It’s now snowing. Windy and cold. My bare garden is infested with slate colored juncos. Always juncos. Those tough little bastards actually fly south to here. Or the the ones who just stay here, cardinals and crows and chickadee’s. I want a warbler, damnit. How about an indigo bunting just for kicks. The hawk is back though. Good hunting brother, get those woodchucks before I have to.

So I hear some interest in the story of the big burn. It will be awhile before I get to that one. I need to do it right and that means discribing the landscape and weather conditions and how they combined to create a fire storm. And I’m a little intimidated by the task of doing that clearly. It wasn’t a big fire by Yellowstone standards. Probably not even a thousand acres. But it was very intense.
I guess I make this time in my life look all exciting and romantic, but remember I’ve been verbally polishing these stories for thirty years. They make great party stories and help me compensate for the dork I really think I am. My plan after college was to work seasonaly jobs so I could develope my art on the off season. My goal was to become a famous painter. I ended up turning my back on art, drinking very heavily, not to mention other substance abuse, having truely nasty relationships with women, getting very sick, becoming so distant from reality I couldn’t figure out how to stop my beard from taking over my entire head and generally losing all confidence in myself. All this time, driven by an insane urge to compensate for my youthful athletic failures and suddenly blessed with a new body forged by fire, I became obsessed with basketball and spent the part of my life that sane people spend forming careers, polishing my game. And for what? So I can hobble down stairs like an 80 year old when I’m 55? So I can’t straighten my legs out and there are only a few positions I can sleep in without pain? So I can be stuck in a low level corporate lacky management job that requires more organization than you could distill out of a hundred of me and where I have to deal with managers who have more organization in their toenails than I will ever have? And artists who make me look like an organizational genius? And never, ever saving a fucking dime?

On the flip side….it was often FU-UN!

I once carried a five gallon gas can attached to a pack frame up a cliff was steep enough to require climbing on all fours and had little patches of open flame all around.

My job in the Forest Service was to dig fire line. That meant using a Polaski, which I guess is a pickaxe by another name. It had a horizontal blade for trenching and a vertical blade for chopping roots. You dig a path 18 inches wide down to mineral soil. In the area where we worked that meant digging through at least eight inches of duff. Duff is the decomposing forest floor that can smolder and burn and carry a fire a hundred yards underground to flare up three days after you think you have the fire out. Most of the time the areas that we were digging line around weren’t burning. Sounds like a government job doesn’t it. What we were doing is preparing areas that had been clear cut for “controlled burns” The loggers came in and took all the trees suitable for lumber and then the government contracted guys to come in and “slash” which means to cut and pile up all the little brush trees that the loggers wouldn’t take and then we came in, dug a line around it and in the late summer came back and set it on fire. That’s right, pyro’s dream job. I put quotes around “controlled burns” because they usually were out of control about 3 minutes after we set them on fire. My big “controlled burn” story will have to wait for another blog though.
We were always on call to fight wild fires when they popped up. Unfortunately (there I said it) there weren’t many wild fires that year. Not enough lightning. You see fire fighters make there money working overtime on fires. It wasn’t a real profitable year, but I got my taste of fighting wild fires.
We were working at a site late one afternoon when our boss, Terry Stranahan, Godzilla himself, or as I called him, Stammerin’ Stranny, got a call on the radio. A construction crew had been building a bridge across the North Fork in an area where the canyon wall came right up to the river. They backed some heavy equipment into a brush pile at the foot of the cliff. It caught fire and burned up through the brushy parts of the cliff. I don’t know if “cliff” is the right term, the landscape consisted of sharp vertical outcropping of rocks that went up maybe eighty or so feet up, with little draws that were moderately pitched enough to grow some hardy brush. There was about five acres of scattered fire that had pretty much burned itself out by the time we got there. But you can’t just leave it, because it will come back and bite you in the ass at noon the next day. I really don’t have much of an opinion on forest management and fire, so if you’re a “let it burn” person, work with me here. Pretend the Forest Service knows what it’s doing. Normally we’d set up some pumps in the river and hose it down until there was no more open flame and then sit on it for a couple of days to make sure it stayed out. But this situation posed a problem. You can only pump water up so far. I’d sound smarter if I knew what that height was, but I’m sure someone will tell me And this fire was well above that level. The boss scouted out the situation. The pumping truck arrived. Here’s what we did.
We had a big collapsible plastic swimming pool with and aluminum frame. It folded out to about 5’ by 8’ by 3’. Two of us teamed up to carry that up to a flat spot at the top of one of the outcroppings. Another guy took the pump. I can’t remember if one guy muscled the pump up or if we teamed up. I know we used two guys to carry the bilge pump out on the tow when I worked the river. Anyway, needless to say there’s some urgency about this so the boss is whipping us pretty hard and my lungs are on fire from the first time up the hill. Stranny looks at me and says, “Well, now we need gas for the pump.” I scramble back down and strap the gas can onto my back and climb back up. I’ll admit to being a little nervous. We now had the pump down by the river filling the reservoir and I sat down on a rock to catch my breath. Stranny spots me and says, “As long as you’re resting go get us a hose pack.” A hose pack is eighty pounds of heavy fire hose coiled into a canvas backpack mounted on a frame. The end of the hose comes out the bottom, so you can hook it up and take of, stringing hose out behind you. This is an activity that will, as an old logger once said, “give you muscles in your shit.” At that time I was 6’1” and about a hundred and forty-five. Can you say rail? My legs were already trembling and I was having a hard time catching my breath. Down the hill put the hose pack on start back up. I’m now so pissed at the boss that I’m going to show him that I’m a real fire-fightin’ sumbitch and I’m am just blasting adrenalin. I hit the top crazed, probably foaming at the mouth. They grab the end of the hose and hook it up to the pump. I can’t remember if Stranny just said, “Now string it out over that hill and down into the draw on the other side.” Or offered to have someone take over for me and I told him to fuck himself, but I hooked up and took off over the rise. I crashed through some bush at the top and came out into a bowl the size of a nearly vertical football field that was mostly burned, with little patches of flames around it. And there, near the top was the a team of women digging line across the head of the fire. The visual I get of this is that they were all wearing denim shorts and work shirts with the sleeves cut off, but that couldn’t be because they were working for Smokey the Bear and would have had to be wearing long sleeves and pants, steel toed boots and orange hardhats. I was almost ready to drop in my tracks when I saw them there, but suddenly I was so inspired and wanted so badly to look macho that I completely revived and ran that hose out like a rutting mountain goat. And probably smelling just as bad.
And that’s how I came to carry a gas can on my back through a fire.

