Author Archives: Old Jules

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods

Posted on November 8, 2011 | 8 comments


I’d planned for some while to write up the early-post-Y2K incident with the helicopters described below.  But Jeanne looked it up in her Y2K journal, read it to me over the phone, and convinced me in the interest of accuracy her version was the most appropriate.  The human mind twists and turns events and mine had worked on those helicopters enough to make the story I’d have written somewhat different from the one she recorded that day.

I’d have sworn I’d been teaching her sons how to use a survival mirror as described in the Survival Book https://sofarfromheaven.com/survival-book-2/, and that the instruction was the reason I had the mirror readily at hand to do what I did. 

I do recall vividly my increased heartbeat when they turned to fly 150 above the cabin.  I’ll defer to her record as to whether I then slunk into the trees.

From Jeanne’s y2k journal:
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2000

A nice day all around. Jules came over fairly early, seemed at loose ends, and stayed til nearly 4 PM.  While the kids were finishing homework, he started messing around with some tools we had lying around and found a rock that reminded him of a dream sheep mother like the ones he’d bought before from the Zunis.

He spent all morning carving a dream sheep out of that rock and then decided we needed a cairn to put it on.  He and Michael and Andrew worked on that most of the day, adding flagstones for a bench to go all the way around it. The dream sheep sits on top like a shrine- I love it.  It took all day, he must have moved a ton of rock. Then he build me another bench to sit on for a view of the sunset. Glad he didn’t ask me to help. Michael helped willingly, Andrew less willingly,  but he still helped.

 After he declared it finished, Michael took off for a hike up the hill and Andrew and Julia were playing around behind the cabin.

We heard some helicopters before we saw them, it turned out to be two black military copters that were slowly flying right along the road that goes by our property.  Jules didn’t say anything but he got out his pocket mirror from his survival kit and started sort of surreptitiously flashing it at the helicopters.  I got real nervous and decided I should  probably walk off in the other direction, so I headed towards the cabin.

I wasn’t sure if they could see who was doing it since he was by some trees, but I wanted to be sure it was obviously NOT me.  Damned if those helicopters didn’t turn a 90 degree angle and fly straight over the cabin to get a closer look at us! But nothing happened, thank goodness. By then Jules had faded into the trees. A few minutes Michael came down the hill and said “Did you see THAT?”

After that Jules and the boys had a long conversation about building a catapult using a sucker rod from a windmill and some other stuff. Said they ought to be able to build one big enough to lob rocks the size of cantaloupes across the road.  They all seemed pretty excited about it.

Anyhow, the cairn is a great place to sit and drink hot chocolate and watch the sunrise. I think it’ll last forever, it’s really solid.

Picked up 25 eggs later when we went down to help him collect them.


Saturday, Feb. 13, 2000

This morning we were eating a late breakfast inside the cabin and talking about going  to gather eggs and suddenly there was this horrifying roar over the cabin which scared us all half to death- we rushed to the door and saw a pair of fighter jets that had just buzzed our cabin! I think  they were getting back at us for the mirror stuff a few days ago…too bad Jules wasn’t around to have heart failure with the rest of us, seeing that it was all because of him.  Of course we had to drive down to his cabin right away to tell him all about it.
Picked up 30 eggs while we were there.

Jeanne K.




8 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Y2K

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For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 6 comments

If you own a chainsaw and it has a primer plunger or bulb similar to the one above you might give some thought to keeping a spare around.

I’d barely started cutting when this one developed a crack and allowed air into the fuel line.  I shrugged, puzzled over possible ways to plug the air leak and decided it probably couldn’t be done because of the oil and gasoline.  So I asked Gale to pick one up for me in Kerrville the next day.

The place he went had a bag of these things of 87 different sizes.  It wasn’t enough to know the saw model and make.  No way of matching anything without the actual item to compare it to.  So a $5-or-less has now taken several days out of getting firewood cut and those dead oaks threatening buildings and roofs onto the ground.  Oak Wilt, Firewood and Sawmilling

There’s no wind today and I think if it weren’t for that piece of plastic I’d have both of those down and cut to firewood lengths by mid afternoon.  I’m going to pick up a spare when I get a replacement.  That saw’s got a lot of miles on it and it’s been a good one, but maybe it will figure it can’t die final-like until it wears out that extra primer plunger bulb.  Cheap insurance. 

And if the saw goes kerplunk and leaves me with one of those little hollow plastic bulbs on my hands I can probably rig a way to use it for something else if I live long enough.

One more bug on the windshield of life.

Old Jules

 

6 Comments

Posted in 2011, Country Life, Emergency Preparedness, Homesteading, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Guy Clark – A young man turns 70

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 9 comments

One of the better songwriters of the 20th Century is turning 70 today.  I’d wondered for a number of years whether I’m older than him because of the song, Texas 1947.  I figured he must be slightly older, but not by much.  When Jeanne sent me an email telling me it’s his birthday the question was answered.  A year and a few days.  He’s another young guy.

