Wine with a Twist

Sometime back, a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur informed me that no self-respecting person would purchase wine that comes in a bottle with a twist top rather than a cork.

It’s just bad policy.

If there is any validity to this, I now have a peculiar problem. My go-to red wine for the last fifteen years has arrived in a bottle with a cork. But when I picked up a half dozen bottles to replenish my stock a couple of days ago, two of them had twist tops.

I lay no claim to being any sort of wine whatchamacallit, and I don't wish to trespass upon anyone's wine sensibilities, but I fully intend to twist the tops off the bottles and drink the wine.

I suppose I’ll need to describe it differently now, too: My wine has an earthy start with a trailer-park, twist-top finish.

I have posted a photograph comparing two bottles of the same wine.

Cork on the Left, Twist on the Right

—Mitchell Hegman

Six Corner Pieces

Now that the seasons are changing and we are slipping toward winter and more time indoors, it’s time for me to work on jigsaw puzzles. Yesterday, I started sorting pieces for one. Every piece of the 1000-piece puzzle is uniquely shaped. Some are shaped like animals, fruit, or other familiar objects.

As always, I first try to sort out the edge and corner pieces as an assembly strategy. I quickly bumped into a weird problem: I found six of the four corner pieces I need.

I think we can all agree that a rectangular puzzle has only four right-angle corner pieces. Finding six of them rather stopped me in my tracks. Naturally, I consulted the picture of the puzzle and quickly identified four rightful corner pieces. Not long after, I found where the other two pieces will land as run-of-the-mill edge pieces.

I am sharing a photograph of the six corner pieces and another showing where the two oddball corners will be placed. I think we may be in for a wild ride on this puzzle.

Six Corner Pieces

Two Not-So Corner Pieces

—Mitchell Hegman

Distracted Working

I’ve seen plenty of warnings out there cautioning people not to drive while distracted, but apparently, I missed all the warnings about working while distracted. Yesterday, while finishing the last few details on the metal I installed on the cabin’s lower wall, I learned a valuable lesson about that.

I’m sharing a photograph of my drill. Somehow, I managed to fall out of focus enough to chuck my pencil in my drill instead of the twist bit I needed. The only thing I can say is that at least I was not likely to harm anyone, and an eraser could have fixed any damage done.

My Drill with a Pencil in the Chuck

—Mitchell Hegman

Fault Line

I have posted one of my favorite songs by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (sometimes abbreviated to BRMC), an American rock band from San Francisco, California. The group was founded in 1998 by Peter Hayes (vocals, guitar, harmonica), Robert Levon Been (vocals, bass, guitar), and Nick Jago (drums).

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is considered an alternative rock or garage rock band. They are straightforward and stripped down in most of their songs. Fault Line, the song posted, is simply beautiful in my estimation.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATtXvIpa4gc

A Non-Kinetic Daredevil

I would classify myself as a “non-kinetic” daredevil. I’m not the type to launch my motorcycle off a precipice or try to catch a bullet in my teeth. My daredevil stunts are steeped in the horticultural end of the spectrum. Put plainly, I allow poisonous plants to grow along the edge of my back deck.

In particular, I have allowed a bittersweet nightshade to clamber about and flop down onto the deck itself. For those unfamiliar, tomatoes and peppers are also members of the nightshade family. The bittersweet nightshade is another one of those exotic invaders from Eurasia. As far as thriving, they favor damp locations.

I find the plant quite attractive in all stages of growth, but, sadly, all parts of this plant are highly toxic to humans, dogs, cats, and many other animals. Also, this plant is a scoundrel that will overrun a flower garden if you allow it.

But I wanted to push the outer edge of the envelope, so I let this one run this year. This is what non-kinetic daredevils do.

Nightshade Berries

Nightshade on the Deck

—Mitchell Hegman

A Pithy Reflection

She thinks that taking bubble baths is far more important and productive than watching political conventions. To date, history has not disproven her.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Bottom is Dropping Out

Quietly, and largely without notice, the bottom is dropping out on us as a species. On this one we could learn something from rabbits.

Humans are having fewer children, and in much of the world the birthrate has fallen below the level necessary to replace the existing population. That matters because our economic systems were built on the assumption that there would always be another generation coming along behind us. Retirement systems, pensions, health care, tax bases and much of the ordinary machinery of commerce depend upon a sufficiently large working population supporting a smaller retired population. As the proportion of old people grows and the proportion of working-age people shrinks, the arithmetic gets progressively less friendly.

We can compensate with immigration, automation, increased productivity and people working longer, but none of these changes the basic arithmetic. Fewer people eventually means fewer workers, fewer consumers and fewer people available to do the work. The United Nations projects that the world's population will peak at roughly 10.3 billion in the 2080s and then decline. Rabbits, meanwhile, appear to have avoided the problem entirely. They just keep making more rabbits.

