Cactus Time

It is cactus blooming time in the west desert. EDO found the first orange claret cup (Echinocereus triglochidiatus, I think) yesterday. The picture is below. I noticed the bright pink prickly pear as we were driving along the Blue Mountain Road today. The picture is above.

Can You Find the Fawn?

I don't really know very much about mule deer. And I don't really care to either. They are such a nuisance around the house and garden that I wish they would just go away. People used to tell me though—and I don't know which people, just people—that deer would protect their fawns by hiding them in the shrubbery. The fawn would lay perfectly still and the hunter would pass right on by. Well, I figured it was mostly something made up by the people who made Bambi. And maybe it was. In any case, I was walking down off a tailings pile at an abandoned mine yesterday and I kicked up a doe. She bounced away through the serviceberry and out of sight. A minute later, I stopped to look at a small brown rock in the shrubs. Except it wasn't a rock. It was a fawn. Maybe there is something to that Bambi story after all.

Botanical Rescue

In the years after the Great Depression, the USDA Forest Service constructed hundreds of small cabins in remote locations on National Forest System lands. These have generally been known as Guard Stations, and for many years they were inhabited by Forest Service employees and their families, especially during the summer months. These Forest Guards would manage livestock grazing, recreation, or forestry projects, and suppress fires as necessary. Usually the stations came with barns and bunkhouses for horses and work crews.

With dramatic improvements in communication and transportation over the decades, however, these Guard Stations became obsolete: It is just as easy to live in town and drive over to the project area in a modern four-wheel-drive as it is to move your family to a little mountain cabin for the summer. As a result, many of these cabins have been boarded-up, torn down, abandoned, or destroyed. Our local version of this story—the Vermillion Castle Guard Station (pictured here in 1941)—met its fate last summer. The Dixie National Forest had the cabin removed because it was becoming an increasingly derelict eyesore—full of trash and graffiti.

Before it went, however, I was up there looking around at what it used to be and I found that someone had once planted a couple of domestic iris bulbs in front of the cabin. They were dry- and yellow-looking and being crowded out by weeds and rabbit-brush. I decided to try rescuing (stealing?) a couple of them so I dug them up with my knife and brought them back to The Homestead. I put them in at the end of a row of other irises against a little portion of fence. They sat there, small and brown, for a couple of years. This week, though, they exploded. They are currently producing the most spectacular purple flowers ever.

The Vermillion Castle Guard Station is now gone. But, at The Homestead, we have salvaged one of its doors (that is another story) and three of its irises.

Natural Disaster

It's not that we've never had snow in May before. In fact, on exactly this day in 2010, we had a little storm. But, this year is different. After a short winter and warm spring all the trees were fully leafed-out. On top of that, this one came in warm, so everything was sticky. Finally, this was not a couple of inches of Utah powder, but a huge slug of heavy, heavy moisture. We may have had eight inches of snow, but it contained at least an inch of water. The result has been bad. "Natural disaster" may constitute hyperbole, but for a place that doesn't have hurricanes or tornados, this is probably as much tree damage as we are likely to see. The branches were breaking all night, all across town. It sounded like gunfire. And the thumping of branches hitting our roof and the ground all around the house kept me awake for hours. I kept waiting for the big one to end up in the bedroom. So far, though, I'm not sure we've had any roof damage. There is one big branch laying against the chimney, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. It's not over yet . . . still snowing . . . and we keep having power bumps, but I'm hoping that the final tally will be a lot of clean-up and some half broken trees, with no trunks on the house.

Fuel Free in 2014

My brother-in-law started the holiday, and I haven't had a report from him yet this year, but I'm going to call us Fuel Free on 4 May. Last year, the holiday fell for Rural Ways on 29 April. For any reader who may have forgotten, Fuel Free marks the first day of the year on which no indoor heating is required. The first time you can get up, not light the stove, not run the furnace, not use a gas heater, pellet stove, or anything else—all day—is Fuel Free. It doesn't mean you won't burn again during the season: At Rural Ways, we will, for example, almost certainly burn the stove later this week because snow is in the forecast, but it is sort of a milestone that gives you a day of rest from your labors. We reached temperatures around 80F yesterday, did not drop out of the 60s overnight, and will likely get back to 80F today. No need for heat.

But, back to the point about labor. Fuel Free is probably relatively meaningless to those who have a hands-off central heating system. If you are heating with wood, however, you end up doing a lot of work, so it is pretty noticeable when that chore drops off your list every day. I think this is especially true for my brother-in-law, the founder of the holiday, because he runs both a pellet stove (or maybe two) and a wood stove. For him, keeping the house warm requires hauling wood to two or three implements each day (and that doesn't even count buying it or cutting it and dragging it up to the porch). The other problem that my brother-in-law has is a really nice, clean house. Heating with wood is dirty. If you live in a big, old, ramshackle dump like The Homestead, you can sort of ignore all the ash and sawdust on the floor. But, if your house is nice and new and neat and clean, it is probably a lot of extra work to keep it that way with all the wood going in and out. So, hats off to Uncle GCK and a warm welcome to the start of the fuel free season 2014.