In previous renditions of my life, I
often thought about what “one thing” I would want to be provided with if
stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean.A fire-starter most often seemed the perfect choice.Sometimes, I thought a tent for
shelter might be best.These days, I’m
thinking toilet paper is the one thing.
It is said a human can live for only 8
to 21 days without food or water.I have
an additional limit.I cannot endure for
a minute without the support of my friends and family.
Over the course of the last two weeks,
I have traveled from one end of Montana to the other teaching continuing
education classes.During a normal
winter, such travels will take you in and out of areas of snow.Generally, some of the wide lower valleys or
the open plains will be clear of snow.
Not so this year.
This year, the entire state is buried
under deep layers of snow.
Yesterday, that girl and I drove from
Helena to Kalispell by way of Lincoln and the Swan Valley.The walls of snow alongside the highway over
Flesher Pass were anywhere from five to eight feet high.Down through the Swan, most fence posts were
buried to within a foot or so of their tops.Homes alongside the road were hidden under white mounds.I snapped a couple of “drive-by” photographs
as we whisked along the narrow path cut through the Swan.The photographs are not particularly
handsome, but you can see by referencing the hood of the car and the signs
alongside the road the depth of snow accumulations.
Simon knew shoplifting was no way to make
a real living, but he could not do the nine to five.Lifting Snickers bars and Reece’s peanut
butter cups was easy.In December he sleeved a new calendar for the coming year.Cans fit easily in his coat pockets.
Stealing a pot roast?That required embracing the absurd.Once, he fashioned a sling for his arm.And then Simon struck on the idea of
appearing pregnant.
He created a costume.
People were afraid to approach
him.Afraid to ask.The costume provided Simon a strange new
freedom.
I find it fairly amusing to flip through
old magazines when I find them.I enjoy
checking out the hair styles in the photographs.For a stretch of time in the 1960s, girls with
super-straight hair were all the rage.The
hair on men grew longer and longer as the decade went on.In the 1970s, afros came and went.In the 1980s girls teased their hair into
something big.Today, for men, bald is a
sure winner.
Conversations about hair have also
changed.
At one time, an exchange between two
young men at a bar might sound like this: “Which girl do you like at the corner
table?The blonde?Or the brunette?”
These days such a conversation may
sound like this: “Which girl do you like at that table? The one with purple and
yellow hair or the girl with green hair?”
The town of Fort Belknap, Montana,
sits atop the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation on U. S. Highway 2 in northcentral
Montana.Locally, we call the portion of
Montana though which Highway 2 runs the Hi-Line.The area—extending east and west just below
the Canadian border—represents the westernmost fringes of The Great Plains.Soon the plains will falter at the feet of
the Rocky Mountains.
Weather is a real thing there.
Last Tuesday, Fort Belknap had what
you might call a “weather event.”Early
that morning, a low temperature of 37 below was recorded.A bit later in the day, a warming Chinook
wind swept across the plains and along the Rocky Mountain Front to the west.The temperature at Fort Belknap rose to a
high of 45 degrees above Tuesday afternoon.A temperature swing of over 80 degrees in one day.
Last evening, I spent the waning
minutes of daylight soaking in my hot tub.The light of day failed quickly as a snowstorm lowered shawls of snow
all around me.Soon, the green pine
trees turned a deep blue.Giant, gently
sinking snowflakes dropped straight down from the clouds immediately above.The snow closed in, obscuring all sense of
distance.
I thought: Wow, this is so cool!
I outstretched my arms and turned my
face up so the snowflakes could melt directly against me.Each one delivered a kind of exhilarating sting
of chill upon touching my skin.Not a
single sound penetrated the storm.
The snow accumulated quickly.By the time I scampered back inside, a new
layer of pure white covered everything.
The snow continued into full darkness.
Late last night, I came awake to
strong winds shouldering against my house.
This morning, after feeding my 20
pounds of housecat and brewing my coffee, I stepped outside as I always do to
get a feel for the day.
I have been in the Montana Club dining
room a total of three times in my life.The first time, I was a sophomore in high school.I applied for a job in the kitchen.
They didn’t hire me.
I managed entrance again some forty years
later as a guest at a Rotary Club luncheon.
Last night, that girl and I went to
dinner at the Montana Club.
The club is located on the corner of 6th
Avenue and Fuller in downtown Helena.Until only a few months ago, the Montana Club was private and a strict
dress code was in place.At the end of
last year, due to a dwindling membership, the Montana Club opened its private
spaces to the public.
The Montana Club was the oldest
continuously-operating private club west of the Mississippi.The club originated in 1885 and was highly exclusive
for next 132 years.
The dining room is beautiful and offers
an expansive view of downtown Helena.
We both enjoyed our dinner and plan on
return visits.
After dinner, we stepped downstairs
and had a drink in the Rathskeller, a small lounge in the basement of the
club.A pair of guitarist were playing
live music in one corner.
