The California Lighthouse

The California Lighthouse sits on the northernmost end of Aruba.  Immediately below the lighthouse is Faro Blanco Restaurant.  Last night, we enjoyed a sunset dinner at the restaurant as a way to close out our last full day on the island.

Faro Blanco Restaurant is mostly an open terrace providing an expansive view of the ocean and the setting sun.  The establishment also features a small bar with a very gregarious bartender.  According to information provided on the menu, the restaurant started life as a dwelling for the lighthouse keeper.    

The California Lighthouse stands 100 feet tall, is 25 feet in diameter, and is made from stone blocks.  Lighthouse construction was completed in 1916.  The lighthouse (and the northernmost point of the island) is named for a vessel that shipwrecked off the coast of Aruba not far from where the lighthouse now stands.

The S.S. California was a wooden steamship.  She ran aground at midnight on September 23, 1891 on her way from Liverpool to Central America.  According to all accounts, the passengers were having a pretty big party onboard when the vessel wrecked.  As the ship came apart on the shores of the island, the crew pitched cargo overboard so it might be salvaged and sold in the city of Oranjestad on the island. 

All of us greatly enjoyed our meals at the restaurant, while only slightly annoying the people sitting near us.

Sunset was spectacular.

Each of made some horrendous attempts at pronouncing what we wanted from the menu (the waiter loved that).  And my hair was the worst it been because the wind was working me from the wrong direction (Bill loved that). 

When we left the restaurant after our dinner, we found the moon and the lighthouse side by side against the cobalt sky.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Two Trees

If you thumb through just about any tourist literature from Aruba, you are bound to see an image of at least one of the two beachside trees at the uppermost end of Eagle Beach.  We have seen the trees a couple times on or treks along the coast.  Yesterday, we drove to Eagle Beach with the express idea of capturing our own photographs of the iconic trees.

--Mitchell Hegman

Morning in Aruba

Morning has perfected itself in Aruba.  Nothing should ever change about sunrise and the first hour thereafter on this island.  The temperature is perfect.  You can step outside in whatever fashion you have risen from your bed.

The sun begins soft and small as a marshmallow before expanding and rising up into a golden sky.  Then, across the elevated neighborhoods, roosters call from yellow stucco houses with red tile roofs and from pink stucco houses with green tile roofs.  Songbirds, whose faces and names I don’t know, answer the domestic birds in elaborate, fluting songs while perched atop stucco fences and tall cactus stands gently swaying in the never ending trade wind.

And often, in the first hour, puffy clouds that have spent the whole of night lazing just off shore, extend white arms and flushed fingers to the center of the island, delivering brief, glittering sun-showers just like the ones I love to watch as they fall cross the open prairies of Montana.

All this before most of the island begins to stir, before small craft stretch their whitewater tails across the sheltered aquamarine seawaters.

 

-- Mitchell Hegman

Side-By-Side Tour

Last night, I woke to my last cold sweat and knew the flu was losing its hold on me.  This morning, I feel much better.  Today, I am posting what I intended to post several days ago.   

The day my illness first struck me, we rented side-by-sides and toured the undeveloped north shore of Aruba.  This is the windward side of the island.   Big waves curl against the mostly rocky shores.  Vegetation is sparse.

The side-by-side tour was interesting, if not something of a free-for-all.  A dusty one at that.  At the beginning of our tour the lead guide suggested the first stretch was something of a test of our skills.   He urged everyone to “keep up.”

And off we roared.  Over rocky terrain.  Through stands of cactus.  Up hills. Down hills.  Bouncing.  Sliding around corners.

I’m talking Baja 500 stuff here.  But with regular, everyday people behind the wheels instead of drivers who know what to expect.

I quickly realized the neck scarfs they gave us at the rental shop were necessary.  We were creating our own raging dust storm!

And we beat the hell out our machines to keep up.  Larry and Chris ended up with a broken tie-rod and had to take a machine from one of our guides.  Patrick and Mary got a flat tire, which was repaired on the spot.

