2008 March Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for March, 2008

Hozhoni Days Pow Wow

Published on March 31, 2008 in Appearances and Celebration. 5 Comments

The 44th annual Hozhoni Days Pow Wow was held at Fort Lewis College, and Indians came from all over the region to help dance Spring into creation. The drums beat all day, and the young men were heartbreakingly beautiful. When I saw this pair racing to the auditorium, I had to do a mental readjustment because this is the Dad with the child, not the Mom. The mothers and grandmothers are the ones who made the costumes.

That’s so cute I need another shot.

These guys are dressed up like I’ve never seen, and my my my the flower of young manhood is something to behold when it’s decked with fuschia plumage.

There were people from many tribes, and there were many types of costumes. The variety in headdresses was awesome, and there was a special prayer of thanks to all the birds who contributed to this pow wow.

This is a man’s headdress.

The women’s costumes were also beautiful. I think the green dress is entirely beadwork.

One by one the costumes were magnificent. All together, it was almost too much to take in.

Here’s a woman with a lot of elk ivories on her dress, and another woman with military connections. Can you see the little girls with the bells sewn onto their dresses? A lot of the little boys had bells on their ankles, and they stamped around making a Spring racket.

Here’s a scene from the bleachers, with young teenaged boys in plumes; the Moms who stitched and drove are having a ball. How many thousand hours of handwork does this photo encompass?

These men, and the boys who want to be men, danced as a prayer. It was as though this is what real men look like and this is what true men do, and the rest of the time they’re disguising themselves as Anglos. It was as though daily small town life has been muted to black and white, while pow wow days are in Technicolor. It was like the one true thing. It was dreamtime made real.

Fixing the light, and three lessons

Published on March 30, 2008 in Small town life. 1 Comment

When our first big January snowstorm knocked out the barn light, I didn’t think it was a very big deal.

I was wrong. Since then, we have had little triangles of metal screwed onto the roof so the sheet of snow can’t slide onto the light:

That was $80.00

Next Bob took the lamp to be welded at Animas Radiator

where Tim put some careful flanges on it. Two of them. The flanges were so careful they cost $70. The nails’ll rip out of the wood before these flanges let go, said Tim.

And it’s still not done. Andy, who wired the house, came by as a favor on Friday afternoon to put the light back up.

He has a new van/ before he used his truck and had to empty it into a storage locker every Friday. A van makes his life much easier.

Andy is an elite rock climber who often jams his fingers. I didn’t ask him what happened this time because I didn’t want to visualize it. Andy has spent dozens of nights sleeping in hammocks suspended from rock faces, and his cliff stories give me the willies. He put up our weathervane by tying himself to a rope looped over the roof and attached to the truck. And since his Mom was a librarian, he always returns books. This visit I’m returning one of his books; we both thought the author was annoying. Plus I’m sending along a jar of jam for his fiance’s opinion: she had a restaurant and I thought she’d like the jalapenos.

Andy is putting up the rewelded, rewired light, and you can see me in the window taking his picture.

In the end, it took both Bob and Andy to get the light back in place. Finally.

This story has three lessons. The fixture came from a gas station in Georgia–it’s a piece of 1940s Americana, and it was a big bargain: it cost about $100 including shipping. It’s an Ebay item. I liked it a lot but hadn’t anticipated a multi-step, multi-person, multi-lesson task. The first lesson is, inexpensive Americana may not be a bargain by the time it’s installed. The second lesson is useful for me but probably not for you: old exterior fixtures from the South are not designed for snow load. And the third lesson was my Grandfather’s mantra: Education is expensive.

Carnage in the garden pond

Published on March 29, 2008 in gardening. 4 Comments

In the midst of winter, the dwarf alberta spruces next to the garden pond were completely covered with snow. By the time these little trees were half exposed, I thought I should start documenting the pond’s reappearance.

At this point the pond had been under feet of snow for three months.

Eight days later, the outline of the pond has reappeared.

Two days after that, it was apparent that at least one of the goldfish didn’t survive.

He looks terrible. It takes two more days for the full carnage to be revealed.

Five dead goldfish: four in the water, and one in ice.

I lost one before, but never all.

