Stranded on Super Bowl Sunday

Somewhere in the gene pool, a glitch occurred when the selections for me were being sorted out. Now, all these years later, this mistake in human design has left me stranded on Super Bowl Sunday.

I won’t be watching the game. Here’s the thing: my genetic mistake makes watching football entirely tedious for me. Over the course of my life, I have watched, surrounded by others who were intensely thrilled, exactly one Super Bowl game. Aside from that, I once watched almost the entirety of a regular football game while captive at a bar in East Helena in the early 1980s.

The sport evades me. It strikes me as a lot of standing around, followed by brief, intense moments of people with helmets and numbers on them rioting whenever a football is picked up off the ground.

They migrate back and forth on a striped field doing this stuff.

Hmmm.

Instead of watching the game today, I’m going to walk around in the scattered timber below my house and look for chickadees. There seems to be a critical shortage of them this year.

—Mitchell Hegman

My New Habit

I’ve developed a new habit. I’ve started talking to the drivers of other cars as I negotiate traffic in town. Mind you, they can’t hear me. They’re in one car and I’m in another. And I’m not bellowing at them. I’m actually speaking in my calm, nurturing voice.

I coax them along:

“Pay attention, Dude… Stay in your lane… Right on red, Lady… Give me a signal… I go, then you go… Easy peasy… Take your proper turn at the four-way…”

When I’m driving alone, I talk my way through the entire trip. If I ever get in a wreck, I can already see myself explaining it to the responding police officer. “I told that guy not to pull out, officer. I said it twice.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Another Batch of Questions

• If, to save mankind, you had to eliminate one color from the visible spectrum, which color would you choose?
• When was the last time you impressed yourself?
• How many pennies can be found in the various catch-all places around your house?
• What is something you keep “just in case,” though you know that case will likely never arrive?
• Have you ever hidden something valuable in the freezer?
• What is your first thought when you see someone sporting a “Mom” tattoo?
• Is there anything hidden in your freezer right now?
• What household item do you own that has outlived its original purpose?
• What ordinary sound instantly pulls you back to a specific moment in your past?

—Mitchell Hegman

Question of the Day

How long would you be willing to drive around a crash-repaired car with a mismatched hood, two off-color fenders, and a missing front driver’s-side hubcap?

—Mitchell Hegman

Chaos

I must admit, I like some forms of chaos. For starters, I like some of the rocks strewn around my house, especially the ones my sapphire-mining neighbor, Blaze Wharton, calls chaos stone. I’ve posted a photograph of a specimen I unearthed on my property, a stone alive with swirling, unruly colors.

Good stuff.

For the last week or so, Desiree and I have been working on another challenging jigsaw puzzle. This one features a panda bear in a thicket of bamboo and is rife with disparate colors. Yesterday, and I’m still not quite sure how I pulled it off, I snapped together six pieces I consider pure chaos. Even assembled, they look wrong, as if they don’t belong anywhere in the larger picture. I set them aside as a little island of order and have yet to place them properly in the puzzle.

I like a good chaotic challenge now and then.

I’ve posted photographs of the puzzle and the chaos pieces.

Chaos Stone

Chaos Puzzle Pieces

The Puzzle

—Mitchell Hegman

The Middle of Nowhere

Back in February of 2018, the Washington Post, for no apparent good reason, used a massive travel-time database developed by Oxford researchers to ask a deceptively simple question: how far are Americans from civilization? For the study, they defined civilization as a metro area of at least 75,000 people. Using these criteria, roughly 98 percent of people in the contiguous United States are anchored within an hour’s drive of an urban area.

Surprising.

But the study also asked the inverse question: which town is the most remote?

The answer landed in northeastern Montana. As it turns out, Glasgow, a prairie town near the Canadian border, emerged as the most isolated town of its size in the lower forty-eight, roughly four and a half hours from a city in any direction. Once buoyed by a nearby Air Force base that closed in 1976, Glasgow now sits amid distances measured in hundreds of miles. To most, it looks like the middle of nowhere; to Montanans, it looks like room to breathe.

Photo: Google Maps

—Mitchell Hegman

Johnny Cash Meets Genghis Khan

Johnny Cash was building a tall post-and-pole fence on his property when Genghis Khan rode up on one of his horses. Reaching Johnny, he dismounted and studied the fence. It struck him as straight and sturdy, the kind of work expected to last.

“You have some skills,” Khan said. “Is the fence meant to keep things in or to keep things out?”

Johnny Cash nodded toward the horse. “I need to hold a pair of those inside.”

Genghis Khan smiled at that. “Our Mongol war horses carried us to victory, but two horses would never do. Each warrior rode three to five horses in rotation, so no single mount was worn down while crossing long lands.”

Johnny grinned. “I’m not planning any conquest beyond the fence.”

“I understand. There is no need. Our achievements already stand,” Genghis Khan said. “What do you consider your greatest success?”

Johnny didn’t pause. “That’s easy. My love and partnership with June Carter.”

“You fell into her burning ring of fire.”

“Happily,” Johnny said. “And it centered me.”

They talked a while longer as clouds slid overhead. At length, Genghis Khan swung back onto his horse and rode off beside the stretch of newly completed fence, the posts standing straight behind him.

—Mitchell Hegman