Bullying’s getting all out of hand here since the weather’s cooled. I’ve written about this hen before, probably under the heading, News From the Middle of Nowhere. She’s always been a Communist from earliest chickhood. But most recently she’s begun spending her nights locked up with the two younger roosters, one a Black Silky, the other a Silky/Australorp cross. Then, after everyone’s out ranging, I let her out of the young rooster pen to range with the rest of the flock and do her laying in the same nests as the other hens.
The chickens are allowed to bully the cats here because it’s the lesser of two evils – the cats all know and respect the fact chickens aren’t to be bullied, whatever their feline instincts argue otherwise. So naturally, the chickens are well aware of this and bully the hell out of every cat that gets in the way of whatever catches their eye.
Sooooo. I re-established the cat houses for the cold weather and the felines explored and tested each for personal priorities and preferences, not taking into account the Commie hen. The cats know those are THEIR shelters. The one this Communist is sitting in is the preferred sleeping place of Shiva the Cow Cat. Not a nesting box for Communist Party meetings between chicken and egg.
Unfortunately, Shiva also knows she’s not allowed to swat the bejesus out of the hen when it becomes a contest over who gets to take over the Shiva-house. So Shiva snoozes until the Commie arrives, then the chicken comes in and gives her a couple of pecks, Shiva exits out the other side, and Ms. Commie settles down to drop a bluegreen egg.
But that’s only a piece of the bullying going on here. I was going to tell a bit about an 8-9 year old kittenish cat named Tabby who’s begun testing my patience by bullying the hell out of the older felines.
But I’ll save that so’s I won’t be tempted to use language strong enough to cause the lady-readers to blush.
This place is looking every day more like a bunch of human beings trying to get along.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
About a year ago the trees in the vicinity of the cabin began dying. I’d been fairly certain it would happen because there’s a grove immediately above about 100 yards that had all died off two or three years ago. It appears to have started at the power line easement atop the hill and is making a path of dead trees moving east, or downhill.
Conventional wisdom is that it’s Red Oak Wilt, or Red Oak Disease. There aren’t a lot of certainties about it, no preventive measures or cures anyone’s aware of.
Over the space of about a month they lost all their leaves and the bark began separating from the wood. One of the problems with trying to get them down is the abundance of wasps making nests between the wood and the bark. Hundreds of wasp nests and clouds of angry wasps. The temptation is to wait for a cold day.
There was a certain amount of urgency about trying to take some of them down because after Oak Wilt kills a tree the first strong wind often brings it down. Evidently the disease rots the root system long before anything shows above ground. Several of the dozen-or-so trees dying immediately around the cabin and outbuildings actually have large limbs hanging over roofs.
But the nights are cooling enough to send the message it’s time to begin building a pile of firewood. It won’t take much hauling this year. Some of it I could almost cut and allow it to drop down the chimney pipe.
The larger trunks are going to be a major undertaking to split, so I’m thinking I might sawmill any of them with potentially good lumber left. Sometimes Oak Wilt rots out the center too badly to leave anything worth using except to burn, but sometimes it leaves the heartwood almost untouched.
If there’s enough capable of being sawmilled it might provide enough oak for a project I have in mind cut relatively thin into planks usable for building a structure. But in any case it ought to stay toasty inside the cabin this winter.
The human mind is a strange place to find ourselves living if we ever get enough distance from the background noise to notice. I tend to notice it a lot.
This morning seemed destined to be just another day. Gale and Kay were doing the Austin Gem and Mineral Show, so I’d figured to walk up to his house to get the truck mid-day so’s to take care of putting their chickens to bed tonight. Startled me a bit when I looked up and there he sat in Little Red a few feet away, having brought it down to me. My hearing must be further gone than I’d realized.
Seemed they’d no sooner gone than I got an email from Jeanne saying my old friend from childhood and later lost-gold-mine chasing days was in Fredericksburg trying to get hold of me hoping I could get over there for lunch. Heck, it must be 15 years or more since I’ve seen Keith, though recently he’s been reading this blog. Naturally him being 40 miles away and me with a truck sitting there available, I headed over there.
Really nice visit, but in the course of bringing one another up-to-date he asked me a number of questions about my situation here that forced me to take a hard look and organize my thoughts about it all. That kicked off a series of trails of thinking to organize clearer, more concrete priorities for myself within a realistic examination of my options.
There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re all stacked atop a single one: having the means of leaving this place in a relatively short time if the need arises. It’s time I decided on a single course of action and begin leading events in a direction that allows it to congeal in a way that accomodates the needs of the cats.
