2009 July Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for July, 2009

Time: 1 day, or, Taking down two trees

Published by Alice on July 31, 2009 in time. 6 Comments

Doc’s only big piece of equipment is the chipper.

Which makes sense, because he says the easy part is taking down the tree, and the hard part is clean-up.

He sharpens his saw

as his helper builds a platform for him to cut from.

He uses a slice of trunk on the platform for his right foot, and cuts a step into the hillside for his left foot. Once he has a stable place to cut from,

he cuts a wedge from the downhill side of the tree, and then cuts through the trunk from the other side, dropping the tree exactly where he wants it.

To cut the second tree, he uses the stump of the first as a platform.

This tree falls slightly to the left of where he intended, and then the work begins.

They cut every branch from the trunk

and feed it into the chipper.

After all the branches are chipped, they cut the bole into slices and load each wheel of wood onto the trailer.

Then they rake so carefully and patch the tears in Bob’s grass with such attention that you’d never know what happened.

PS. I was checking where the world ’bole’ came from, but different dictionaries gave different word origins. The definition below says it’s from Old Norwegian bolr- “tree trunk, torso”, but others attribute it to the Indo-European bhel- “to blow, swell”. I didn’t realize that sources disagreed on word origins, but there you have it.

bole –noun

the stem or trunk of a tree.

Origin:
1275–1325; Middle English from Old Norwegian bolr trunk (of a tree), torso; see bulwark

Time: 1 second, or, A falling tree

Published by Alice on July 30, 2009 in time. 1 Comment

We were told to call either Doc or Dirty Don to get the trees down. Doc came Wednesday.

It didn’t take long for him to cut the first tree.

The earth shook

and the branches shattered.

Rodeo 4 - Calf Roping

Published by Alice on July 29, 2009 in horses and small town life. 2 Comments

I had to do another rodeo post because the photos were so much fun.

In calf roping, the calf gets a head start out of the gate. The horse comes galloping after the calf as the cowboy throws the lasso, holding the rope to tie up the calf with his teeth.

They catch their calf nearly every time. One cowboy missed his throw and another caught a foreleg,

but mostly the loop lands squarely around the calf’s neck. As soon as the loop goes on, the horse brakes.

It all happens really fast: the horse nearly sits down and maintains a steady tension on the rope around the calf’s neck as the cowboy dismounts

and works his way down the rope to the calf.

The cowboy tips the calf,

and ties three legs together: first one,

then two,

and then three legs together

as the horse independently maintains tension on the rope, facing the calf.

One of the best calf ropers was in junior high school, and this might be him going quietly and quickly back to his horse.

It’s interspecies teamwork.

The calf is supposed to stay tied for a specified amount of time ( I think 10 seconds)after the cowboy remounts, and the horse maintains tension until the calf kicks off the ropes and gets up or until the ten seconds are up.

And the calves all scampered off without complaint. No chiropractors for them, but I bet they got some special treats for dinner.

Rodeo 3 - Bareback Riding

Published by Alice on July 28, 2009 in horses and small town life. 3 Comments

The cowboy has to stay on the horse for 8 seconds once the gate opens, and lots of people help him get into position for his ride.

The gate swings open, the cowboy holds onto the strap,

and the horse pauses before it makes its move.

It goes the opposite direction of the moving door,

and gets to work. Cowboys start their ride with their hat on, but they lose it early on.

The bronco bucks and jumps and fishtails, and the cowboy sticks like a burr. These are very long seconds.

I don’t know whether his time is up or they don’t like his form, but the cowboys in red ride in fast to take him off the horse.

There’s three of them, their horses are big, and they get right in the way of the bucking bronco.

The bronc calms down when it is hemmed in by other horses.

A second after this photo, the man on the right scoops the cowboy off the bronco with his arm, and leaves him standing in the arena. It seemed as though very few of the contestants were bucked off; they were taken off by the cowboys in red.

The bronc is lassoed to buck another day–this appaloosa is the most famous bronco here today–

and the cowboys dust themselves off, pick up their hats, and go back to work. As they say at the rodeo, they cowboy up.

I say, get that man a chiropractor and a beer.

Rodeo 2 - Wild Horse Racers

Published by Alice on July 27, 2009 in horses. 3 Comments

This rodeo started with the Rodeo Queen, Princesses and Ladies in Waiting galloping around the arena.

