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

On the Loose

Yesterday, three of my neighbor’s longhorn cattle broke through a section of fence and made their way in the general direction of my place. Fortunately, Tad, my lakeshore neighbor, caught wind of this. Before long, we joined a couple people from the place next door and hazed the cattle back to where they belonged.

I’m no cowboy, and only a few minutes of pushing cattle will cure most people, including me, of wanting to be one. At the same time, I must admit, longhorns look rather cool under the Big Sky.

Longhorns Back Where They Belong

—Mitchell Hegman

On the Other Hand

We are pretty smart standing here at the thinnest edge of a new century. We now have the capability to compute our way through skyscraper-sized columns of mathematical formulas in nanoseconds. We can flick spacecraft to Mars and beyond. We trick tomatoes and cucumbers into thinking they are dimension lumber and first cousins to insecticides. We have turned sound into a tool that can see the complex inside of once-impenetrable solid objects. We fashion heavy metals into fluff. But an old-fashioned range fire still kicks our ass.

—Mitchell Hegman

Another Year of Bad Practices

On something of an annual basis, I prove that having food and drink in the living room is a really bad idea. As it so happens, I did this just yesterday by flipping a fresh bowl of salad upside down on the sofa.

Wow. That’s a surprisingly competent mess.

But there it is: a good reminder that eating salad on the sofa is a bad idea.

Thanks for that.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I should be hooked up for another year of bad practices.

—Mitchell Hegman