Mulch

Published on March 28, 2008 in gardening and teenagers. 3 Comments

At the end of November I reasoned that since winter obviously wasn’t coming, I might as well get another load of mulch for the gardens. That night it snowed, and the mulch froze into the truck bed. It was immovable, so Bob covered the load with a tarp and parked the truck for the winter (sort of a bonehead mistake, but really it did happen overnight).

In the last few weeks, flower beds have emerged from the covering of snow and the solid block of mulch started melting.

Today was the end of the truckload, thanks to Sam.

Here’s another shot of Sam shovelling mulch. Teenaged labor is a beautiful sight that gives me deep maternal joy;

Sam’s question was, What do I get for being so helpful emptying the truck?

You get to live with us, I explained.

That’s fair, he said, but can’t I have something else?

The kid’s a slick negotiator. We settled on pasta with white sauce and proscuitto.

The turkeys are gone

Published on March 27, 2008 in birds. 5 Comments

I’m crushed. When the snow melted, the turkeys left. I was excited about the possibilities of photographing turkey mating dance (they strut in a figure eight with their snood almost reaching the ground); I thought I had a good chance of photographing turkey sex; and now I have no turkeys at all.

So I’m getting a flock from Murray McMurray Hatchery. At first I thought we could have Guinea fowl, adventuresome birds who forage widely. Bob pointed out that the flock would probably really like the neighbor’s yard too, and we should ask them if they want 30 Guinea fowl visiting before I put in my order. Good point.

I don’t want turkeys because they’d be bound to escape and mess up the wild turkey’s gene pool. Does anyone know about chickens? I’d like a flock of meat birds that are independent foragers

I thought the Lakenvelders looked nice–this is an old Dutch variety that are independent with very competent roosters.

The silver grey Dorkens are an old breed–known to the Romans, says Murray McMurray–with a long body and short legs. They’re supposed to be calm.

And finally, I liked the looks of this bird: a white laced red cornish hen.

The catalogue said that these have the blocky body type of the true cornish hen, and are slow to mature.

If there’s a better foraging type, please let me know.

And if you have an opinion on which kind of flock I should get, please leave a comment.

How to see where a porcupine lives

Published on March 26, 2008 in what they eat. 5 Comments

I saw my first live porcupine a few weeks ago. I’ve seen dead porcupines before, but I just recently learned how to find a live one.

See? You look for the little fronds of pine needles littering the ground under the tree. Someone is eating up there!

Since the porcupine is the same color as the tree bark, he just looks like a lump on the tree. I couldn’t get a nice picture of him, but we know that he’s there because of his piles of needles.

According to Wikipedia, porcupines eat different foods in different regions, and in this region they stay up in a pine tree all winter, eating the cambium layer under the bark, and the needles. Sounds like a beaver, I thought, and sure enough the porcupine is the second largest rodent in North America (the beaver is #1).

Porcupines stunt pine trees by girdling them high above ground, and in the last century the US Forest Service used strychnine to clear them from public forestland; widespread eradication efforts have only recently stopped.

A porcupine can live up to 18 years in the wild, and the poor girls are pregnant for 7 months at a stretch. If we were pregnant as long as porcupines were, we’d be carrying babies for 28 months. Like us, they only have one at a time, and it’s called a porcupette!!! I couldn’t get a shot of a porcupine, but here’s someone else’s photo of a mom and her porcupette.

Is that a sweet little prickly thing, or what?

Why I love Irish Spring soap

Published on March 25, 2008 in deer herd and gardening. 3 Comments

In the arid West, deer pressure can be pretty intense. People live on most of the acreage near the waterways, they’ve diverted most of the water, and the areas that aren’t next to the streams and rivers are often too dry to be very productive. The deer can get fierce in their need for the plants that you’re growing… and since it was their land and water in the first place, I sympathize to a point.

I’m happy to have a deer herd around, but I don’t want them browsing my gardens. So I try to work with them. I grow plants that they don’t like to eat, mostly cultivars of native species and old favorites. Daylilies, lavenders, mints and hyssops work fine, and so do lilacs and potentillas. I used to get plant lists from the state agricultural extension service, and now you can find lists of deer resistant plants online.

Bob regularly sprays the twigs and foliage with an appalling mixture of rotten eggs, sour milk, garlic and red chili pepper (more on this later).

