Yeah, yeah....

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I know. Like everything else on this ranch, the ol' blog is running behind. No, it's not still winter as the header might imply, I'll get on that. Or else I already have by the time you're reading this, and you're seeing green grass and sunshine instead of snowdrifts. It did finally stop snowing the last week in April, we have green grass, the trees are starting to get serious about leafing out, and the blizzards have morphed into sweet-smelling spring rains.

I'm sure glad the weather has settled down, all those April storms were killing my bad toe. Of course I'm not cool enough to have a bum shoulder that acts up whenever a cold front rolls in. Nope. I get shooting pains in my crooked fourth toe. And no, I didn't break it while fending off a charging bull. I tripped over my son's footstool one morning in a pre-caffeinated haze. Not much of a coffee shop story there.  

I remember back in the old days, the boys down at the cafe΄ comparing aches, a cluster of grizzled, human barometers. "Yup, gonna rain tonight," Art might declare. "The knee I messed up back in '68 is throbbing like the devil. You remember when I did that, Bob, down at Birch Creek when my colt blew up…"

Followed by a full recitation of the events of the day, beginning with how many spoonfuls of sugar Art had stirred into his coffee that morning and ending with a vivid description of the resulting blood, gore and permanent deformity. Uninterrupted, because no matter how many times the rest of the crew had heard the story, it's proper coffee shop etiquette to listen, nod, and gasp on cue. Besides, as with all good cowboy stories, the wreck got better with every re-telling, so it was always worth listening to hear the latest embellishments.

Art would barely wind down before Bob would pipe up, waving the stump of a digit that he'd caught in the coil of his rope back in '75. Kept the severed part in a jar on his dresser to show unsuspecting visitors until his second wife figured out what it was and made him give it a proper burial. "The way this ol' thumb is tingling, I'll betcha it's gonna snow. At least a coupla inches. Prolly get down close to twenty degrees 'fore mornin'."

Then someone else would chime in asserting that, no, if it was gonna be that cold the ankle he busted two years ago woulda let him know. And around they'd go, each convinced his scar tissue could produce the most accurate short term weather forecast.

Ah, how times have changed. Last month we went up to High River, Alberta to a three day Senior Pro rodeo, what was once--less politically correct, but more accurately--referred to as the Old Timers tour. We were due to head home on Sunday, but a blizzard was predicted for Saturday night so we were keeping close tabs, debating whether to leave early. I mentioned this to a cluster of over sixty team ropers as we all sat horseback, waiting to compete.

Four of them whipped out smartphones to check the forecast. Not a single mention of aching joints, not one good wreck story. Just squinting and pecking at their palms. As I mourned the loss of yet another fine tradition rendered moot by technology, Bob said, "Well, now, that doesn't sound right to me, Art. My website says only three inches of snow, and it's not gonna start 'til after midnight."

"Bah!" Art dismissed Bob's forecast with a wave of his hand. "There's gonna be close to a foot, guaranteed. You gotta use my website, it's way more accurate."

Another guy cut in, shoving the screen of his phone under their noses, insisting that no, his website was obviously more reliable. Why, if it said the storm would start at midnight, you could put money on the first snowflake hittin' the ground by 12:01.

And me? I just smiled, thinking maybe some things don't change that much after all.  

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The Short End

My son rode out in the pasture with me last weekend, one of his first trips that involved traversing real landscape, and I was reminded of how it was to be a kid in the saddle. Especially a really short kid.

Horseback riding is not friendly to the vertically-challenged, unless you happen to be a Kentucky Derby jockey with a groom on hand to give you a leg up. Think about it…the shorter the person, the shorter the stirrup leathers, and therefore the greater the distance from stirrup to ground, when I already started at a serious disadvantage compared to my longer-legged cousins. How is that fair? 

Sadly, I never found any spare grooms loitering around the barn on the ol' ranch, although the hired man could be pressed into service in a pinch, if I caught him passing by on the way to the shop for whatever the only tool was that hadn't been packed in his toolbox, but turned out to be essential to replace a broken section on the swather.

More often, I had to make do with a hay bale or a bucket. Want to guess how long it takes a horse of average intelligence to figure out all he has to do is sidle away from the bucket to keep you from mounting up? About thirty seconds less than it takes a meaner than average horse to realize it's more fun to just knock you off the bucket. Or reach around, grab the hay bale with his teeth and yank it out from under you.

Somehow or other, I always managed to get aboard. Feet in stirrups, reins in hand, ready to go…except the horse didn't move, because a horse doesn't see a lot of sense in leaving the place where he gets grain and hay. 

"Just kick him," my dad always said. 

Yeah, sure. Easy for you, your feet reach down past the saddle blanket.

Once I got free of the barn's gravitational field I'd be on a roll, until we crossed the first slough west of the house, where the grass grows belly high. How was a horse to resist reaching down for a bite, ripping the reins right out of my hands? They'd slide clear to his ears, and despite hanging upside down from the front of the saddle by the tips of my boots I couldn’t reach them, so there we'd stay, the horse happily grazing, until someone noticed we'd stalled. 

