Thoughts and Statements

• If cheese hadn’t already been invented, I would have done it myself.
• I hear voices in running fans.
• I want to invent a comb that combs out stupid thoughts when people use it.
• In the Philippines, walking around with both hands stuffed in your jacket pockets is considered a sign of arrogance. Doing that here, in the midst of a Montana winter, is necessary.
• Often, the most important missions are those we can’t justify financially.
• Within six months, I plan on swimming with whale sharks.
• I’m convinced that working hard always pays off at some point.
• The technology that got me into the fix rarely gets me out of it.
• You may want to look into what Botox is made from before having an injection.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Heavy Metal Tree

Trees are capable of weird things. They’re also capable of thriving in the harshest of conditions. One way or another, they find a way to survive: from low, heat-warping deserts to high, blizzard-wracked peaks.

Here in Montana, trees must endure radical swings in weather. Some thrive in poor soil and dry, windswept environments. It’s not uncommon to see a pine tree growing straight out of a rock face. Ponderosa pines have learned to survive where wildfires regularly sweep through the understory.

And trees will find a way to work around all manner of obstacles.

I have a section of a fir tree in my cabin loft that grew around and nearly encased a long-dead three-inch lodgepole that had been blown over and caught up in nearby trees before reaching the ground. Early this spring, we felled a tree near my cabin with strands of barbed wire embedded deep inside it. Somewhere in the early 1900s, the tree had served as a living fencepost.

Yesterday, while splitting the last round of fir I brought home from the cabin, I came across a piece that refused to split. After several minutes of me “going at it like a one-armed man killing snakes,” as my friend Kenny used to say, I finally broke it apart with a wedge and sledgehammer. Inside, I found a hook of metal nearly a half inch thick, likely part of a giant broken nail.

I’m sharing two photographs of the metal. In the second, I held a Cold Smoke beer beside it for a sense of scale.

Freshly Split Wood with Embedded Metal

Cold Smoke and Metal

—Mitchell Hegman

Conspicuous Beauty

For the past few days, I’ve been breaking up my day by lugging a round or two from the fir tree I chopped up at the cabin out onto the drive and splitting a few pieces of cordwood by hand. This serves the purpose of satisfying my fairly constant need to “be busy” and provides a solid level of exercise.

A victim of pine beetle infestation, the wood clearly displays the gray-blue staining at the butt end of each round. A conspicuous sign of death. Clear evidence of the killing fungus vectored into the tree by beetles not much larger than a grain of rice.

I don’t like to say this, but the staining is beautiful in its own way. Finish wood milled from beetle-kill trees is quite appealing. Over the years, I’ve used blue pine for a variety of finish projects. I first used it over thirty years ago on the walls of a basement in a house in East Helena. The vaulted ceiling in the cabin runs end to end with tongue-and-groove blue pine. The north wall of our living room is finished with lightly whitewashed blue pine.

A Blue Pine Round

Blue Pine Split into Cordwood

Blue Pine Wall in Our Living Room

—Mitchell Hegman

The Little Big Move

About the only thing I didn’t need was the hand truck.

Allow me to explain. Following the successful installation of our new big-screen TV, I needed to move our old TV stand from the living room to what is now my office. We’re talking about something less than thirty feet in distance.

Oddly enough, this turned out to be “the little big move.” The job consumed the better part of a day and required armfuls of both hand and power tools. The difficulty arose from the fact that I had customized (read: made it really big) the old TV stand to accommodate a 48-inch TV several years ago. To make the move, I needed to unscrew and pry apart nailed pieces from a live-edge slab of blue pine I had used to extend the stand to something near six feet in length. I also removed a glass door and some shelves.

Following the disassembly, I used furniture sliders to push and pull the stand down the hall and into my office. I had no more than an inch to spare when rotating the hulking piece out of the hall and into the room. Once I wrestled the stand into the office, I dragged my collection of tools into the space and clambered around it, reassembling everything I’d torn apart.

Required Tools

The Stand in the Hall

Reassembled Stand

—Mitchell Hegman

Back to My Batchelor Days

Desiree and I purchased a 75” big-screen TV. Wall-mounting and commissioning it proved shockingly easy. That said, a weighty problem did surface—we need a low-built table to support all the associated hardware and, of course, the requisite rocks from my collection that deserve a place beneath the screen.

