How I discovered cheap domestic labor

I was living in my house for a few years before I began to wonder why I never heard bird song around my home in southeastern Colorado.

If you have ever lived in eastern Nebraska you know what it is like to wake up shortly before dawn and hear a rising chorus of birdsong that climaxes right at sunrise.

I heard that symphony over and over the summer we lived in Seward, Nebraska.  At the moment of climax, the birds would erupt in one final loud collective bird shout - and a squirrel would suddenly race across our roof.

It is something that has to be heard... it is hard to communicate how mystical and intense these morning bird chants were and likely still are.

I would wake up most mornings and hear this rising chorus of bird song that got louder and louder until that climactic moment.  And what prompted the squirrel to clatter across the roof at the peak moment I have no idea but I guess it was just an appreciative listener exploding with applause.

While eastern Nebraska is the second major flyway for birds in the United States, the dry plains of eastern Colorado don't have the songbirds of the deeper Midwest.  We do have lots of sparrows. And crows and starling. The occasional woodpecker can be heard tapping on my trees in winter. If you go out to the Bent's Fort Inn, where a previous encouraged a bird refuge, birds can be heard singing and chirping.

It occurred to me that birds never hung around my place to chirp or flitter because they had no reason to.

So I started putting out bird seed.  That did the trick.  Now they start flitting around the two feeders and peck on the ground where I scatter seed because some birds are ground feeders.

Some mornings I sit on my porch, like I did today, and watch the birds come and go.  The morning doves  fly in with grace and loud caws to drive away lesser members of their tribe. I also keep cat food on the front porch and lately a robin will sneak in to steal kitten chow I put in a food dish. He's putting one over on me, like a cat thief.

Before too long though I noticed the birds caused damage.  If some seed was put out under the tree the ground underneath was quickly churned up to dust.

Because our side of the street has no clearly defined curb and gutter, our properties just extend from our houses out to an undefined border where paving begins toward  the middle of the road. Last year a patch of grass and weeds was diligently watered to create some green buffer between my lawn, which last year was mostly a sunflower patch on the south side of my lawn.

But as the drought intensifies here, I decided to reduce my watering this year. That patch of grass and weeds toward the street parallel to the mailbox would have to go.

So over the winter I began scattering seed every day over that patch of grass and the birds would show up and scratch and peck.  Now that area is neatly groomed, thanks to the birds.

I found a way to put the birds to work and make them earn their food.

Now there is a ragged edge of grass and weed on the south edge of my unpaved rural driveway, so this morning I scattered seed there to give my feathered friends a new task. When I sat out on the porch birds would come to the normal feeding area and walk around and peck - I guess at small stones as the seeds were already gleaned.

Eventually though I expect them to discover their new work area.

And this cheap labor isn't imported either.  Just home grown American birds who are proving they want to work.  And they'll work for bird feed.

Country Life ...More Than It Seems

       The other day a dreamer in South Florida spotted my home for sale ad on the Internet. He asked if I would do a rent to own deal.

       I explained at this time I need more walking away money and cannot do a deal like that.

      I suggested he look  into the USDA Rural Development program.  They offer loans on low price properties in rural areas like this.  If you found a home for $20,000 and could buy it through them a mortgage would be around $140 a month.  A librarian came into town and her husband was in school still so they bought their house that way.

       However, I also urged him not to move here if is wife is a major source for income  as this is part of the Empty Quarter, if you are familiar with the Nine Nations of North America.  Population is sparse and widely scattered. I can my correspondent wanting to get away from all the people, which is partly why I came down here. However jobs are very sparse and in this small declining towns the locals are fighting over diminishing resources and outsiders are not always welcome unless they have outside income like retirement or have an over the road trucking job.

       Good jobs are reserved for locals. Outsiders  might have drive 30 miles to get that job, more gas and wear and tear on the car. Even locals have to look far and wide for jobs.

      I like rural life.  I do like the slower pace ....usually...and lower traffic and two lane roads that  often seem empty around here.  But while it looks nice from the outside, once you get inside you can see it is pretty competitive and sometimes desperate.  I am death on drugs...but illegal drug usage is higher in rural areas.  Despite Colorado having spectacular scenery - not down here on the plains - and wonderful cultural activities like opera, dance, drama (Denver's performing arts draws more patrons every year than the professional sports teams) the citizens have to turn to marijuana to dull their minds from the trauma of their  perceived boredom in our post modern world.

