Wither Crops, Hopes, Humanity, and Quail...

 The Oklahoma wheat harvest is under way, and it's expected to be one of the worst - if not the worst - on record. This time of year we should be covered up with custom cutter crews and wheat trucks and combines in the fields. Instead, many of those wheat fields have either been hayed, turned out to cattle or turned into patches of cracked, bare earth.

Bread's gonna get dear, so now may be a good time to go on that low-carb diet...except that when I was picking up dog food at the feed store last week the sweet, tough, leathery 'ol gal who runs the place told me that more and more ranchers were being forced to reduce or even sell out their herds for lack of grass and water. It's been that way for a while now, of course, but the pace is apparently picking up. The local livestock auction has been a busy place lately. So instead of low-carb, paleo, vegetarian, or whatever, now may actually be a good time to start transitioning yourself to the hottest new diet soon to be sweeping the world. It's called the climate-change diet. It's very simple: you starve until you achieve your desired weight, then you continue starving until you die, because there's nothing to eat. And when you do find temporary sources of food, you eat whatever the hell you can find, when you can find it, where you can find it, while you can find it. And the great thing is, all that binging is completely guilt-and-consequence free, because soon enough you'll start the starvation phase of the diet all over again. Cheery, huh?

But damn, I'm digressing here at a rate rivaling Antarctic ice melt rates. Back to quail and rain...    

While perusing the festivities at one of the recent PF/QF Pheasant Fests, I got to hear a number of interesting seminar talks about quail conservation, but two in particular that stick out for me were talks given by, respectively, a biologist from the state of Missouri and Dale Rollins at the Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch. The Missouri biologist talked about the detrimental effects of spring rains on quail populations, then Dr. Rollins talked (briefly, because his seminar was on another topic) about how in contrast to Missouri, there's just no such thing as too much rain in west Texas (and by extension, Western Oklahoma), for quail or people.

And thus is how the bobwhite quail (and us) rises and falls on the dusty, arid plains of Comancheria. Live by the raindrop, die by the raindrop. And there have been damn few raindrops falling on my head lately. The picture above is of the rain gauge in my back yard. That three-quarters of an inch of precious liquid represents the sum total of our May rainfall. We were supposed to get two to three inches this weekend. This is what we got instead. Thankfully for the folks directly south of here, they did get several inches, and if anything, they needed it more desperately than us. I spent last week driving the roads in and around Black Kettle National Grasslands (about an hour or so south of here) and much of that country looks like the surface of Mars, whereas in these parts we merely resemble the interior of Death Valley.

Moreover, last week the entire southern portion of my main quail hunting area burned in a massive wildfire. I drove by there not long after, and just about cried. I live in a sandy region. I know how incredibly fragile is that thin skim of crust atop the ancient dunes that cover this area. I know how easily and quickly that sand can start blowing away if it gets grubbed out by too many cattle, broken by plows, scraped clean for a well pad, or torn up by the wheels of the ATV crowd. But to see that sand exposed on such a massive scale is startling, to say the least. In the space of a single afternoon, thousands of acres of habitat that - despite the drought - was still going to be important nesting habitat this spring and summer, was incinerated and turned into a sea of dunes. So much burned so completely that the state transportation department had to place signs warning motorists of blowing dust conditions.

Yes, fire is a natural and necessary (and too-little used) part of the prairie ecology, and we need much, much more of it, but the difference these days is we're just not getting the rainfall needed to regenerate any growth after those fires. Further complicating things, the composition of the prairie plant biome itself (what little of it remains) has changed drastically over the past hundred or so years. More invasives and weeds, fewer true native prairie grasses with those amazing root systems that anchor the soil. So the soil just sits there, untethered, barren, drying out, and blowing away.

And so, too, are my hopes for this coming fall. After last spring's timely and relatively abundant rains and the subsequent modest increase in quail numbers, I thought this year - weather permitting -  would be one for the books. But weather is damn sure not permitting. At least not yet. It's not too late, I suppose, to turn things around, but I think I can hear too late coming over the horizon if we don't get more rain.

