Howling in the Night

When I first moved out here to the country thirty-some years ago, the coyotes living in the pine and juniper wilds around my home yowled nightly. They also had a strange habit: if a small plane flew low over the ranchlands at night, they would ignite into a crying fit just after the plane cleared the gulley, hill, or island of prairie where they happened to be. The howling frightened my wife, but I found myself fascinated by how the wild chorus swelled and ebbed all around us. However, as more houses began to appear in the landscape around me, the sound of the chorus began to fade. By the early 2000s, the nights fell into silence, and the coyotes were gone. This year, for whatever reason, the coyotes have returned to the swaths of darkness surrounding my house. I can’t say this is comforting, exactly, but a part of me appreciates the crying in the night.

—Mitchell Hegman

A High Mountain Drive

We followed a meandering road, ascending high into the mountains. By now, at all elevations, the forests have adopted their autumn colors. The road we chose soon delivered us to a place where lofty tamaracks had marched into the fir and pine stands of timber. Here and there along the way, cottonwood and aspen trees appeared in tight collections, presenting a bright yellow, sometimes leaning toward orange. Where the sun reached into the understory, it often highlighted brush in bright red hues.

Posted are four photographs captured during our drive into the mountains.

Yellow

Desiree on the Road

Mountains to the North

A Splash of Red

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Yogi Berra Said

—"It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much."

—"If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."

—"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

Descriptors of Me

What if there existed a requirement that each of us were required to hang a sign on our person that used a single descriptor to describe us? How would you describe yourself in a single concise phrase? I got to thinking about this and quickly realized that a lot of phrases would apply. Following are a few descriptors that apply to me:

• Often Looking in the Wrong Direction
• Still a Work in Progress
• Will Accept Donations and Some Advice
• Trying Not to Whine
• Not Afraid of Snakes
• Mostly Well-Trained

—Mitchell Hegman

Bliss

Last night, in our evening wear, Desiree and I walked out to stand on the deck as the sky slowly pulsed with rainbow colors. It was a soft display of northern lights—not dramatic, simply beautiful. Today, I am sharing an image of Desiree and me under the colorful sky.

Bliss (The Two of Us Amid Northern Lights)

—Mitchell Hegman

Digging a Hole

Weirdly enough, I don’t mind digging a hole in the ground. For one thing, the results of your work are immediate and obvious. Additionally, performing any manner of manual labor allows me to clear everything else from my mind—it’s a holiday for my brain.

Last winter, Helena and the broad area surrounding it experienced a die-off of certain non-native decorative juniper bushes. We lost a juniper that had been growing alongside the driveway for thirty years.

After experiencing her first autumn season some six months after arriving here, Desiree has become enamored with bushes and trees that display red and orange when they turn. With this as our guide, we agreed we needed to dig out the root ball and replace the juniper with something that will exhibit red in the fall. On a recent visit to a local nursery, we purchased an autumn splendor buckeye tree.

Yesterday, I excavated around the juniper root ball, pried it from the ground, and dug a hole that would accommodate the buckeye tree. A great order of work, that. And yet, I enjoyed the time spent digging.

I am posting a photograph of the hole I dug and the juniper root ball I removed to make way for planting the buckeye tree. I placed a can of Cold Smoke Beer alongside the hole to provide a reference for size.

The Buckeye Tree Hole

—Mitchell Hegman

A Group of Old Folks

While poking around inside a store the other day, I spotted four elderly folks clustered together, chatting near the intersection of two aisles. I immediately surmised that they were friends—two couples who had chanced upon each other while shopping.

I thought to myself, Old people are kinda cute.

As I walked past them, I recognized one of the individuals as someone several years younger than me. That nearly convinced me I am getting old.

—Mitchell Hegman

Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)

Last night, a most beautiful display of light fell upon us from the north. From end to end of the starry expanse, the aurora borealis pulsed and shimmered above us—all the work of the sun showering charged particles upon the magnetic shield enveloping our planet.

When you experience the northern lights, as we did last night, you quickly set aside all thoughts of the science behind them and simply stand below in wonderment. This is how the sky became my garden.

I am sharing three photographs I captured at the peak of the light display.

Desiree in a Wash of Colors

Northern Lights Above the Lake

Desiree on the Back Deck

—Mitchell Hegman

An American Fire

Before arriving in America, Desiree harbored a certain image of life here. Interestingly, this image wasn’t that life resembled the scenes on our exported sitcoms or that life in America revolved around a California beach. Instead, Desiree imagined all good Americans sitting beside a warm fire during far-north winter days.

