plath, unhappy in the constant squall of her own too-sharp thoughts, suicided at the age of thirty.

Where do my indecent, my own morose thoughts go after knocking at my door? Do they scurry off to cower in a corner like a mouse or a shrew, waiting for a chance to rush back and gnaw at my ankle before we enter our bruised eternity?

—Mitchell Hegman

Another List of Random Thoughts

Following is another modest list of my thoughts and attributes:

• My ability to solve problems is vastly surpassed by my ability to make them.
• If I were to become President, I would put forth only one executive order: a cease-and-desist mandate to force all grocers to stop putting stickers on fruit.
• If I were given the task of re-engineering the world, buffalo would have wings (making the restaurant chain reconsider portions), gravity would be adjustable, and eating Filipino food would cure a wide array of cancers.
• Catastrophic failure is always an option.
• I wish mice were magnetic so we could repel them (at velocity).
• In my estimation, psychotic should not have a silent “p” and should be pronounced “puh-sigh-KOT-ik.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Retirement

You spend the first three-quarters of your life gathering and binding stuff together, and then you retire and spend the last quarter watching everything unbind again.

—Mitchell Hegman

Prescribed Burn

On an average year, something between 300,000 and 500,000 acres in Montana end up scorched by wildfires. In 2017, Montana recorded 1.4 million acres burned, which is the most acreage lost to wildfires in a single modern recorded year in state history (not accounting for the historic Great Fire of 1910, which burned roughly 3 million acres across Montana and Idaho).

Worse than this, fires have the capability to sweep through the most modern of cities. Just this year, a fire ravaged a neighborhood in Spokane, Washington.

One leg of prevention is controlled fires, more aptly tagged as “prescribed burns,” owing to the fact that fires can be only marginally controlled, and calling them controlled is a bit over-optimistic.

Yesterday, a prescribed burn was initiated behind Mount Helena. It’s jarring to be driving around Helena while smoke billows up from a wide sweep of land just beyond the city.

Hopefully, the wind will remain settled and this fire remains only a half-threat. I have posted a photograph Desiree captured as we drove through town.

Prescribed Burn Near Mount Helena

—Mitchell Hegman