As a temporary solution, we’ve had to resort to the kind of furnishings I used back in my early, frugal bachelor days. You might recall the bookshelves made from concrete blocks and dimension lumber, giant wooden wire spools pressed into service as tables, and posters standing in for art.

For this project, an old cooler and a plastic storage bin are filling in as our temporary television table. I’m rather pleased with the look and feel of it, truth be told.

The Big Screen and Furnishings Below

—Mitchell Hegman

Buddha’s Hand

The Buddha’s hand is—apologies given now—hands down the weirdest citrus fruit on the block. It looks like a lemon trying to become an octopus. Its origins trace back to the lower slopes of the Himalayas and northeastern India. Botanically, it’s a close cousin of the citron, one of the ancestral citrus species from which many of our familiar lemons and limes descend. What makes it truly odd is the way its robust segments set out on their own and stretch apart as it grows, giving rise to the distinct “fingers” that make each fruit look more like a sprawling sculpture.

Unlike lemons or oranges, Buddha’s hand contains no juice—none at all. Inside, it’s mostly pith, thick and pale. But here’s the twist: the pith isn’t bitter. You can use the whole fruit, rind and all.

I find the scent of Buddha’s hand appealing. It’s bright and floral, with an obvious hint of lemon. Many people simply set a Buddha’s hand on a counter or shelf and let its fragrance fill the room. In the kitchen, it makes for a lively natural flavoring: thinly sliced and candied, infused into vodka or syrup, or grated over fish and pastries where a delicate citrus lift is wanted.

Desiree and I picked up a Buddha’s hand on our latest shopping trip. She used it to flavor baked salmon. I like the way it eased through the other flavors without tipping over any carts.

A Buddha’s Hand

A Look Inside

—Mitchell Hegman

Clearing the Way

I had to fix the creek at the cabin.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. The creek is fully functional, and the fish are fine. Rather, at some point during the summer months, a strong wind shoved a dead-standing fir to the ground alongside the creek, blocking the way for anyone (me, specifically) wishing to walk beside it and pitch random sticks, rocks, or pinecones into the water.

Montana being Montana, the weather obliged me yesterday with a cool, snowy day—exactly the kind I enjoy for cutting rounds with my chainsaw. So I lugged my saw down to the creek and powered through a section of the fallen tree. As I cut, the reason for the tree’s death became clear: beetle kill. Each round exposed the gray-blue staining left by the fungus the beetles carry in when they bore for lunch.

It’s the fungus, not the beetles, that chokes the trees to death.

After an hour or so, I had segmented about fifteen feet of the trunk, providing a clear path for walking. I lugged the rounds—the largest measuring sixteen inches across—to my truck and hauled them home for splitting.

The Downed Tree Alongside the Creek

Fungus-Stained Tree Butt

A Collection of Rounds

—Mitchell Hegman

Ponderosa Pine Cones

Let’s talk about pine cones.

For one thing, size doesn’t matter. At present, the tallest trees in existence are coast redwoods, which can attain a height of 350 feet. Yet the redwoods produce cones only about an inch long for the distribution of tiny seeds—about the same size as a tomato seed.

In my section of the woods, ponderosa trees produce the “big-daddy” cones. They’re durable, industrial-sized, and generally as big as a grown man’s fist. The local fir, spruce, and lodgepole pine produce far smaller and considerably more fragile cones.

Many of the ponderosas near my house have produced an abundance of cones this year. I find them beautiful in their symmetry and appreciate them whether hanging in the tree or shed upon the understory.

A ponderosa cone is built to both protect and distribute its seeds—and it does so with prickly authority. The outer scales are thick and armored, each tipped with a sharp, recurved barb—a cat-like claw. These barbs form the tree’s natural defense system, deterring animals from prying open the cone before the seeds fully mature. Handle one long enough, and the claws are bound to snag you.