I said “hose bag”

Old man tennis again tonight. I’m playing better all the time. I made some great shots at the net. We played three tough sets, I practically had to crawl to the car. In the last set I was up two break points on my serve and lost. I did pull off a classic serve and volley point though. I got my serve down the middle hard and Glen got all of it on the return cross court and right to me. I was moving in and vollied it hard cross court right back at him and just kept coming behind it. I was all the way to the net when his next shot crossed over about dead center and I blew one by him right at his feet. On the flip side there were at least two occasions when I thought I had overheads lined up, took a big swing and went under the ball. I guess I was thinking I could still jump. The best part of the night was when we when Glen was introducing my partner and I to the new guy. My hearing sucks but not as bad as this guy. Although it’s almost impossible for anyone over fifty to hear anything in an indoor tennis court.
Glen: “Joe this is Don.”
Joe: “Scott?”
Don: “Yup”
Glen: “And this is Bob.”
Joe: “Bud?”
Bob (in his mind) “Never mind.”
I like Scotty and Bud as names for a doubles team anyway. It’s got that cable knit sweater and wooden raquet feel about it. “Muffy, be a dear and bring us some gin and tonics please.”

Sometime in the last year I sent out an email to my staff asking for suggestions as to what I could do to make their jobs easier, more rewarding or more fun. Most of them just snickered and thought “There goes Bob again, paying lip service to being a concerned boss.” But one person replied that she would like more of my stories. That was a motivating factor in starting to blog. I had a couple of blogs going at a different location and then one evening I was in the basement and saw Q’s link to Xanga and thought, “what’s Xanga?” And that’s how I ended up here. I’m probably the oldest guy here and my life has settled into a pretty normal groove so for a change of pace now and again I’m going to reminisce.
I call the summer of 1972 the summer of a thousand stories. Both my companion, Bill and I feel that there’s at least one novel for each of us in that year. Bill graduated on time and I had to go back in ’71 to finish two quarters I’d missed because I dropped out senior year to go to Europe. So after I finished up in the early Spring of ’72 we decided that we would head out to Wallace, Idaho, his home town, and get jobs building I-90 through the Silver Valley. Wallace is tucked into the Mountains of the Idaho Panhandle, just across the Montana border. It’s primary industry is silver mining, it’s population in those days was about 1500 and it had a reputation as a wide open town. It had one of the highest ratios of single men to women in the country. There was gambling in the bars (lot’s of bars) and had five bordellos with neon signs and names like Lux Rooms and The U and I. One of our college classmates who was also from Wallace did a research paper that involved interviewing the hookers.
The summer took had a somber start because the day before we got there, there had been a fire in the Sunshine mine and 91 miners died. When we got to Bill’s house, his dad, who was on the fire rescue team, had not returned from his shift the day before. All his mom knew was that he had gone down in the mine to pull guys out and hadn’t gotten back yet. I’ll elaborate on this later. That’s one story.
When we went to get out highway construction jobs we found out that you couldn’t get a job without being a union member and you couldn’t join the union unless you had a job. No kidding. So there we were stuck in the west with no income. We briefly found work laboring for a local contractor Harry Votalini. But Bill broke his ankle playing basketball (there are lots of bball stories as well) and Harry fired me the next day. Harry loved Bill, Bill was a hometown hero. Harry didn’t like me much, I was a soft city kid who couldn’t dig like a badger. I ended up getting a job with the Forest Service, which whipped the softness out of me and Bill ended up going to work in the mines when his ankle healed. It was a summer of love, laughter, adventure and mind altering substances. Here’s a quick sample story.