I have posted a very short but powerful video offering one man’s explanation for at least part of the reason this is occurring.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W32yi5k_Tu8

Stick of Paradise

Living in Montana is not for everybody. This especially applies to a host of exotic plants. Honestly, it’s a narrow range of plants that can survive our long months of winter, replete with arctic impulses and their sub-zero temperatures.

We can lull some of these soft-natured plants into growing here by providing space in places such as our sunroom. But even the sunroom trick fails from time to time. Perhaps our low humidity squeezes them a bit too hard. Or the intense and unrelenting midsummer sun slaps others silly.

Now enter a bird of paradise stage right. The plant kind, I mean. After brief deliberations, Desiree and I had a “bird” shipped here. We immediately unpacked the thing and placed it in the sunroom.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the plant gradually shriveled and died as an upright stick.

We now have a stick of paradise.

A Healthy Bird of Paradise

New Bird (Our Plant Arrives)

Stick of Paradise

—Mitchell Hegman

Possible Outcomes

Listed today is a run of possible outcomes for following your first instinct:

• You invent a new tool for extracting broken bolts.
• You end up flailing in mid-air and seeking a soft landing ten feet below.
• A new nickname is born: Smooth.
• Thirty years later, you remain perfectly happy in marriage.
• You find yourself pacing back and forth in a jail cell.
• At least your smartphone case proves its worth.
• You become briefly famous for something you would rather not have become famous for.
• You accidentally start a chain of events that ends with you owning a three-legged cat.

—Mitchell Hegman

Bands of Light

The narrow mountain valley in which my cabin is located forces the sun to work for proper access. In the morning, the sun must clamber up the eastern flanks of the mountains before peering in. In the evening, it must hang on for as long as possible before descending the west slopes and finally setting. But in the rarified minutes immediately after cresting the mountains above us in the morning and just before slipping away in the evening, the most extraordinary event takes place. In these fleeting minutes, bands of sunlight extend long across the forest floor alongside hard shadow.

The light ignites all the colors and details amid the understory and sends all manner of birds and insects strobing through the bands.

In these brief stretches of time, both the fragility and strength of the forest are on full display. I love no other time of day better.

Morning Light

Evening Light

—Mitchell Hegman

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

A Salamander in the Mousetrap

As someone who by nature requires declaring a favorite in most every category, I will now declare that the Western tiger salamander is my favorite amphibian. They are not reptiles, in spite of dressing up to look like one. Salamanders typically have moist, porous skin, giving them a smooth, almost silky appearance.

Western tiger salamanders range throughout Montana on the eastern side of the Continental Divide. According to the Montana Field Guide: Adults are found in virtually any habitat, providing there is a terrestrial substrate suitable for burrowing and a body of water nearby suitable for breeding.

Adult western tiger salamanders are shy by disposition and tend to remain underground in burrows in prairie or agricultural habitats and only emerge for any length of time to breed in the water available to them. They make their living by climbing down in these holes and eating insects and worms.

I mention all of this in light of the fact that yesterday I caught a Western tiger salamander in one of the live mousetraps I set near my hot tub outside the back door. Fortunately, the salamander was unharmed, and I was able to release it and let it go along its way.

I have shared images of the salamander in question. Naturally, I also captured a photograph of the salamander alongside a Cold Smoke beer for a sense of scale.

Salamander Closeup

Salamander in the Trap

Posed with a Cold Smoke Beer

—Mitchell Hegman

Two Random Thoughts

 Thought #1: I wish to be at the very place where wind takes pause, where thoughts have muscles and teeth and claws.

Thought #2: How much can be explained by the fact that we are the overfed products of a naturally isolated gene pool?

—Mitchell Hegman

Winter Negotiations

One thing you learn early is that no matter the season declared by the calendar, you don’t wander far from your heavy coat here in Montana. We don't really have four seasons in the standard sense of those. Around here, it’s more fractured negotiations between winter and everything else, with winter getting regular allowances across the board. As I have mentioned before, I have seen snow at my house on the valley floor every month of the year, including July and August.

I mention this in light of the fact that we are now descending into cooling temperatures over the next few days. Some of you may want to start snuggling your coat. At a minimum, all of us should locate one.

For any newcomers: Welcome to Montana.

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Henry Rollins Said

Henry Rollins is the intense, iconic frontman of the hardcore punk band Black Flag who built a multifaceted career as a spoken-word artist, author, actor, and cultural commentator. Here are three of his quotes:

— “My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.”

--- “The truth is an anti-war statement in itself.”

--- “Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn't worth the time and effort.”

—Mitchell Hegman

A Metallic Green Sweat Bee

If metal is good for making trains, planes, and automobiles, why not try making an insect out of the stuff? Or at least make a bee that looks as though it were made from metal. Enter the metallic green sweat bee, a tiny native and super-efficient pollinator that looks like it was fashioned from emerald-colored steel.

Yesterday, I captured a crisp photograph of a metallic green sweat bee putting in a shift on a sunflower near my house. The image is clear enough to reveal its pollen-covered legs. Those yellow clumps are the bee's cargo, gathered from the sunflower's tiny disk florets.