Not long after Desiree came here, I suggested getting a wood stove, and she readily supported the idea. Her version of America could be realized. I wanted a wood-burning stove for more practical reasons. Mainly, I worried about losing power (read: heat) in sub-zero temperatures. A wood stove immediately solves that problem. Additionally, we have 20 acres of forest from which we can gather plenty of free fuel.

We had a Lopi Endeavor Hybrid stove installed in August. This stove is incredibly efficient and clean-burning—so efficient that it qualifies for a biomass-fueled heater tax credit. Yesterday, given the cool morning, we started the first-ever fire in the stove to “cure” the finish on both the stove and the venting while flinging the windows of the house open.

Thankfully, only a faint oil scent and a tinge of smoke were released inside the house as the wood stove reached full heat. Most incredibly, only an occasional whiff of smoke issued from the rain cap on the roof once the fire warmed enough for optimal burning.

All of this in our sufficiently American life.

Desiree Starting our First Fire

Flames

—Mitchell Hegman

Our Fall Mindset

The songbirds have departed, and chill winds flick leaves from the chokecherry. Our summer shoes are now stashed near the door. You would think, with winter bullying its way toward us from some unremarkable place in the Arctic, a kind of sadness might infect our thinking.

But no.

We celebrate instead, in the good light of early morning. There is no other sky that can compare to this. The blue is without flaw, and the mountains have adopted pink as their own, even if only for a moment.

Later, we can walk to where our shadows never try to escape from underneath us. The air will be cool then, but not cold. Maybe the chickadees will find us out there. They have been gone since early summer, and I miss them.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Smiley Face

I’m not blessed. I didn’t find the image of Mother Mary burned onto my grilled cheese sandwich. Perhaps you recall that story from the early 2000s: a woman from Florida auctioned a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich on eBay, claiming the toasted bread bore the image of the Virgin Mary. The sandwich sold for $28,000.

I’m unable to account for the madness of spending thousands on a decade-old sandwich, but I can explain finding the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or the likeness of Elvis in a muddy footprint. This is something called “face pareidolia,” and it’s really just our minds perceiving something familiar in lucky, random patterns.

As mentioned earlier, I’m not fortunate enough to find an eBay-worthy Virgin Mary, but I did find a smiley face at the bottom of a jar of hand lotion. I figure that’s about right for a kid from East Helena, Montana. I’ll take it.

A Smiley Face

—Mitchell Hegman

Seaweed

I’m not sure exactly when my food preferences got knocked off track. It may have been during that stretch in my early twenties when I found myself unemployed and surviving on nothing but potatoes and ramen noodles. Perhaps it’s the same genetic flaw that causes me to forget someone’s name two minutes after meeting them.

Whatever the cause, I’ve drifted away from craving sweets and developed a firm passion for savory foods, especially when snacking. Recently, I’ve ventured into new (possibly alarming) territory: I’m eating roasted seaweed.

Seaweed!

I can’t explain how this happened. Frankly, seaweed doesn’t taste great—it’s something like a marriage between mud and, well, pick any vegetable you barely tolerate. The texture is weird too. Roasted seaweed is paper-thin and brittle. Still, despite all this, I like it. I find myself munching on seaweed all the time. Yep, I’ve embraced it. My new motto: sex, seaweed, and rock and roll.

Seaweed

—Mitchell Hegman

The Plea

Hurry. Bring love.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Scattered Dead

Yesterday, on a late afternoon drive into town, I came upon an ugly scene in the ranchlands. I found more than a dozen dead red-winged blackbirds strewn across the road in a wide swath. The birds were in an area where huge numbers have been flocking together, as they do before migrating south. Recently, I have witnessed hundreds upon hundreds of the birds swinging back and forth through the air in mesmerizing murmuration flights.

I’m of the mind that one of two things explains what happened: either the birds were mowed down by a vehicle before they could lift from the roadway where they had gathered, or they crashed to the ground en masse while in one of their murmuration flights. I have seen a video of red-winged blackbirds in a murmuration crashing into the ground, resulting in the death of many.

The scene of carnage rather haunted me as I drove into town. On the return trip home, I stopped so Desiree and I could remove the scattered dead from the road and place them in the barrow ditch.

A Bird in the Barrow Ditch

A Bird in the Road

Birds Scattered on the Road

—Mitchell Hegman

Perfect Timing

I will admit to being somewhat fuzzy about when specific Christmas decorations should be displayed along the Filipino timeline, where the Christmas celebration begins in September and extends through December. However, today is October 1st, and I think Desiree got it just right by dressing our bed in pumpkin-colored sheets.

Pumpkin-Colored Bedding

—Mitchell Hegman