You know what's not fun?

1. Getting to your mountain house after dark on a cold February night and discovering that the roof, which has upon it two feet of rapidly melting snow, is leaking into your solarium.

2. Discovering shortly thereafter that your internet isn't working and the internet people have to come out and fiddle around with the doohickey while you twiddle your thumbs waiting to feed your addiction.

3. Downloading pictures from a brief snowshoe trip up the mountain and finding a persistent dust mote on the digital sensor.

4. Opening the refrigerator door and noticing that, just to add insult to injury, the refrigerator light is out.

None of this is fun. Nope. Not fun. Not even a little.

It's still better than being anywhere else.

Give me a moment while my fingers thaw

We've arrived. And it was a short trip, friends. Very short, compared to what we're used to doing. We left this afternoon and made it here before dinner.

Of course, it's a Montana winter and that means it takes the entire evening to warm the house up. The bedrooms have their own baseboard heating but the upstairs relies almost entirely on the wood stove. We got here 90 minutes ago and I'm still wearing my parka.

But I can actually type now, so that's a good sign.

Sunday before Christmas

Cloudy, 32 degrees. There are about six inches of snow on the ground. Thomas and I took our walk this morning, crunching companionably through the snow crust together.

Snow tells a tale of the mountain that's hidden the rest of the year. It reveals the intensely, almost manically nomadic nature of deer, and records the passage of other animals. This morning we saw rabbit tracks interspersed with bobcat tracks, a drama written in the snow, but with no discernible ending. Did the bobcat get dinner? Or did the rabbit live another day?

Snow tells part of the tale, but doesn't promise more than that.

Frost on the woodpile

It'll be more than frost next time, no doubt.

A traveler makes his way back home

From last week.

Dispatches from Stinkbug Ranch

You know how, on television and in popular culture generally, fathers are portrayed as benevolent doofuses when it comes to childcare and their wives are portrayed as sensible types who always have it together with respect to the kids? It's sort of an Everybody Loves Raymond model. That crap has always irritated me, and not just because it offends my feminist worldview. Even more fundamentally, I just don't recognize anyone I know in that model, least of all my own family.

Which would explain why I realized on Thursday night that my son had not bathed since Sunday. You see, my husband always does that, and he's been overseas since Monday. It just didn't occur to me until The Kid announced that afternoon that "hey-- my feet stink!" (He quickly backpedaled on this assertion when he realized he would have to take a bath without Daddy. Fortunately, his grandmother bribed him into the tub with some pumpkin soap.)

Patricia Heaton's character totally would have remembered to give her kid a bath. It seems I have become the benevolent doofus. I guess this means I have to grow a penis or get kicked out of the club.

The weather has been moody this week, as you can see from some of the photographs I've gotten. But I've stolen little bits of light here and there.

As for pictures, I offer you the main road:



Blogger won't let me upload the other two pictures of the gravel road up to the house, so to hell with it. I'll do that later.

Aspenglow

Well here I am. Back in middle of nowhere, and it's grand. The aspen in front of my house is completely, richly gold. The tamaracks are turning. We ate freshly caught trout for dinner Sunday night. And again I marvel that I feel less isolated in a place where traffic congestion is a moose blocking 5th street.

My in-laws are here with me this week. This is the first time my father-in-law has returned here since he sold us the place a little over a year ago. It can't be easy for him -- I saw him standing, that first evening, staring out at the corral whose fence he built by hand, one split rail at a time. But he's got a permanent companion in the grandson who shadows him constantly, hanging on his every word. And his mood improved markedly Sunday night, after he, Mr. T and the Kid fished a part of the river he'd never gotten around to while he still spent time here regularly.

For my part, life is easy this week. I just had to stop my mother-in-law from bringing the coffee carafe over to my cup and refilling it while I sat on my ass. Mr. T filled the 80's era PornoHotTub before he left, and I might get in once or twice. I've got some photographs scoped out, should the weather decide to cooperate, and I spent ten minutes this morning watching a woodpecker work on a tree down the hill. I do have to work, but somehow it's not as grinding here.

It's all good.

On tap for the next two weeks: bathroom remodeling and game cams

Because nothing says Montana like a pink crapper.

Last time I was at our place in Montana, I was pacing up and down the driveway on my cell phone talking to my brother, when our conversation was interrupted by this sound on the trail that branches off the drive. It sounded like a very-large-something blowing or huffing in an agitated manner.