It was during Lead Creek Derby, Wallace’s local festival, when they release little balls with numbers into them into the South Fork of the Cour d’Alene River, known as Lead Creek or Shit Creek (for those of you who haven’t lived in the West, that’s pronounced “Crick”) because of the horrible industrial run off from the mines.They sell numbers on the balls and the first ball under the bridge in Wallace wins the jackpot. I was drunk as a lord and coming out of one of the bars. They had one of those little gypsy carnivals set up on the main street and when the ass of a merry-go-round horse presented itself to me, I decided to do my Gene Autry impression and do the flying rear mount (rache, don’t) of the plastic pony. I took a run at it but in my stumbling drunkeness, I slammed my shin into the edge of the merry-go-rounds metal deck. Even with lots of pain killer flowing through my veins that was one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me. There’s still a scar there and my shin had a tender lump on it for years afterwards. I’m not sure but that might have been the same night that Bill came out of the bar and kicked his shoe into the air only to see it land on the roof of one of the whorehouses. He had to go upstairs and ask to get on the roof to get his shoe. He claimed it was an accident anyway.

I thought that this note alone would make a pretty good entry this morning. I found it on the basement door when I got home last night after watching the game with a friend. But when I got up this morning, still half asleep and was starting to make coffee, as I poured out the last dregs of the old pot, this is what I found sitting in the garbage disposal. At first I thought it was a discarded leftover until I saw a clawed foot. It was still alive! You should have seen me trying to get it out of there. I resisted the temptation to just push it down and turn on the disposal. I had heavy work gloves on and I still didn’t want to touch it. I used a garden spade to get him out and Becky trapped him in a container.

What the hell was he doing sleeping in the garbage disposal? And if he was locked in the basement….how did he get upstairs!!! Did Ollie catch him and decided he wasn’t tastie enough and drop him in the disposal like a good fastidious cat would? Or are bats thrill seekers that like to sleep inches away from whirling death? YIKES!

I was sitting here kind of at a loss for what to write about. And then I remembered the wierd dream I had last night. I usually don’t remember my dreams, except the ones involving unnatural acts and rache. I was driving through this incredible mountainous landscape with my dad, who died in 1970. It was India, but the road was way too good for India and we were driving really fast. Dad was at the wheel I was in the passenger seat. It was a roller-coaster ride.
How is one to interpret such a dream. Was it a premonition of death? Was Dad giving me a tour of heaven? Heaven, for me, would include mountains and I’d be in good enough shape to play in them. Or was riding shotgun with Dad driving too fast at the edge of thousand foot cliffs a vision of hell? Or had Dad returned to give me a little driving lesson in the road rally of life, since he didn’t stick around to guide me through my young adulthood? Or were the dream god’s just providing some cheap entertainment to prevent an endless loop of Dianna Taurasi pumping her fists and celebrating UConn’s victory over my beloved Gophers. Or was it just the Garlic Lover’s chip dip?

I volunteered, I should say I was volunteered, to work the clock in a youth basketball tournament today. Four games, starting at 7:45. I would have been an hour late if the clock on my computer didn’t spring ahead automatically. The games were young boys, fourth graders and maybe fifth graders. Pretty cute. Some of it was pretty brutal basketball though. By the fourth game I was having a hard time concentrating and my friend Deb who was keeping the book and the refs and the fans had to keep yelling at me to start the clock.
UConn beat the Gophers so the Lyndsay Whalen era is now over. But I think Minnesota is going to have a great Women’s hoops program for years to come.
Obviously I’m too tired to come up with anything either entertaining or informative.
Good night.