 

This next one appears to be one of the performances when he was on the road with Townes Van Zandt.  I’m just guessing about that.

 

I can’t even recall how many performances by Guy Clark, and Guy touring with Townes I’ve seen in my life, but every one was worth the price of admission.  Even when Townes was so far down the downhill slide watching him brought some pain.  Those years they could bring in a house of 150 or so when they came to Austin.  Just about enough to fill up the Cactus Cafe at UT Union building.

 

LA Freeway’s one of those songs I used to have as the single song on a 90 minute tape played on long road trips.  I never tired of it.

 

Guy’s evidently a fine craftsman, makes all his own guitars.  I gather he’s also built a boat, or two, but I’ve always preferred to think he was talking about more than boats in this song.

 

I’ve always thought if circumstances had been different and I’d managed to come across Guy Clark somewhere when we were both young we might have been friends.  As it is, I suppose I think of him as a friend anyway because of all the joy his songs have given me over the decades.

 

What more can a person say?

“C’mon Jack!  The son-0f-a-bitch is coming.”

Here’s wishing you a long ride, Guy.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2011, Music

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Sunday Morning Flies

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 25 comments

I don’t recall ever seeing such an abundance of flies in Texas.  I first noticed it a week-or-so in Kerrville in a restaurant.  Flies were buzzing around the place in such profusion the customers were waving forks and dinner rolls in the air trying to drive them off.

Then I began seeing them here, hanging around the windows and door, waiting for things to happen in their favor.  I usually think of fly problems in a context of fly-breeding sources, so I checked the chicken roosts, figuring I’d allowed the droppings to build up enough to allow fly eggs to hatch and go through their development cycle.  Not so.

But up at Gale and Kay’s house a few days ago I saw they were similarly blessed.  Plenty of flies to go around.  Enough for most usual purposes.

Yesterday, or the day before they began finding their way into the cabin.  They weren’t docile enough to allow chasing and swatting as an option, and I’m not all that big about having flies walking over my face while I try to sleep, type, or meditate.  The military surplus mosquito net head-cover I’ve had for thirty years or more works as well as anything I know of to keep that from happening.

I’m a person who tends to believe most things are indicators of other things, but I haven’t a clue what this is an indicator of.  Probably someone somewhere would say it means we’re going to have a hard winter, or some other unusual kind of winter.  Usually Texas has a few flies and they’re worse in the fall season, but on its worst day this part of Texas usually can’t compare to a normal fly-day in the high desert country.  Desert flies converge on perspiration and any other water from miles around.

Swatting Flies in the Last Century

But this year Texas can brag it has something to compete with New Mexico.  Rich folks from Houston and Dallas won’t need to go to Ruidoso, Eagle Nest and Taos to have as many flies as they hanker to have crawling around on them.

Old Jules

25 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Flying, Solitude, Texas

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A Sobering View of Y2K

Posted on November 5, 2011 | 7 comments

That tribal talk a week or so ago got me thinking about an old Mescalero bud I’ve known on and off through the parts of this lifetime that matter. We go long times without seeing one another, but we top off the long spells by bumping into one another in unlikely places.

Kurtiss and I first met working on Skeeter Jenkins’ ranch near Kenna, New Mexico. Must have been 1958, ’59. Skeeter wasn’t a joyful man on his ranch-hands. He’d berate Kurtiss by comparing him to us white lads, then he’d turn around five minutes later and tell us we weren’t half as good cowboying as that damned Apache over there.

I guess the only good that came out of that job was the bond that formed between Kurtiss and me, and the lifelong lesson I learned about not trusting ranchers. Old Skeeter cheated all of us spang out of a hard week pay and spread around the word none of us were worth the board he’d furnished working for him.  Fortunately, he’d done that sort of thing before, so nobody paid him any mind when it came to hiring us for other jobs, which we frequently got screwed out of our pay on, same as with Skeeter.

The last time I ran into Kurtiss must have been 1998, ’99. He and a couple of Arizona broncos were sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked for a powwow in Albuquerque when I came across them and a case of beer that was too close to gone to be any good.  When we’d killed what was left of that case we kicked out of there and spent the night singing ’50s rock and roll songs, getting roaring drunk and filling in on the minutia of our lives since we’d last met.

Spent a good bit of time talking about Y2K also, which was much on my mind at the time, and they’d never heard of it.   I expected that and explained to them. Those Apaches thought that just might be something really fine.

Kurtiss immediately thought of a state cop over toward Ruidoso who’s bad about kicking around folks who’ve had a bit much to drink, “I hope nobody gets to that prick before I do.”

