Meeting Challenges/Why I Write

Ready for a Challenge!

I thought I was well prepared for cold weather and was not surprised on Monday morning to learn that the outdoor temperature was a frigid three degrees Fahrenheit, not expected to rise above 10 degrees by afternoon. After all, that’s what the forecast had shown in preceding days. And it is January in northern Michigan. So, from under the bedcovers, with coffee and book and dog at hand, it seemed like a pretty ordinary winter morning until, finally, I noticed that the bedroom was colder than it should be, the house unusually quiet. Why wasn’t the furnace blower coming on? Up to investigate! Only 45 degrees in the living room? Even I am not that frugal! 

 

Four days earlier I’d checked the outdoor propane tank and called to order a refill, but no way could I have gone through 20% of a tank in four days! Checked the circuit breaker box. No problem there. Emergency call to my furnace guy (had to leave a message), and then Sunny and I went out for a very short, quick run. As snow quickly turned to ice between her paw pads, she gave me no argument about cutting short our first sortie of the day.

I won’t go through my Monday morning hour-by-hour but instead will cut directly to the chase to say that the furnace guy found the propane tank was empty, after all. I’d probably gotten a false reading from the gauge, he said, sharing that his home tank gauge had once read zero when the tank turned out to be 85% full. I called for propane delivery once again, explaining the emergency situation, and by 12:30 p.m. my house was on its way back to normal. By 2:30 the chicken I’d planned to cook in the big cast iron pot, braising with it vegetables, was at last underway, and I’d managed to read almost 40 pages of Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., much of that reading accomplished—before the propane delivery—with a sleeping bag over my legs, throw around my shoulders, wool scarf around my neck, and knitted cap on my head. 

 

Life lesson: No one is coming to save us. Now that’s not 100% true, is it? After all, the furnace guy came, and the propane delivery came, and my goose would have been cooked—no, frozen!—without them. But, no one made the calls for me or unearthed the space heaters to aim at pipes under kitchen and bathroom sinks or filled the bathtub and kitchen sink and washing machine with hot water to keep things under control until the situation was resolved. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth wouldn’t have gotten any of those jobs done. Wishin’ and hopin’ and dreamin’ would not have accomplished a thing.

 

People are often asked what advice they would give to their younger selves, if such a thing were possible. I’d say, “Cowgirl up! What’s the first step? Take it! Then take it from there.” 

 

When someone says “Cowgirl Up!” it means rise to the occasion, don’t give up, and do it all without whining. [Source of quote online here.]

 

Sometimes, honestly, the first step is hard to see. What does need doing? What should I do? For me, even if I can’t see right away the first step to resolve a particular situation, there’s always something that needs doing. It may be completely unrelated, but experience has taught me (I only wish it hadn’t taken so long!) that doing anything constructive, even if it’s nothing more than cleaning the bathtub, makes me feel more effective, more capable in general, and that staves off the paralysis of helplessness and hopelessness. 

 

That’s probably the reason I keep writing these blog posts, these little-noticed bits of thought that I toss out into the great uncharted ocean of humanity, like messages in bottles, without knowing if they will ever even make landfall. Writing is something I feel capable of doing, and when I do it, I feel more capable of dealing with life in general. 

Strength comes from dreams, too.

Back to the Ghost Town

Return to the West, VI: Back to the Ghost Town

How often this past winter I have returned in memory and imagination to last winter in Dos Cabezas! It would not be everyone’s dream getaway, as it was, quite literally, a ghost town: we had to drive fourteen miles (to a real town) to find so much as a cup of coffee, let alone library, post office, and stores; we only met four neighbors during our entire three months’ residence; we had no cell phone signal; and traffic on the two-lane highway past the cabin was limited to other inhabitants of ghost town and neighboring ranches; travelers between Willcox and the Chiricahua National Monument; U.S. Border Patrol vehicles; and cows.

“Cows,” the generic Western label for adult cattle, regardless of sex, and whether natural or “fixed.” Cows and calves. Beyond the area of scattered houses and adobe ruins the land was fenced to keep cattle in, but Dos Cabezas itself, paradoxically, was open range, with cattle guards across the highway at both ends of town. Anyone who wanted to keep cows out of their yards or gardens had to put up their own fences.

The cabin we rented sat high off the highway. It looked down on the highway in front and off through the wash to the mountains in back. In front were two big metal livestock gates, painted green, but no fence surrounding the property. Cows could, and therefore did, come right up to the door. Cow patties could, and did, appear anywhere the cows went.