So I dump out the rain gauge, sigh, and with the Reaperish specter of the coming summer hovering over my distant fall hopes, look to the skies and ask the winds for rain while muttering under my breath about ammo, toilet paper or possibly moving to a nice Scandinavian country like Norway...     

Buddhism Tells Us...

 ...that nothing is permanent, and to think otherwise is Ozymandias-level folly. I guess that also includes blog hiatuses. Yes, it really has been almost two months since I last posted, and if I'm honest I hadn't exactly been burning up the blog in the time leading up to the layoff. What can I say? Creativity, desire, discipline, interest, they all ebb and flow, wax and wane, come and go as they please, and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it, at least until Big Pharma finally creates a boner pill for creativity. You wake up and you either want to write, or you don't. Lately, I've been in "don't" mode. Now I'm trying to ease the dial back over into "want" mode.

So what have I been up to during my literary hiatus?I also took on a really unique and interesting short-term contract non-writing job with the intention of turning said unique and interesting non-writing job into a unique and interesting feature story.

Can't say much about it now, as I've signed an NDA for the job, but hopefully after the contract's up I can sell a spec piece on the experience. Think "Arrested Development" meets "The Worst Hard Time" and that's kinda what I'm shooting for. Yes, it's an odd combination, but it's an odd job.

What else? As part of the job I flew to San Francisco for a few days, then road tripped home, and in the process finally got to see a few things I've always wanted to see, as well as a few more I hadn't seen in way too long.

A few takeaways:

My first visit there, and California is easily the most diverse and complex state I've visited. Texas, in typical Texas fashion, likes to brag that it's a whole other country. It's not, except in the mind of Texans, but California really is. Fascinating state. Not sure I'd ever want to live there (the eternal bleating proclamation of the terminally meek and provincial!) but it's damn sure a place worth exploring and knowing about.

I didn't see much of San Francisco proper, but what I saw was very lovely, except for the traffic, which was very ugly, and curiously - at least to this truck-drivin' Okie, almost completely bereft of pick-ups. No, really. I hardly saw a pick-up at all, other than commercial trucks, in San Francisco. Doesn't anyone in the Bay area drive a damn truck? What's wrong with you people?

Silicon Valley is its own weird world with its own weird culture, utterly alien to a rube like myself. I didn't like it at all. Too... something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Smug, maybe? A bit like Boulder, Colorado, writ way large. However, in spending a couple days there I noticed some striking and hilarious similarities between the average Oklahoma oilfield worker and the average Silicon Valley tech worker, most of those similarities based on the insularity and cultishness of their respective worlds and the fact that they both make roughly the same outlandish amount of money. Of course they spend it in completely different ways, but they're walking, talking, cliches, both of them. And really, techies, you need to eat some protein or something, because you all resemble twigs. 

The San Joaquin Valley is one of the most fundamentally altered landscapes I believe I've ever driven through. At least now I know where my almonds come from, and the price this place and its workers (including some ancestors of mine) have paid to make it so. I stopped in Bakersfield for lunch, and considered trying to find Merle Haggard's childhood home, but was pressed for time and so I didn't. I consoled myself by blasting disc two of "Down Every Road" as I left Bakersfield and the endless monoculture stoop labor depression of the valley behind me, climbing up, up over Tehachapi pass and down into the shimmering heat of the Mojave with Merle's bourbony voice ringing in my ears...  

"My daddy plowed the ground and prayed that someday he could leave this run-down mortgaged Oklahoma farm, and then one night I heard my daddy sayin' to my momma that he'd finally saved enough to go, California was his dream, a paradise for he had seen, pictures in magazines that told him so.

California cotton fields, where labor camps were filled with worried men with broken dreams, California cotton fields, as close to wealth as daddy ever came."

The Mojave desert is as starkly and fearsomely beautiful as I have always imagined it to be. I fell instantly in love with it. If I were single, childless and responsibility-free, I'd quit my job, sell whatever possessions I couldn't fit in a jeep or a land cruiser, and literally lose myself in that region for a good long while, chasing feverish, shimmering desert rat dreams, perhaps never to return.

