Author Archives: mandala56

Hi blogsters:

I never cared for Social Security all those years they took it out of my earnings.

From 1958, for forty-odd years I put money into that pool and never expected to live long enough to see any of it come back.  Or, alternatively, I expected it to be bankrupt by the time I reached the age where there’d be some returns.

In a couple of weeks I’m going to be 62 years old.  I recently filled out all the paperwork online, still figuring it would be a miracle if I ever saw a penny of that money from all those years.  I haven’t kept track of what’s happening with the system, and it just seemed too unlike most of my perceptions of government for them to actually pay back something the way they claimed they would.

Well, the US Postal Service managed to get a nice, xeroxed letter from them to me saying, hey…. YOU MADE IT!  You gonna get a check from us every month because you made 62 circuits of the sun and we’re just naturally going to send you a check, same as if you were someone else.

Won a small jackpot and took the annuity, you might say.

On the other hand, it means I have something of an obligation to live another four years just to get back the bare bones of what I paid in over the years, minus interest.

Which I damned well plan to do, provided I don’t die.

Jack

Afternoon Blogsters:

All the talk about chickens, cabins and Y2K got me thinking about the differences between people in various geographies and residential environments.  It came to me that a lot of blogsters are probably townies and don’t know much about people where the bonds of civilization run a bit thin.

A few years ago I wrote a book called Desert Emergency Survival Basics.  One chapter was dedicated to getting along with the locals in backwater areas.  It probably applies a lot of places besides deserts:

Ranchers, rainbow people, desert rats, and outfitters

Although it won’t be obvious to you, most land in the continental United States, both public and private, has someone watching it, trying to scratch out a living on it, and feeling ownership for it. When you turn off the pavement, you are an intruder into a socio-economic system you are probably unfamiliar with. Respect it.

The people you meet who live in remote areas don’t see a lot of strangers. They tend to have strong opinions about most things, and don’t get many opportunities to express them. Listen politely, nod, and smile a lot. These monologues aren’t an invitation for you to share your own opposing views.

You won’t convert a remote desert dweller to your pet opinions, and he won’t sway you to his. Your entire body of experience is unlike that of the person you are talking to. The observations about reality you base your opinions on are different.

Keep your eye on the ball. Your investment in this person involves finding your way somewhere, or finding your way back. You aren’t looking for a new best friend. You don’t care what he thinks about Japanese-made automobiles. Keep it tight.

Talking about religion, sex, and politics used to be a breach of manners. There were solid reasons for this. The potential for someone being offended was too great, and the returns, too small.

In remote areas today, those prohibitions should probably extend to other issues such as environmentalism, abortion, welfare, wolves, and almost everything besides the heat, the dry, and whether that dirt road goes all the way out to the pavement.

If he talks ugly about the government and welfare programs, you won’t win his heart by telling him you think grazing leases on public lands are just another kind of welfare. If he tells you the land you are on is “his”, and you know it’s actually public, he probably means he has the grazing lease.

You can use that as an opportunity to apologize and tell him you thought it was public, and drag out the map to show him where you thought you were. Turn on the GPS and plop it on one corner of the map to keep the wind from blowing it away. And let him show you where you actually are. If the map shows it’s public, you’ll both know without anything more needing to be said. Sometimes technology has advantages.

If a gate is closed when you get to it, close it behind you. Stay on the two-track and don’t drive on grass. Grass you drive over in June is still bent over and brown in August. Respect “No Trespassing” signs.

If you find you’ve driven into someone’s yard and you want to stop and chat, honk the horn and wait a few minutes before you get out of the vehicle. Give the dogs a chance to come out of hiding and stand on their hind legs snarling at you through the window, if they’re going to. Give the resident a chance to slip on a pair of bib overalls and clamp a kitchen match between his teeth before he comes out to greet you.