Sweat bees have adopted the single life, forgoing the crowded social arrangements of a honeybee hive. Most live solitary lives in little underground nests, although some species will make their homes in the soft, decaying wood of a punky log. Each bee has her own nest and provisions her own young.

The fascinating part is what happens to the pollen they collect. The bee carries it back to its underground nest, mixes it with nectar, and stocks a little pantry for its offspring. Those pollen-covered legs are carrying groceries for the kids.

Metallic Green Sweat Bee on a Sunflower

—Mitchell Hegman

My Woodshop

Today I am posting a photograph of my woodshop and a tabletop I am finishing. The shop is quite spacious. Air is constantly exchanged to keep it free of sawdust. Additionally, the floor is self-sweeping, and the lighting is perfectly even and bright throughout the entire space.

My Woodshop

—Mitchell Hegman

A Big Cat (Game Camera Captures)

Over the weekend, Desiree and I made a trip to the cabin. Soon after arriving there, we gathered cards from our three game cameras, as is always our wont, to see what critters have been tip-toeing about in our absence.

We captured the requisite number of deer and a standard-issue image of a fox at night. But, most impressively, a mountain lion triggered images on the camera facing the cabin and then sauntered in front of a second camera I recently set just north of the cabin.

Even though I have been living in the mountains of Montana for my entire life, I have yet to see a mountain lion in person. They are simply too stealthy. This is the second time I have captured one on a game camera. The first camera offered up a fairly ghostly image. The second is pretty clear.

I am also sharing the capture of a bull elk from a third camera in the meadow south of the cabin.

All good stuff.

Mountain Lion on Camera #1

Mountain Lion on Camera #2

Bull Elk on Camera #3

—Mitchell Hegman

Self-Assessment

I’ve got orthotic shoe inserts to placate my feet and crowns on my teeth to hold them together, but the middle of me is holding out pretty well, although it is expanding a bit.

—Mitchell Hegman

Problem #1 and #2

Problem #1: Those damned ravens keep landing in a tree near my back door to “grunk” and “caw” at me.

Problem #2: The stuff they are saying to me is starting to make sense, and I agree. The mice have been total ass-wipes this summer, and I need to leave more raven treats on the top of my fence posts.

—Mitchell Hegman

Without Words

In our love we grow soft and quiet. Our cheeks silk. Our elbows soft and delicious as marshmallow. Our hands rose petals. Our voices have trickled down to clear rainwater and soaked back inside us.

It’s not that words have failed us.

We simply don’t need them.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Ants Are Building Topsoil

I got stuck staring at a red ant pile.

When you’re Mitch Hegman, these things happen.

But I wasn’t thinking about the ants. I got to thinking about dirt. Topsoil, according to the touchy folks at the local plant nursery.

We tend to think of topsoil as something that has always been there, just hanging out and waiting for something exciting to happen. But topsoil is not quite as passive as it looks. It is continually being built, moved, mixed, and modified by some remarkably small construction crews. Ants are among the most industrious of these soil engineers. They excavate their nests, haul soil ingredients from below to the surface, mix mineral particles, create passageways for air and water, and carry bits of organic material into their underground colonies.

The red ants I observed have created a huge mound of mostly organic material, two feet tall and nearly twice that in width.

In either scenario, ants redistribute nutrients and alter the structure of the soil around them. Scientists call this activity bioturbation, which is a rather impressive word for what amounts to ants digging holes and moving dirt around.

My kind of work.

Red Ants at Work

—Mitchell Hegman

Eating Pain for Dinner

A surprising number of us crave a healthy dose of pain for dinner. I’m talking about adding hot peppers to our dishes. While some may claim hot peppers are adding a “taste” of heat to dinner, from a physiological standpoint, capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the heat, binds to a specific protein on your nerve endings called the TRPV1 receptor, creating pain.

While this reaction to capsaicin is essentially a false alarm on a receptor that is supposed to trigger at real temperatures above 106°F, the pain feels absolutely genuine.

Again, hot is not flavor; it’s pain. And, sincerely, I don’t enjoy eating pain. I prefer my tacos merely warm and a good old mild comfort food such as macaroni and cheese. Apparently, I’m just not wired for fire.

Desiree’s Peppers

—Mitchell Hegman

An Early Blush

I know quite a few Midwesterners who have transplanted themselves here in Montana. They don’t seem terribly confused and have adapted well. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the buckeye tree (of Midwestern origins) Desiree and I planted in front of our house. Even though fall is not scheduled to arrive until September 22, the muddled, out-of-its-element tree pulled the pin, as the saying goes, and turned autumn red this week.

Apparently, buckeye trees are known for being somewhat rash when charged with prepping for fall. Still, it’s pretty weird to see the blush of colors when the apples on a nearby tree have yet to fully ripen and our first frost is not yet knocking at the door.

Buckeye Tree

Apple Tree

—Mitchell Hegman