Author Archives: mandala56

Afternoon blogsters:

JAP69 pointed out to me in a comment on the Lightning Strike entry that I didn’t explain myself in a way I could expect anyone to understand, which I appreciate.  Sometimes I take too much for granted.

Gold, silver, platinum and several other precious metals are the heaviest elements around.  When the rocks weather away from around them and erosion carries them into channels it drops them at the first opportunity.  It takes a lot of energy (velocity) for the water to carry any particulate, but it takes more, the greater the density of the material being moved.  So the heaviest sediment load drops to the bottom first.

Prospectors rely on this.  It’s how placer gold is found.  Nature has spent millions of years concentrating these precious metals, shaking the ligher overburdens with water movement, sinking the heavier particles to the bottom of the sediment layers.

Lighter than the precious metals, but heavier than the silicone sands the water also carries, is the black sand.  It’s mainly an iron product.

So a prospector studies the channel, examines it for places where the water loses energy, particularly during flood stage.  Where there’s a curve in the channel there’ll be a place just on the downstream side of the curve where the stream drops silt.  That’s one of the places a prospector looks for gold.  Similarly, backwaters behind rocks and other obstructions, ancient beaver dams, anywhere the stream flow was interrupted.

The prospector digs into these spots and finds a hardpan or bedrock, or maybe a crack.  He takes the material and places it into a pan, sluicebox, dry washer, and agitates it to stratify the material, just as nature has done to concentrate the metals in this spot.

Gradually the prospector washes away the sand until there’s only black sand in the lower rim of his pan, and hopefully a few specks of gold, sometimes a nugget.

What happened to me in No Name Canyon was that there was a LOT of material that was heavier than black sand.  So much of it that the black sand was floating above it in a barely noticeable layer.  Such things don’t happen, or happen so rarely that when a person sees them he tends not to consider it a possibility.

There’s a thing that happens to gold sometimes.  It’s called telluride.  Prospectors have to know about it to recognize it.  Throughout history prospectors who didn’t recognize telluride gold because it doesn’t look like gold, have thrown it aside with a few curses because it’s screwing up their panning.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Someone told me about some poor guy in Waco, Texas, who got himself electrocuted.  Guy was a minister standing in a baptismal about to baptize someone in front of a congregation of 800.  Reached for a microphone and got struck dead.

I commented that it was a bit like being struck by lightning, to which the reply was, “No it wasn’t!  You don’t get struck by lightning from carelessness and stupidity.”

Fact is, that’s precisely why people tend to get struck by lightning, along with a bit of lousy luck.  Lightning behavior is a lot more easily predictable than lottery numbers.

I went on to tell the story of something that happened to me along those lines once.

I was working a canyon I’d dubbed “No Name Canyon”.  I was finding something completely absorbing and confusing.  Heavy precious metals sink to the bottom of a pan, get covered by the next heaviest, which is magnetite or hematite, black sand.

I was in a heavily mineralized area and the bottom of the pan should have been filled with black sand, but I wasn’t getting any.  About an inch or more in the bottom of the pan was filled with a grainy material of a reddish brown color that was pervasive and frustrating.  (Sometimes you get to expecting what not to see and find yourself not seeing what’s in front of you)

Anyway, I’d worked there alone half the afternoon in that V-bottomed canyon when I heard thunder and saw clouds moving across the sliver of sky visible to me.  I didn’t care to get caught in that canyon in a cloudburst, so I hoisted my daypack, shovel, pan and headed up the mountain.

About halfway back up there’s a relatively steep, bald face just with a scattering of large pines.  That’s where I realized I was a damned fool.

Suddenly lightning was striking all around me.  I gave it some quick thought and decided my best shot was to sort of lie down on the slope, though lying down doesn’t precisely describe what I was doing because of the grade.

So, it began sprinkling some, lighting hitting everywhere, me wondering if I make less of a target this way, when I observed that every tree within my range of seeing had a lightning strike burn on it.  That place has been a magnet for lightning for a long time.

I reached to push the shovel further away from myself in case the metal might make a better target.  As I gazed at the sprinkles hitting the blade of the shovel, where there was still a lot of residue of what I’d been digging below, I suddenly found myself looking at black sand washing out of the small clods glued to the surface.

Hmmm, thinks I.  That is really weird.  I couldn’t get any black sand down below, but here it is on the shovel.  Lots of it.

Then it came to me.  The stuff on the bottom of the pan was heavier than the black sand and was floating it.  I’d been looking for the black sand below below the brown grainy material on the assumption that what I was looking at was worthless.

Instead I was looking at something the likes of which I’d never seen before, thanks to being on a mountainside with lightning striking all around me like the fool I have a tendency to be.

Anyway, the storm ended, left me unstruck, but a lot wiser.  I’d never have understood what was happening mineral-wise in that canyon if I hadn’t been stupid and careless.  But on that day I managed to also have mama-luck on my side.

Jack

A map and compass, a shoulder rig, a bag of bugler, a rag hat and some color in the bottom of a pan leads to the kinds of moments people tend to remember.

If you young guys have noticed your lives don’t include moments you care to remember you might put some imagination into changing it.

Give some thought to tossing out the television, Good-Willing that jacket with the football team emblem on the back, and go find yourself something worth remembering,

Jack

Morning blogsters:

It’s alway good to see the government backing away from sticking its nose into the private lives of the citizenry.  The Texas voters have wisely forced the Texas government to divorce itself from the issue of marriage.