If you have a portable microphone and an oblique sense of humor you can point the megaphone at the front of the house and announce, “WE KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE! NOW COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!” But I don’t recommend that, or carrying your guitar to the front porch and trying to practice Dueling Banjoes with the rancher’s kid.

One of the unanticipated by-products of the War on Drugs is that people who used to depend on beef prices and drive 20 year old trucks are now driving new $30K 4x4s with extended cabs and are a lot less tolerant of strangers. If you hear the drone of a $5000 4-wheeler in the distance it will probably be a rancher out tending his cows. There are also a lot of bush-vets scattered around, and a few unreconstructed hippies.

For you, this calls for some specific attitude adjustments translated into your behavior. If you see something unusual, something that shouldn’t be where it is, something that indicates there’s been a lot of activity or gardening going on a long way from anywhere, don’t investigate or linger. If you try to do a little harvesting on your own, someone is likely to be offended. While you pat yourself on the back for your good luck, an emergency situation will probably develop.

Last, if you whiff the faint odor of acetone or iodine you are in the wrong place.  Go somewhere else. Whatever trouble you are in can’t compete with the trouble you are in.

Similarly, there are a few hard-core prospectors out there working established mining claims. They usually have a lot of pride of ownership. If you come across one of these, the law allows you to walk across it, because it’s public, multi-use land. However, the person who filed the claim owns the mineral rights. You don’t want to pick anything up or crank up your dry-washer to see how much color he’s getting. Bad form. The boundaries of the claim are marked at the corners. Go outside those boundaries if you want to do any rock collecting.

If you get out much, someday you’ll encounter a guy with an in-your-face, glaring stand-offishness and an air of knowing every possible thing about everything.  He’ll usually be in a cowboy uniform, but sometimes he’ll opt for BDUs. If he spits on the ground and glares when you greet him, there’s a fair-to-middling chance he’s an outfitter.

I don’t know whether the profession just draws men of that sort, or if they sit down and ponder the desired image and deliberately cultivate it. An outfitter depends on affluent flatlanders spending a few grand to be led to a giant bull elk or some other prey, usually. I assume they believe to be successful they have to be the kind of character the flatlanders can go home and shake their heads about to their wealthy friends so they’re dying to spend a few grand to meet this guy, too, and tell their friends.

These fellows don’t suffer fools joyfully, and they project the wisdom that every man, save one, is a fool. They save their purplest scorn for other outfitters, but you can figure on deep maroon for yourself at the very least. In any case, Hollywood discovered the type a few years ago and enshrined it in a movie, but they added an authenticity and charm that’s usually absent in the real item.

I’m telling you this so you are forewarned. Don’t bother asking the guy any questions or conversing with him unless you happen to be on the upswing end of your manic-depressive cycle and need a little something to get you back down a little. If you get any answers from him, they probably won’t be true, and the cost will be that you’ve had to communicate with him. The circumstance will have you replaying the conversation in your mind a week or so later, thinking what you wish you’d said.

Bumper-stickers:

Leave your politics at home. A banner on your car announcing that “Whitey Will Pay”, or your opinion of cows, whales, ranchers, guns, abortion, or the president, invites hostile attention on an unattended vehicle. If you need help you won’t improve the odds by rubbing the nose of your rescuer in your biases. You might find yourself at the mercy of a person who is violently opposed to your viewpoints a long way from the nearest lawyer or cop.

This could go on and on, and it begins to resemble a camp meeting sermon.

From Desert Emergency Survival Basics

Copyright 2003, Jack Purcell

Jack posted this in November, 2005:

El Palenque

El Palenque doesn’t think;
Knows and loves
His only job
And does it;
Perfection without compromise.
Reality
Where owls, hawks
And sly coyotes salivate
Reduced
To lowest common denominator
When the cackling hen
Rises from a fresh-laid egg.
Gallo del Cielo

Gallo del Cielo
Looks at God
Before he dies
Weeps
For eggs
Unlaid
From Araucana
Hens.