After coming down off the pass and its thousands of wind turbines, I briefly turned south and drove into the town of Mojave, just because I liked the name. Later, as I drove along Highway 58 across the northern edge of Edwards Air Force base, a B-2 flew directly overhead, then banked low and disappeared south toward some secret destination within that mysterious shaded area on the atlas. 

Somewhere near Barstow, where I spent the night, I drove a lonely, long-abandoned section of the Mother Road under a brilliant high desert night sky, just to say that I had, then turned onto a side road, killed the car and sat on the hood for a bit watching the stars, listening to the passing traffic on I-40 and contemplating things of importance only to me. At that very moment no one in the world - not even my wife - knew where I was. Sorry, aliens, You had your chance. I was ripe for the abducting, and you blew it. I took one last look around so as to always remember the sight of Joshua trees glowing in moonlight, then I got in my car, drove back to Barstow, ate one last In-N-Out burger (standard tourist menu, no secret menu knowledge here), drank a beer or three, and went to bed. It was a good night. I will go back there someday, before I die, and leave my footprints in lonely places.

A few more takeaways:

The drive from Barstow to Needles is long, lonely and gorgeous, if you're into lots of space and not a lot of people, towns or traffic. Check all three for me. That's my kind of interstate highway. 

The high prairie vista that assaults the eyes as you come back down onto the plains heading east out of Flagstaff, Arizona is one of the most beautiful I've seen, so much so that I had to pull over at a roadside rest stop, clamber onto the rock outcropping behind the rest stop (Caution! Animals found in this area can be venomous!) and sit on a wind-smoothed ochre boulder soaking in the immensity for a few minutes (schedule be damned!) as endless waves of fat, bored motorists trundled into the pissers below me, emptied their bladders, waited as their useless little yappy dogs emptied their bladders (where's a golden eagle when you need one?), then hurriedly got back in their cars without so much as a glance at the mind-blowing beauty stretching out in all directions before them. Their loss.

New Mexico, where I spent significant chunks of my childhood, remains - mile for mile - the most achingly gorgeous state in the union. I spent the night in Gallup, and after a good meal at a local place, I walked up and down the main drag past rows of pawn shops and panhandlers, just taking in the intoxicating differentness of culture and place, this one just a few hundred miles from my own, yet vibrating at such a divergent frequency. Later that evening, I sat at the big window in my third-floor hotel room at the very end of town on a thin strip of undeveloped land between I-40 and the main road. I watched travelers whizzing by on the highway to my right, while to my left three native boys, teenagers, by the looks of them, tried to thumb a ride on the state road leading out of town (to where, I wondered?) as evening's shadows deepened on the rocks. No one stopped to pick them up, and eventually their forms disappeared into horizon and night.

The sight of the Sandias looming over the desert is the best thing, in my mind, about Albuquerque. My brother and I used to spend part of our summers in Albuquerque, shuffling between there and Farmington - where my dad lived - depending on his work schedule. Sometimes on weekends we'd drive up to Sandia Peak and have a picnic. When we couldn't, I'd roam the desert wastelands near my grandparents' house looking for reptiles. It was, and is, a lovely area, but even then I remembered Albuquerque proper as a horrid city in a beautiful place (as most cities are) and some twenty-five years later, driving through at the peak of rush hour, I saw no reason, no reason at all, to modify that long-ago adolescent assessment. Windows up, seat belt on, and foot on the gas is the best way to experience Albuquerque. 

Crossing into the Texas panhandle I realized that virtually all the kitschy roadside shops and businesses I remember desperately wanting to stop at as a child are now gone. Hell, even Stuckey's is out of business. Of course, remembering their food I can see why. Most serial nostalgics pan the interstate highway system as cold and impersonal, and I guess it is. I'm way too young to remember Route 66, however, so for me I-40 has always been my ersatz version of the Mother Road. It was the route we always took to visit my dad's family in New Mexico, and later, after the divorce, my dad. I have many fond memories of I-40, but while I have visited New Mexico a number of times since then, I've not had occasion to drive I-40 from Amarillo west in some twenty-five years. So many things have changed, though thankfully not the landcape itself, mostly.

