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.”

Fledging the Loud Way

For some years, ravens have been nesting in the bull pine near my property. Yesterday, two of this year's brood attempted to fledge and ended up stranded in a tree immediately below my house for much of the day. For the entire time, a group of adult ravens hung around monitoring, protecting, and encouraging the fledgling birds as they hopped from branch to branch, testing their wings.

Here's the thing: both the newbie ravens and the adults spent the entire time cawing and croaking. The little ones often made return calls that sounded like someone thwacking short lengths of dried bamboo.

In other words, the entire event was utter cacophony.

I stepped out onto my deck several times and, to no avail, "encouraged" the young birds to fly off. Eventually, the birds in the tree flew off, towing the adults along with them.

An Adult Raven on My Fence

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Names of Grass

Timothy does not flourish

where blue grama and needle-and-thread hold sway.

In disturbed ground

rise cheatgrass and rough fescue.

Give to the open sun

crested wheatgrass and big bluestem.

Along windswept slopes

gather foxtail and awnless brome.

For the sake of name:

orchardgrass and slender wheatgrass.

Foxtail

—Mitchell Hegman

A Capture from the Learning Curve

We recently picked up two more game cameras. Before leaving the cabin last weekend, we had to install batteries and set both up so we could strap them to some trees in the woods.

As with any new electronic device, there is a learning curve to be negotiated before successfully inputting the date, time, and settings you prefer. In this case, the camera captured a slew of wonky images in various directions as we manipulated it while trying to input our preferences, creating something of a permanent record of our swerving about on the learning curve.

I’m sharing one of the captures of the cabin ceiling and Desiree’s forehead. Hopefully, the camera does better in the woods.

A Forehead Capture

—Mitchell Hegman