Topped all the felled trees, finished the limbing on them, too. Began the hauling to the front. Wore myself out. Tomorrow I’ll start cutting them up.
Rain today. Cloudy. Our solar production is far behind what was predicted, due in large part to the heavy snowfall, but also to cloud cover. Payout may take more time than we have here, but the intimate connection between the sun and our electrical use is worth it anyhow; as is severing, to the maximum extent we can, the link between our electrical use and coal generated power.
Chain saws whir all over the neighborhood here on Shadow Mountain. Fire mitigation is the mountain spring equivalent of planting a garden. Weeding, really, on a large scale. A weed is a plant out of place. Of course, you could argue that those of us who live up here are the weeds. Perhaps the trees should be plucking us out. Which is, of course, exactly what a wildfire does. Complex, man.
“…I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” Joan Didion, California Notes, NYRB, 5/26/2016
Front, May 6th
Becoming native to a place implies the opposite of what Joan Didion recalls in this fine article taken from notes she made in 1976 while attending the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. The becoming process implies not being easy where you are, not knowing the place names as real, not knowing the common trees and snakes.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is not a real place to me. Neither is Four Corners nor Durango nor the summit of Mt. Evans, only 14 miles away. The owls that hoot at night, the small mammals that live here on Shadow Mountain. No. The oak savannah and the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Familiar. Easy. The Big Woods. Yes. Lake Superior. Yes. The sycamores of the Wabash. Yes. Fields defined by mile square gravel roads. Pork tenderloin sandwiches. Long, flat stretches of land. Lots of small towns and the memories of speed traps. Yes.
A local photographed yesterday near here. from pinecam.com by serendipity888
With the fire mitigation this property here on Shadow Mountain is becoming known. It has three, maybe four very fine lodgepole pines, tall and thick. A slight downward slope toward the north. Snow, lots of snow.* Rocky ground, ground cover and scrubby grass.
Denver. Slowly coming into focus. The front range, at least its portion pierced by Highway 285, too. The west is still blurry, its aridity, mountains, deep scars in the earth, sparse population. The midwest clear, will always be clear.
Becoming native to a place is the ur spiritual work of a reimagined faith. First, we must be here. Where we are.
*”Snowfall for the season on Conifer Mountain now stands at 224 inches (132% of average).” weathergeek, pinecam.com
As the precipitation has backed off over the last week, the creeks are less vigorous, though still full. Properties with a driveway running over a creek have to build strong bridges and use solid culverts, a considerable expense I imagine. And sometimes, like last year, the creek washes them out.
The Gransfors limbing ax got a workout this morning, finishing the limbing in the back. Tomorrow the chainsaw. First task, cut the felled trunks into either fireplace size logs or larger logs that Seth can come pick up. Second, move the limbs and tree tops to the front so they can be chipped or hauled away. Third, cut down the remaining trees marked by Splintered Forest last fall, limb them and cut them up, moving the limbs and tree tops to the front. Last, cut down a few more trees I’ve identified, dead ones or small ones blocking the growth of larger trees. Limb, cut up, move.
The blue ribbons are a little faint, but they’re about a fifth of the way up the trunk. This is how Splintered Forest marked the trees to cut. A two topper is a lodgepole with a branched trunk at the top. These are prone to splitting under stress and are almost always marked to come down. This one was near the house so I had Always Chipper cut it down. The limbing goes up to the narrower tip of the branch which I’ll cut off with a chainsaw. It will be chipped or hauled away. The rest will get cut up.
The felling ax may come out for some of the smaller trees just because it’s fun to act fully like a lumber jack. Gotta keep the Minnesota forest cred somehow.
The beauty of a mountain morning. The rising sun catches the peaks of Conifer and Black Mountains, the lodgepole and aspen still punctuated by a web of snowy lanes.
Someone has cut five long ski runs down the face of Black Mountain. The land is private, employees of the Arapaho National Forest confirmed this in an e-mail. These ski runs, all beginning at around 10,000 feet, still have snow cover.
Using Jefferson County property maps the name of the owner of much of the land seems to be Jeffery Lysol, a vice-president for Armstrong Oil and Gas, based in Littleton. He is a skier, biker and runner according to his facebook page. Private ski-runs, Jon says, are not unusual in Colorado.
Business meeting this morning, then back to limbing. This will be a chainsaw week since I want to finish our fire mitigation before Memorial Day.
Into Denver last night for a burger with Jon at Park Burger on Holly. Park Burger is fancy, in a high modernist way. Lots of angles, metal, television screens. It sits in the middle of an upscale Jewish community near Cherry Creek, one of the tonier neighborhoods in the Denver metro.
Its menu reflects its setting. Not just cheeseburgers and cheeseburgers with bacon. You can get a third pound lamb burger, an ahi tuna burger, and, among many others, a Scarpone burger. This has pancetta, giardiniera, olives and a wonderful flavored mayonnaise. A stick to your veins sort of meal.
Even with its polyurethane covered pine table tops, hip waiters and list of interesting milkshakes, Park Burger does not match Matt’s on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. The Juicy Lucy, often imitated but never well, may be Matt’s sole claim to burger fame, but it’s a solid one. Matt’s also has the distinctive patina only neighborhood bars and cafes get, the Velveteen Rabbit affect. It’s a real place, a place to have a beer and a burger with friends. Park Burger is too shiny and bright and new. It’s a place just recently brought home from the toy store, button eyes, cloth covering and all limbs still intact. It’s not real. Not yet.
