Category Archive for ‘Small town life’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'Small town life' Category

Things you don’t want to do on Sunday

Published on March 17, 2008 in Small town life. 5 Comments

Gelande jumping is one of those things that you really don’t want to do. Never heard of it? Good, because it makes as much sense as going over a waterfall in a barrel.

Gelande jumping is going off a huge ski jump with normal ski equipment. I dated a Norwegian ski jumper briefly in college, so I’ve never minded other people going off big jumps so long as they’re using the proper equipment: giant seven to eight foot skis with a free heel.

This is a normal ski jumper.

Gelande jumpers are out of their minds, because they can’t pose their jump.

The jump at the ski area is a natural jump, not a ramp. It’s 70 meters high, which is considered smallish.

The ski jump itself starts at the big rock and goes about 70 meters before the lip that propels those poor guys into the air. The chute is the landing zone.

The first line marks a 200 foot jump, the second line is 250 and the third line is 300 feet. The dark speckles on the slope are the scattering of pine needles that allows the jumpers to see the contours of the snow. Sprinkling the slope with pine needles is standard for many ski events, not just gelande.

You can’t really see how incredibly steep this is. I tried to climb up it, but had to give up half way because I had soft boots on. With ski boots, you can jam the toe into the snow and climb very steep terrain, but with soft boots it was hopeless.

Here the jumpers are climbing up to the top of the take-off,

and this is the person who had the longest jump on the first round.

He’s off

Looks OK right now

and he’s getting some altitude, but with a fixed heel his form can’t hold.

you can see from his shadow how vertical he is

and he lands it

barely.

That’s gelande jumping. My real question for these guys is: how do you fit those gigantic cojones into that skin-tight speed suit???

but I didn’t ask.

In the deep freeze

Published on March 14, 2008 in Appearances and Small town life. 8 Comments

When my twenty pounds of chocolate from the Bloomers Sale disappeared in a corner of my coffin freezer, it occurred to me that you might like to see what else is in there. Heck, I’d like to see what else is in there.

Some of it is recent. In addition to the chocolate, there is

2 gallons of cider left over from cider pressing last fall,
2 organic turkeys (80% off the day after Thanksgiving), and
25 pounds of buffalo that was just recently added. There’s
15 pounds of fish and
7 pounds of butter from 1/2 price sales. From last summer, we still have about
10 pounds of lamb and sadly, about
7 pounds of lamb ribs that are getting old. We get a few lambs for the freezer every spring, which includes many packets of lamb ribs. Do you know what to do with lamb ribs? I don’t. There’s not a shred of pork, which makes me wonder about getting piglets this spring.

The fruits and vegetables are less manageable. There are are at least

30 pounds of tomatoes (a few pounds dehydrated, 10 pounds peeled, and 20 pounds frozen whole like little baseballs). I was glad to find
a bag of raspberries, of blueberries and some applesauce. I was less excited by the
15 pounds of peeled and pitted peaches from 2 years ago. And the freezer item that absolutely has to go is
20 pounds of apricots.

There are a lot of roadside apricot trees around here, and apricots are easier to freeze than they are to use up. So in honor of the weekend, I’m processing apricots Sunday: one batch with raspberries, one with habaneros, and maybe another with ginger juice. If anyone has a good apricot recipe, please, pass it along.

I didn’t realize I had so much food downstairs (and I’m not the only one; most of my neighbors have coffin freezers too). I pretend that it’s rational, but I think that deep freeze satisfies some ancient imperative. I’m talking primal satisfaction. I mean, this Anasazi granary and my deep freeze would qualify as things that don’t look alike, but are.

The Bloomers Sale

Published on March 14, 2008 in Small town life. 3 Comments

One of the perks of living in a small town is access to factory seconds. In Vermont, we lived near the Ben and Jerry’s factory and a sock mill. The socks were handy, but ice cream seconds were often disappointing: chocolate almond ice cream where they forgot the almonds… what’s the point? Nearly a decade ago, we moved to the home of the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I think every woman in La Plata County would agree that the Chocolate Factory’s semi-annual sale of chocolates with a bloom of cocoa butter on the surface–the so-called Bloomers Sale–is a great local event.

It’s sort of a public service, and takes place at the County Fairgrounds. Small children can afford to buy substantial amounts of chocolate.

As for the adults, well, these days chocolate is practically health food.

Local wisdom is that if you have a deep freeze in the cellar, there’s no such thing as buying too many truffles. I bought 20 lbs. I do love that big deep freeze.

Garden Club

Published on March 7, 2008 in Colorado women, Old-timers and Small town life. 4 Comments

A few years ago, my then 92-year-old neighbor asked if I would join her garden club. Since it met once a month and she was getting to an age where she needed help with transportation, I said I would. Two years later, I’m the club secretary and Miss Roberta, who has been attending Garden Club meetings for over 50 years, is still going strong.

Most of the meetings take place in the Grange, and there are three or four women in the garden club who have been Grange members their whole life.

The Grange is a place of rural pride, home to the 4-H Club and the Saint Patrick’s Day corned beef boiled dinner.

It is part of the National Grange system of 3,600 Granges in 37 states, with an American flag out front.

Roberta and her late husband Robert are both Past Masters of the Grange, with their picture on the wall.

This is the Garden Club. Many of the members have been attending meetings for decades. Ruth was the hostess today, and she brought cherry pie made with her own cherries from the deep freeze.

It was an exceptional pie. And Roberta looked like a flower

but was pretty annoyed because she couldn’t hear at the meeting. She was the principal of two schools in her prime. Just last year she ran a bear off her property by yelling at him. She is a small woman with a tiny jaw, but it was very firmly set at that garden club meeting.