       I downshifted like this Florida man wants to do, moving my family to another small Colorado town years ago when I bought a rural weekly newspaper.  Looking back, it was a mistake. I went back to the big city after my wife became paralyzed from m.s. and there I found the resources to keep everything together until the girls got through high school and into college.

      With the nation still in depression economically, it is not so easy to just pick up and move around as it was in my youth, and I moved my family a lot.

      There are some books out there like Small Town Bound and books on how to best prepare yourself for coping with the challenges of life in small towns. Another time, when I moved to Seward, Neb. back in the early '80s the only job I could hustle up was part time news (20 hours) reporter for a weekly at $4.25 an hour.  The only other job I was offered was selling life insurance for $600 a month.  We befriended some people who had left Chicago and were trying to work their way back slowly across the country.  She found a job with a local clothing store - this was before the WalMart invasion - and though she did bookkeeping they classified her as sales so they only had to pay her three bucks an hour.

       I now live on Social Security and can afford to live in the country if I choose because the cost of living is so low.  (Because I went back to the big city after my wife became ill and had a good high wage job for 14 years that got my SS payments up from what they would have been when I was self employed in the rural country.)  

      It is good to feel called to live a rural life...but just be more aware of what its all about.  Not trying to discourage you, but enlighten you a little.  And remember, a positive attitude and strong will and some luck can overcome the challenges I have outlined.

     If I had read Gene Logsdon's books decades ago I might have done it right.  He has a vision of an America in which everyone lives on a small land holding, growing their own food.  And operating a home based cottage business for supplemental cash income. His dream of a nation of cottage farmers is a healthy one. But is more suited to the Midwest and East Coast and South rather than the arid west, except where there are pockets of irrigation. .

     But in a way that is how France envisioned it being.  More agricultural and non-tech, and that fell behind in the mechanized, highly organized modern Western national business model.

     People are now trapped in a subtly brutal post modern world.  It is easy to see how one can drive by bucolic fields of grains and cows and want to be a part of that.  But many would not last long.  Logsdon enjoys the simple pleasures of country life, watching the birds and bees and cows and sheep at play.
   
     Amish farmer David Kline captures this simply life in his journal Great Possessions.

     But whether you are in the city or the country, the truth is someone has to work...hard.    

 

Something Large, Still Unidentified....

     I still don't know what it really was.
     It was something huge, mysterious and still unidentified.
     This was back when I owned a weekly newspaper on the Colorado plains. A daughter was asleep in the
back seat of the car.  It was after dusk and a full moon was in the sky, so it was probably on the
night of the full moon, or very close to it, in September 1991.

     We had gone to Pueblo for the day and were headed home after shopping.
     We were near Arlington, which was just a post office at a ranch along Highway 96.  It was Friday and
any people in the surrounding lonesome prairie were likely at a football game in a prairie village
where people cluster under Friday night lights.  I think there was a game in Eads that night.
     As I drove, I noticed a yellow light in the sky to the north. Then I saw a separate red light. My
brain initially processed this as the lights on a low flying B-52 bomber, which used to roam this vast
section of the plains not far off the ground. They would sometimes startle a driver as one of the
huge planes suddenly appeared over them as it moved along.

     When I looked back to see if the lights had moved closer or farther, to determine which way the plane
was going, I suddenly grasped it was something else.  It was a huge cylinder stretching across the
night sky north of the highway.  The two lights were at either end of it.
     Because of the full moon I could clearly make out the skyline of the prairie to the north, toward
distant Karval which was over there somewhere.
     This huge shape was just hanging in the sky.
     Then I noted in my rear view mirrors a bright light was following behind my car, maybe a quarter mile
back.  It was going the same speed as I was.  It was this disturbing light that kept me from stopping
to take a closer look at the huge cylinder thing hanging in the sky.

     Mile after mile I drove along, feeling a little fear, I admit.  And then a railroad berm to keep snow
off the tracks rose up and I lost view of the cylinder. But the bright white light was still tracking
me.
     The headlights of an oncoming  car suddenly appeared on the horizon miles ahead, near Haswell, the
highest point in Kiowa County and from which you could glimpse the distant Rockies before the ground
descended and you lost site of them again until you got much closer to Pueblo.
      When that distant car appeared, the white light behind me suddenly stopped dead in mid air and I
started to move away from it...and the mysterious large object in the sky.

