Excuse the Interruption....

...I've been out of town, visiting a friend.

Back to my regular blogging schedule once I've recovered from the trip!

Happy Mother's Day to Me....

And to Sweetgrass, who gave birth to her first foal Saturday morning. It's a boy. It's gray for now, but we're hoping he'll turn out to be a blue roan like his daddy. So rather than breakfast in bed or baskets of flowers, I spent my Sunday enjoying spectacularly gorgeous weather and watching our new little man test out those stilts.

Good times. And his Mama is rightly proud.

May Day!

As usual, Old Man Winter couldn't let us meander happily into spring without taking at least one more cheap shot. While the rest of you were prancing around in sombreros and sipping margaritas to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, I was wearing the bear and being pelted by the slushballs that pass for snowflakes in spring storms. They're so big and so wet my heavy canvas Carhartt coat was almost soaked through by the time we got back to house and I could wring water out of my snowpants and the hood of my sweatshirt.

We had one newborn calf that got chilled and didn't look like he'd had a good meal, so Greg and I headed out on the four wheeler towing our trusty calf rescue tub, otherwise known as a black plastic water tank. Of all the contraptions we've tried this simple little tank works the best.

The trick is to put the calf in something the cow isn't afraid of, where she can see and smell him. Then she'll follow wherever you take him (theoretically, anyway, barring the occasional fence post stupid cow that hasn't figured out she has a calf or would rather someone just take him off her hands). This is key because a cow that has just calved is near impossible to chase. You have to convince her to come along on her own.

So we dragged the calf down to the corral, put Mama in the squeeze chute, and tried to persuade Junior to have a bite to eat by prying his chattering teeth apart and stuffing a teat inside. He was a lot less cooperative than his mother, possibly because he was so cold and wet his jaws were locked from shivering, or possibly because he already had a bellyful. Either way he was chilled to the bone, so we loaded him in the pickup and hauled him home to warm up.

Then we went back to the house to dry off and warm ourselves and the power promptly went out. Ah, spring. I wish I could say this one was an exception but no, it's pretty much always like this.



Postscript: in case you noticed an excess of heavy breathing on the part of the camera person, you should know that in order to video this I had to jog along BEHIND the cow and four wheeler in Muck boots and full winter gear while being blinded by icy snow bullets. You see what I do for you? 


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A Rare Privilege

For the past three years of my life the last week of April has been dedicated to an event called the Montana Storytelling Roundup. Although many people are only aware of the weekend event, the true purpose of this organization is to bring artists and entertainers of all kinds into Glacier County schools, a pressing need in these days of budget cuts that have trimmed arts programs to the bare bones.

Within our county there are eighteen schools from elementary through high school. Six of these schools are located on Hutterite colonies.

For most who are unfamiliar with Hutterites it is easiest to begin by imagining the Amish, except with really big tractors. Unlike the Amish, Hutterites are all about mechanization and the latest in agricultural technology. Hutterites live in colonies, all property is community property. They are farmers, dairymen, raise pigs and chickens and huge gardens with which they feed themselves and often sell the excess in their local communities. They also make and sell amazing baked goods.

Hutterites are Anabaptists. The strictness of their beliefs varies by colony and by geographical area. Television and radio are not condoned. The colonies we visit do not, for the most part, formally teach music in their schools, but they do encourage singing. Some colonies do not allow musical instruments, others permit private use of guitars, for example. But across the board, the Hutterites love music.

While visiting one of the colonies this past week with Storytelling performers we had the rare privilege of being treated to a few songs by our hosts. When you click on the video below, please keep three things in mind. It was recorded with a cheap video camera in a lunch hall, so the sound you'll experience isn't even a fraction as powerful as actually being there. Due to privacy, the video has purposely been altered so that the individual singers can't be identified.

And most of all...remember these singers have no music teacher. No sheet music. No piano to demonstrate proper keys. No one taught them these harmonies. They've developed organically, from the individual ranges and pitches of the singers, passed from one generation to the next the way we pass our legends and stories.

So just close your eyes and enjoy:



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Flat on My Face Tired

The past five days have been spent with the amazing artists and musicians of the Montana Storytelling Roundup, and I have enjoyed myself almost into a coma. I topped it off with a day of sightseeing with Trinity Faegen before packing her onto an airplane for home, so in lieu of sparkling wit, you get photos from our tour of Waterton Park and the Many Glacier area.

Prince of Wales Hotel

Horning in on the road

Still icebound at Many Glacier

I'll be back later in the week to share more photos and videos from Storytelling and our sightseeing tour. For now.....faceplant.

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Flat Tired

The other day a friend was bragging that she'd changed her first flat tire. She was rightly proud. It's good to be self sufficient even if, like her, you're a city dweller who has access to AAA and a reliable cell phone signal.