The name “Rathskeller” is of German
origins and is a combination of “rat council” and “cellar.” A rathskeller is
typically a bar or restaurant located below street level.
All in all, that girl and I had a great
time.I am posting some photographs I
captured with my smarter-than-me-phone.
Let’s begin again.This
time, you can be the vast sky of stars leisurely swirling above.I will be the ocean gently undulating below.We can meet at the horizon.And that’s where you can hand me the moon.
One of the keys to success is setting realistic
goals for yourself. My goal for today is to
take a nap before 3:00 in the afternoon.Today, I will be a sure winner.
You can’t be a superhero every day.There will be days in which your only notable
contribution might be that you managed to get to the bathroom before peeing
your pants.
If you are anything like me, you don’t
eat fully ripened bananas and figure skating confuses you.
Oh, and you never wear underwear.But we should talk about that later.
I have been watching the Winter
Olympics skating events.I enjoy some of
the spinning and jumps.But the scoring
completely confounds me.I cannot begin
to fathom the long list of rules governing the judges when scoring a program. The skaters seem to be dropping a tenth of a
point at every swish of a skate.I am
guessing there is at least a two-tenths deduction if a skater sticks a finger
in his or her ear during a spin.
I am also not terribly discerning when
it comes to recognizing the various elements and jumps.I don’t know a triple axel from a double-knotted
shoe lace.If a skater under-rotates
something, I know only when one of the commentators mentions it.
Samantha had always been impulsive.It was not a great surprise when sheabruptly
stopped loving her husband one Sunday at 2:35 in the afternoon while sitting on
a stool at her kitchen peninsula.
She allowed a pair of scissors to fall
from her hand upon the startling realization she was no longer in love.She had been using the scissors to snip
recipes from a magazine.The scissors
clattered loudly against a plate.
Alerted by the clatter, her husband
called out from the living room where he sat watching football:“Are you okay in there?”
“I’m fine,” she answered.“I have fallen out of love, that’s all.”
“Oh, I thought maybe you broke something.”
“No,” Samantha replied, “nothing like
that.”
At 2:39 in the afternoon, Samantha picked
up the scissors once again.She could
use them to extricate herself from her now loveless marriage.
Some highways in Montana have miles
and miles of miles.Highway 89 between
White Sulphur Springs and Interstate 90 is one of those.Small towns whisk by—Ringling, Willsall,
Clyde Park—but they are distant and tiny enough a boy could barely reach full speed
on his bike if riding from one end to the other on the longest street.
Between the towns is big empty.Open hills of grass and sagebrush.The Castle Mountains.The Bridger Range.The Crazies.Open range.
A lonely man or lonely woman might
suffer to drive these miles.The open
country and the empty highway might draw too much from inside.
I drove those miles at mid-day
yesterday amid snow flurries and ground blizzards.The storm and the snow pressed down firmly against
the two-lane highway, obscuring all features beyond.Wind dragged scarves of snow across the
roadway.I was alone on the highway.
My mind turned in on itself.Honestly, I felt a little hollow.
Of all things, my thoughts soon turned
to Sandalwood, the dog we had when I was a boy.He had a crazy habit of barking incessantly if you drove him across a
bridge.Same for Canyon Ferry Dam.He followed me anytime I left the house.I sat and talked to him the night before my
mother had him put down for biting someone he thought was going to harm one of
us kids.
I thought of all that.
You would think fifty-some years of
time would diminish your feelings for a childhood dog.
But driving Highway 89 will take you
back.
I quivered a little thinking about
Sandalwood.And then I grabbed my camera
and shot two photographs through the windshield of my truck as I drove.I still had over 100 miles to go to reach
Billings.
The calf must have come late in the
night, when blue shadows cast their own black shadows.Stillborn, the calf lay wholly deflated and cross-legged
on a patch of dark ground at the very corner of an otherwise snowy pasture.
By the time I drove near the calf at
sunrise, the other cattle had cleared a semi-circle around it.
None of them would go near.
The entire gathering of animals was comprised
of expectant mothers or mothers with wobbly newborns at their side.
I stopped my truck, stepped out, and crunched
over the snowy terrain between the road and the fence.I leaned hard against the barbed wire
strands, peering down at the calf.
The calf could just as well have been
a black coat flung to the ground.For that calf, it mattered not whether the gate was latched shut of
flung wide open.It did not matter that
the snow will soon melt and sweet new grass will flush green across the
expanse.
The beginning was the end.
Standing on the opposite side of the
fence, no more than three paces away, the mothers and newborns cautiously watched
me.
What was my place in this, they
wondered?
A valid question, that.
I crunched back to my truck, climbed
in, and drove away from the rising sun.
I often dream of fish. I have no way of explaining this, but my
dreams are regularly swimming with fish, jumping with them. This has been so for as long as I can remember. Trout.
Small fish gathering about me in clear waters. Fish from the sea
Why not dogs?
Why not songbirds?
I don’t know.
For the last two weeks, I have been
sparring with the flu. More recently, I
have been sleeping fitfully at night.