I turned north at Amarillo, back into my country, into the high, arid plains where interstates and their long, unbroken lines of motorized ants give way to two-lane blacktops, farm-to-market roads and obligatory steering-wheel waves to oncoming traffic. East of White Deer I stopped to check out a large playa lake that I always used to give a look to when we'd visit friends in Amarillo. On one such drive years before, I observed more pintails on and above that playa than I'd ever seen at one time in my life. Wave after glistening wave of ducks augered into the shallow water, while above them even more pintails circled and undulated in what the dumbshit stars and aficionados of avian snuff films like to call a "duck tornado" but what I (stealing from the Brits and their damn starlings) prefer to call a murmuration.

There were no murmurations today. Just the keening wind and the roar of oilfield traffic. No ducks, no shorebirds, no water and no life, even though it was the middle of April, ostensibly the rainy season. The playa was dry, just a vast, dusty bowl of heat and nothing, which pretty much describes the whole region at the moment, and perhaps longer, probably much longer, if that vast, evil, world-wide conspiracy of climate scientists and their pesky, goddamned facts are to be believed.

I got back in my car and drove deeper into the empty plains, silently contemplating the inscrutable mysteries of climate doom, In-N-Out burgers and the death of roadside kitsch as I steering-wheel waved to friendly strangers the whole way home. It was a good trip.
   

Good Words, Good Weapons...

Those of you who know me, know that I've long had the dream to find some nice, mid-sized university town in a western state with lots of nearby public land for hunting, fishing, and roaming, and open up a used book and gun shop. I've even laid out my vision here

What I envision is a bookshop where you can browse the stacks for books, then walk over to the gun rack to check out the used shotguns or maybe take a look at the vintage Ambassadeurs in the reel case.

Yep, a combination used book, gun and tackle shop. The kind of place where you can walk out the door with an obscure first-printing, a box of AAs and a classic pre-owned baitcasting reel, all in the same bag. In essence a literary and sporting junk shop. I think it sounds cool, and it's the kind of quirky, off-beat place I've always been drawn to. Not too stuffy, tradition-bound or pretentious, but not too weird. Just a mellow, funky spot for freethinkers, hippies, gun nuts, literate rednecks, bookworms, fishing bums or anyone else who possesses an artistic bent and an appreciation for firepower and spinnerbaits.

Well, it looks like someone else is living my dream. or was, at one time. The date on the ad for the coin guidebook says 1969, so perhaps rather than being forward-thinking, I'm actually way behind the times. Either way, it's cool...

A picture that FB friend and blog reader Todd Shaffer posted on FB. Now this is my kind of book store...

A Movie About Wannabe Writers? Why Not?

I've never - aside from the thousands of fairly typical, late-night, beer-and/or coffee-fueled conversations with the like-minded friends of my high school, college and near post college years - been a part of a "writer's group" or anything similarly high-minded. Not that I'm opposed to the concept, but I started writing decidedly non-creative, non-artistic, workaday yeoman's copy for money while still in college and have been doing it pretty much non-stop since. As a result, the creative, nurturing, let's-talk-about-our feelings-and-such group setting of the typical writer's group is totally foreign to me.

Which is why I want to see this movie.




I know nothing of the movie itself, but anything starring Jonathan Banks (Mike from Breaking Bad) or Dennis Farina can't be all bad, right? What I'd really like to see is Christopher Guest do a movie about aspiring writers, but until that happens this is what we've got.

 Anyone ever been part of a writer's group? We've got a local writer's group in my town comprised almost wholly of sweet, blue-haired Republican grandmothers writing Christian romance, heartwarming Billie Letts-esque light fiction and books about quilting. I thought I might join and see if I could get some feedback on my Chuck Palahniuk-inspired experimental fiction...

Water, Water No Where...

Nor any drop to drink...

A few weeks back I wrote a little blog post about the ongoing drought on the southern plains. Well, it's still here, and yesterday when the winds in this part of the world were gusting to almost sixty, the dust got so bad that out in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, they had to lower the snow gates on the main highway north into Colorado.

From this story in The Oklahoman

BOISE CITY — Spring break travelers driving through the Oklahoma Panhandle on Tuesday might want to choose a new route.