Javelinas, locally known as “pigs,” were a different matter. Classified as a game animal, javelinas could not be killed except by hunters with a proper license, and permitted numbers were limited, which was a problem because the pigs were notorious garden raiders and despoilers. Coyotes, on the other hand, not classified as game, could be killed without a license in unlimited numbers by various means. No doubt there was a logic to the distinction, but it escaped me.

Our neighbors had gardens and so were pestered by javelinas. We never saw evidence of them around the cabin. Coyotes we heard in the distance regularly, but we were used to that from northern Michigan. Birds, lizards, once a rock squirrel – those were the wildlife we saw. Since we were there in winter, we were not troubled by rattlesnakes or scorpions.

The ghost town, at any rate, was open range to animals wild and domestic.

Once laid out in a grid, with streets and house plats, the ghost town had once had its own school and post office and stores. In its early days, it was on the stage line; later a railroad served the area. Mining was responsible for the boom years, but no great amounts of gold or silver or copper were ever taken, and at last hopeful prospectors went elsewhere, leaving the town to wither and die. Old railroad ties used as fenceposts were one sign of the past, coils of barbed wire another, but the most obvious and picturesque were the ruins of adobe houses and stores. Crumbling adobe walls we looked to as a landmark stood at the bottom of our driveway. Elsewhere nearby, rotted wooden sills marked places where buildings had stood, craters (some fenced to keep cattle from falling in, others unfenced) all that was left of old dug wells. Antique automobile carcasses begged to be photographed, so as not to be forgotten.

Across the road from our cabin was a B&B, but that house, like our cabin, was set far back from the road, and we never saw anyone we could identify positively as B&B guests. Next door to the B&B, also a long way off the highway, was the home of a young couple; the husband was a mechanic, but his shop was in the town of Willcox. As it happened, our 2000 Toyota needed work more than once, and that mechanic was a lifesaver. Once I walked across the highway and up the drive to their house, hoping to meet the mechanic’s wife, but no one came to the gate when I called. Oddly, their dog, lying silently in the shade of the house, did not bark once at my presence. I call that odd because that dog barked every morning about 5 a.m. and at other irregular intervals through the day and night. He barked long before the rooster crowed the sun up. But when a stranger came to the gate? Silence.

Not far past the B&B and the mechanic’s house was the home of the French-Canadian handyman and his wife. Monsieur Jean, as we called him, was another of our Arizona lifesavers. It was Monsieur Jean who replaced the nonworking refrigerator in the cabin for us and loaned us a television and hooked up the antenna to bring in, without cable or dish, as many as twenty stations, including PBS. We owed much of our knowledge of the neighborhood to Monsieur Jean and his wife, a very cordial couple.

Another neighbor, who had inherited from his father property that met, at the corners, the property where our rented cabin sat, was Señor Dan. Some days I would be outdoors talking with Dan while David was deep in conversation indoors with Jean, and later we would compare notes and share what we had learned. It was all “Dan says” and “Jean says,” and I tried to make notes so as not to forget it all.

Those were the neighbors we knew to greet by name, neighbors with whom we conversed: Jean and Cheryl, Dan, and Jared. Others we knew only through stories those four shared with us.

Dan told me people in Dos Cabezas pretty much left each other alone except for the annual cemetery cleanup, an event that included a potluck meal. The cemetery and annual cleanup and potluck seemed to be the community life, from what we gathered, but maybe the ranchers had their own social life. We heard there were some arts and crafts people, and perhaps they got together now and then. But there was no gathering place in the ghost town – no church, no community center, no fire hall.

Still, it was a place, with an identity distinct from Willcox and the rest of Cochise County. People with history in the ghost town felt the ties keenly, particularly those with relatives buried in the old cemetery.

It was a mile from our cabin to the cemetery. One day I suggested to a friend visiting from Michigan that we walk that mile and back. The wind was strong and piercing, and by the time we got back to the cabin the air was filled with horizontal snow, the only snow we saw in Arizona except for what remained high on mountain peaks.

From either direction, approaching either from the north-northwest, from Willcox, or from the Chiricahuas to the south-southwest, entry into Dos Cabezas was clearly delineated by a cattle guard across the highway, a sign announcing Dos Cabezas, and another sign saying “Go Slow – Save a Cow.” From Willcox, the road climbed, and from Chiricahua one wound down into lower elevations, but either way, the cattle guard and signs clearly marked the edge of the ghost town. Whether ascending or descending, from wherever else we had spent the day, when we reached the signs and the cattle guard I felt, happily, that we were home again, but the feeling was most intense when we came from the Chiricahuas, late in the evening, and the scattered lights of houses and ranches sparkled quietly on the darkling desert below us while the stars twinkled in the blackness above. Dear little ghost town!