Yesterday, by 2:00 afternoon, after jabbing at my computer for the
better part of the day, I flopped back on my sofa, thinking I might catch a
nap. I lay there for perhaps fifteen
minutes, gradually shrinking away from the daylight and the immediate sounds of
light winds nosing at the bay windows.
Finally, I settled into a shallow
state of dream. I was fishing inside
some kind of industrial building whose lower levels were filled with water and
populated with dark fish. On my second
cast into one of the lower level lochs, a big fish struck. As habit dictates, I pulled back hard on my
fishing rod to set the hook.
I woke with a jerk on my sofa. I lay there confused, blinking forcefully to
ward off the too-bright light.
Her printer cartridges had long ago
ran out of ink. But she continued
printing anyway. Blank, stark white
sheets of paper stacked up in the finishing tray. When the printer reached the end of the
document and then clicked and shuddered before falling silent (as it always did
when finished), she scooped the blank pages from the tray.
A curious satisfaction overcame her as
she thumbed through the blank pages.
Eventually, she found a large
envelope, addressed it, and enclosed the ghost pages inside.
The following day she posted the
envelope.
Off into the mechanics of this world
it went: the story of her life.
Early this morning, I flopped onto my
sofa, flicked my television and satellite remotes and waited for something “newsy”
to appear.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, my television launched into some
kind of weird, complimentary-colored Pablo Picasso mode. The colors and abstract shapes shifted about the
screen in jerking fashion to the sounds of a normal audio feed.
I flipped through several channels and
found the same result.
On a different day, I might have
enjoyed this television mode.
After capturing the photograph I have
posted here, I rebooted and found some news.
In the bigger picture, perhaps we
might take comfort in the simple misery of knowing we all—man, fish, beast, and
bird—are little more than a compendium of dust particles swept across unfathomable
space. Time eventually smears all of us
into a singular, meaningless, impenetrable event. Who, then, in a half-billion years, will
recall the sad tale of Nigel the gannet?
Nigel lived his last five years on the
small, otherwise uninhabited island of Mana, just off the coast of mainland New
Zealand. The “otherwise uninhabited”
part of this story is a bit tricky.
Years ago, conservation rangers from New Zealand placed some eighty immobile,
painted concrete replicas of gannets on the eastern cliffs of the island. The same rangers also broadcast gannet calls
from speakers powered by a small solar photovoltaic system. The hope was to attract nesting gannets back
to the island after forty years of absence.
Nigel landed on the island in 2013 and
soon began courting a particular concrete bird.
Who can say why that bird?
Something about the curve of her sleek neck? Her colors a bit brighter? A certain flaw that made her seem approachable
for a regular bird like Nigel?
Nigel made his choice and did not look
back again. He lived alone with his
concrete love and her inanimate concrete companions.
Nigel groomed her concrete flanks, her
cold neck. He carefully constructed a
nest for her. For five years, devoted
his time to his concrete mate.
Recently, Nigel was found dead
alongside the cold mate he chose. He had
never wavered in his dedication to her.
Of course, to be a true tale of
sadness, there must be one more insult to add to injury. In the story of Nigel the gannet it is
this: Nigel died only a few weeks after another
three living gannets settled into another part of the concrete colony alongside
him.
Nigel ignored the other living
gannets, of course. His love for his concrete
mate remained steadfast until the end, until he was swept against the great
unknown.
-- Mitchell
Hegman
The details of
this story are from an article that appeared in The Guardian.
Perhaps, you played that game as a kid—you
know—where you try to see who can stare the longest without blinking. Maybe you and a friend stared directly at
each other. You stared until your eyes
watered. You stared until your vison
went out-of-focus.
But eventually someone gave in.
After the first person blinked,
everyone happily blinked. And blinking
your eyes felt better than anything else in the world.
The blink reset everything.
While in Aruba, it occurred to me that
I need to blink—in terms of producing a daily blog, I mean. I need to stop forcing daily blogs. I may need to allow days to pass without a
blog. For one thing, I feel my blogs
have been suffering from serving quantity rather than quality in their
measure. In recent weeks, I have been
very frustrated by an increasing occurrence of repeating themes, spelling
errors, typos, etc.
I will not stop blogging. I enjoy it!
My goal is to provide a well-rested blog with more horsepower.
One of my intentions is to (as I have
done in recent months) devote more time to other writing projects. The first project is a technical book in
digital multimeters. The other us a
telling of my late wife’s life, which is hugely beautiful and tragic at the
same time. I have many dozens of pages
started on each of these projects.
I am at a loss for words on what I need
to say next. I know what I want to say, but
nobody has yet invented words big enough, bright enough, and strong enough to
convey everything. So here goes: My sincerest thanks to all you who have
stopped by to see me daily at the blog. Having
you out there has been both humbling and gratifying for me.
-- Mitchell
Hegman
Note: Later today
I will finally be arriving back home in beautiful Montana!