     A few days later I took my story to Gary Rehm, then sheriff of Kiowa County. I knew years earlier he
had spent many nights chasing down cattle mutilation reports through southern Colorado. I expected him
to ridicule me and my tall tale, but he just accepted what I said and told me it was good I had not
stopped.
      He said if I had stopped I would have been shot at with a laser weapon, referring to the rifles that
use a laser beam to zero in on a target.  In his opinion, he said a drug drop was going on.  And if I
had stopped that is why we would have been shot at.
     I don't think he understood the full image of what I had seen. The huge cylinder seemed to be solid.
     But years later I concede it might have been a holographic projection in the sky to scare people away
from what might have been a large truck unloading drugs somewhere on the pasture lands beneath it.
It is unlikely that an interstellar craft would have to send out what might have been a helicopter
with a bright headlight to protect it.

     So I still don't really know what I saw that night. But I still have a visual image of it in my mind.
No, I did not wake up my daughter to take a look. Something like that would have really spooked her
anyway.
     A few years later I was living in suburban Denver and one night while perusing the Internet I came
across several reports, from both the east and west coast, of giant cylindrical craft in the sky that
seemed to be three fourths of a mile long. That seemed to match the description of what I saw.  It was
like one of the cigar shaped craft George Adamski had written about years earlier in his books.
     So I went to the National UFO Reporting Center site, NUFORC, and decided to post what I had seen.
      Though the report was then several years old, it was posted and is part of their data base still, I
assume.

     That is one of the times I have seen something strange in the sky. It was the most dramatic.  Glad
what I saw that particular night has not  repeated on those many dark nights I drove home from Denver
in recent years from Limon to Rocky Ford, another long stretch of very lonely road.

People go and seasons change

        I have not been over to Tank and Tummy the last few days as it will be all different now.

        Marty's little 14 foot trailer out in the country, next to his big house that needs a lot of work, is now empty for good.  Marty passed away more than a week ago and about two weeks after his operation.  We were told the operation went well and he recovered fast, but he remained at the hospital and had turned down chemo.

     He always said when a cancer gets operated on it then spreads like fire. That is how it happened with his late wife. And that is how his played out.  He had been debating not to have the operation and just have a longer life.

      Marty was always at T and T convenience store and takeout, as it was his living room.  Last summer I spent several afternoons with him sitting in the lone little booth outside the front window.  And we would watch the world go by and chat with the occasional tourist who dropped in for gas.  We would admire their Cam Am. Though the first time one pulled in Marty said do you see that, and I said yes, referring to the shapely gal who got off the bitch seat.  But Marty had been referring to the tri-wheel bike.

      We would talk to the tourists, ask where they were from and where going as they refueled their vehicle and went in to refuel themselves or empty themselves.  We would congratulate the bow hunters hauling their trophy heads home in the trailer behind their SUV.

       He would usually go home to his trailer the hottest part of the day and sit in front of a fan and rest
to come back around dusk to take up the evening conversation.  If I stopped by at T and T, he would
usually be there, at least one person to anchor the visit and talk.  Craig and old Charley are buddied
up and often drive out to the Keller district to look for deer. Don comes by mid afternoon and then
usually leaves, especially when Marty or Jerry would show up. Jerry comes infrequently and erratically
because he has his cow chores.  In any event, the past months he has been talking about a growing
operation with Tony, in response to Colorado's new recreational smoking law.  But I think Jerry is just kidding while I think Tony is more serious.

       Over the past winter though there were times when all of us would  hung together and have  nice conversation...but now the same stories are being told...and so nothing lasts for ever and seasons come and seasons go and the locals too need to have the outsiders turn over  so they can have new outsiders for amusement as that is the only change they have in their lives.  the ones who come and go while they stay.

       So I suppose I will just spend more evenings here at home, as I did today.  I put on a Coast to Coast show to listen to as I made dinner - I would rather eat my dinners in a timely manner anyway rather than go
visit til 7:30 or 8 and then come home and eat late.  I can see my life unwinding here as the universe
nudges me on to be somewhere else, anywhere else.  That is a trait of the Scotch Irish.  We tend to
move around a lot.  Restless.

      And even though a tourist might think the prairie is all the same. It isn't.  And it is.

      A few years ago I was in the Bureau of Reclamation Office at John Martin Reservoir and I stopped to admire the prairie view outside a window.  A federal employee said I had obviously been here a while. I asked how he knew and he said new comers see the land as flat and do not notice the little undulations and rises that give a piece of the prairie its own unique view. This particular view had a nice low bluff in the middle ground.  Not the Tetons, but something to admire when there is little to admire.

     Each little village in the prairie has its own collection of local characters and eccentrics.  In these parts, Marty was one of them.

    In the end, when he retired, he could not afford the utilities in the home he had raised his family in.  So he hooked up power to the small travel trailer, the same one he had drug up to the campgrounds west of Trinidad a few summers ago when he worked up there to escape the summer heat and earn a few summer dollars as a campground attendant.