My horse had two speeds: plod, and bone-jarring trot. The average rider counteracts a rough trot by placing weight on their feet. This is somewhat more challenging when your legs are stuck straight out on either side of a flat-backed, hog fat kid pony. I'd be pulling on the reins for dear life, every slam of his front feet on the ground bouncing me a little higher, until I looked like a paddle ball on the end of a rubber band. At some point my butt would fail to contact the center of the saddle and plonk! Off I went.

The north pasture was a field of horrors for a kid rider. Right off the bat, we'd have to cross a coulee. Going down usually wasn't bad. Going up was steep, though, and my horse would break into a lope, lunging for the top. If I wasn't screwed down real tight, he'd blow me right out the back of the saddle. Plonk! Arse over teakettle off his rump.

The absolute worst was crossing creeks. Now that I'm an adult, I own a whole herd of horses that will step sedately over and through waterways. Not so when I was my son's age. Back then, my horses approached creeks much like Evil Knievel approached Hell's Canyon, settling back on their haunches, winding up, and launching. My neck would snap, my feet would pop out of the stirrups, and…splat! Kid, meet creek.

Or hole. Or ditch. Or tree branch. Or plain old dirt, thanks to a rabbit or grouse popping out of the brush and sending my horse ten feet sideways. Good thing the ground wasn't near as hard back then as it is now, because most days I considered it a major victory to only fall off once. On the rare occasion I made it all the way home without a single tumble, my horse had one last trick. The shaking started at his ears, grew in magnitude as it traveled up his neck then burst into a full body earthquake, rattling my teeth, jangling my brain and rearranging every vertebrae in my spine.

Figures, that'd be the only time I couldn’t seem to fall off.

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That'll Leave a Mark

I bruise often. No, I don't mean easily. At any given time I have two or three random bruises, and there's nothing easy or comfortable about most of them, although I often have a hard time recalling where they came from. Currently my left knee cap is a lovely shade of plum. I have a vague memory of whacking it on something. Under a desk, I think. It's hard to say. Not because it didn't hurt at the time, but because I blunder into so many obstacles that it's hard to decide which one left a mark.

Take the heater in my bedroom, one of those black cubes about six inches square. Every night I turn it on to warm up the icy floors before my husband takes his evening shower. And every night I turn it off before I go to sleep. Nearly every morning, I trip over it in the dark and stub my toes because I forgot to shove it safely under the end of the bed.

The trailer hitch on my Jeep is another notorious assailant. You'd think after the fifth or sixth time I raised a goose egg on my shin hauling groceries out of the back of the car, I'd get a clue, but somehow that hitch always comes as a total surprise.

Some bruises have not only left a mark, but a permanent impression on my psyche. The worst, hands down, was the first summer I lived in South Dakota. I'd gone to a friend's house for roping practice one sunny Saturday, the weather warm enough for a thin cotton tank top. I roped a big yearling, missed my slack, and instead of around his neck the loop came tight on one back leg.

My horse stopped. The calf kept going. And the breakaway hondo on my rope…didn't. Not until the rope was stretched taut, the five hundred pound calf dragged almost to a stop. Then, snap! The rope recoiled, straight back at me, the end lashing around my torso and bare upper arm like a bullwhip, the hondo nailing me in the ribs. 

There is a frozen moment, between the impact and the pain, when your brains scrambles to figure out how to eject from your body before the hurt sets in. I failed. I can't even describe how it felt without tears springing to my eyes. I peeled my shirt up to find a perfect impression of the hondo on my ribs, with a welt that snaked in a full coil across my stomach and arm. A rope tattoo, complete with the spiral ridges, that gradually morphed from red to purple to green then yellow over the following month. 

More recently, my child was invited to a birthday party. After driving an hour into town every day of the week to work, getting me into a car on a Sunday is like stuffing a cat into a barrel full of water. My husband offered to take our son to the party if I would help my dad bed down the calving barn. Fine by me. First I had to open the big double doors, which are held shut with a spring-loaded metal bar. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distance between the bar and my face, and when it popped open it smacked me in the cheekbone.

I walked around with a purple smudge under one eye for two weeks, looking as if that half of my head hadn't slept in a month. My husband declared it proof of what he'd always suspected: I would rather punch myself in the face than be sociable. 

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Family Outing

My dad graduated from high school in the little town of Ennis in southeastern Montana. When he was in college, his parents moved to Bozeman and remained there for the rest of their lives. Then my sister moved to the Gallatin Valley twenty years ago. Altogether, I've been going to Bozeman for visits and holidays my entire life.

This year we met my sister from Spokane here for Easter, and this morning we marked the occasion by going for a hike. Not just any hike, mind you. We trudged up the side of a mountain to the big white 'M' that honors Montana State University, because nothing says resurrection like nearly dying of a heart attack. 

