Some, to see a bear, would pay a fee*

While I'm still fairly grouchy about missing the Glacier Institute's three-day grizzly bear seminar this weekend, I do get a consolation prize: I'm flying my sister into Kalispell on Friday night and we're going to show her around Glacier before flying her back on Monday to the crappy job that gives her so little vacation time she hasn't a single extra day to spare by September.

But I was really hoping to attend this seminar and finally see a grizzly in the wild. On the glacial recession trip, we hiked the Swiftcurrent Trail, which had been closed until that very day because of grizzly activity. Last year, the seminar participants had encountered a sow and two cubs on the way up to the glacier. This year we saw nothing, though we did meet some folks at the glacier who had taken the ferry across Swiftcurrent Lake instead of the trail around it, and informed us there was a sow and a cub on the slopes above where we were hiking at the exact time we passed through.

I've had a lot better luck with black bears. There are a few black bears that hang around the mountain up at the house. My neighbor owns more than a hundred acres of woodland that surround our place, and while he thinned the forest a bit this year, he made certain to leave a substantial channel through which the bears could travel. My mother-in-law and I saw one a couple summers back, and we frequently see them on the road up to my brother-in-law's place on Big Mountain. And we had an encounter with one up in the Adirondacks, which is worth its own post.

And of course, there was this little experience in Glacier almost exactly a year ago:



I love how, at the end, the bear briefly observes the car going by and then immediately goes back to munching.




*Can you name that tune??

Deregulation, Salem style

For someone who hates winter as much as I do, it may seem odd that all of my favorite holidays are clustered in the run-up to it. I'm a confirmed Halloween freak; as several of the readers of this blog are aware, Mr. T and I used to hold an annual Halloween costume party that seemed to become more elaborate every year before the tradition basically spluttered out when we moved to Oregon. My friends and family were all good sports about it and we had nearly 100% costume participation every year. So every year when the breeze gets a cool tinge, my thoughts turn lightly to jack-o-lanterns, skeletons and kettles full of dry ice.

And today I spotted the first Halloween-related news item. Apparently Salem, Massachusetts has eased its regulations on fortune tellers. Or, as the ordinance reads,

those locals who are engaged in "the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act."

Since the dark arts have now been deregulated, concerns abound over letting just anyone practice them. I swear, if you can't get a quality phrenologist in Salem, then where, I ask you, is one to be found?

Cartomancy? Scrying? Anyone got a dictionary? Because I'm too lazy to click over and look those up.

Given my Halloween fixation, I've often wondered whether I ought to hoof it on up to Salem one year. But I hate tourist traps, and Salem on Halloween can't possibly be anything but a tourist trap. Has anyone been?

Calgon, take me away

I'm having a rather rough day, and during the worst part, I actually googled "how to get kid to leave me alone" just to see what would pop up. This essay burbled up, and was like freshly split aloe on a sunburn, I tell ya. Reading that was a helluva lot better than perpetual self-flagellation for not being able to stop myself from yelling at my kid.

Shrinkage, for sure

Well, I didn't go quite this far.

Latest favorite photo

Here. A vertical is here.

I took these in eastern Oregon on the way back from Montana in late May. I made Mr. T pull off the highway (he's used to this sort of thing) while I spent half an hour trying to find an acceptable composition. I've been wanting a photo from this angle for a long time, but I'd pictured it very differently in my mind's eye. Essentially what I want is this composition, except taken from the middle of the river.

Hmmm.

It's just sex, after all

Welp, I got the question tonight. The unvarnished, unadorned, completely straightforward, no wiggle-room question: But how do the mommies and daddies make the babies?

I need some time to consider how much information to give him, and in what way, so I dodged a bit. Fortunately, it was bedtime, so I did what I always do when he asks a question just before bed. I told him we'd look it up and discuss it the next day. I've heard some good things about certain books, which will at least help provide a framework for the explanation.