     I never saw the inside of it, but someone who had said it was pretty small, with hardly room to turn around in it.  But that was Marty's home.  He lived in it during the scorching heat of summer and during the freezing cold of the prairie winters.

     He had a small fridge and I guess a stove burner, and a radio. He would listen to Texas radio stations all night and the next day would have a new set of knowledge about Texas events, and national events, with a Texas viewpoint.

     I suggested he get a small TV so he could watch games but he said he did not have a ledge big enough to put one on.

    One might call this a Spartan life, but it did not seem so to Marty.  And in the last election he was as ardent a Mitt Romney supporter as anyone. He truly identified with the rugged individualism of the super rich who put so many out of jobs to pocket their wages as asset rejiggering profits.

    Marty was devastated when Mitt lost.  More devastated at having to pay me off three small coffee bets because 'Bama had won, the Dems had retained the Senate, and gained ground in the House.  He did not speak to me for several weeks after that except to rail at me and 'Bama and our treachery.

    As I calmly explained, the presidential contest had been between two shades of darkness, with 'Bama the paler shade, which is why I had signed on with him.

    It was a few weeks after that, about the time he made his annual visit up north to visit a stepson and stay in a real nice house for a few weeks, that Marty started to have pain in his side.

     He thought it was a reaction to him taking too much medication for a stomach ache.  But in the end it turned out to be much worse than that.

    Another one of the prairie characters has moved on, changing into a ghost that now blows along with the breeze, causing ripples of waves in the tall grass, as it moves along.

     

The pot rush is on....

        Doonesbury has been a hoot the past few weeks.
The slacker Zonker has moved to Colorado, where he plans to be a pot farmer.
This reflects real life.
In the small town where I live Jerry, a cattlemen who runs his herd on leased acreage, has been talking up plans for growing marijuana.
Another local, Tony, has offered to supply the seed and expertise if Jerry comes up with the land, water and work.
They mapped out their ambitious plans while other old timers watched them from the sidelines at the same table.
What is not known is how serious Jerry is.  In some ways he has a reputation to uphold. He used to be a banker, and still is in some offhand part-time way that is not fully explained but alluded to.
Tony is very serious.  He may or may not have been a player in the past. But he drives a nice looking truck, while Jerry continues to do his chores in older, beaten trucks because he says that is how cattlemen stay in business.  I am not sure about that.  If all cowmen drove just old battered trucks then how would Ford have come up with its King Ranch edition? But then, maybe just yuppies from the Silicon Valley who have hobby ranches buy those spiffed up trucks.
I would think that if Jerry were to become a big producer of pot, that he would have to drive a much nicer truck in line with his image.  The book Freakonomics has shown that most big city street dealers live with their mothers and don’t make much off drugs, while taking a lot of the risk.
But the people upstream, or downstream, depending on how you diagram it, have bling and the projection of wealth and power from their expertise in managing major distribution and or production enterprises.
I have often chided Jerry for not buying a new truck, for not helping Obama by stimulating the economy.  Jerry thinks that is what Democrats are for and Republicans are supposed to drive old vehicles and be very conservative and let someone else stimulate the economy, just so it is not the government.
Meanwhile, in Denver police expected up to 80,000 to show up at a pot smoke in at Denver’s Civic Park downtown.  There were some rumors of a shooting at the smoke in but I cannot confirm that since I could not access my free trial digital subscription of the Denver Post and I usually do not buy the Pueblo Chieftain because I generally boycott the mainstream news media for not reporting real news anymore.  It just regurgitates government handouts. Or tells us what Madonna or Justin Timberlake or Anne Hathaway are up to. Or lets us know about the latest attempts of an impoverished immigrant child to get free tuition as a reward for their parents breaking and entering into our country because the rich millionaires of Mexico refuse to tax themselves to provide opportunity and education for the Indian blooded Mexicans.  Because the Mexican rich think the disappearing American middle class should help support the less fortunate of foreign lands.
The huge mass of people who smoked pot show how well government policies are working.
In the prisons, administrators allow a steady slow stream of heroin and other drugs to flow in to sedate the prisoners and keep them under control.
In the same way, the powerful government institutions in the United States have allowed drugs to flow in to the nation to sedate the population, pacify them, and make sure they do not care how the nation is being ripped off and by whom.
When the banksters wrecked the western world by dumping non-existent mortgages onto unsuspecting sovereign funds and pension plans and widows who have orphans, the resulting collapse put up to a quarter of the U S work force out of work.
Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements draw a crowd in the low hundreds at best.
But the American libertarian right to dull one’s mind with pot can draw 80,000.
The government has won. The cartels have won. The banksters have won. Jerry and Tony think they will.
And of course the pot smokers of Colorado are celebrating because they have won too.
As for Colorado, it has lost.  It has shown that spectacular scenery and a vibrant performing arts culture and sometimes very successful professional sports teams are not enough.  The majority of Coloradoans need to drink and smoke marijuana to help them get through the boredom of post modern life in the Queen City of the western plains.
        People will bristle that marijuana does not kill brain cells, is healthy for you, is not addictive.
       But in Doonesbury Zonker is spacey, forgetful.
       A joke on Soda Head a few days ago was that someone drunk will drive through a stop sign. Someone stoned will stop at the sign and wait for it to turn green.
      A study claimed that kids who start smoking marijuana have less brain development.
      Yes, as I say, that is what the government wants.   Citizens who are less intelligent. Citizens who will mass together in the tens of thousands for the right to smoke pot. Citizens who will not mass in the tens of thousands to throw the bankster and government regulators in prison for derailing the western world economy with greed and unethical behavior.
      Many citizens now seem to welcome the more free time they have, the freedom from work. It gives them more time to smoke up and tune out.
     