Jon showed me photographs of his students’ art work. Some of it is sophisticated. An example was a print of two spoons, what Jon calls object printing. He’s developing this technique right now in his art and has some of his students doing it, too. He uses found objects, like crushed soda cans, parts fallen off cars, a guitar, a crushed metal folding chair. These get cleaned off, then covered with ink and run through his press. The result is a monoprint with unusual depth, contours, shapes.
His student took two spoons, covered one lightly with brown ink and another with a light blue. As he printed them, the light brown ink created a ghostly impression of its spoon, while the other slipped a bit in the press and created a tail, a swoosh of light blue ink behind the even fainter impression of the spoon. The result is dynamic. Maybe beautiful. A fifth grader if I recall right.
Got out this morning early to begin limbing. Still cool. Finished the front and went on to the back. Using my Gransfors’ limbing ax. Conifer Mountain and Black Mountain were in the distance, a breeze blew up Black Mountain Drive and through the Lodgepole pines. On it the scent of cut pine floated up as first dead limbs then limbs with green needles fell to the side. The thunk of an ax cutting wood, the vibration of the oak handle, the release as the ax head sails on beyond the cut. Primal. Direct. No internal combustion engines. Just wood and steel and muscle.
Rigel and Gertie are the go-go girls. Whenever we leave the house, together or singly, they get big grins, bump us, start moving toward the back door, then back to us, repeat. Into the truck they go, bounding up and into the back. Only to lie down and often go to sleep. They don’t seem to care how long the trip. On the way home Rigel always gets up, starts looking around. They’re having fun, so we enjoy taking them with us.
Dr. Repine sweeps into the room with her white-gold hair. Her examinations are thorough, practiced. She sweeps the various magnifiers over my eyes, the ones that allow her to see the inner parts of my eye directly, dons a headlamp that would not look like out of place on a miner and picks up a thick magnifier. Look up. Look down. Look to the right. To the left. Good. Everything’s looking fine.
Gertie
Eyeball pressures are 14. Which is in the normal range. Glaucoma held at bay by Latanoprost. Cataracts, however, are advancing, changing my reading prescriptions. She says if they get much worse we’ll just take them out. Oh. Just? The good news is that cataract surgery often helps glaucoma by lowering the pressure in the eye. Something to look forward to?
Kate went with me. We went over to Whistling Duck, a furniture maker, to discuss beetle kill pine dining room tables. Kate had her measurements. She talked tables while I wandered around looking at the displays. We’re still in the early stages, getting quotes.
And, the sun. The sun. Blue skies. Winter to summer. Down the hill, that is. It was 78 in Littleton yesterday, but as we drove back up into the mountains the temperatures dropped, 54 when we got home. Ah.
This last round of snow, ice and colder weather got a lot of grumbles. Fortunately, we didn’t get the 5 inches predicted and the roadways were warm enough to melt what fell, but the part of our bodies that wants blue skies and somewhat warmer temperatures felt cheated. Not rational, I know. And the snow was pretty as always. But still.
Today Dr. Repine gets a look at my eyeballs, a glaucoma check, and a refraction. Might produce new reading lenses. After that we’re going to Whistling Duck, a carpentry shop specializing in beetle kill/blue pine. Our upstairs dining is still on the round bar table we bought as a temporary measure the month we moved in.
Life’s been eventful since our return from Asia with Vega’s death, the legal wrassling and the reluctant iconoclast moment. There’s another major event swirling in our lives right now, too, one I can’t write about openly yet. Not a health issue, not about Shadow Mountain or any of its residents.
Last night I got glimpses into the way forward on both Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf. That means my creative mind has emerged from the fog of image expunging. The Superior Wolf concept pushed me back to the origin idea, made me see that the way forward lay in the mythos, starting the story at the beginning. Solving a way for a magician to pull off a remarkable trick pushes the storyline of Jennie’s Dead past a road block. Feels good.
It’s taken me a week and a half, but I’ve cleaned up Ancientrails. All images are either mine or ones from sources without copyright issues. The time it took was penance for not being attentive to this issue for over ten years. There is, too, a financial penalty, negotiated between a lawyer and myself for using a copyrighted photograph.
I feel like a raven whose stash of pretty things has been stolen. But, ravens are thieves and I was, too, though not in a possessive way. Both Richard Prince, an artist who reuses the photographs of others, and Walter Benjamin, who wrote a famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” have been on my mind during this time.
Once I’ve taken a break from the computer, today I’m going to do a lot of straightening up and rearranging up here in the loft, I’m going to give the whole issue of copyrights, attributions and fair use a concentrated look. Included in that will be a rereading of Benjamin and some of the follow on scholarship plus material about Richard Prince and others like him.
Trying to get some printing done, photographs on fabric. Having a hard time. Our H.P. refuses to recognize its own ink cartridges. A friend of Kate’s who lives outside Bailey had an inkjet that refused to perform, too. Looking for other options in Denver and I’ve found some.
Puerto Mont, Chile tapedero
When we visited Judy Young, Kate’s friend, on Tapedero Drive, getting there gave us that odd insight street names give to an area’s early shapers. We turned off Cty. 43 onto Hangman Road. Off Hangman onto Vigilante Avenue. Hitchrack Road and Desperado Street intersected. Tapedero is a covering for the front of the stirrup so the boot won’t slip through.
An old west fantasy was on the mind of whomever platted this area.