In Texas it used to be illegal even to take a gull across a sedate lion for immortal porpoises, for gosh sakes.  Talk about government scattering itself around to find unlikely events to prohibit.

Wasn’t long ago Sammy Davis Jr. used to forever get himself in trouble for having some sort of genital exchange with women of the white gender, which was forbidden a lot of places.

I’m glad to see Texans point out to the Texas government that matters of marriage are private, spiritual and no business of the government.  Same with sex, for the most part.  The voters of Texas have demanded their government cease recognizing the institution of marriage.

Now people can go back to jumping across a broomstick, whatever, without having to worry about the thorny future issues of divorce, tax breaks for marriage partners, anything but just marriage bliss until death do them part.

In a somewhat fluid gender-environment of the brave new world questions such as who can marry whom achieve an ambiguity probably too complex, anyway.  There’s already been a case where two lesbians married one another in Texas because one of the two was born male.

Twenty years ago it was still a misdemeanor to shoot an Indian on a street car in Austin, which no longer had street cars and few enough Indians.  The sanctity of marriage, street cars and Indians in Austin, Texas are all a bit safer today because of the wisdom of Texas voters, the forced migrations of Texas Indians who survived the invention of Colt firearms, to Oklahoma, and the automobile.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

I managed to get home without picking up a carton of smokes from the Rez the other day.  Ran through a partial can of Bugler that had been lying around here for just such an emergency, but it spang ran out.

The question is, do I make my decisions, or do smokes make my decisions for me.  Am I going to be ruled by habit and drive ten miles down this mountain just for tobacco?

Of course not!

Instead, I’m digging around in the garbage cans and ashtrays for snipes with a little left on the end, rolling up tea, coffee grounds testing them for smokability.

I’m not a man gonna be ruled by stupid habits.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while.  That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him.  I’ll tell you a bit more about him.

Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car.  A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer.  Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.

The deputy wasn’t fooled.  He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins.  He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.

In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink.  He became Marine Recon and a sniper.  Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB, though the squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.

They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer.  Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.

Phil did two tours over there.  When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard.  Which Phil believed would be easy duty.

Instead, it was riot control.  Wherever Nixon went there were anti war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.

Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.

But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.

When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles.  The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.

Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID.  Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.

I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet.  Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

That thing with Texas voters banning marriage got me thinking about some Texas marriage observations of the past.

I used to know a guy in Texas named Phil.  Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations.  We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.

Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan.  Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered.  A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected.

Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.  Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse.

Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less.  They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.

Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home.

A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.  Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick.  We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.

One scene a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in.  They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole…  But midway between the truck and the hole they realize there’s no time.  They drop the wounded guy out in the open.  They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.  Amazing footage.

Anyway, I’ve digressed.  I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage a troix situation.  They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.  The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone.

Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief.

But I’ve wandered so far what with pingpong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage a troix story for another time.

Jack

Made in Heaven

He yearns silence.
Distraction.
Distance.
Elbow room;
Thought room;
Silent listener;
Lively bed partner.

She yearns acknowledgement,
Soft music.
Candlelight dinners.
Intimate touch
Soft words
Planning

He gives what he yearns for.
She gives what she yearns for.
And both yearn
Through the majesty of years.

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

Evening blogsters:

I was just sitting here clipping my toenails into the carpet and thinking about the institution of marriage.  Texans passed a Constitutional Amendment a few days ago banning the entire thing, lock, stock and banana peel.

H.J.R. No. 6

A JOINT RESOLUTION

proposing a constitutional amendment providing that marriage in
this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman.
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:
SECTION 1. Article I, Texas Constitution, is amended by
adding Section 32 to read as follows:
Sec. 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of
the union of one man and one woman.
(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may
not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to
marriage.
SECTION 2. This state recognizes that through the
designation of guardians, the appointment of agents, and the use of
private contracts, persons may adequately and properly appoint
guardians and arrange rights relating to hospital visitation,
property, and the entitlement to proceeds of life insurance
policies without the existence of any legal status identical or
similar to marriage.
SECTION 3. This proposed constitutional amendment shall be
submitted to the voters at an election to be held November 8, 2005.
The ballot shall be printed to permit voting for or against the
proposition:

“The constitutional amendment providing that
marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one
woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this
state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or
similar to marriage.”
______________________________ ______________________________

President of the Senate Speaker of the House

I certify that H.J.R. No. 6 was passed by the House on April
25, 2005, by the following vote: Yeas 101, Nays 29, 8 present, not
voting.

______________________________
Chief Clerk of the House

I certify that H.J.R. No. 6 was passed by the Senate on May
21, 2005, by the following vote: Yeas 21, Nays 8.

______________________________
Secretary of the Senate

——————————————-

Evidently Texans are so thoroughly committed to keeping those other kinds of guys from marrying one another they decided to just throw the baby out with the bathwater and end the whole issue.  You got to take your hat off to them for innovation.

I generally have never understood why anyone would care one way or another whether someone else saddled himself with sixteen women for wives, with a wife who happened to have whiskers, or with a whole passel of wives and husbands forming some sort of marital platoon.

For myself, my view of marriage is roughly similar to the view a three-legged coyote has of leg traps.  But I’m not evangelical about it.  Whatever someone else wants to do in the marriage department is his own business.

Fact is, people are out there doing whatever they want to do with their various genitalia, and they’re doing it in whatever residential setting they wish.  If they want to formalize it with a piece of paper and a preacher, what’s the difference?

I think the Texans went further than I’d have gone to prevent marriage.  But you have to respect the willingness to go the last mile to keep people from engaging in legal sex.

Jack