Here's the view of the M from my sister's back yard, it's the white smudge right in the center of the picture: 

Doesn't look that high from the bottom. Whole different perspective looking down from the top, and your car is nothing but a speck in the parking lot. Or maybe that was just one of the dark spots dancing in front of my eyes from oxygen deprivation.

Once your vision clears, the view is its own reward. The highest peak in the distance is Lone Mountain, home of Big Sky Ski Resort. And down there on the right side of the photo is the campus of Montana State University. I think you can see why I was in no big rush to graduate. 

In case anyone doubted us...photographic proof that we didn't just send the camera up with one of the crazy people who actually jog laps on this trail. 

Happy Easter

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Meadowlark

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Back in the way back when I was younger and fairly new to the writing thing, I still took myself seriously as a human being and author. After a few years, I figured out trying to think deep thoughts is sort of painful, and it's a lot more fun to just laugh at yourself. Before that epiphany, I took a writing class at Blue Mountain Community College, and as an assignment I wrote a short story, which I later submitted to one of those obscure literary journals that sold about fifty copies of each edition, mostly to the contributing authors.

For the first time since then, I'm working on a piece of fiction that, like that story, is set on my home turf. Plus it won't be long now 'til we hear the first meadowlark trill, and they always have been my favorite, probably because they were the only stinking bird I ever got right on the nature walks in grade school. When my friend BA Tortuga asked me to do a guest spot on her blog, this old story came to mind.

So here you go. Probably the most sentimental thing I've ever written:  Meadowlark



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Wake Up Call

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Sleep is a weird and wonderful thing. All these centuries of poking around in brains, human and otherwise, and no one really understands how it works, beginning with why we do it at all. Where’s the evolutionary advantage to dozing? If you’re a zebra trying to avoid becoming the evening entrée for a lion party of five, wouldn’t it make more sense to stay awake around the clock?

Could it just be that it feels good? Especially naps. The kind where you hunker under a warm, fuzzy blanket on cold gray day and drift off with a book propped open on your chest. Naps are a gift from the Almighty, and a large part of the reason I’ve been known to include ‘sleeping’ when asked to name my favorite forms of recreation.

All that aside, the need to sleep is mostly inconvenient, especially if you’re on the endangered species list. That ill-fated zebra, for example, or a college senior who put off starting a twenty-two page thesis proposal until nine o’clock the night before it’s due (not that I would know from personal experience).  Or a columnist who’s desperately plunking out words in the wee hours before a deadline (also not from personal experience, of course).

By the way, you can always pick these people out of a crowd. Look for the telltale checkerboard pattern on their forehead from passing out face down in the keyboard, which may or may not be why I’m sporting bangs these days.

Think about it, though. How strange is it that we crawl into bed at a specified time, close our eyes and expect our brains to shift into idle? How exactly does that work, anyway? Is it like a dimmer switch, turning down the voltage? Is the power we save while in sleep mode stored up in tiny little batteries in our neurons? Is that why we wake up feeling recharged?

Except when we really need to. That’s the trouble with sleep. You can’t count on it in a pinch. When your job is stressing you out and your brain is drained right down to the last quart, when what you need more than anything is a solid eight hours, sleep is that fickle friend who flounces off to hang out with people who aren’t so tense. Which leaves you even more tired, which makes you even more tense, and after three or four consecutive nights of chasing it around the bedroom while cursing its very existence, sleep won’t even make eye contact let alone snuggle with you.

As you can tell, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating this subject lately, most of it between the hours of one and four a.m. This is not conductive to optimal performance on either a job or parental level. If you have any doubt, ask my kid, assuming I can remember where I put him. Which isn’t entirely my fault. Studies show sleep deprivation affects mental acuity more than alcohol. A week of short rest and there goes your memory, concentration and coordination. And other stuff, too, which I would explain except I’m really, really tired and my phone is ringing.

Oops. Is it that time already? Guess I lost track. I suppose that’s the school calling again, wondering if I plan to leave the kid overnight. Well, they’ll have to hang on a few minutes longer. First I need to find my keys. Then I have to remember where I parked my car.

Or maybe I’ll just take a nap.  

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Collage of the Forgotten

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I periodically borrow my mother's camera because it's a lot better than mine. Then, unless I'm working on something specific, I promptly forget that I borrowed my mother's camera and never go back and retrieve the pictures. So the other day I took some pictures and in the process of fishing them off the SD card, I found a whole bunch of others. Some of them are pretty good, so today, you get a collage of forgotten images.

Sunset painting the clouds gold east of Cut Bank.

Add a liberal sprinkling of cows

Fog bank rolling in.

Fog in the foothills

Apparently, the pot of gold is buried in our indoor arena. 

Still trying to find a use for all these damn rocks. 

And the best of the works, fall swans near Duck Lake, 

with the entrance to the Many Glacier valley in the background. 

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