My company just changed health care insurance as of the first of the year. I’ve been covered by the previous company for eleven years at least. I’d never had a problem. I thought this was going to work out fine, the clinic we go to was in network so we could keep our GP’s and Alergists and I could keep my same poop doctor. Trouble was just lurking in the shadows ready to pounce. I guess the company went with Joe’s Cheap Ass Health Ins. Low cost and incompetant. I had some lab work ordered by the Rear Admiral and I got a bill for the tests. They claim the doctor out of network. But it says right on their useless piece of shit website that he’s in network. I called customer service and they said they would resubmit the claim. Didn’t hear from them until today. Actually I didn’t hear from them, they heard from me.
I’ve decided to pursue this ADD issue. I’ll go into more detail why I think I have it another time, but let me just say that it never dawned on me until recently, but looking back on my childhood I said in my daughther’s vernacular, “duh.” Also Q told me recently that she thinks she has it as well. My first response was, “Kids with ADD don’t get straight A’s” But wait, I did. And remember, I’ve told you I worry about her because she’s so much like me. The other day she told me, “I want to read, but I can’t sit still long enough to read a book.” So, anyway, I’m looking to get an eval and go from there. It turns out that one of the guys on my tennis team is a “mental health professional.” I started talking to him about the situation and he said he couldn’t see me because he knows me, but he’d make a recommendation. He works for the large local clinic that I’ve gone to for years and is in network so I assumed that the shrinks there would be covered as well. He gave me a name and yesterday I made the call. I started this at work at about 3:30. I had everything done that really needed to be done, Friday afternoons are usually very quiet and I thought it would only take a few minutes to make the appointment. What follows is an account of the kind of customer service nightmare that seems to becoming all too common these days:
I called the number on the web page print out that my friend gave me. I got an answering machine left a message. Half an hour later I got a call back and was told that I needed to call a different number for first time patients. I called that number and got someone on the first try without being on hold too long. My plan was to set up an appointment for myself and then bring up my daughter and plan a course of action for that once I talked to the shrink. The person on the phone took my info and then asked me what I wanted to see the psyche about. “I want an evaluation for adult ADD.”
“That would not be appropriate with a psychologist, adult ADD evals are done by psychiatrists, the counsellors do child ADD evals but not adults.” That has a certain dinosaur logic to it, but I guess I can play along.
“OK….how about an appoinment with a psychiatrist then.”
“Do you want one at the same clinic?”
“Um….sure.”
She set up the appointment and then asked me if I was sure I was covered, because it would be about $400 bucks if I wasn’t. I told her I was sure that I was, after all my all of five of the other doctors that my family sees regularly are with that clinic. But I’ll check just to make sure. I made the appointent with the understanding that I could call back and cancel if I wasn’t covered.
No problem, I’ll just check myincrediblyhoseduphealthcare.com the web site the HMO has out there to make me think they are easy to deal with. It’s agonizingly difficult to navigate and you usually can’t find anything that really answers a question and the contacts are really no contacts at all and the only phone number in the whole site is for “customer service” and I think goes to a call center in Bombay. It does have a find a physician search engine. You can select either Primary Care or Specialist If you select specialist there is a pull down menu. Psychologist, psychiatrist, mental health professional, head shrinker, none are listed in the pull down. There’s a button under the pull down labeled “Medical Specialties” I click on it and then click on “psychiatrist” it takes me to a definition of “psychiatrist.” I know what a fucking psychiatrist is! I’m starting to get irritated. I spend another five minutes searching the site for some way to get answers. You can email the webmaster if you have technical problems with the site, you can chat live with a nurse about your ingown toenails, but the only way you can get any answers about coverage is to call the customer service number. which I’m fairly reluctant to do since, as we have all come to learn, calling customer service these days is like falling down a rabbit hole. But it seems I have no choice.
I am not a Xenophobe, OK. Well OK maybe I cringed a little when the woman who answered the customer service line had a thick Indian accent. She was polite, well trained and tried to be helpful. In her defense I didn’t have the spelling of the shrinks name, so that held things up. BUT. My hearing is suffering from the effects of way too much loud rock n roll music without ear plugs, if I’m in a place with a lot of background noise or trying to follow the dialogue on West Wing I’m pretty much SOL. Accents over the phone really throw me. She kept getting frustrated and sounding peeved that I had to have her repeat everything two or three times. I never got the feeling she was really understanding me either. To make a long story not too much longer, after much confused back and forth which included this exchange:
“The Brookdale location only has optomitry.”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
“The Brooklyn location only has optomitry.”
“Brooklyn Center?” This is the town that Brookdale is in.
“Brookdale.”
“Yes, well, I know that’s not true, because I go there all the time it’s a full service….er, a regular or….I know it’s not just an optomitry clinic, place um facility. fuck”
“I will research further.”
“Thank you”
“You are welcome.” I have no problem with the woman personally, she’s polite and helpful, even though she appears to hate the hearing impaired. Nevertheless, I’m starting to get pissed.
“He is not in network.”
“Not covered?”
“It looks like he is not in network.”
“OK, can you tell me who someone is covered?”
“I can refer you to someone who is in network.”