"What was that?" my brother asked. I started walking back to the house, unwilling to find out. I never did learn what it was. Mr. T insisted it was nothing but a deer, but The Professor (whose 130 acres surround our relatively tiny six on all sides) concluded that it was one of the bears that hang out on the mountain. I searched on the internet for both sounds, and none of them fit the bill.

This trail has seen some action over the years. When my father-in-law owned the place, he stumbled across a lavishly dismembered deer carcass fifty or so yards beyond the drive. This summer we found a single, unmistakably fresh deer leg. Then there's the bear poo.

This is enough to convince me that this is a thriving game trail. We clearly needed a game cam. Fortunately, the thoughtful Mr. T got me this one for my birthday, and my wait is almost over. Mr. T is going back to China in the middle of October, and I'll be spending my time out there instead of here. As a bonus, my in-laws are coming to spend the week taking care of the Kid. So the week is mine, friends. I considered going to China with Mr. T, but I've been there already. Frankly, I'd rather spend an autumn week in northwest Montana than South China, and save the money I'd spend on plane tickets and carbon credits.

And this way I can finish the green bathroom remodel. This summer we applied zero-VOC paint, installed cork flooring with low-VOC adhesive, and got the Paperstone countertop cut and in place. (Paperstone is spendy, but beautiful. We were lucky enough to find a small scrap of it at our local Environmental Building Supply.) A light and some fixtures are all that remain. This interesting place is in Idaho, on our way to the house, and I've been eyeing a few things there. But really, I've had a bad case of decision paralysis on the issue, and I'm going to try to get it wrapped up on this trip.

I'm just glad the pink is gone.

An open letter to a pack rat

Dear Pack Rat:

You probably don't read my blog, but given the ingenuity you displayed in trashing my house during the month of August, I can't be completely sure. Since I have no idea where you are just now -- though you clearly spent some time on your toilet my counters again this weekend while we were gone -- this post may be my best chance of reaching you.

Really, it's not so much that you ate an entire bag of peanuts out of the pantry and then made a nest with the shells in our stove, thus requiring us to discard the entire appliance. After all, we were going to remodel that kitchen anyway, and heck, we can cook on our camp stove this weekend. I can even accept that you appropriated two rolls of toilet paper to make a bed in our linen closet downstairs. One cannot, after all, be expected to sleep on a bare shelf.

But when you so kindly left -- as a sort of rodent memento -- hundreds of tiny turds on the laundry I threw carelessly on the bed before leaving four weeks ago, you placed your dainty ratly toe over the line. It simply isn't done.

You know, Pack Rat, this ain't my first time at the rodeo. And I've gotten meaner as I've aged. But I've been thinking about it, and I've decided to leave you a peace offering. There is a blob of peanut butter in the kitchen -- where the stove used to be -- right next to a couple of dire-looking metallic contraptions.

Help yourself.

Hoofing it

There is nothing quite like spotting a freshly severed deer leg on the trail to quicken the pulse and heighten the senses. This effect is magnified when that trail branches off your driveway.

The leg was mostly stripped clean of meat, but undeniably fresh. There are a number of possibilities as to the transporter of said deer leg, ranging from the mundane to the dire. A coyote could have dropped the leg after stripping it from a scavenged carcass. Or it could have been the mama bear who's been loping around this mountain for the last couple of years. Or it could have been -- and I watched the treetops as we headed back home -- the elusive mountain lion.

It's probably the coyotes, though. Wolves have reestablished themselves a few mountains over, and it's put pressure on the coyote population. There's a sister pack that's been hanging around for awhile, and they have regular conversations with the Newfoundland down the road.

That said, none of us will be venturing down that path alone for the remainder of the trip.

Now that I've posted the lizard

I can actually post the pictures Jennifer over at Under the Ponderosas asked me for two weeks ago. Here goes:



This is a still from some video I took when I climbed up behind the house on Christmas Eve last year.



This is from the road. This picture is four or five years old, before we owned it.



From the second floor in the solarium. That thing at the bottom is the hot tub cover.



Another view from above the house, this time of the valley. It's late spring in this picture.



This is the view from the living room. Those are the Cabinet Mountains.

All right, I'm whipped from packing, and I have to be up early to pick up my cork flooring at the Environmental Building Supply place before we go.