But the process of thinking about it in an organized way had a parallel thinking-path over whispering somewhere else in my brain wiggling out a sort of excitement, anticipation about it. Here’s something that will be pure trauma and agony for the cats I do everything possible to spare such things, and my ticker’s beating a little faster in a pleasurable way just considering it.
That, combined with the certainty the process of getting things together to execute the plan I come with is going to involve some unpleasantness, excruciating work and fingernail chewing as it goes along.
Seems I’ve somehow contrived to be two different places at the same time inside my mind. One being pushed by probabilities to do what makes sense rather than what I’d prefer, the cats would prefer. And one reaching somewhere into fond memories of pinon trees, high mountains and an entirely different sort of solitude than I have here.
Keith confided to me today, “Everyone thinks you’re crazy.” I can’t find any good argument that everyone’s wrong. It’s nice being crazy and still being as happy as I manage to be all the time, though.
Anyway, to satisfy that fiddle-footed nagging, here are some songs of the highway and the road.
For a number of years I’ve watched people wearing ball caps turned backward and sideways, nobody raising an eyebrow. I’m not sure why they do it because the purpose of the visor on a ball cap is to protect the nose from Old Sol’s battering. But I gradually began to wonder if people just didn’t know which piece of a hat is the front, which is the side, and which is the back.
Eventually I decided to perform an experiment. I carefully selected a hat for my next trip to town, determined to wear it backward all day, seemingly oblivious to that. I wanted particularly to corner-of-my-eye observe the reactions of people wearing their ball caps backward and sideways.
My findings weren’t ambiguous. From my first stops of the day I saw that people of every age and gender did double-takes, then attempted to surreptitiously call the attention of someone else to the fact I was wearing my hat backward. If they had no companion they’d nudge a stranger to share it. Not once did anyone sidle up to me and whisper, “You’ve got your hat on backward,” as they’d have done if my fly was unzipped.
If I’m wearing a hat when I eat in town I usually take it off a moment while I briefly acknowledge gratitude. On this occasion the hat was on backward when I entered and took my seat, ordered my food and waited to be served. The café was well populated and though I pretended to be reading I observed the hat was a subject of notice and concealed, smiling discussion at almost every table.
When the food arrived, after the waitress left, I removed the hat and bowed my head a moment, then replaced it, facing forward. But, pretending to notice I’d put it on forward, I took it off, looked at it, then turned it backward again on my head, and began eating while still occupied with my book, watching the other patrons.
This brought giggles and laughter, even among those wearing ball caps turned backward and sideways.
My conclusion from this study is that people don’t know what is the front and what is the back of a ball cap, but they do know the front from the back of western-style headgear. I believe the findings are important enough to justify more in-depth study by PHD candidates in anthropology, sociology and fashion.
This is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona, who died in prison awaiting trial for homicide. He was posthumously acquitted. However, Swilling’s hat is the issue here. There’s a bullet hole in it, and it’s been ripped almost in half and sewn back together. Swilling’s hat could be worn backward, forward or sideways and nobody at all would allow himself to notice.
Here are some other examples of non-ball caps that might be worn backward without concern:
Manny Gammage of Texas Hatters made this hat for me in 1971, or 1972. The style was dubbed The High-Roller.
Here it is today with the original Mystic Weave band Manny put on it when he made it. I’ll leave it to your judgement and the judgement of the PHD candidates whether it ‘works’ backward.
Other possible backward hats:
This pic was taken around 1976 worn conventionally.
Here’s the same hat today, backward. Your call.
Straw John B. Stetson backward.
Felt John B. Stetson backward. These last two and the next one are hats I inherited from dead men sent me through thrift stores and flea markets and arranged by the Coincidence Coordinators.
This one is Guatamala palm leaf bought for a dollar in a thrift store. Maybe the best straw hat ever made.
Backward’s not much different.
This is a Tilley, the best canvas hat made anywhere. It can be worn backward or forward without fear.
This is a Tilley knockoff. Can’t be worn backward or forward with pride.
Gale gave me this dead man hat he picked up somewhere. Here it’s worn backward. You can just never tell.
Old Jules
Carl Sandburg, Hats:
HATS, where do you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
Hats: tell me your high hopes.
Carl Sandburg, Hats are Sky Pieces:
Proudly the fedoras march on the heads of the some-
what careless men.
Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still
more careless men.
Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper
debonair men.
Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest solemn noodles.
And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dapper and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero marches on the heads of important men who know
what they want.
Hats are sky-pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat
slowly; your hat is you.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