When mature and dry, the cones open in warm weather, their scales flexing outward to release the winged seeds—each capable of spiraling away on a puff of wind. In cooler, damper conditions, the cones close again, guarding whatever remains inside. This simple, temperature-driven mechanism helps the tree time its seed release for the best chance of success.

I’m sharing a photograph featuring a Cold Smoke beer (as a size reference), a ponderosa pine cone (the larger one), and the much smaller cone from a spruce tree.

Pine Cones in the Tree

Pine Cone Comparison

—Mitchell Hegman

Fine Sand

As I’ve mentioned many times before, my house sits on a literal pile of rocks. I don’t have such a thing as native topsoil in my yard. My property lines are flung across what is essentially a heap of cobbles and boulders plowed into this section of our broad valley by ancient waters.

But an interesting twist flavors the rocky makeup of the ground at the front of my house. I discovered this many years ago when I planted a Russian olive and again when digging a hole for the linden tree outside the bay window. In both instances, while digging a hole in which I could plant the tree, I dug down into a layer of pure sand—almost as fine as flour. The layer of sand lies a bit over a foot below the surface and is at least a foot thick. The linden tree has thrived, I believe, by splaying its roots within this layer.

A few days ago, I started digging a hole for a tree (species to be determined) that we’ll plant some twenty or so feet southwest of the linden early next spring. Happily, after barring and shoveling my way down through the hard-packed rocks, I once again encountered the super-soft layer of sand.

Strange good stuff, this. I’m not sure what unusual dynamics account for layering the sand between shelves of stone, but I appreciate the effort.

I’ve posted photographs of my digging project. This includes a photograph of the sand alongside a Cold Smoke beer. The beer is not a reference for size in this instance—rather, it’s there because I earned a sip.

The Beginning of the Hole

A Sample of Cobbles

A Sample of the Fine Sand  

—Mitchell Hegman

Tolerating Silence

I can tolerate silence. I don’t seek it. I don’t particularly like it. But I can tolerate it.

This has not always been so.

For most of my life, I found silence insufferable. As a boy, I could not precisely define why I disliked—or at least mistrusted—quiet spaces. I quickly discovered a solution to the bothersome silence: making my own noise.

Making a bunch of noise all the time proved somewhat impractical, but I did my best. I chattered away. I tapped on tables, bowls, and plates. I made car and truck noises. Thankfully, my mother enjoyed listening to the radio and often did so throughout the day. I soon developed a deep love for music.

As I got a little older, I realized the issue with silence was not the silence outside me. The problem developed within. Lacking input from the world, my brain began fiddling with knobs and dials better left untouched. My thoughts jumped off cliffs and sometimes left the hose running.

To this day, I turn on either the television or stereo within five minutes of waking. I need the sound. But as I’ve advanced in age, I’ve learned to tolerate a small diet of silence. I suppose I’ve, in a sense, exhausted my brain by now. It’s fine with just lying there for a few minutes.

—Mitchell Hegman

Closing Out

A strong blast of wind clawed away the last leaf from the buckeye tree and sent it scratching along our front drive. The last of our bluebirds gathered by twos and threes before stitching off and dissolving against the nomadic clouds.

Though the Mayday and linden remain clutching their leaves jealously, this marks the end of our far-north growing season.

We’re closing out.

At the flower beds, we’ve shaken free and gathered seeds from both the annuals and perennials—some of those as small and shiny as new minnows. We’ve cleaved the dry stalks of the dead things at the base.

In our modest vegetable garden, we’ve unbraided the tomatoes from the supporting wire cages and uprooted the plants entirely. Both the green and blushing fruits have been appropriately gathered. We’ve harvested the last three kohlrabi.

Come now the raw wind driving frost into the earth itself. Bring us the sweeps of snow. We’ll piece together jigsaw puzzles indoors for the months of long darkness. And next year, when the days are long again, we’ll begin anew with seeds sown in fistfuls of soft soil, with lush green starts basking in the ever-warm light of our sunroom.

—Mitchell Hegman

First-Best, Second-Best

Forgiving yourself is the second-best thing.

The first-best thing is recognizing you were an ass to begin with.