I had thought that the Court was about mascara and big hair, but instead they’re barrel racers who wave, smile and look pretty at a full gallop.

One by one they stormed the arena and took their place in

a row that included the Court, the flag bearers, and the cowboys keeping order in the arena. When everyone had entered there was a prayer that particularly asked God to watch over the animals and the cowboys.

Then there was the national anthem, sung by a local. Everyone stood and put their hand over their heart. Then came the wild horse racers.

Teams of three men catch and saddle a wild horse, and get the horse and riders to a square marked in the arena. There are six teams and six wild horses in the arena at the same time.

This team is attaching the lead to the halter.

It’s two on the head while the saddle goes on,

and they’re sweet-talking this horse, moving fast and gentle.

Here’s a team with a rider in the saddle, and they’re pulling the horse to the right part of the arena. It seemed to me that at least half of the wild horse race teams were Native American. They wrestled those horses so quietly and surely that it wasn’t clear how wild they were

until the cowboys tried to get those horses out of the arena. When all six were finally cleared, the rodeo clown came out to perform. He did tricks with his lasso.

Will Rogers taught me this trick, he said. Will Rodgers was famous for saying that he never met a man he didn’t like.

The clown paused for a beat. Guess he never met Nancy Pelosi, he said.

Rodeo

Published by Alice on July 27, 2009 in horses. 4 Comments

We went to the rodeo yesterday.

I have a bunch of cowboy photos,

but I didn’t have a chance to put them together yet.

A Dragonfly

Published by Alice on July 23, 2009 in insects. 3 Comments

This dragonfly is a twelve-spotted skimmer. The only way I know this is from looking at photos of dragonflies.

According to the Department of the Interior, there are no confirmed sightings of the twelve-spotted skimmer in La Plata County, so this one is flying under the radar (so to speak).

Moths and butterflies have complete metamorphoses, where they go from egg to caterpillar to pupa to adult. Dragonflies have an incomplete metamorphosis: they go from egg to nymph to adult, but the nymph is like an adult without developed sexual organs or wings… and they live underwater.

This isn’t my photo and it’s probably not the same type of dragonfly, but you get the general ugly-duckling extremely-creepy big-waterbug idea of how this creature might have looked before it emerged from the water.

I’m mainly interested in whether it’s a boy or a girl.

According to this drawing, the two points on the end of the abdomen are male claspers.

It’s a boy!

A pine bark beetle fatality

Published by Alice on July 22, 2009 in insects. 2 Comments

One of our ponderosa pines died. Last summer it was looking peaked, and this year it is definitely dead.

These trees grow along the upper irrigation ditch, so they have plenty of water. Since pine bark beetles usually infest forests that are stressed by drought, I thought these well watered trees would be safe.

Instead, the dead tree has a double trunk, and the attached tree is bleeding out from beetles as well.

The beetles drill holes in the bark and the sap oozes out. When this tree dies, they’ll be looking for another tree to attack, so both trunks have to be cut down and hauled offsite. They’re about 100 feet high.

Between 1996 and 2007, this little beetle killed 1.5 million acres of Colorado pines… and that’s just Colorado. The forests it infests are so vast and so completely dead that this insect’s newfound success is attributed to global warming.

The same day we realized we have two trees to remove, I backed into another car in our mechanic’s lot. Coincidence?

A random photo

Published by Alice on July 22, 2009 in insects. 0 Comments

A motherless fawn

Published by Alice on July 19, 2009 in deer. 2 Comments

I saw a mule deer fawn beside the road, and then I saw his dead Mom.

A stomach is sticking out, and you can see she was still nursing. Her fawn hung around for a few hours before leaving.

His last spots are fading away, and you can see tiny antler nubs. He’s probably a few months old, and I bet he has been bossed around continuously since birth and is now wondering about his next move. He stayed under an apple tree for a while,

chewing carefully and well.

He crept carefully around a milkweed and checked out his Mom again. She still wouldn’t budge, and he didn’t know what to do.

He defecated carefully–he’s barely past the age when his Mom licks his butt to help him along–and settled in near his Mom for a while longer.

When I came back two hours later, he was gone.

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