Durango does disaster

Published on February 23, 2008 in Small town life. 2 Comments

There was a fire downtown, and three businesses burned.

Durango has a flair for disaster, and has had a good stretch this winter. A few weeks ago two kids skiing down a ridge in town were caught in an avalanche. There must have been a dozen rescue vehicles there, and since the kids were wearing avalanche beacons they were in fact rescued. Most of our firemen have attended avalanche rescue workshops, so what could be better than rescuing an avalanche victim within city limits? As it turned out, that was just a warm up.

Downtown was filled with fire trucks and firemen from towns as far as thirty miles away. A three building fire that threatened to engulf a city block had everyone working together.

There were stockpiles of oxygen tanks and of water

and our firemen were heroes, every one.

Snowdown 3: Outhouse Stuffing

Published on February 5, 2008 in Small town life. 0 Comments

I don’t know if outhouse stuffing is standard festival activity but, like the belt sander races, it’s a Snowdown tradition. It is a formalized affair. First the portapotty is declared clean by the gentleman with red mittens. You can see that the team on the left has already shed their coats.

A team starts to file into the outhouse as the gentleman with the earflaps and red mittens keeps count

two, three, four

five six

seven eight nine

The chamber is declared full,

the door is shut and the crowd chants to ten.

Then the door bursts open and everyone spills out. It’s like watching a film clip run forwards and backwards.

This time around, 16 people were squished in the Affordable John. Last year, the winning team was 20 people (and yes, there is a minimum age requirement so no one assembles a team of toddlers.) You wouldn’t think it, but outhouse stuffing is another surprisingly entertaining winter activity.

Snowdown 2: Canine Fashion Show

Published on February 4, 2008 in Small town life and dogs. 0 Comments

During Snowdown, people not only dress up their belt sanders, they also dress up their dogs. Here are just a few of the dogs attending the canine fashion show. Some of the dogs already have winter sweaters and just need a few accessories.

I bet this old dog’s pig costume was used in a school play.

This bulldog knight likes the pig-dog. I think the bulldog costume must be an actual bulldog snowsuit with a sword and plume for Snowdown. I didn’t even know they made bulldog snowsuits.

Here’s a girl who is dressing her dog onsite. First the tutu

Then the scarf.

This good dog knows that they’re not done yet… and she’s still willing.

Now that’s a costume.

It’s not just girls who are dressing up their dogs. Here is a grown man with a really big jester.

And the best costume? It was easy to decide.

Snowdown 1: Belt Sander Races

Published on February 3, 2008 in Small town life. 0 Comments

Snowdown is the annual winter festival. It ran Thursday through Sunday with events including slalom kayak races in the municipal pool and mountain bike snow slalom races at the ski area. This year the theme was Ye Olde Snowdown, with knights, ladies and jesters.

For the belt sander races, people dress up their belt sanders and race them at the local hardware store. It is a town tradition, and there are lots of entries. This belt sander is dressed up as a knight.

The belt sander on the right was dressed up by a grown-up, while the sander on the left was dressed by the kids. Note the integration of the Tonka grader with the Barbie heads. Very creative!

The crowd around the tracks is paying attention, because the sanders go really fast.

The race officials make sure the sanders are all plugged in

And they’re off!

This might look like an example of collective insanity, but these races were actually pretty entertaining. Belt sanders last a long time, and people grow fond of them. Bob’s belt sander tried to eat his leg about eight years ago; next year he might enter it as “Jaws”.

Bread

Published on January 22, 2008 in Small town life. 0 Comments

One of my favorite things about having teenagers around is that we use up a loaf of bread a day, so I have a daily stop at the bakery.

Does every organic bakery look the same? It seems like you can travel thousands of miles and walk into a bakery that looks just like this. My dog always comes and sits exactly outside the door; in the summer she holds the same position when the door is propped open. I don’t know when she learned this trick, but it seems like she has always been a bakery dog.

Some girls will do almost anything for treats.

Miss Roberta’s sour cherries

Published on January 4, 2008 in Colorado women and Small town life. 0 Comments

Miss Roberta, 94, lives alone in a house down the road. She brought dessert when she came to dinner on Christmas Eve, thanks to a barter gone wrong.

Roberta and I often discuss how different things were back when she was growing up on a ranch. These days, people prefer to buy their fruit in the supermarket. There are apple trees all through town, but those apples are piled in the alleyways for the bears to eat while people buy apples in the grocery store shipped all the way from Washington State. She just can’t understand it.

As it happens, the local bakery Bread can use any amount of local fruit with no notice, but they don’t pay: they let you have lots of bread and pastries for free. They’ll barter but they won’t buy.

When Roberta was 92, she got fixated on the dual ideas that her sour cherries were worth $40, and that the bakery would buy them. There was nothing to say about it. She paid her 65 year old handyman to strip the tree-he didn’t say a word–and I took them to the bakery. I couldn’t give her cash because then she’d be wanting me to sell her cherries next summer too, so I gave the cherries to the bakery and bought Roberta a $40 gift certificate.

Roberta is about 4′8″ and 95 pounds. She’s not a big eater and doesn’t go to the bakery. The gift certificate sat in her drawer for two years, and I remembered it after I invited her over for Christmas Eve dinner.

I offered to pick up a fancy bakery dessert if she wanted to use the gift certificate, and she was tickled by the thought. She ruffled through her desk looking for that two-year-old certificate, but it wasn’t there. And then she opened the top drawer of her dresser, and pulled it right out. At 94, she knew this day would come, and she was right.

I picked her up a Linzertorte for 12 ($18), and the gift certificate went back in her dresser drawer for another year. Miss Roberta is prepared for nearly all occasions.

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