At the turn-around point of the tour, we bounced straight down a rocky outcrop to reach “Conchi.”  Conchi, also known as “Natural Pool,” is a pool protected from the high crashing waves by a natural rim of rocks that disperse the waves allowing only tamed, white, bubbling inflows of water to drain into the pool.  

On the way back to our machines after swimming in Natural Pool, Larry borrowed a string of fish from a local spear fisherman so I could take his picture.  As he said: “How often am I gonna get a chance to pose with a string of barracuda?”

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Kind of Bug I Prefer

Whatever bug befell me is still with me.  I pretty much kicked my bed’s ass again last night in fitful sleep.  I disemboweled one pillow, flung the bedding to the floor, and managed to once again slide under the mattress sheet instead of on top.

What the hell?

As I sit writing this, the island time is 4:30 in the morning.  A massive clangor of a headache woke me.  Some neighborhood dogs are barking in the distance.

The flu has given me a different conception of what’s inside my head.  As I progress through the night, sleeping, or drag myself about during the day, I have come to appreciate how much changing the position of my head changes everything about how I feel.  When I shift my head, new compartments inside my head fill with headache fluid.  Other fluids leak from different corners of my mouth.  I ache in new places and I’m unbalanced in new ways.

Well, later this morning, at 8:00 island time, I plan to go to a new snorkeling beach with the rest of the team.  If a pillow case is still clinging to me from my night’s battle with the bed, I intend to drag that sumabitch along with.  I’m not ready to snorkel just yet, but I can sit on the beach looking as hapless as the next tourist.

On their outing yesterday, the rest of the crew saw a giant centipede while I lay in bed at the villa, sniffling.  A giant centipede is the kind of bug I prefer to battle today.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Disorderly Sleeping

Last night, because I am still battling with the flu, I slept alone in the spare bedroom here at the villa.  I am not sure exactly how it went down, but somewhere in the night, I got into a series of brawls with the bedding.  I woke several times and found myself hopelessly entangled in the sheets and pillows.  I quickly kicked myself free and fell back to sleep.

This morning, I woke and found that two of the four pillows had been peeled free from their covers.  One of the pillow covers was on the floor.   The other was balled up beside me. The blanket was clumped into a heap at my feet and the cover sheet was wadded up nearby.  Somehow, I had managed to find my way underneath the mattress sheet.  The elastic corner of that was pulled tightly over my head.  The pillows were all pushed against the headboard. 

-- Mitchell Hegman

Sunset from Kamay 77

Somehow, I managed to catch the flu down here.  It hit me pretty hard yesterday afternoon.  I went to bed at 7:00 yesterday evening and did not get up until about 9:00 this morning.  The rest of the group—at my request—left me here at the villa today while they went swimming and snorkeling near the California lighthouse at the end of the island.

Posted today are some photographs of last night’s sunset.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Baby Beach Reef

Yesterday, we drove the island from end to end.  This is no great feat, mind you.   The island of Aruba is a bit under 20 miles long.  The lack of proper road signage made for some interesting side adventures along the way.

We were all struck, for one thing, by the fairly regular appearance of lemon yellow houses along the narrow neighborhood streets.  These houses positively glow.  The other drivers on the road are also noticeable.  By noticeable, I mean they tend to pull out in front of you on a regular basis.

I am personally impressed by the lizards.  I have seen several iguanas.  One was at least three feet long.  I have also seen a gazillion little whiptail lizards.  The whiptails appear everywhere on the ground, on buildings, across the pool deck.  They are like living punctuation marks required to interrupt our own movements from point to point.

We ended up spending most of our day at the southernmost tip of the island.  We swam and snorkeled at Baby Beach Reef and then watched kiteboarders at Spanish Lagoon Reef.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Aruba, Day Two

We spent part of the day lounging around and swimming in our private swimming pool. We also went on a shopping spree at Super Food so we could fill our refrigerator for the week. Super Food is something of an equivalent to Costco at home.  With the current exchange rate for the Aruban florin to the dollar (1 dollar is equivalent to something near 1.79 florin), the prices are very reasonable.