—Mitchell Hegman

Eating a Sponge

Welp, I’ve dodged a bullet. I’m not going to be forced to eat a sponge. Turns out the loofah plants Desiree planted in our garden can’t tolerate even a touch of below-freezing weather. This, despite our efforts to tent the plants in plastic and pitch a blanket overtop the evening before temperatures crashed into the twenties. By the next frosty morning, the plants had deflated and begun to dry out.

Mature loofah gourds are not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, but they do produce a decent exfoliating sponge. Before reaching that stage, though, young loofah gourds are edible. They’re sometimes called vegetable sponges or Chinese okra. When cooked, they apparently have a mild, slightly sweet flavor—something close to cucumber.

Our plants were just beginning to extend miniature gourds from a few desiccated flowers when the cold struck. No eating sponges this year.

Loofah Sponge

Young Loofah Gourd

Desiree’s Cold-Damaged Loofahs

—Mitchell Hegman

Portraits of Glacier National Park

Desiree and I had planned to cross Going-to-the-Sun Road on our way home from Kalispell. Instead, Montana’s ever-restless weather swept in with a brawling snowstorm at elevation, steering us away from the high country and along the park’s southern edge on Highway 2. The mountain peaks loomed above us—wind-bitten and dusted with new snow. Still, we found our way to the shores of Lake McDonald, where waves shuffled against smoothed stones, and later wandered partway into Two Medicine on a day mostly claimed by the weather.

I’m sharing three photographs from our drive.

Lake McDonald

Desiree at Scared Dancing Cascade Falls

Two Medicine

—Mitchell Hegman

My Half-Fortune Cookie

While in Kalispell, Desiree and I ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant. After finishing our meal, we were given the requisite fortune cookies.

My fortune was not good.

When I snapped my cookie in two and fished out the flag of paper inside, I discovered that half of my fortune had been torn away at some point before reaching me. The half I received read as follows:

“ease from your cares, have a good”

That’s it.

A cryptic, incomplete fortune awaits me.

Life can be so weird sometimes.

My Fortune

—Mitchell Hegman

Along the Blackfoot

One of the best things about living in Montana is that to get from, say, Point “A” to Point “B,” you must drive through Montana. Yesterday, Desiree and I drove from our house near Helena (Point A) to Kalispell (Point B) by way of the Seeley-Swan Valley. The first leg pulled us close to the Blackfoot River and twisted us alongside it. The second funneled us between the toothy, eager Mission Mountains and the chevron peaks of the Swan Range. Tall tamaracks marched beside us for miles, while lakes flashed into view when allowed.

The leafy trees and bushes are just now flushing color through their skirts, and the tamaracks are only beginning their fall wear. Desiree is especially enamored with autumn colors, which don’t exist in her faraway tropical home.

The cottonwoods along the Blackfoot glowed half-neon yellow in the new light of our early-morning drive. I stopped at a turnout atop a prow of earth and stone so Desiree and I could pile out and bracket a few photographs.

Fall Colors Along the Blackfoot River

—Mitchell Hegman

A Single Feather

I’m incapable of passing up a feather. If I chance upon a feather lying on the ground, I feel compelled to sweep it up and examine the colors and patterns, and then drag it like a soft file against my wrist. Feathers are invariably pretty. The standards iridescent. The structures impeccable, sometimes otherworldly.

Interestingly, a feather grows the opposite manner to a tree. A tree grows new at the top, while a feather grows new at the bottom. Trees add height and reach through their tips, where buds at the ends of branches and the crown extend upward into the light. Feathers, by contrast, push out from follicles in the skin, with fresh cells forming at the base and older material carried upward until the feather unfurls to full length. One reaches higher by stretching at its topmost points, the other by building steadily from its root.

Yesterday, I found a feather near my back door—a northern flicker feather, by my best estimation. That’s a woodpecker, for those of you from my lovely smelterite-filled neighborhood in East Helena, Montana.

Northern flickers are strikingly attired and sure to catch your eye. They also overwinter in our rumpled swath of Montana. For that, I give them due credit. At the same time, they can prove a pest. They are not opposed to pecking away at the exterior of a house if they appreciate the sound it makes or suspect dinner is someplace inside. A few years ago, one of our local flickers took to hanging out with a rowdy band of magpies that regularly descended upon my yard.