Northbound U.S. 287 in Boise City is closed and the snowgates placed down because of blowing dirt that resulted in zero visibility, said C.F. David, managing editor of the Boise City News.

Zero visibility on a sunny afternoon. Think about what it means to achieve something like that. And the beat goes on, here and elsewhere. Read Slate's Eric Holthaus' excellent (so far) series on drought in the west for a glimpse into the future of just one area.

But back to mine...

Several years back, while coming home from an assignment at Black Mesa (Oklahoma's highest point, which is in the NW corner of Cimarron County) I decided, on a lark, to drive the lone public road that traverses the northern half of Cimarron County.

Contrary to the popular image of flatness, this is pure mesa country, a geographic anomaly that extends in a finger pointing east from the canyonlands of northeast New Mexico across the northern border of the Oklahoma panhandle until elevation and contour are finally vanquished by the inexorable flatitude of the plains a few miles east of US 287. That highway, the same one closed yesterday by dust, is where this lone county road finally terminates some miles north of Boise City, Oklahoma. It is a staggeringly beautiful, incredibly remote and almost completely unpeopled region. Some of the darkest skies in North America are found here, which is why one of the nation's largest stargazing parties calls Black Mesa country home.  There are no towns, no other roads, no houses. Just heat, stone, sky and solitude. My kind of place.

The road quickly degenerated into a rutted, washed-out, low-gear two-track that wound through low-water crossings and deep, winding pinyon canyons begging to be explored. I spent the entire afternoon lost (metaphysically if not completely physically) in that enchanting world and never saw another soul, never passed another truck, never heard anything relating to Man or the outside world. A few hours later, I finally made the highway, pulled south onto US 287 and left it behind. I've been back to Black Mesa country a number of times since then, but haven't driven that county road again. I've made tentative plans to return to Black Mesa later this spring on a promised camping trip with my oldest son, and I may have to drive that road one more time before the land, ruthlessly transformed over the years into something it was never meant to be, completely blows away.

Water will be the defining issue of the future. Everywhere, for everyone. For many of us, it is quickly becoming the defining issue of the present. We are living in interesting times, indeed, and they're getting interestinger by the day...     

I'm Not Dead!

To quote the poor, soon-to-be-dead serf in Monty Python's The Holy Grail. But I have been busy on a couple long-form writing projects the past month or so, and as a result have been somewhat neglectful of the blog. Unfortunately, that's a trend that will probably continue for at least the next few weeks. But I'll be back.
Eh, not like there's a helluva lot going on, anyway...

Great Last Graph Thursday...*

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

                                                                             Cormac McCarthy

* with apologies for the recycled brook trout pic. I've got others. Just damn laziness today.

Firewood Gettin'

Back in late October, I was having a spirited debate with a large tree concerning our differing views on the law of the conservation of energy and how it should apply to said tree. I was of the opinion that now was a good time for the tree's stored energy to be converted into a new state, while the tree remained rather steadfast in its belief that its energy should remain conserved in its current state.

I eventually won that debate (and if you're wondering, the orange stuff on the stump is smashed-up Halloween jack 'o lantern left out for the deer...).

 But not before the tree, perhaps given to the same sort of rage that could turn any literary, scientic, or philosophical debate deadly, tried to kill me. As a result, I wasn't really physically able to get back down to the farm to cut more wood for a couple weeks, and by then bird season had started, so I put it off, hoping that what I had already cut, split, and stacked would suffice until bird season was over. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cutting firewood, it's a very contemplative and self-satisfying endeavor. Just not as much as bird hunting.

Real woodcutters living in northern climes who cut all their wood pre-season will scoff, but living in Oklahoma, where the winters are generally mild and dry pleasantness interspersed with temporary bouts of brutal, windswept misery, I can get away with being lazy. Plus, I have a large amount of dead-standing hardwood to use, so I generally don't have to cut wood and then let it season before using it.

Unfortunately, this winter has been a whole lot colder for everyone, including us. I've burned a lot of wood. So with my firewood dwindling and a winter storm coming in this weekend, yesterday I loaded up the truck and went wood-cutting. Now I've previously written about what a pain in the ass cedar trees are when cutting firewood. And yesterday I went back and revisited the spot I wrote about in that blog post.

