Johnson Canyon

We made it about five miles up the Nephi's Pasture Road today. It is usually a horrible sand trap, but last week's snow actually helped. Instead of mud, we had firm sand. I hiked to the foot of Spring Point with EDO, while VSO turned in a couple more paintings. After some sand surfing, we went back out to Johnson Canyon. While VSO worked (again), EDO joined me on the yellow sandstone.

Mudded

The thing about this country is that when it is wet it is wet. There is nothing you can do. Best stay on the oil. It always catches me by surprise, though, and I think it will get better if I just try again further down. After mudding out three times in a row, I gave up. VSO sat on the roof of the Chev and cranked out a couple of paintings while EDO and I explored a (sloppy) little canyon. Not the day I had planned.

Homesteader Milestone

At Rural Ways we have The Homestead (where we live and pay high taxes) and The Farm (where we just pay high taxes). Despite these rustic appellations, we are plainly not hard-core modern homesteaders. We live in town, and the two properties combined are less than one acre. We buy power, water, and sewerage from the municipality (at high rates), and buy most of our food from the grocery store.

My sister and brother-in-law, on the other hand, have gone a greater distance down the road to the Jeffersonian ideal—yeoman farmers all. They have 30 acres, their own well, and a flock of chickens. While they still buy food, Rural Ways is taking a moment this week to acknowledge a homesteader milestone:

At the weekend, my nephew visited the field behind the family (log) home with a couple of friends. Within one hour he had shot and killed his first buck. (My brother-in-law would like his son to know that things in life are generally not that easy.) That night the family dined on venison backstrap—evidently the finest cut available. During dinner, my sister looked around the table and noted that every dish—every crumb of food—had been grown, raised, or hunted on their own land. Congratulations.

Destructive Sampling

This week I was walking along a ridge in the Tushars thinking that I was seeing the same old high-elevation spruce-fir when I suddenly realized that there was charcoal on the ground and a fair amount of ponderosa pine. Ponderosa. At 9300 feet. So, I started giving things another look. In contrast to many of the other stands, this one had clearly been shaped by fire. I found evidence of some very old timber cutting, too. Plus, just where you would least expect it, there were large blue spruce. Not Engelmann spruce, but blue spruce. It really made me wonder what was going on. What kind of stand was this?

I thought about it all night. In the morning, I had an idea. Right in the thick of things I had noticed a large ponderosa that had been killed by a mountain pine beetle attack in 2012. Why not go back there and cut it down? It would allow me to slice the stump into a couple of cookies that I could use to date not only the tree, but the fire history of the stand.

So, I did. I climbed all the way back to the ridge with a chainsaw that must have weighed about 300 pounds. I felled the tree, and got a couple of cookies. But, I couldn't bring them home. At least not both of them. They were too heavy. I took the thinnest one . . . and the 300 pound saw . . . and made it back to the truck with, I think, both of my knees intact. The other cookie is still up there. It is a nice one, too. It is up for grabs. (If you want it, the location is printed on the card in the picture: UTM, Zone 12.)

What is it that a scientist says when the actual outcome does not match the expected outcome? "It will likely take decades before we understand the full impact of these events on this fragile ecosystem." (BTW, I'm not a scientist but I've read about them.) In any case, my sample tree germinated between 1842 and 1849 and my cookie displays not a single fire scar. This was not what I expected, so it required a trip to the library.

European settlement of the area around the Tushars began by about 1860 and, this being Utah, we have pretty good written records of everything that has happened since then. At the library I skimmed through a couple of fairly detailed histories and did not find a single mention of wildfire. Given the reliance of the early pioneers on the natural resources of the area, along with the fact that most of them were outdoors for about 90% of their lives, I would have expected some mention of wildfire. Unless there were no fires. Which is what my cookie tells me. Could it be that the obvious charring that I am seeing pre-dates 1840?

Caught With the Ole Pants Down

I suppose it is only fair that I tell this story. I mean, I would be really critical if I caught someone else with their pants down like mine were, so I'd better admit my own short-comings. It was like this: I went to pick up the girls at church last Sunday. They go to one of these california-seeker-sensitive places that is full of gangster-looking punks and Harley guys. I can't stand the place. But, the main point is that the church doesn't have a regular order of worship, so they might finish at 11:00 or 11:30 or noon or anytime. When I go to pick them up, I bring something to read and sit in the car waiting, sometimes for a long time.