It goes on like this for awhile, and she gives me the name. “Pastor (spells it out) Colon (spells it out)”
I reply, “Pastor Colon?”
“That is correct, sir.”
At this point I decide I need to try a different tack. Not with her, a different tack altogther. I need to end the conversation.
“OK!”
“Is there anything else, sir.” Please stop with the sir….it makes my knees hurt.
“Weeeeeelllll, I was notified that I owed for some lab work that you were supposed to cover…..”
“Do you have the claim number.”
Amazingly I did.
“I will research that, sir.”
Thiry seconds of silence.
“Yes, you sent this claim for review. It was denied.”
“Denied, Thanks for letting me know.” OK I didn’t say that but sitting here, I wish I had.
“Yes sir. It says you were out of network at the time the services were provided”
“The services occurred on 1/26 and your company started covering my company on the first of the year, that was the cutover.” My voice is taking on a tone.

On and on it went, we agreed that she would resubmitt the claim and I calmly (I’m so proud I stayed reasonably calm, there was a time when I would have been standing on my desk waving my fist and screaming into the phone which doesn’t work in a corporate environment although it might work to my advantage as an intimidation factor; don’t mess with the crazy guy) gave her some notes she could put on the claim which actually got a laugh out of her.

Then I left the office and hour after I started this mess. M.N. if you read this go ahead and dock my pay. I was going to the store to get asparagus and lemons to go with the Halibut fillets in the freezer.
I forgot to take the route that takes me past the grocery and had to backtrack. When I arrived at the store, I realized my wallet was still on my desk and I had to drive all the way back. Kind of brings us back to why I made the call in the first place, doesn’t it.

I’m in the midst of composing a long rant. If you’re lucky, I’ll accidently delete it.

If you read anything today, read the last two posts by TooOldForThis

Unfortunately the mission has been called off. They got the guy with the old exploding goat trick. I could’ve used the extra cash.

Geese

In the late sixties Canadian Geese were rare enough in Minnesota that one day around this time of year when there was still snow on the ground and I saw a small flock of them land in Lyman Lakes from the printmaking studio at Carleton, I ran to the back door and tried to sneak as close as possible to get a good look at them. They were wild and spooky and took off when I was still 20 yards away. I was utterly enthralled my the magnificent beauty of these giant graceful birds as they lifted from the lake, wings whisting, cheerfully honking. Today in this part of Minnesota you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a goose. They are the worst of vermin. Every putting green on every golf course is covered with goose shit. Can you imagine having to clear fifteen thumb sized green plugs of bird crap from the path of your putt? It’s virually everywhere that’s anywhere near water. And of course in Minnesota you’re always pretty close to water.
The Lake of the Isles, one of the gems of our urban chain of lakes, is particularly badly infested. I think that’s because the hot shot lawyer from Kenwood that used to drink at my bar got some goslings and put them in a chicken wire compound on one of the islands to protect them from foxes and got a flock started there. They come back to the same place to breed and twenty years later we had a huge flock. They were going to round them up during molting season with nets, and feed them to the homeless, but the animal rights folks stepped in. So they just netted them and hauled them out to North Dakota or some other desolate wasteland. They came back in about two days. You can see them flying around town all year long, many don’t even bother to migrate, there’s plenty of open water to be found. They once tried to find out where the ones that did migrate went. Rochester. Ninety miles south, where an power plant keeps a large area of water open all year. I suppose they were just getting their annual checkups at the Mayo clinic along with the movie stars and royalty.
Leo Kottke the great finger picking guitarist claims that his voice sounds like goose farts on a muggy day. I don’t know about that but I think the sound of their voices and wings and the sight of them skimming the tree tops on a foggy day as they land in the cemetary for dinner is still kind of exciting but for the most part these days its “just another fucking goose.”