They sell some strange flavors of potato chips at Super Food: maple bacon, barbeque ham, paprika, Bolognese, etc.  Another difference?   The store is filled with entry and exit gates to control the swirling floods of people into and out of various points in the store.

The store is crazy busy, which is odd, because the island is not all that busy.  A map we picked up at the airport noted the island of Aruba has a population of only 102,000 people.  The beaches we stopped at were beautiful and not really all that populated.  Not busy at all.  There was plenty of room for pelicans and other sea birds to dive in alongside swimmers to catch fish. 

We swam at one beach, snorkeled at another, and then walked along a third near sunset last night.  The water was perfectly warm.

So far, I am greatly impressed.

And my buddy Bill—perhaps a leading expert in mispronouncing words from foreign tongues—is just getting started.

I managed only a few photographs yesterday.  Today, we intend to cover the entire island and I will try to capture photographs.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Villa Kamay Hills, Aruba

My first thought when I woke this morning was this: the sun is on the wrong side.  East is not east.  My north is south.

I have been upended!

When I flung back the curtains at the sliding glass door of our room and looked outside, I saw Aruba for the first time in daylight.  My thought then: Wow!

We are on something of a rise above and away from a row of hotels and white sand beaches.  Behind and slightly above us, tall cactus have grown into a forest.  When I stepped outside, I was bathed immediately in warm humid air.  I retrieved my camera and tried to snap a picture, but the lens instantly fogged.  I heard strange birds singing sharply, beautifully from the cactus and heard a rooster “cock-a-doodle-doo” from a small house below.

We have rented a villa for ten days.  No, a castle!  Our villa is stunning.

We had a bit of trouble finding our way here for three reasons.  First, we did not leave the airport until almost 10:30 at night.   Second, Google Maps is very confused here.  Third, street signs are not high on anyone’s priority on this particular island.

If you ask locals for directions, which we did, you are told something like this: “Follow the row of hotels until you get to a streetlight with a Wendy’s on one side and a Texaco station of the other.  Turn right onto that street and drive until you see a Chinese restaurant…”

We had a grand time getting lost (not kidding) on the way to our villa.  We finally arrived at our house after midnight.  Posted today are a few photographs from last night and this morning.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Aruba

That girl and I are in Miami, Florida, this morning.  Later this afternoon, we will collect at the Miami airport with three other couples and fly off to the island of Aruba.  The island is not all that far from the equator and resides in constant summer weather.

Aruba was called the “the island of giants” by the Spanish explorers who first struck its shores in 1499.  The natives inhabiting the island at that time were notably larger than the European explorers.  The Spanish considered the island “valueless” because they did not find gold there.

Aruba was acquired by the Dutch in 1636 and today remains an independent part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.  The island lies something a bit under 20 miles off the coast of Venezuela in the southern extent of the Caribbean.  Today, the island thrives by catering to tourists from both North America and Europe.

The island is small: 20 miles long and a mere 6 miles wide at the widest point.  The landmass is fairly flat and without a river.   The climate is dry and enjoys a fairly low humidity.  Most importantly, the island sits outside the hurricane belt.  Aruba only rarely sees the weaker tails of hurricane events and was spared entirely from the storms that devastated many northerly Caribbean islands earlier this year.

The temperature on Aruba, thanks to the presence of constant trade winds, remains at a near constant 82 degrees.  A variety of cactus flourish on the island and the divi-divi trees there grow leaning away from the trade winds.  Mostly, the island is known for expansive beaches of white sand, aquamarine oceans, and the good fortune of being home to four species of sea turtles.   

We hope to be swimming with the turtles soon!

-- Mitchell Hegman

Photo: Aruba.com  

The Television Learning Curve

The learning curve often is strewn with sticky notes, legal pad pages filled with sentence fragments, and wads of crumpled false-starts.