Anyway, last week I was playing a CD on the car radio and I left it playing while I waited for the service to end. In order to have the radio on, I had the key turned. It might have been turned far enough for the headlights to come on, I don't know. (The car has automatic headlights. When you turn the key, they come on. It is kind of annoying, but I understand that we live in a nanny state now, ain't nobody expected to take care of their own business.) In any case, whether the lights were on or just the radio, it shouldn't have mattered because I didn't have to wait very long. It was probably 10 minutes that I sat there with the key turned—not long enough to kill a decent car battery.

When the girls got in the car, however, it wouldn't start. It wasn't getting enough of a shot from the battery. The starter would tick a little, but it wasn't enough to turn it. I popped the hood and took a look. I think the battery was probably fine, but the terminals and posts were obviously corroded. You know how they'll develop a thick green layer of semi-dry, battery-acid looking crust? Well, that is what we had. With the battery drained down a little, and the corrosion pretty thick, there just wasn't enough juice getting to the starter to kick it over.

How does that Billy Joe Shaver song go? "I got a good christian raisin'/and an eighth-grade education/I wasn't born no yesterday." Well, I've surely dealt with this little problem before. All it takes is a wrench and a wire brush: You pull the terminals off, scrub the corrosion off the posts, clean up the terminals, put it all back together, and, bingo, two minutes later you're on the highway. Well, and this is where things started getting bad: I suddenly realized that all my tools were in the Chev . . . back home in the driveway. I always carry a toolbox, and a bunch of other stuff, like jumper cables, tow straps, and a can of fix-a-flat. (The fix-a-flat really saved our bacon in the middle of the San Rafael Swell one time. We were about 50 miles from Green River on the gravel when we got two flats at once. The spare went on one and the fix-a-flat went in the other. It probably saved us a week of shooting flares at passing airliners.) We've had the car for most of a year now, but somehow I'd never stocked it with the basics. There was not one tool in the car. Not one.

This was the point at which things went from bad to worse. I reached for the pliers that I always carry in my pocket, but they weren't there. For some reason I'd left the house without them. I had my pocket-knife, of course, but that was it. I was reduced to begging the girls to look through their purses for a pair of tweezers or something. I'm not kidding. It was desperate times. I started imaging what it would be like to spend a week living in that crumby church parking lot. Then, just as I started really worrying about it, we were rescued.

It was awful. It really was. One of these Harley guys had left the motorcycle at home, so he pulled over next to us with his pick-up truck. Out came his little tool kit. It had jumper cables, pliers, a week's worth of rations, everything. It was terrible. While we hooked up the jumper cables, he sort of lectured me on what I should do. I'm not kidding. Here was Rural Ways standing in a suburban parking lot getting a speech from a california-harley-guy about how to keep my battery posts clean. I couldn't say anything. I mean, he was right. My pants were down around my ankles (figuratively speaking) and I had been reduced to begging. I just kept my head down and agreed with everything he said. Fortunately, the instant we put his cables on our battery the car started.

We beat a hasty retreat. I practically ran the guy over just trying to get out of there. I drove straight home, grabbed the wrenches, pulled the terminals, cleaned up the posts, and got the whole thing back put back in operational order. Since then, I've gone through all my tools and built a little care package: cables, tow strap, channel-locks, screw-drivers, a flashlight. You know, the basics. We might need help again someday, but it won't be because I am standing there empty-handed wondering how long it is going to take me to walk home.

Standard Time

The shift from daylight savings time to standard time is, I suppose, almost universally treasured. I mean, doesn't everybody enjoy that extra hour of sleep you get from falling back? At Rural Ways there may be less enthusiasm for the change than is typically assumed. The first of us, and I don't mean the girls, gets up at 5:30 every morning to start the coffee and the fire. Whichever one of us that is does not need an alarm clock because he is generally awake at 5:00 am anyway. Setting the clocks back simply means that a certain person now awakes automatically at 4:00 am. Four in the morning is a gawdawful time to get out of bed. On the other hand, laying there for two hours waiting for the rest of the world to stir starts to feel pretty boring.