Bee-Dee-Vee

(Fair warning to Bernard DeVoto devotees: This post will feature some mild criticism of the great man.) VSO came home from the Parowan Library yesterday with a copy of Across the Wide Missouri. How she was able to put her hands on it when I've searched high and low over there at least a dozen times is a mystery to me. But, that is beside the point. What I really want to do is wish her luck. I mean, there is no denying that DeVoto was one of the great historians of the American west—certainly in the top rank with Stegner, and perhaps Bolton and Bancroft—but he can really wear you down. You can get into it, and really be enjoying it, just plugging away, filling your head with facts about DeSoto, LaSalle, Meriwether Lewis, everybody you've heard about before and many you haven't. Then, you stop and look at the clock, and it's been an hour and you've read five pages. You do that every day for a month, renewing it at the library twice, and then a second month, until there are no more renewals on your library card: When you go to return it you're on page 300 of a 700 page volume. Whew. Defeated.

The last time it happened to me, VSO was dismayed. "I've seen you read Atlas Shrugged," she cried. "And War and Peace." "I've seen you read door stoppers by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Sydney Ahlstrom." "If you can't get through it, nobody can." Well, as I said, I wish her luck. It's not that DeVoto was a bad writer; he wasn't. (Though Stegner was clearly better.) And, it's not that his knowledge was anything less than encyclopedic, but there is something about the combination of writing style and overwhelming information that can turn it into a bit of a grind. I joked with VSO that BDV probably never had an editor: Not only was he notoriously prickly, but there isn't a person on earth that could have gotten through all his material. In any case, I'm not saying that DeVoto should be left on the shelf: He is a one man history machine. But, I may take the month off and read something quick and easy, like Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Four Hundred

I know that we've already celebrated one publishing milestone this year—the fifth birthday of Rural Ways—and I don't want to be constantly interrupting the flow of wisdom by marking inconsequential events, but this one has got me thinking. This is Rural Ways' 400th post. Four hundred? Wow. Does anyone really have that much to say? Evidently so, and to prove it I'm going to attach links to six former posts. The first three are, by Google's page-view count, the most popular ever published. (Well, they are the most popular posts at Rural Ways. I recognize that Arianna Huffington may have a few more readers in general.) The second set have, by Google's count, never been viewed. Given that my loyal fan base has recently surged to three, I find that hard to believe. But, I'm going to repost these because I think they deserve something better than zero. How about one?

The Jotul
Home Made Cages
Highway 14

Waiting for Spring
Chickens or Eggs
Don't Let the Chimney Fall on You

Burning Fir

In some places, there is such a tangled mess of pinyon, juniper, mountain mahogany, white fir, ponderosa, Douglas fir, and everything else, that it is hard to know what to do with it. Here is one solution. It actually seems to work pretty well. With a band of snow packed aspen above, and an uphill breeze, you can put the drip torches to it without worrying about where it is going. We burned just outside of Beaver this week—consumed a fair amount of thick, dead material, too. It's good work if you can get it.

Planting Pine

In 2012, a wildfire burned through Oak Creek Canyon, killing a portion of a ponderosa pine stand located in a popular dispersed camping area. This week, the District Ranger asked if we had any trees that could replace the burned ones. Fortunately, we had 600 extra pine seedlings sitting in the cooler, so we went over there and planted them for him. Or, I should say that some other people planted them. Of the 600 in the truck, I helped on about 50. (I guess that's what happens when you start to get into program management . . . you stand around talking to other managers while the real people get the work done.)

In any case, there were a couple of interesting things about this ponderosa stand. First, it was off-site pine: It was planted there, brought in from elsewhere. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any "native" pine in the canyon. I cored one of the larger live trees (19 inches) and counted eighty-some rings. The ranger thought it might have been planted by a CCC crew, which would have been in the 1930s. However it got there, it is clearly well adapted to the site and I would think that it might naturalize. Which brings me to my second comment: In order to naturalize, it must survive. Given the density (230+ square feet of basal area) and the fire damage, I am worried about a beetle attack. If a little pulse of mountain pine beetle gets started, it might kill all the trees that survived the fire.

Television

After most of a month away, I'm finally back on The Homestead. While there are a lot of things to dislike about other places, one thing that drives me absolutely crazy about traveling is television. In modern America, the television is everywhere. It is in the car, the plane, the airport, the hotel, the restaurant, the classroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, the potty-fer-godsakes. And it is always on. There is nowhere to go, nothing you can do to get away from it. It is just this constant, streaming, penetrating foolishness. Whether it is CNN, ESPN, TNN, or the Food Network the singular fact is that every broadcast is useless garbage. Garbage of the mind and heart.

I do everything I can to try to get away from it. I sit in corners. I sit with my head down and my fingers in my ears. And, still it penetrates. Sometimes, if you're lucky, in some place, you can find the remote unattended and push the mute button. But, it never lasts. Someone always wants to know what the Kardashians are doing today. I try to concentrate. I try to focus. I get my fingers in my ears, my eyes on the page, my head down. I concentrate on what I am reading, on what I am thinking, on what I am writing, but I almost always fail. There will be some shift in the cadence of the presenter as they reiterate that the missing airliner is missing and it will break my train of thought. This is the thing that most irritates me: With the television on there is no space for thinking.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I am not, I could have a field day with this. This is more Orwellian than 1984; it is more coercive than the slogans of Animal Farm. We have achieved world dominance through the stealthy turning of every brain to mush. We have reduced the average attention span to 20 seconds. We have convinced the masses that the words coming from the television are important. This is perfect. No longer will we face the threat of the man who has learned to think for himself.

When I was a kid, people smoked cigarettes where ever and whenever they pleased. In the car, in the plane, in the restaurant, and definitely in the potty. Over the course of my lifetime, however, the dangers of second hand smoke have become so well known that legislatures everywhere have moved to ban indoor smoking. Today it is extremely rare, at least in the United States, to smell cigarette smoke in any public place. But what about second hand TV? Surely the overflow of televised inanity poses a greater threat to human health than cigarette smoke ever did. I mean, smoke might kill you, but television forces you to live forever with a splintered psyche. If you want to smoke in an airport today, you are banished to a small, filthy closet. Why not do the same for television? Anyone who really wants to be bludgeoned by foolishness can go sit in a sound-proofed cave.