Each of us seems to have a blind spot on the learning curve.

Me?  You could teach me to both recall and properly tell the very same joke for several hours.  You could include instructive videos, a pop quiz, and two practice sessions.  But in two weeks, if you asked me to tell the joke, I would be shooting blanks.

Jokes don’t stick to me.

My sister, Deb, has an equivalent struggle when it comes to the operation of a smart television with more than one input.

Yesterday, she and my brother-in-law came out to my house so I could give her a rundown on how to operate our new television.  She will be watching the house and caring for my 20 pounds of housecat while that girl and I travel to Aruba for a stay on the island. 

Things did not go exceptionally well at first.  At one point, I had to stop and hug my brother-in-law…just because.  After a few practice sessions and a series of notes, my sister managed to access the Blu-ray player, the sound bar, Netflix, and the satellite feed we use out here in the hinterlands.

I will admit, our television control is a bit daunting.  Four remotes are required for all that she wants to do.  I have posted a photograph of the methodology my sister finally developed for managing the television.

I think she has this!

-- Mitchell Hegman    

Through the Night

Yesterday, just before dark, I glanced out the back door (it’s a glass patio number with cat noseprints across the bottom) to see if any ice fishermen remained on the lake below.  I saw what looked like rain spots on the deck, which is presently surrounded by high berms of snow I cleared from it.

I stepped out and stepped back in.  “It’s raining,” I announced to that girl.

Fifteen minutes later, in full darkness, I stepped out the front door and stepped back in.  “It’s really, really, really raining,” I announced to that girl.

“Is that a big deal?”

“It is for January in this part of Montana.”

Rain persisted into the darkness.

This morning I stepped out the front door and stepped back in.

For a brief time I considered running back to wake that girl so I could say, “It’s ice,” but that would likely be an RLE (relationship limiting exercise).

 -- Mitchell Hegman 

Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart

In May of last year, Chris Cornell committed suicide by hanging himself.  He was 52 at the time of his death.  His story is often told: the story of a highly successful star who seems to miss finding happiness at every turn and ultimately crashes.  Chris Cornell was among my favorite male vocalists and songwriters in rock music.  I loved his work in Soundgarden, Audioslave, and Temple of the Dog.

Posted today is “Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart."

-- Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpMfZPAc1kg  

Hoarfrost

Hoarfrost is probably my favorite of winter’s many presentations.  It’s way better than the presentation where you and your buddy get a four-wheel-drive truck stuck in deep snow halfway to the middle of nowhere.  And way better than the one where your big sister talks you into sticking your tongue onto a metal post in subzero temperatures.

The “hoar” in hoarfrost, near as I can tell from slipping around on the internet, is derived from the Old English term “har,” meaning gray or white with connotations of old age.

Hoarfrost develops on almost anything upright when ideal conditions persist: trees, grass, and fences.  Overnight, a brilliant white sheath of scales grows on every exposed limb, every post, and every wire.  Even overhead powerlines become enveloped in frost.

So far as frost goes, hoarfrost is easily the most fragile of formations.  Shaking a heavily bejeweled tree or bumping against an encrusted fence will cause the frost to detach and spill down wholesale.  The entire coat of frost will instantly shed as sparkles of so much fairy dust.  A brisk wind will clear an entire landscape in a spectacular wash of sparkles.

Yesterday morning came with heavy hoarfrost and a cold inversion pressed against the prairie south of my home.  As soon as the sun cleared the hills east of my house, I ran outside to capture images.  The last photograph features my house when the sun, as it does, finally scoured the frozen mist from the earth.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Retirement

I once thought a man was not a man

who did not smoke cigarettes to nubs,

drink late,

and espouse Charles Bukowski.

I girled-up, though, and quit smoking

and I worked.

My legs hurt.  My Back.

But up went the airport terminal,

the hydroelectric plant, towers on bald hills,

garish houses, workshops.