Those Apaches demonstrated some rich imagination concerning the nuances of Y2K aftermath.  “We’ll be able to run raids on the Rio Grande tribes like the old days!”   This didn’t interest the Arizonians.  They were fairly sure Mexico would be open for a bit of raiding, though, and better pickings.

Then Kurtiss went thoughtful.  “I’d sure as hell like to kill me some Navajo.”  He told the old story of Bosque Redondo and all the slaughter the Din’e did to the less numerous Mescalero during the decade years they shared the reservation.   Apache numbers there were decimated until only 1800 were left alive when they escaped the rez and went back to Mescalero.

Bosque Redondo was fresh on his mind because of Navajo whines he heard at the Gathering of the Tribes Powwow. “Mescalero’s too large for such few people.” (The enormous Din’e Rez is getting jam-packed these days, by comparison.) “They ought to take some of that land away and give it to us,” was the general theme.

“We fought our way down,” Kurtiss quoted himself. “And you guys multiply like rabbits.”

This led to some laughs and sneers about the theme of the Gathering of Nations Powwow, “Celebrating 400 years of unity (among the tribes)“.

“I wonder where that was,” one of the Coyoteros grunted. “The Apache never saw it and neither did our enemies. Those Mexicans and Pima and all those town Indians were lucky the whites came along to save them.”

Mostly those guys were in agreement in their scorn for other southwestern tribes. “They don’t know how to use the land,” gesturing with a nod and a slight pucker of the lips.

A whole different view of the end of life as we know it.

Old Jules

 

7 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Native Americans, Senior Citizens, Y2K

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Unanimity

Posted on November 4, 2011 | 10 comments

She was the mayor
Of course
Chief of the cops
Dog catcher
And sometimes ran
The sewer plant
Owned the bar
The grocery store
The factory
And bank.
Although the berg was small
It always seemed larger
When the yes-men
Those yes-men she served
Those little people
Saluted

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in Poetry, Politics

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Opalized Petrified Wood

Posted on November 4, 2011 | 15 comments

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Gale recently acquired some material of a sort I’d never seen previously.  One he was working on when I went up there was opalized petrified wood.

He’d never seen any before, either, so he polished up this piece just to get an idea what he was working with.

He’d just finished cutting this piece and it was a bit oily from the saw.  It’s going to be a beautiful chunk of rock when it’s polished.  Beneath it’s another recent acquisition, zebra agate, formed from river delta bottom mud.  The paisley’s caused by the shells of marine life.  He hasn’t slabbed and polished any of it yet.

This gives you an idea of the size of the chunk he got.  He doesn’t expect to ever see any again, so he’s trying to plan ahead carefully insofar as what he’ll make from it.

Meanwhile he’s keeping three saws working up there slabbing the jewelry quality stone he picked up at the San Antonio Rock and Mineral Show, hmm or maybe it was Austin, a few days back.

I’ve been friends with Gale since 1970.  At the time our circle of friends used to joke Gale was the busiest person any of us had ever met.  Most of them are dead, or faded into history, so I’m the only one left to testify.  He’s still the busiest man I’ve ever known.

Here’s one of the last several remaining of those Siberian Wolf Fang pendants he was working on a while back.

Here’s another of those recent acquisitions just off the saw.

Watching Gale work used to be a hair-raising experience back 30-35 years ago before he lost that finger.  He became a legend for a while by making a fairly detailed chess set out of exotic woods using a radial arm saw, holding each piece between two fingers while he made his cuts with the saw.

I occasionally remind him of this piece of history and he always replies, “That wasn’t what I cut the finger off doing.”

Miracles do happen.

Old Jules

 

15 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Music, Senior Citizens, Uncategorized

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Occupy Old Sol, or New Chinese Manufacturing Markets

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 14 comments

As you can easily see, something’s going on across the surface of Old Sol.  Astrophysicists are not agreed on the issue of whether this represents further expansion of Chinese manufactured goods, or the spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

MAGNIFICENT SUNSPOT: One of the largest sunspots in years is rotating over the sun’s northeastern limb. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of AR1339 during the early hours of Nov. 3rd:

Measuring some 40,000 km wide and at least twice that in length, the sprawling sunspot group is an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. Two or three of the sunspot’s dark cores are wider than Earth itself.

Naturally, such a large sunspot has potential for strong flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% chance of M-class solar flares during the next 24 hours. One such eruption has already occured: An M4-flare at 2200 UT on Nov. 2nd produced a bright flash of extreme UV radiation (SDO movie) and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. The CME is not heading our way. Future CMEs could have greater effect as AR1339 turns toward Earth in the days ahead.  http://spaceweather.com/

 

 The Chinese are split on the issue, one side claiming it’s another accomplishment of their space program, the other inscrutably denying its lousy steel products manufactured to help Sol hold himself together, but the steel-quality insufficient to do that job any better than it does any other.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movements in Europe and the US have announced the entire phenomenon is the result of an awakening awareness of the injustices inherent in the ways Old Sol maintains those bands of magnetic fields.