We're supposedly getting internet access at the house this time, so I won't be gone for too long this time. Raise hell, etc.

Pieces of Montana

While it may be said -- and has been -- that the entire blogging endeavor is an exercise in rank narcissism, I hereby institute a new series that reaches previously unachieved degrees of self-indulgence. Ever since a friend from South China gave me a digital video camera, I've been recording bits of pieces of the my world. Thus, the inauguration of the "Pieces of" series.

Our corral was a veritable Deer Thoroughfare this Christmas. This was particularly nice given that we saw none over Thanksgiving. It was hunting season then, and they made themselves scarce. But last week, they held several deer meetups in my corral at various times of day. In summer, I can get pretty close to them, but they were brooking no human foolishness this close to the end of hunting season. So I captured the footage through the glass. And, alas, you can tell.

Stop me before I anthropomorphize again

The interesting thing about a house in the woods is that the trees are always trying to take over. Pine trees are the dandelions of the mountains. Of course, I've always taken a contrary position on weeds -- I infinitely prefer them to manicured lawns. And so I do as well with my coniferous friends. They are, after all, merely trying to reclaim the space we've taken from them.

But this creates a certain dilemma in a region where one's embrace of the term "defensible space" can be a matter of life or death, should you be unlucky enough to find yourself in the midst of a raging forest fire. In northwestern Montana, as in many other places here in the American west, how well you clear your property of "fuel" can sometimes determine whether your home is a complete loss or is only lightly charred.

I find it difficult not to cheer the little upstarts that take root in my corral and even in the patch of land in front where the lupines grow in spring. I feel the same way about the ones that have poked up in the protective shadow of the house. They're small, they're uppity and they're ambitious -- all qualities I cannot help but admire. But the fire people tell me I should "remove" them.

I'd hate to do it. I like them. Who wouldn't?



Blast it all, it rubs my fur the wrong way to yank out a tree. I'm simply not one of those people who can rearrange vegetation willy-nilly as though moving around the living room furniture. A neighbor once observed to me that she intended to remove a hundred-year old cottonwood in favor of "more manageable trees." My mouth yawped open, unable to speak.

More manageable trees? That seemed an unspeakably capricious reason to remove a tree, especially one as venerable as that cottonwood. To me, there ought to be a very good reason to remove a tree.

Like, perhaps, defensible space.

Right now, this is a question I need not face at the Ranch. There will be no lightning to spark a blaze for several months, and with the canopy of snow overlaying the winter forest, nothing would light anyway. But the dry summer months loom, inevitable, with hard choices their traveling companions.

Stinkbug Ranch

My primary residence is in the Portland, Oregon area, but we have a place in northwest Montana as well. It's an oddly shaped house on six acres and change on the side of a mountain that looks out over the Kootenai River. We're lucky to have it.

It's been in the family for several years, first through my father-in-law, who bought it and spent summers there after he retired. The first time I ever spent there was in the winter of 2001. We were frequent visitors thereafter, especially when we moved from the midwest to Oregon in 2004. Mr. T and I became progressively more attached to the place, and when his father announced this summer that the place needed to be sold, we went into panic mode. He'd been talking about selling it for quite awhile, but backed off at the last minute every time.

Every time this game of chicken played out, we'd wipe the sweat off our foreheads in relief. He'd offered us the place before, but we simply couldn't afford it. Till this summer. I can't say it's financially easy, but we think of it as home, and where we ultimately want to live full-time. We'd rather drive old cars and have that place than drive new cars and not have it.

But that we even have such a choice underscores how many opportunities we've had in our lives -- and how deeply grateful we are for them. When I drive up the mountain and up the gravel drive, I'm still amazed at and thankful for my good fortune.

I dubbed the place Stinkbug Ranch in an e-mail to one of my dearest friends, telling her we'd finally closed on it. The moniker comes from the hordes of stinkbugs that descend on that part of the country every September. They congregate in orgiastic glory during those autumn weeks, presumably to mate and thereby propogate their species before they die an undignified death in the windowsills.

Every time we'd arrive at the house the week after Christmas, the first order of business would be to vacuum up the musty-smelling stinkbug carcasses.

Stinkbug Ranch.

It's funny to name such a beautiful, comforting homestead after one (and perhaps the only) undesirable characteristic. For me it shows how very little could diminish my pleasure in the place. A few dead bugs certainly couldn't do the job.