I armored-up, edged my sword,

marched against my own better judgement,

marched against my own leisure.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I thrust my leave-taking letter

through a mailbox slot,

and imagined plunging my sword into the hard belly of a dragon.

My sword sharp and brilliantly white.

To hell that dragon.

To hell you hot bastard.

-- Mitchell Hegman

NOTE: The above writing is what happens if you drink coffee and think about Bukowski the morning after dropping an application for retirement benefits in the mail.

A Day at the 4R Ranch

Picture yourself sprawled face down in two feet of snow.  The equivalent of half-sheets of plywood have been strapped to your feet and you are not certain you can extricate yourself from the snow.  A pair of over-exuberant dogs are bouncing—no—swimming like porpoises through the snow around you.  Some birds in a nearby aspen seem to be laughing.

What I have just described is something we call “snowshoeing.”

I am mostly kidding, of course.  Snowshoeing is far more beautiful than the tumbles you might (will) take.

Winter in the mountains affords a great and extraordinary quiet.   Pure white meadows of untracked snow sparkling from end to end.  The rest of the expanse—the rolling, upward surging landscape—is either evergreen, blue, or white.  Nothing else compares to the purity, the serenity of deep untracked snow.  The sun is brighter.  The whites are whiter.  The greens are greener.  The blues are bluer. 

Winter seems one big soft thing.

Yesterday, that girl and I drove into the Elkhorn Mountains to snowshoe with our friends Patti and Tom.  They own the 4R Ranch, a 900 acre slice of mountain perfection just below the highest mountains in the range.  We started our trek right at their front door and snowshoed in a perfect returning circle under a warm sun.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Tracks in the Snow

At this point, the ice on the lake below my house is some eighteen inches thick.  Yesterday, with temperatures reaching into the forties, that girl and I walked down to the lake and then tromped onto the perfectly flat, snow-covered surface.  All the way down to the lake and across the surface of the ice, the snow told tales of crossings and explorations.  But mostly the day was given to our deep blue sky.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

New Snow and a Promise of Sunshine

We have “his” and “hers” channels on television, magazines for people who like to lift weights, and talk radio channels where people yell overtop each other all day long.  You can find stores selling nothing but household appliances, communities where only “seniors” live, and youth groups in almost every church.  We have social media in our ear and at our face 24/7.  We have cell phones, laptops, desktops, iPads, and something blinking in every room.

We have fully electrified, specified, connected, protected, and streamed in.

But on a morning like this, I want nothing more than to drive deep into the mountains, fasten a pair of old-school snowshoes to my boots, and slowly trudge across the white silence of an open meadow making blue holes with my tracks.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

In Measure

On the whole, I think half my problems are the result of me spending a quarter of my time accomplishing only a fifth of what should be done.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Building: Little Victories

I have always liked building projects.  Though building my own home got a bit rushed and intense at the end, I found the project both enjoyable and immensely satisfying.  I have been steadily working to construct and complete my cabin since 2003.  I work in “flurries” when I am there.

I have learned a lot about construction while doing my various projects.  I regularly reach out to others I know in the trades when I bump into something that confounds me.  Laying out the stairs at my cabin, for example, was a bit much for me.

One aspect I like about construction is that when you get hung up on details in one spot, you can always move to a new spot, make some noise, make a big mess, and produce some kind of progress.  Eventually—maybe after outside advice—you go back and finish the spot where something hung you up.

Actually, finishing a project is not nearly as satisfying to me as the thousand little victories that got me there.  Even today, as I sit writing this, I recall some of the victories in my home's construction twenty-seven years ago: finishing the lighting valance above me, completing the bay window framing.  I recall the day my buddy Bill and I finished joist lay-out for the sunken living room.  When we pulled corner-to-corner measurements to see if the layout was square, we discovered the layout perfect.

I can go from room to room filling my mind with these memories.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

The Man Sitting Beside Me

Spring of this year will mark the 41^st year I have been involved in the electrical industry here in Montana.  I must say, I have enjoyed my entire career.  I sincerely mean that.  I have worked with some of the most generous and intelligent people inhabiting this blue planet.   My union membership provided me with a safe work environment, decent pay, health insurance, excellent training, opportunity, and now—best of all—retirement benefits I will reap within a few months.