I’m personally leaning in the direction it’s something to do with something else I haven’t figured out yet.

——————————————–

Meanwhile, nearer home, glaciologists are puzzled over the huge crack discovered in one of Antarctica’s glaciers.

http://tinyurl.com/4xnf5gw

Although the glacier is rumored to have been reinforced by Chinese steel there’s no unanimity as to whether the usual inferiority of the product is responsible.  Some believe the rift is being caused by the growing economic disparity within the Antarctic ice fields and infiltration by Communists undermining the traditional values required to hold Antarctica together.  Wall Street hired hands have rushed to assert the crack will destroy Antarctica if the one percent who caused the crack are held accountable.

I personally haven’t yet arrived at an opinion.

Old Jules

 

 

 

14 Comments

Posted in Politics

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Rotting the bone marrow – Dependence on China for tool steel

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 16 comments

I noticed several years ago a person can’t get good drill bits in the US anymore.  When you buy them they’ll barely cut into aluminum, afterward they’ll cut nothing and can’t be sharpened to hold an edge capable of cutting.

Today I walked up to Gale’s to look at some spectacular rocks he’s acquired [opalized petrified wood], and this drill bit thing was on my mind because I’d just attempted to drill through some aluminum.  I mentioned the Chinese steel drill bits and how we need to watch the thrift stores for US bits from a time when they’d hold an edge.

“I’m seeing the same thing in saw blades,” he mused.  Damned band saw blades won’t cut with any duration.

As we discussed it the light dawned.  Even Chinese screwdrivers bend instead of breaking.

“Do you suppose it’s the alloys they’re using, or the temper?”  Neither seemed to me to satisfy the symptoms.

“Might be a bit of both, but it doesn’t make sense.”  Gale’s done considerable tempering of steel, as I have.  “Tempering just isn’t that big a deal.”

But whether it’s intended or not, whether it’s the alloy, which it probably is [There’s a good possibility they’re sending us something nearer IRON than carbon steel] the fact is it creates a still greater dependence.  Nobody in the US is going to be able to operate any of a hundred metalworking businesses if they can’t get good tool steel bits, blades, tools.

I’ve got a pair of wire pincers out on the porch I thought about when I got back to the cabin.  I’d noticed just the gripping them enough to cut woven wire bends the handles to the center.  This was a more-or-less expensive pair of pliers.

If I believed in conspiracies, I’d be tempted by this.  But I’m at loss why we’re not getting high quality tool steel inadvertently.

How, I wonder, would it appear differently if it were a conspiracy?

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in Politics, Survival, Uncategorized

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Poking Around Canyon, Colorado for the Navajo Rug

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 5 comments

Sometimes a song just happens to twang the heartstrings and worm its way into a lifetime, I suppose.  Navajo Rug’s been such a song for me.

I first heard the song in Austin, Texas, performed by Bill and Bonnie Hearne in some tiny, packed appearance of theirs in the mid-1980s.  I liked it so well I bought a tape.  Then, later I discovered the Tom Russell version and made a 90 minute tape with just that song on it, listening to it on road trips sometimes for several hours at a time until the tape wore out.

Almost a decade later I was headed through the Four Corners area toward Hovenweep and various ancient sites in southwestern Utah, but still in Colorado when a road-sign announced I was entering Canyon, Colorado.  I craned my neck watching for evidence of a burned down cafe in the weeds as I passed through.

But all the time I was in Utah over the next several days the Navajo Rug song and Canyon, Colorado were nagging at the back of my mind.  I didn’t even have the tape with me, so I sang it to myself and the truck.  Then, on the trip back I resolved to try to find out if the cafe ever existed, where it was, maybe even pick up some piece of broken melted glass or a spoon from the ruin.

I spent half a day in that village slowly driving back and forth along the grader ditch, getting out and trekking around possibilities, asking around among any residents I could approach without interrupting what they were doing.

I didn’t find it, didn’t find anyone in town who’d ever even heard the song.

But I did sit down in the only eating establishment open and order two eggs up on whiskey toast, home-fries on the side.

Sometimes that’s about the best a person can do. 

But it wasn’t the only time I’d found myself pursuing musical/lyrical craziness when location comspired with a song I remembered to distract me from a destination.  On more than one trip through Morenci and Clifton, AZ, I did a lot of asking trying to find someone who remembered who sang Open Pit Mine.

 

Not a soul even remembered ever hearing the song.

Old Jules

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Posted in Adventure, Music

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