Interesting stuff, that. And the feather I picked up is interesting enough that I placed it on a shelf in my den.

The Feather

Northern Flicker (Photo: Audubon)

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Sitting Bull Said

Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader, warrior, and spiritual figure best known for uniting the Plains tribes against U.S. government policies that threatened their land and way of life. Revered for his wisdom and courage, he played a central role in the resistance leading to the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, where Lakota and Cheyenne forces defeated General George Custer’s troops. Though later forced to surrender, Sitting Bull remained a symbol of Native American resilience and dignity, even touring briefly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He was killed in 1890 during an attempted arrest at Standing Rock Reservation, but his legacy endures as a powerful voice of defiance and cultural pride.

Following are three quotes from Sitting Bull:

— "It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.”

—"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.”

—"Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

—Mitchell Hegman

Another Observation

In my limited experience, mean people make decent electricians, but they don’t make for good cashiers at the local grocery.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Noise Deep in the Night

My house, like all wood-framed houses, makes noises from time to time—all the usual stuff. The floor occasionally creaks or groans under weight. The wind may elicit a whistle or cry at the windows. When confronted with bitterly cold weather, the exterior walls and roof framing might even crack their knuckles.

Late last night, though, my house issued a new, bigger thing. It flung a body against a wall—or dropped it to the floor in another room. The sound had no precise location. It was big but not exactly loud.

After hearing the noise, I lay in bed blinking at the dark, wondering what might account for it. Neither wind nor cold weather could be held to blame. After several slightly uneasy minutes of listening for a repeat, I twisted into my blanket and drifted back to sleep.

Years ago, a similar odd sound in the night later proved to be a tripod I had leaned against a closet wall that had fallen over of its own accord. Early this morning, I swept through the entire house looking for “a body.”

Nothing turned up, leaving the mystery to rattle around with the pipes and beams.

—Mitchell Hegman

Exiting September

Welp, we are on the verge of exiting September, the first of our four “ber” months. If you are married to a woman from the Philippines, as I am, you quickly learn that September through December aren’t just months on the calendar—they’re one long Christmas season.

In the Philippines, Christmas sneaks in the moment the page flips to September—because, well, it ends in “ber,” just like December. By the time the rest of the world is still arguing over Halloween costumes, Filipinos already have lights strung, decorations dangling, and “Silent Night” echoing through the malls. Four whole months of yuletide cheer—it’s basically an endurance sport.

Christmas is serious business there. And pulling a Filipina off her island and plunking her down in Montana is not going to tone down that Christmas spirit—it just means she swaps palm trees for pine.

Desiree was a little slow off the starting line this year, but she made up ground fast over the last couple of days. We are now officially in Christmas mode. Baubles dangle here and there, a wreath hangs over the electric fireplace, and most importantly, the tree is up and fully decorated.

I’ll admit, the tree looks pretty spiffy. I’m sharing a photograph of Desiree placing the star on top—smiling like she just won Christmas gold.

Merry Christmas!

And, oh yeah, have a nice Thanksgiving somewhere along the way.

—Mitchell Hegman

Not Litter

I disdain litter and will readily collect it when confronted with it. But at some point, cans and bottles stop being litter and become relics. Some even elevate to collectables.

The transition isn’t precise, but several decades must pass at a minimum. Vintage motor oil cans provide a perfect example. Collectors will pay over $1,000 for “rare,” well-preserved cans from the early 1900s. Antique purple bottles, in my estimation, qualify as beautiful. They were produced between the 1880s and 1914.

In the buckled hills surrounding my house, relics from bygone eras lie exposed amid splays of sagebrush, gnarls of juniper, and sun-bleached bunchgrass. Iron tidbits. Shards of brown and purple glass. Twists of wire. Occasionally, a can rusted to fragility. I chance upon these things now and then on my walkabouts and rarely disturb them.

Yesterday at midday, I paused over an old rusting beer can a few yards below my house. I’ve passed it many times in my life. I’ve never picked it up, nor ever thought to. I believe it belongs there now—weathered into place, a quiet marker of the past.

It is not litter.