I have a story about those benefits.

In May of the long ago year in which I started my electrician’s apprenticeship, I attended my first union meeting.  As luck would have it (bad luck, I assumed at the time), contract negotiations were underway.

The meeting turned somewhat heated.

Well, it all sounded like nonsense to me.   A bunch of young guys stood up and bellowed about putting an upcoming raise “on the check.”  Most insisted they would take care of their own retirement and do better.   A bunch of old guys stood up and urged applying some of the raise to retirement programs—the only certain way to guarantee money will be waiting for you in the end.

I must have looked bored, maybe a bit shell-shocked.  The man sitting beside me (a man somewhere near the age I am now) nudged me.  “You should pay attention to this,” he suggested.  “When you get to be my age, you’ll wish more of every raise went to retirement benefits.”

I didn’t respond to the man, but I never forgot what he said.  Actually, today, what he said very near haunts me.  The closer I near reaping my benefits, the more I think of him and what he told me—the absolute truth of it.  Not more than two days ago, I told this story to a young man before urging him to consider his own retirement plans.  I often urge younger people to think about their retirements.  I am so thankful for all the old timers who caused me to consider mine and who insisted on applying money to retirement programs.  I didn’t even know the man sitting next to me at that meeting, but he was my brother.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Three Horses, One Man

Three saddled horses stood against the sun for more than an hour.  Though not tied to any of the nearby scrub, the horses had learned to wait.  Just before the sun melted down onto the farthest reaches on the open plain behind them, a single figure appeared.

A man.

He seemed to emerge from the earth itself.  The quiet earth.  The man dragged one leg as he approached the horses.

One of the horses, the larger one, trusted the man and always had.  The horse allowed the man to lean hard against his flank; allowed the man to pull himself up into the saddle.

The man walked the horse near the other two horses and took up the reins of each.

The horses knew violence.  All of them did.  And they sometimes sensed it in the same way they sensed monsoon rains before the darkest clouds opened above them.  They also knew that men knew bigger violence.  Much bigger.

The violence was gone now.

The two horses did not in particular trust the man leading them, but they trusted the horse under the man and they liked feeling the open ground fall away under their hooves.

Nothing felt better than chasing the sun.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Calving

Glaciers calve icebergs into the ocean.   My house calves dense piles of snow from my metal roof down into my yard and down onto my driveway.  Yesterday afternoon, on our second day of warm temperatures following heavy snows, a fairly sizeable drift calved from the garage roof onto my driveway.

Shoveling the snow off the drive took about ten minutes, but I rather enjoyed getting out and flinging the blockish chunks of snow of into piles along the drive.  Furthermore, I realize I can fasten cleats on the roof to keep the snow from sliding off.  But, honestly, I take a certain perverse pleasure in watching huge calving events from my roof.

Near 7:00 last night, the house shook a little and I heard what sounded like distant thunder.  Thunder from one valley over.  When I peered out my front door—sure enough—the other half of my drive was heaped with heavy snow. 

That girl and I dove into our coats and went out to shovel the snow off the drive.  Overnight, in cooling temperatures, those mushy sheds turn into mountains solid as rock.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

The Yellow and White House

Last night, my own dreams betrayed me.

A yellow and white house fell from the sky and crashed to the ground very near me.  Inside the house, two small children perished.

I did not ask why a yellow and white house fell from clear skies.  Of course that makes no sense.  I asked, instead, why small children should suffer or die.

What sense in that?

I woke immediately from my dream of the children, of weeping parents.  I woke to the bruised darkness of my own house—to such profound sadness.  Awake, I felt the sorrow as certainly as I felt the bedsheet and blankets on my chest.

What hidden monster inside me smashed that yellow and white house against the earth and killed those children?

-- Mitchell Hegman