That feeling lasted three months, until the morning came for us to say good-by to the high desert and make our way across the Great Plains and the Midwest and around the Great Lakes to our home in northern Michigan, there to take up, once again, our well-established life, rich in friends and meaningful work. For months, the ghost town felt almost unreal. And then our Michigan winter came upon us, and my heart began to look back West.

How Long Is a Day?

Return to the West, II: How Long Is a Day?

Information on times for sunrise and sunset are readily available for any intersection of latitude and longitude, for any day of the year, but clock times given don’t take into account trees, hills, mountains, or canyons. Here in Michigan, someone living deep in the woods, west of a high, wooded ridge will experience sunrise much later than a Lake Huron shoreline dweller. Dark comes earlier in the woods, too. The beginning and end of a Michigan day are gradual, anyway, even along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, often with subtle, soft edges and muted tints.

Desert and mountain sunrises and sunsets are more tropical – at least, from what I’ve read of the tropics. They are not, except on the occasional cloudy morning or evening, long drawn-out affairs. The sky grows light before the sun itself appears, but once up that sun is anything but subtle. So, too, when it drops below the western horizon at day’s end, dark is a sudden presence. (Absence of light = presence of dark.)

On this spring Sunday in northern Michigan, with cold, grey skies promising a gloomy day, precipitation probable, I remember very different mornings, those of our ghost town cabin in the high desert. In Dos Cabezas, if I woke when the sky was still dark, the lights of distant houses and ranches winked against the blackness, as they had the evening before. Slowly, then, gradually, unrelieved blackness would give way to indistinct, shadowy hills. At first the mountains were more suspicion than reality, themselves untrustworthy, but when at last the sun set fire to the mountain horizon the light would be instantly implacable, flat and white and pitiless, and the reality of the mountains revealed – falsely, of course, as we know from geology lessons -- as immutable.

After a night cold enough to make gas heat welcome in the cabin, morning remained cool enough that I habitually wore a heavy, rough suede jacket lined with wool fleece for the day’s initial sortie, a walk with my dog down into the dry wash. The Philadelphia Wash, one of the neighbors called it. Like rivers and creeks in Michigan, the washes in Arizona have names, though it is generally only the locals who know them. In summer storms dangerous torrents of water from the mountains rush through: in winter only patterns in the sand show where water sometimes flows. The wash was easier walking than the desert itself, because beyond the wash one must thread carefully through mesquite and catclaw (jacket and boots necessary protection), and the ground throughout our part of Dos Cabezas was littered with strands and pieces of rusty barbed wire, rusty old tin cans, and all kinds of broken glass, remnants of an old dump as well as the ghost town itself, with wire fences strung to keep cows out of various parcels of property.

Down in the dry wash, in midwinter, where frost inhabited shaded areas until they were reached by sunlight, morning’s bird was the pyruloxxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal,” singing from bare branches of leafless winter scrub oaks. The color palette of the winter high desert was limited to dusty browns and greys and grey-greens, relieved only by the bright green of creosote bush. Day or night, the smell was of dust. Sometimes, also, if they were near the cabin, there was the living fragrance of cows. The creosote bush, if brushed against, had its own strong smell, of course, but the primary smells were, first dust, second cows.

(Later in the season, furry leaves of the little bajada lupine, a beautiful flower at close range but low and small enough to be easily overlooked, offered drops of dew, held carefully like transparent glass beads. Tiny, delicate toadflax and stands of frail desert leeks, both with heavenly light-blue flowers, cast slender shadows on the ground. Primrose opened wide to the morning, some yellow, others almost white but lightly tinted pink. None of the early spring blooms of the high desert are large or showy. All are shy and close to the ground, living, it seems, on the scant moisture from morning dew.)

The heat of midday brought with it the illusion that the afternoon sun stood unchanging for hours, but spending those hours around the cabin dispelled the illusion, demonstrating by movement of shade that the sun too was moving across the cloudless sky. The front steps, facing south, however, were always in full sun, the tiny back deck, under an extension of the roof, looking off to the Cabezas, always shaded.

Every morning my first self-appointed task was to make coffee. As soon as darkness began to leak away, I would begin opening venetian blinds -- those on the east opened last and never all the way, because David liked to stay in bed later, the two west windows and one north over the sink all the way as soon as the sun was up.

Windows and blinds facing south were most judiciously and gradually adjusted, slats tilted to let in light but guard privacy (although the road was some distance from the cabin), the tilt monitored and changed little by little until finally maximum light streamed in. Before we left for the day’s adventures, however, we closed those south blinds tight, for while morning’s warmth was comforting, a full afternoon of sunlight would have turned the small cabin into an oven by later in the day.