Would Frances Mayes Call It Oysters della Rosotto?

The dwindling town of Las Animas and the surrounding dried up pasture lands of southeastern Colorado are a far cry from the Tuscany ofcelebrated and beloved author  Frances Mayes.

And yet there are similarities. Tuscany province has Roman ruins.  Bent County province has Native American petroglyphs. (Though technically Colorado would be the province and I guess Bent County an area within it.)

But I have to admit Ms. Mayes can sound a little pretentious when she arrives at the Trattoria del Leone and is excited to "spot" Olive all'Ascolana on the menu.  She notes how the ...uh delicacy is a mixture of textures and flavors.

We're usually a little more subdued out here on the high plains of Norte Americano.

Though, we have our culinary delights too. When they have the annual Santa Fe Trail Day in Las Animas along the...yes,..Santa Fe Trail, the fire department takes delight in attracting a huge crowd to its delicacy...Rocky Mountain Oysters. Nothing pretentious sounding  there. Just good indigenous food.

I guess when the Italians make Olive all'Ascolana they remove the nut, or pit, from the olive and stuff it with salami or some other meat and then fry it.  Well, when the Coloradoans make Rocky Mountain Oysters they keep the nut of the castrated young bull and toss that into the frying pan. It would seem that women are drawn to the Oyster of the Rocky Mountains as men are drawn to the Olive of Italy.  But of course both dishes are androgynous as  both men and women actually enjoy both delicacies in probably roughly even numbers.

And if anyone is offended by Americans eating bull nuts, then those same people would be offended by French and Italians eating snails.

It would seem that indigenous cultures everywhere get hungry and they have over time learned what they can eat, and live to tell about it.

And how the cultures tell about it can vary.

 Ms. Mayes in her book Everyday Life in Tuscany takes great delight in throwing out the name of everyday food by using a long drawn out flowery title.  For example, on page 55 she gleefully passes on the recipe for Giusi's Crespelle ai Procini e Ricotta.  She adds that "for variety in the pommarola...try using odori."  I am not making that up. She is a former college level teacher in the City by the Bay, so she knows her stuff.  Of course, she does explain what odori is, but I won't because that is something you could buy her book and find out about for yourself.  And I am not cheating her out of a book sale by revealing what she has copyrighted and protected from appropriation other than for fair use from review or reference, and this is a reference.

Ms Mayes went thousands of miles and across the sea to find the culture she resonates with.

I have found I can stay in my humble home and resonate in my own kitchen.  It is not uncommon for me to simmer potato, carrot, onion and zucchini (to throw in a sophisticated Italian word) in broth of the chicken.  And I can cook up a chicken Marsella, even if I just pour the flavor out of a bottle rather than simmering the ingredients from scratch for hours.

A few weeks ago I placed a frozen Safeway Select pizza on my perforated pizza pan and roasted it in my electric oven, and the result was good, very good.  But I will not be pretentious and say it was as good as a home made pizza that Mayes and her husband baked in an outdoor stone kiln fueled by a roaring wood fire. But my pizza was good for me.  And I do not have to throw out any foreign words to describe what I did if I choose not to.

As I said, I will not be pretentious.

After all, I live in a broad river valley on the windswept plains.  What is there to brag about?