Living where we live changing your own tires is a survival skill. You could sit for hours waiting for the next stray car to pass. Growing up my sisters and I had plenty of opportunities to learn thanks to single axle horse trailers with under-sized rims and four ply tires…and a brother who was selfish enough to be the baby of the family.

We started off as observers, invariably on the side of a highway, one of us holding a pair of horses and the other keeping track of the lug nuts while Dad tried to make like a race track pit crew so we wouldn't be late for the rodeo. In addition to developing our mechanical skills this was an excellent opportunity to expand our vocabularies, although none of my new words ever showed up on a spelling test at school, more's the pity, since they were mostly four letters and easy to sound out.

I've had two flat tires since I moved back to Montana, both on my way to work. It's one of those Murphy's Law addendums that tires only go flat when you have a specific place to be at a specific time. Double the odds if you happen to be wearing white pants on a rainy day, but if that's the case you were asking for it anyway.

The white pants were toast by the time I wrestled the dirt-caked spare from under the back bumper of the Jeep. Then I set up the little crank jack and attempted to lift the car. The jack sank into the soggy gravel road. I employed a few of my dad's favorite tire-changing words, cranked the jack down, repositioned it and cranked again. The jack sank again.

Of course I had nothing in my car to put under it to create a wider base of support, and who knew there was a place in Glacier County that doesn't have a decent-sized rock? I was sitting on the spare tire in my ruined pants practicing creative phrases of my own when a nice man pulled over to help.

I appreciate the assistance. Honest I do. Except for the part where the man in question always assumes the real problem is that I'm a girl and therefore lacking in brute strength and an inherent understanding of basic mechanical principles.

"I need a board to put under the jack so it won't sink," I said. 

"Got it covered." He whipped out a slightly larger version of the same jack, shoved it under the car and cranked it up. It sank. "Need to put it on a board," he declared.

Wow. Why didn't I think of that?

The next tire was at least considerate enough to go flat on pavement and on a day I was wearing jeans. I dragged out the spare and the tools and employed my patented lug nut removal technique, which begins by positioning the wrench in such a manner that the handle is parallel to the ground. Then I jump on it. The nut didn't budge.

I tried again. Nothing. I tried the next lug nut. Then the next. It was like they were welded on. I dragged the spare tire closer and used it for a launch pad so I could jump higher. Crack! The wrench and I hit the ground. I gathered us both up and inspected the damage. The lug nut had held firm but its cute aluminum cover had split open and was now wedged inside the wrench.

I was sitting on the spare contemplating how to pry out the mangled scrap of aluminum in the absence of a pair of needle-nosed pliers when the next helpful man came along.

"The lug nuts are stuck," I said. "I broke one of the covers trying to get them off."

"No problem." He whipped out a wrench exactly like mine and gave one of the nuts a twist.

Nothing. He cranked harder. Still nothing. He reared back and put all of his weight into it. Crack! He stared at the aluminum shell wedged inside the end of his wrench. "Lug nuts are on a little tight," he declared.  

Well, golly. You'd think even a girl could've figured that out.

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This week over on the Songs and Stories page, a couple of tunes from my private stash. Come and meet Doc Walker and Dylan Leblanc.


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On the Rodeo Trail

Yep, it's April, which means calving, mud, and the High River, Alberta rodeo. Every year I swear I'm not gonna enter a rodeo before Memorial Day, and every year April rolls around, the days get longer and I start getting antsy and the next thing I know we're towing the pickup and trailer out of yard with a tractor. True story. Happened last year. Then we jack-knifed the trailer on a hill on the main gravel road in the foot of fresh snow that fell while we were gone and had to be dragged back in again. Good times.

So of course we entered again this year. And I'm happy to say no towing required, only a couple of encounters requiring jumper cables but that's a long story involving our non-rodeo-loving child, a mis-wired inverter in the camper and Super Mario so you'd probably rather we not go there.

The rodeo started at noon on Friday. High River is two and half hours north of the Canadian border and our local port of entry doesn't open until nine o'clock in the winter, so at ten minutes before nine, this was us, waiting for the gate to open:

Being the first big outing of the year, High River draws a big crowd. And of course it's indoors, which means things get kind of cozy behind the chutes.

And yes, High River is part of the Canadian Senior Pro tour, which means all of the contestants are forty years or older. In some cases much older since in some events there's a sixty eight plus division. Yep, it's the Viagra Vaqueros. The Fearsome Fossils. The only rodeos where a sizeable percentage of the contestants can legally park here:

Hey, word is on the curmedgeon circuit the newer models of those titanium hips work just great for roping.