This topic doesn't freak me out, and I've made a practice of being somewhat matter-of-fact about these types of questions. What bums me out the most about this landmark is that I know he won't be able to keep this fascinating new information to himself. I can look forward to him discussing the nitty-gritty of baby-making with his classmates, teachers, my mother and the server at the next restaurant we patronize.

And then I'll have to tell him that's not a topic for public discussion, and then -- no pun intended here -- the seed has been planted. Sex is something mysterious and dark that freaks people out, just like death. (No honey, it's not really nice to tell your grandfather you thought most people died before they got to be as old as he is. I know he laughed. But really.)

Plus, my baby is growing up. Maybe that's what really tugs at me.

Even my fingers are sore

My friend John and I did a Habitat for Humanity build yesterday, and I used muscles I've neither seen nor heard from since about 1986. I graded a lot with a metal rake, a round shovel and something ominously dubbed a "rock spade." That was actually an outrageously heavy metal thing that's taller than me, with a thin flat spade-like blade at the tip. The job was basically to use that thing to bust up hills of clay that had dried to near rock-hardness in the kiln-like Oregon summer, then use the shovel and rake to redistribute the smaller pieces around the lot, thereby creating a flatter surface.

After awhile, the site leader took pity on me and offered me a job inside painting, but I'm stubborn and egotistical, and I was going to win. Which accounts for the fact that, twenty-four hours later, I still can't stand up completely straight. And because I'm a big whiny baby, I've been emitting little yelps and moans all day while moving around.

What all this means, of course, is that I haven't done a real day's work in about a decade. I won't say I've never done it; during college I pulled plenty of double shifts as a waitress. But as annoying and grinding as the law can be, I never had to push my body to its outer limits on a daily basis.

I'm going to do it again, of course. There are too many people living in crappy housing to whine about how hard it is. John goes about once a month, and we agreed that I'd go along from now on.

Uh, dude, there's a marmoset on your head

Of course I love this:

A man smuggled a monkey onto an airplane Tuesday, stashing the furry fist-size primate under his hat until passengers spotted it perched on his ponytail, an airline official said.

Outstanding.

We have before us a photostream

You know how I'm always babbling about my photography but I never post anything but snapshots? Well, as you can see from the flashy-thingie on the right, I've finally created a flickr account. Click on it if you want to see more of my stuff.

The first page is a bit boring so you'd do better to venture into the other pages or my photo sets. I'm going to be uploading my new stuff to this account as I get it, and I'm still - still! -- working on scanning my slides in for posting. So it's a work in progress.

Glacial Recession V

I'm starting to channel the Friday the 13th franchise with my serial glaciering, but this one's the last.

The final day we hiked a bit along the Highline Trail, looking at excellent examples of the U-shaped valleys carved by glaciation and generally just winding down from the day before. Jeff will likely offer the seminar again next summer, and I'll probably go again, as he plans to hike to other glaciers in the park next time.

The entire seminar was just great. I learned a great deal, not just about glaciation and the effects of climate change on the park, but about geology in general. Mr. T was a geologist before he became a bidnessman, but I had always glazed over during discussions of faults and synclines and formations, until I was standing in front of the real thing with someone explaining it to me. I can be a stickler for technicalities, particularly when dealing with terminology (imagine that!), and that was tripping me up a bit. Or rather, I tended to approach geological terminology with an overly literal mindset.

But really, I have to plug the Glacier Institute now. I mentioned to Jeff during class that I thought there was a good chance I'd become an Institute junkie. Just look at all the classes and seminars they offer. I could spend ten months just taking class after class, and I'd never get bored. The neat thing is that many classes allow kids as young as six to attend. So I think The Kid and I might take some seminars together in the coming years.

Finally, there are a slew of crevasse photos in my photostream here. (There are a few mountain goat shots in there, but the bulk of it is the Grinnell Glacier.) Perhaps you'll be able to get a sense from those images how unnerving it is to be hiking around them.

And sometimes, unnerving is good.