All the blood, sweat and tears I expended back in August clearing out this area paid off, as it actually didn't take too long to cut a pick-up load of firewood. Unfortunately, I had to carry each round, piece by piece, up out of the canyon to the truck above me...

Trust me, it's farther and higher than it looks. Or maybe I'm getting old. One or the other. I did, however, have some help from a re-purposed pair of antique ice tongs that I use to carry the larger rounds cut from the base of the tree...

They belonged to my wife's grandfather, and work as well for toting wood up hills as I'm sure they did toting those big blocks of ice. In another bit of re-purposing, I also use a pair of old railroad tie tongs that belonged to my grandfather to skid around the larger sections of wood and position them for bucking...

All in all it was a warm and agreeable wood-cutting session. I filled the back of the truck with enough stored sunshine to hopefully see us through the next few weeks, no trees attempted to murder me, the chainsaws played nice, and I even had enough time and energy left over to grab the 10/22 (stainless, walnut-stocked Mannlicher version, my favorite) and take a walk down the canyon on a quick porcupine/squirrel patrol. Nothing doing there, so I shot a few tin cans instead, walked around a bit, looked for interesting rocks, scoped out a few new spots to build stands for next year, and then went home. I've spent worse days.

Monday Morning Inspiration...

"If a person with a demonstrably ordinary mind, like mine, will devote himself to giving birth to a work of the imagination, that work will in turn tempt and tease that ordinary mind into cleverness."

                                                                                               Kurt Vonnegut

Letter to a Lout...*

To the alleged duck hunter(s) who visited the east side of my local duck-hunting spot this past weekend: I'm sure you don't care, but I picked up all the empty shell boxes, used wet wipes, plastic bags, candy wrappers, pop cans and other assorted garbage you left strewn across the parking area. You're welcome, jerks. That was right classy of you.

I kind of expect that kind of behavior from the methheads who sometimes use these isolated areas of the lake to toss out the toxic leavings of their mobile meth labs. I expect it from the littering, drunken slobs who throw their beer cans and fast-food containers out the window as they drive around the lake looking for road signs and assorted wildlife to shoot up. I even expect it from the don't-know-any-better high school kids who sometimes throw parties out here, far away from the prying eyes of their elders.

But what I don't expect is this kind of behavior from my people, fellow hunters, people who ostensibly should have the greatest respect for the land from which we derive our greatest pleasure, our sustenance, and indeed, our very meaning. Most of us have been taught to venerate our public lands, treat them like they're our own, because, well hell, they are. Maybe you're one of the "new breed" I've been running into more and more lately, and who knows, maybe you and your "crew" didn't have time to pick up after yourselves following that epic skybusting clinic you were putting on this morning (yeah, I was watching from across the lake...) 

This little piece of public ground (one I'm very fond of, by the way) offered up its treasures to you, and you responded by treating it like a dump. I don't know how you were raised, don't know what kind of role models you may or may not have had, don't know if you're congenital jackasses or if your behavior is a product of your upbringing or environment, but since it's a new year and therefore the perfect time to turn over a new leaf, here's a suggestion for a belated resolution: Try really, really hard to stop being dicks. Instead, make a concerted effort to cultivate a minimum level of class, dignity and ethics. Try mightily to refrain from being an obvious disgrace to your sport and your culture.

And if that's just too much effort for you, too much work, sacrifice or consideration, then please, just go the hell away and be an embarrassment to some other demographic. Take up some other sport, parachute-less skydiving, maybe, or perhaps nude shark-chumming. I hear golf's a fun game, and I know it's popular with many, many assclowns like yourselves. Anything, really, but hunting or any other activities requiring a small modicum of respect for wild places. Because you obviously have none to give.

* Believe it or not, I actually wrote (angrily and quickly) this blog post during last year's waterfowl season, saved it as a draft, and then promptly forgot it for over a year. So it's not actually current anger, it's past anger. I only noticed it today while I was trying to clean out some old stuff from the folder, but decided "what the hell, I dealt with the same shit this year, maybe even worse, so why not?"