I’ve posted a photograph of the old rusty beer can.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Aging Thing

I’ve reached that stage of life where a host of changes in my person and attitudes are becoming apparent. Here is a list of a few of those:

• My belly has struck out on a path of its own.
• My name recall app is often in failure mode.
• I get urges to kick the kids off the grass, but I don’t really have grass, and, actually, there aren’t any kids around.
• Tying my shoes qualifies as exercise.
• I’ve gone far beyond the point of ever learning to appreciate opera.
• Every day is a hearing test.
• I actually want to organize my garage.
• My body no longer rids itself of aches and pains. It recycles them.
• I’m finding beauty in smaller things—like the slow stretch of morning light across our valley floor.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Mathematician’s Limit

I was but half a man

until you rose from infinite possibility.

Your converging lines, your incalculable curves,

a symmetry that once held me whole.

At a single touch we became a singularity—

centered, fleeting as a fragile mean.

But before me now unravel broken domains and shattered fractals,

approaching the limit, where nothing remains.

—Mitchell Hegman

Lemon Tree Update

I have an important lemon tree update.

To begin, we’ve moved the lemon tree back inside the house after several months of residing alongside the back deck.

Some three weeks ago, our weather began moderating, and our tree—having nearly stripped itself bare of leaves during the hot, sun-scoured Montana summer—initiated a vigorous growth stage. Lush new leaves spurted forth in all directions.

Honestly, this is the fullest I’ve seen the tree since we started growing it.

Citrons, lemons, and limes are the least cold-hardy of the citrus trees. Given our present descent into long, cool nights, with frost soon to bejewel the entire landscape, I carried the lemon tree back into the sunroom and plunked it down below the south-facing glass wall.

I’m sharing a photograph of the lemon tree alongside a Cold Smoke beer, which provides both scale and color contrast to balance the composition.

I’m still awaiting my first lemon.

The Lemon Tree

—Mitchell Hegman

21:48: Violently Making the Bed

Given the size of our bed (a California King) and the fact that the bottom half of the mattress rests tightly inside a wooden box, stripping and replacing the fitted sheet is difficult. Desiree and I need to tag-team this chore. A lot of lifting, shouldering, pulling, stretching, and stuffing is involved. We get a little “western” with it, using a somewhat local euphemism for getting wild or violent. Typically, I need to hoist each end of the mattress high while Desiree wrestles the fitted sheet into place.

The last time we changed the bedding, our skirmishing produced a bit of collateral damage. After we finished with the fitted sheet and dropped the mattress back down into the box, I walked over to the nightstand on my side of the bed to inspect the tautness of the sheet.

“Where’s the clock?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” she responded.

“It’s not on the table.” On closer inspection, I found the thin cord trailing down under the mattress. “Guess what? I think the clock is under the mattress.”

Somewhere in all of our swinging and shifting about, we had knocked the table clock off the stand. With Desiree stationed near the cord, I hoisted up the corner of the mattress and she fished the clock out from underneath.

Interestingly enough, the clock popped out having changed to displaying the time in a 24-hour format. The time was 21:48.

The Clock Cord Trailing Away

The Clock After Pulling It Free

—Mitchell Hegman

The Autumnal Equinox

At exactly 12:19 yesterday afternoon, the sun crossed the celestial equator on its way south. That instant marked the start of autumn. It’s not a date we simply penciled in on the calendar—it’s a real event in the sky, measurable down to the minute.

The word equinox means “equal night,” and though day and night are not perfectly balanced, they are close. From here, the tilt of the Earth gives Montana shorter days and longer nights until winter solstice.

On the ground, changes are already underway. Bull elk have started to bugle, their high, fluting calls echoing through mountain valleys and carrying across the prairie as they gather harems of cows. And, of course, some trees have started blushing with colors.

Desiree, having lived on islands where the sun holds high in the sky and seasons exist in name only, finds autumn dazzling. She’s particularly enamored with trees that blush red before shedding their leaves wholesale. Last year, we planted an autumn splendor buckeye near the front drive to provide us with a splash of red in the fall. Over the last week or so, the tree has flushed through with warm red colors.