When we came home in late afternoon, we would slide a few windows open from the bottom and open the south blinds partway, on a slant, permitting evening air to circulate until sunset (which came on early in January and gradually later as the weeks went by), when I closed all windows and blinds tight again, this time to hold in whatever of the day’s heat remained. As the season advanced, we also took to leaving the heavy front and back doors of the cabin open in the evenings so that air might pass through the cabin by way of the screen doors, taking away the heat of the day.

During the day, a large mirror above the gas heater faced the front door, and the mirror would reflect and intensify the south light in the cabin’s interior. There was no excluding the sun. Even with the blinds fully closed, the days were awash in light. Meanwhile, monitoring and adjusting light and air through windows and blinds was an integral part of each desert day’s ritual, and I relished the task, set for me by the sun and mountains rather than by any capricious human mandate.

At night, against the endless black of the sky, the shining stars far outnumbered those even in our northern Michigan sky, while cows continued to shuffle around the cabin, grazing in the dark. Off in the distance rose a coyote chorus, sounding much farther from the cabin than our northern Michigan coyotes sound from our old farmhouse, where they seem to be serenading us from below our bedroom window, though it’s doubtful they are any closer than the willow-lined creek. 

Stars and coyotes in the high desert – so familiar, so like home, and yet reminding us constantly that we were somewhere else, very far from home.

Two Good, Super-Easy, Cold Weather Dishes

Day 2, more than half-gone

These recipes would make fall and winter suppers, too, but there are plenty of cold days in early spring, don’t forget (check that outdoor thermometer today!), so when you haven’t had time to shop and won’t have anything in the garden for weeks yet, here’s something you can throw together from what’s in the pantry.

Day One: Quick Turkey Stew on Rice

(Double or triple recipe for large family or crowd. I cook for two.)

1 lb. ground turkey

½ large onion, chopped

Brown turkey and onion in skillet. Transfer to large pot and add:

1 can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 can sweet corn (not creamed), drained

1 can diced tomatoes, drained

1 small can tomato sauce

chili powder to taste

salt to taste

Optional: sliced or chopped jalapeno peppers to taste (or these can be added later by individuals to their bowls).

Serve on hot rice, with sour cream and Tabasco sauce on the table as condiments.

Day Two: Turkey Pot Pie

Grease a pie pan (size will depend on amount of leftovers you have from Day One) and spread leftovers evenly in the pan. Mix ingredients below for topping. Note: The amounts given are half what would make a square pan of cornbread because you don’t want the topping too thick.

Cornbread Topping

½ C + 2 Tbsp. unbleached flour

¼ C + 2 Tbsp. yellow cornmeal

2 Tbsp. granulated sugar

¼ tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking powder

1 egg

½ cup milk

2 Tbsp. oil

Spread cornbread batter over turkey stew to cover. Bake at 400 degrees, 20 -30 minutes, until cornbread topping is browned and crisp. Serve hot. Dig in!

True comfort food

My Winter Garments of Repentance

Begin with a warm coat. Forget the ski jacket. You want a coat that goes at least down to your knees, and it must have a lining. Pockets are essential--

the deeper the better.

Heavy barn coat with warm lining and deep pockets

But on the coldest days even a long coat isn't enough. 

You need leggings 

(over cozy, drawstring exercise pants 

over your jeans over your tights).

Leggings

Keeping hands warm is important. 

You can't keep your hands in your pockets outdoors and get very far, 

so good, heavy, lined gloves are a must.

Gloves

Then there are the days when a little cap isn't enough--

not if you're going to stay outdoors any length of time at all. 

That's when you throw all concern for fashion out the window and-- 

dress like a lumberjack! 

This wool helmet is fleece lined and has earflaps and a fold-down forehead visor.

Wool helmet and warm scarf

Face mask

David thinks my face mask looks scary.
Doesn't it appear to be smiling?
There are days outdoors when I would not be smiling without it!

The "Outfit"!

And there you have it--at least from head to knees....

Boots--ESSENTIAL!

But don't forget boots, and they must be lined, waterproof, and warm! 

If head, hands, and feet are warm, you'll be fine.

Options for warmer days

Of course not every winter day is an Arctic day,

and on warmer days a light cap and less bulky mittens will do,

especially in the sun.

Not pictured here are the warm socks or underlayers for body and legs.

The rest of my outdoor kit included 

a folding beach chair (carried in its own case with shoulder strap),

binoculars,

sketchbook,

pen, pencils, eraser, and pencil sharpener.