Red Tail Hawk
Raptor eye
Picks the kindred soul
Of silky bantam
From the flock
Rosencrantz

(A buff-crested Polish)
False dawn
Full moon
Morning.
Treetop cries
Of Rosencrantz
And Guildenstern
Deceived by
Counterfeit
Light
And sound
Misty memories
Of owl dreams

From Poems of the New Old West
Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

Morning blogsters:

Mostly a quiet morning here.  Still thinking about those chickens, which occasionally happens.  Maybe next year I can fill up the chicken house and orchard in back with a new flock.  I love waking to the sounds of a flock of chickens stretching out and discovering they’re alive.

That pic at the top is a worked over scan of the grips on a 1911 Army Colt I keep around.  The grips came off another one that was evidently made for the Brazilian Police, carried around and worn completely out, except the grips.

An acquaintance of mine came by the piece, wanted to renovate it, but hated the grips because he believed they were too hokey.  Which of course, they were.  Made them a perfect match for me and mine.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

I don’t recall being overly fond of chickens when I was a kid.  Used to have to wring their necks, watch them spray blood and flop all over the place, then scald and pluck them.  That didn’t encourage me to make pets of them.

But during the Y2K non-event one of the most treasured pieces of the months living in that remote cabin was all the chickens I had for company.  Those above are buff crested polish.  Rosencranz and Guildenstern were of that ilk.  Both had more heart than good sense, looked a bit on the homercestual side, but definitely weren’t.  Coyotes got Guildenstern, but old Rosencranz survived.  Ended up with a farmer over near Fort Wingate who wanted some birds when I came back to town.

Lady MacBeth was similar to this, though she had leggings.  Good layer, white eggs, a bit prissy for the tastes of the other hens, however.

About half my flock was Ameraucana.  Great layers, blue eggs, good brooders.  Good all ’round hens, though perhaps a bit more dense than a person might wish.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My silkies were iridescent black, but the shape was the same as these.  Absolutely the most intelligent chickens I’ve ever seen.  The roosters have more heart than they can afford and hawks will pick them out of a flock thinking, I suppose, they’re immature birds…. lost all my hens that way, but the roosters survived to the end.

Strange sensation having a silky rooster come up to you, tilt his head and look you in the eye.  You get the distinct feeling the critter has something on his mind besides hens, hawks and other roosters.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

I was going over some pressing matters in my mind this morning, got to thinking about a song by my old acquaintance, Jerry Sires.

When I knew Jerry he was living on a hardscrabble farm out toward Granger, Texas, doing carpentry work, roofing, teaching some Industrial Arts classes at the Granger High School when they couldn’t find a certified teacher to do it.

It was generally hard times.

I Could Sell Bibles

I’ve got a good woman who always treats me right

but she was saying just the other night

that she wants me to be happy

and she’ll do what she can do,

But she’d like to see me pull my own weight

in a year or two.

And I know that I could sell Bibles if I had to

but that kind of thing would take me too far away

from the things that I love and the good things I got used to

hanging around the poor farm all day.

I built us this shelter and grow most of our own food

but this day and age that kind of thing just ain’t no good

’cause you can lose it in a moment or just overnight

if your life ain’t insured or things don’t work out right.

I strum on my guitar and make lunch for the kids

Sounds like the story of a man on the skids.

But you know, it has it’s moments even for a man

if he can just find something to do with his hands.

But I know that I could sell Bibles if I had to

but that kind of thing would take me too far away

from the ones that I love and the good things I got used to

hanging around the poor farm all day.

By Jerry Sires

Strange as it seems these days, almost everyone I used to know took a shot at selling Bibles door-to-door for a while.  Sort of makes me wonder if kids are still doing that.

Jack

Writing the entry about the flu stuff got me thinking how often we humans tend to worry about the wrong things.  Reminded me of a guy I used to fly with a bit during the late 1970s named John Rynertson.