And I do love that Irish Spring soap. On every newly planted tree, I tie a bar of Irish Spring in a knee-hi stocking at deer-nose height. When it rains, that Irish Spring perfume works its way down the trunk and coats the surface of the ground… and deer detest it.

Here’s a bar of soap that made it though the winter, and to the deer it still stinks. The bears hate Irish Spring too.

Here’s a bar of soap that a bear ripped out of its stocking and buried under a red twig dogwood. I dug it up when I was weeding a few weeks later, and put it back up in another stocking, claw marks and all. I think Irish Spring is one of those anti-deer miracles.

If people say it doesn’t work, it’s because they haven’t tried it.

Sunset rock

Published on March 24, 2008 in Photography. 5 Comments

(This photo is named Sunset Rock, but the cliffs aren’t.)

Streamside Sunday

Published on March 23, 2008 in riparian edge. 2 Comments

Today, the stream looks like a little river.

This is a photo taken three weeks ago from the same location, different lens. The local meltdown is happening fast, and there’s quite a lot more snow in the high country.

This shot was taken where the deer were crossing this winter.

The water has risen, and is rising still.

Hot Apricot Jam

Published on March 21, 2008 in recipe. 5 Comments

When I found bags and bags of apricots at the bottom of the deep freeze, I got that spring-cleaning feeling that it was time to take care of them. So I did.

Sadly, the apricot raspberry jam is a bust. It’s a beautiful color and has enough seeds that you think it might be raspberry, and when it turns out to be apricot it’s a big let-down. But this apricot-jalapeno jam is killer. It’s out-of-this-world. It’s such a great invention that I thought I must be exaggerating and took some over to the bakery this morning, and they all agreed: this stuff is darned good.

I learned to make jam from my friend Theresa who made jam her whole life, and died two and a half years ago. She had very definite jam rules—there’s-a-right-way-and-a-wrong-way kind of rules—that I can share with you. Here is my tower of ingredients:

I forgot to include a garlic bulb in the group picture, and now it’s too late; other critical ingredients include a bag of sugar, some lemons and jalapenos, and some bags of frozen apricots. I’m sure you can use any kind of liquid pectin, but I always use Certo. And I usually get new flat tops for my jars, and reuse the ring of the two-piece lid. (This is one of Theresa’s rules).

The first step is to sterilize the jars (which I do in the dishwasher) and to clear a counter so you can spread out.

Locate some clean kitchen rags, pull out your lobster pot, an enamel pot for cooking the fruit, and a food processor.

This is where another of Theresa’s rules must be taken into account: no matter how much fruit you have, you may never never EVER double the recipe.

The instructions for jam is in the enclosure from the Certo package; their apricot jam recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of fruit, 1/3 cup lemon juice, 5 3/4 cups sugar and a packet of Certo. In those 3 1/2 cups of apricots I included 2 jalapenos and one clove of garlic,

split, seeded

and cut into pieces.

And that’s all the chopping that’s called for

because the food processor chips up the frozen apricots into perfect jam-sized chunks. Do you notice that this whole series of photos has my shadow in it? How gauche.

Here’s another of Theresa’s rules: although the ingredients for jam are large quantities, they must be precisely measured. If you do not use these exact amounts your jam will not set and you will have wasted your supplies. (Theresa called sugar and Certo ”supplies”.)

You carefully measure all of the ingredients and dump them into the pan. Put the flame on high, and start stirring.

Keep stirring and soon it looks like this

and then you stir stir stir until it comes to a full rolling boil. Really a full boil. At that point you dump in the Certo all at once

and stir through a full rolling boil for 60 seconds exactly. (Theresa’s Rule: count one potato, two potato, three potato….) And then it’s off with the heat, ladle jam into each jar to within 1/8″ of the top, and slap on the flat lids.

This is the step I don’t like, wiping the threads clean before you screw on the lids. The jars are hot, and you need a wet rag to wipe with and a dry rag to hold with. Toss all six jars into the lobster pot to boil for 10 minutes, and think about starting another batch.

I have broken all of Theresa’s jam rules over the years, and she was always right. Jam is supposed to be tricky, but if you follow her rules you can’t go wrong… and she would have thought this combination of apricots, jalapenos and garlic was the bee’s knees.

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