Desiree is not disappointed.

Buckeye Tree

Desiree Admiring from the Porch

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Big in the Back Yard

Shortly after arriving home from the cabin, Desiree drifted out the back door to check on a small garden she’s been tending throughout the summer. After only a minute or two, she popped the door open, leaned in, and called to me:

“There is a big vole or something out back.”

“What?”

“There is something big back here. Come look at it.”

Intrigued, I trotted to the door and followed Desiree across the deck toward the east end of the house. There, under the chokecherry bush, I saw what she was talking about.

“That’s a beaver. A giant beaver!” We were not confronted with a real beaver, but rather an artistic relief rendition of one. We both started laughing.

“And I think I know where it came from,” I added as we drew close. “It’s from the old Montana Historical Society Museum. This is Tad’s work.”

Our friend Tad has been working on the new Montana Historical Society Heritage Center, and this looked suspiciously like something from the old museum. A flurry of texts, followed by a phone call, confirmed my hunch—Tad had been tasked with disposing of the beaver, a life-sized representation of prehistoric beavers that once inhabited our Montana spaces.

The beaver will eventually find permanent residence near the lakeshore on the property adjoining ours. I’m sharing a photograph of Desiree with the giant beaver as we found it near our house.

Desiree and the Giant Beaver

—Mitchell Hegman

The Privilege of Fire

Pursed within a natural bowl in the conifer timberlands, our cabin cools quickly after the last light of day dissolves into the long shadows. Waking in the predawn this morning, I started a warming fire to ward off a district chill.

Starting a fire is not an imposition; it is a privilege. I also enjoy the constant challenge of building the perfect kindling stack to grasp the first flame and hand it off to the split rounds needed for righteous heat.

I used paraffin-infused chunks of sawdust to start fires in the woodstove. They are not as greedy as paper. Rather, they hold the flame once ignited, then gradually intensify and feed the kindling.

There is a solid gratification in tending the woodstove in the early morning hours and bringing warmth to the pink, shadowy beginning of a blue-sky day.

A Paraffin Fire Starter

Fire Inside the Stove

—Mitchell Hegman

Furrows

 

We live under the pink bellies of roving clouds.

At our flanks, silver waters uncoil and pull into winding rivers.

In neat furrows and raised beds, we sow bits and seeds of things.

We’ve penned the softer animals.

And our shelters are solid as bollards.

 

We have a problem.

A god problem.

 

The rains come when they please, not when needed.

Our seeds sprout crooked, and the starts wither.

The river now teems with bony and unpalatable crawlers.

 

Clearly, someone among us—or all of us—has offended our gods.

 

Some whisper we must plant squirming things.

Some suggest we stamp in dry ground

and lift our own clouds of gray dust.

The elders speak of freeing the soft animals,

but their eyes do not meet ours.

For now, our furrows lie open, hungry as mouths.

 

—Mitchell Hegman

Gone Gray

While at a public function, I chanced to see a fellow construction worker I’d not seen in something approaching twenty years. As it so happens, these last few years are also the ones where people of my generation have seen their hair fade to gray. I must admit, my friend’s ashen hair knocked me sideways in the saddle when it came to recognizing him, but we quickly fell into a warm conversation once I approached him.

I’m an exception to the turning-gray regime. My hair washed itself gray more than twenty years early. Partway into the conversation with my old workmate, he said to me: “You haven’t changed. You look just the same as you did before.”

After our conversation, I considered what he’d said. Maybe turning gray prematurely advantaged me. I pre-aged in that regard.

—Mitchell Hegman

If Keys Were Bowling Balls

Here is a list of things I want to know:

• Who decided hot was a flavor?
• Why do people keep selling me “deer-proof” plants that deer munch down to sticks within days of me planting them?
• When is the best time to do something you shouldn’t do?
• If keys were the size of bowling balls, how would we carry them—and where would we hide them?
• Why do I keep buying so-called “deer-proof” plants?
• How different would my life be if my parents had named me Paul, their runner-up choice?
• If you can’t dance worth a damn, is being an excellent hugger a viable alternative?
• Is there any occasion when confusion is the optimal response?

—Mitchell Hegman