John was a man who flew a blue Cessna 120.  It was a lot like the 140 Helldragger I flew.   But he was also a man prone to introduce himself to people around the Killeen, Texas airport as ‘one of the best pilots around’.

Naturally there were those who didn’t favor his self introductions involving pilot skills.  John wasn’t a man who could claim a lot of friends.  But he did have a wife almost as desirable as that 120 he flew.  So pretty, she was, that whenever he wasn’t flying, John was worrying about her.  He fretted over what she might be doing when he was off flying, or when he was almost anywhere he couldn’t keep an eye on her.  Which was a good bit of the time.

Old John just worried himself silly about that women.

Then one day he was flying with some Warrant Officer from Fort Hood and managed to get more airspeed than that old air frame was willing to put up with.  The 120 wasn’t rated for snap rolls.  But being one of the best pilots around, John just naturally figured they weren’t referring to him when they rated the airplane.

Wings came spang off that mama at about 3000 feet above the ground.

Turned out John didn’t need to be worrying about what his wife was doing.  If he was going to worry, he needed to be focusing on learning to stay alive and fly at the same time.

Whatever his wife might or mightn’t have been doing while he was alive, she certainly did after he was grease scattered over an acre of ground.

Similarly, I recall all those kids who used to spend all their time worrying about getting drafted for Vietnam, then took too much of the wrong thing and ended up corpses right here in the good old US of A with never having been fired at in anger.

A person needs to use a lot of care, consult an internal map, look at the compass and GPS, picking things to be worried about.  Otherwise he’ll spend all his time worrying about things that don’t happen while the things that do sneak up behind him and tap him above the ear with a ball-peen hammer.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Around 1969, I was in a freshman Geology course at the University of Texas, first week of classes. The instructor was a grad student teaching assistant who began the course with an overlay of how geologists determine the age of a particular layer of deposition.

Along about the third day a kid who’d been sitting next to me raised his hand. I’d noticed him squirming from the first day, and now he just had to get whatever was bothering him off his chest.

“I’ve been trying to understand what you’re saying, but it’s confusing. How can all this be true, all those depositions being so old when the world’s only (some specified low-range number of thousands) years old. It’s all been calculated when God created the earth.”

After the chaotic eruption of laughter from forty sophisticated freshmen who knew better subsided the instructor directed his response to the now-cringing questioner.

“You can’t have it both ways. This is a Geology course. Everything you hear in this room is based on the premise that the earth is ancient beyond imagination. That the world we see around us is the product of eons of tectonic activity. Of faulting, lifting, erosion, weathering followed by more of the same.

“I’m not going to try to convince you that what you’ve said is wrong. But I’ll tell you that if you can’t accept, for the sake of discussion, the possibility that the book in front of you describes reality, you’ll never get through this course.”

The kid joined me at a table in the Union coffee shop later. He was still upset and confused by the incident, the laughter. Turned out the kid truly couldn’t wrap his mind around the concepts being discussed. He KNEW it to be otherwise at such a fundamental level that he’d have had to relax all manner of other things he KNEW and held sacred to even consider it.

So he dropped the course and never let his mind out of the cage he’d built around it.

The experience that kid had in a geology classroom isn’t too different from what all of us encounter in life. It’s all a matter of where we place the boundaries of the cage.

Within a decade of the incident the geology world was turned upside down with emergence of tectonic plate theory, and much of what he’d have learned if he’d finished the course would have been out of date.

But Tectonic Plate Theory found similar boundaries among geologists’ minds during the difficult battle for acceptance. Old department heads wrestled against it in a war as bloody as a fundamentalist preacher would have fought against the concept of an earth more than a couple of thousand years old. They’d just placed the boundaries a bit further out than the kid and whatever school teacher told him the world was young. Those old geology profs KNEW there was no such animal as continental drift. No point in discussing evidence supporting it.

Similarly, we all KNOW the numbers are random.

Jack