...and it came to pass -

In the world of haste

busyness calls out your name

come back to the form

A couple weeks since the last entry... Much has changed. I interviewed well, was offered and accepted the job, so now I'm working in Bloomington instead of 75 miles away. Yay! In fact, I'm about a mile and a half from home instead of an hour and a half. I'm happy, my wife is happy, our cats are happy. I think even my new employer is happy with their decision.

Now I'm being paid to be in class, learning the ropes and regulations. Then I sit for a state test which, if I pass (as I am confident I will) moves me into a phone center and earns me a 17% raise immediately. Presto, my income's replaced -- plus, since I'll no longer incur the expense I had of travelling to the other job, to say nothing of much lower wear and tear on both me and my truck, I'm ahead money, time and stress.

I feel I now will have time to more fully participate in the community events and life I've so dramatically missed this past nine months of commuting. I'm considering volunteering for a YMCA board position, can begin to go to the church mens' group again, and get together with friends here in town. And, among other writings, I can resume my blog and my haiku. And continue with the snailmail round-robin of writing from word prompts with the two friends I mentioned earlier. I just sent them my latest installment, in fact, which was along the lines of a Mickey Spillane bete noir episode. Karen's, as frequently is the case, was quite different in feel as well as subject.

She and I are also mulling the idea of starting a similar writing group here in town, perhaps from among our church circle but perhaps a wider venue than that. I think it would be fun. Actually, as it happens, one of the other new employees at my new job also is a poet although I'm not entirely sure he knew what haiku was when I asked him the other day. His forte is free-verse but hey, creativity in writing is at the core of both. Could be a fun contact to explore.

Good to be alive

in all the golden beauty

this late summer day

Don't count your jobs before they hatch

Pale three-quarter moon

Nimble deer on dew-wet grass

pungent blue wood smoke

insects wake and stretch their wings

I go to work and wish not

Life is what happened while I was making other plans.... I didn't get moved to the next interview stage for the non-profit I wanted, but in response to the other call I set up an interview with the another company. I have to say, I don't have as much heart for it as for the non-profit, but it would get me back home and I still can look around for another job when things open up in the market.

Karen reminds me to compare how satisfied I am now (very un-) in my current set of circumstances vs how bad could this other position actually be, even if it doesn't really excite me? I'd save all the cost of renting a room down here, all the costs of driving back and forth each week, and the 'incidentals' that help ease the stress of separation from my family and community. All that's going for the current job is habit & lack of presenting opportunity.

I already have generated some excitement for this additional prospect. The guy who called to set the interview told me up front that they really liked seeing the experience I can bring to their position, so -- as they say -- this job "is mine to lose"....by blowing the interview, really not liking the company, etc. I always go into interviews feeling that it's as much about me interviewing the company as it is of me being interviewed. So I'll be packing my list of probing questions to help me figure out what I want to do. I feel better about what this could be and how it would resolve so much of our current stressors.

One bug in my path

mile a day on sixty legs

Go, caterpillar!

An Embarassment of Riches -- yes and no...

I think I'm out to about Plan F or G now. My financial advisor ... well, advised me (that's what they do, eh?) to put off for as long as possible my draw from Social Security. She said that even though I'm able and even willing to work part- or full-time now, in my early 60s, that won't always be the case, and how would I feel having to hold down some kind of job in my 70s because I started SS too early? "Hi, welcome to WalMart." Point made.

Activity in several arenas over the past week or so. My son's still up in the air about their plans after their house burned down, so we've been accepting clothing donations to take down to them the next week or two. I got a call last week from a non-profit I'd really be excited to work for and had a job interview yesterday. I think it went pretty well and should hear back from them soon about the final interview - and would be very pleased and excited to work for this group.

While I was digesting that good news, I also got a message from another company to which I'd sent a resume and they're interested in talking to me if I'm still looking. Remember, I've been searching diligently for a replacement job since the first of the year and more casually for months before that and these are the first interviews I've even been invited to. So I'm feelin' good...and will feel better and best when I get the job offer from the non-profit.

I've also become part of a 'writing round-robin' with friends in Mexico and California. We circulate a set of "writing prompts," three random words that must be used in a quickly-written short story, and then we circulate the stories among ourselves. It's a ball. Last week's prompts were basalt, birdhouse and ballerina and one of the women wrote a story that, I swear, every other word started with 'b'. It was literately and literally alive with 'b'ees. This week's are parking lot, marshmallows and envelope. I've got a story going that's very "Guy Noir meets Big Lots." It should be fun.

Hear about the gull

who tried to stand on a fish?

He fell off his perch

House burned down

Smoldering ashes

my house has burned to the ground

opportunity

My son's house burned to the ground Thursday night. No, there's no punchline; it burned down. The only parts left standing were the fireplace, the chimney, and one brick wall. Noone was hurt, they were all out of the house: Adam was on his way home from work and his wife & kids were away at her mother's in Georgia.

One of the neighbors noticed smoke and called the fire department, but told them that the roof already had collapsed into the upper floor. The three fire trucks that came focused on keeping the fire from spreading to the adjoining trees and surrounding forest. I don't know if anybody has speculated what caused the fire, but it sure did a number on the house. My son and his family were pretty much in shock up through Friday at least.

Karen and I drove down early Saturday morning -- to give moral support, to help them review their options, and to take down some clothes donated by employees in my department at work. An obvious haiku would be the one about the farmer having a better view of the moon now that his barn had burned down. My thoughts keep bouncing back to the Chinese glyph for 'crisis' being the same as the one for 'opportunity'.

Certainly we all mourn the loss of momentos, heirlooms, early family photographs and the like, and yet .... what might you do if sent this crisis, this opportunity? Would you rebuild the same style house on the same spot, buy the same kind of furniture, tools, utensils and appliances, step back into the same boxes as before? Or would you give some thought to what else might you be able to do now, and where might you want to do it?

With ample insurance reimbursement, a house could be built again, sure -- but where would you want that house want to be? What would you want to do out of that house? Maybe you'd buy a motor home and travel. Maybe rent instead of buy? Instead of buying the tools you're used to, is there something else you'd want to attempt, try out, do, or be? And then the biggest question of all -- why wait for a crisis to think about these options?

Deer and elk, continued...

So...here I was at 11,000 feet after a blizzard left two to four feet of snow, depending on where you measured. I had plenty of food and firewood and I knew how to find wild game if it came to that. But I needed to get word to the rest of the group about the results of the storm and see if it changed our plans. Four of the eight of us were meteorologists, so they already knew it had snowed; they just didn't know how much. My old CJ5 was up there with me, too. No top on it, never had a top in all the time I drove it, whether rain, snow, desert heat or a fine sunny day. But it had a strong winch on the front and had gotten me out of some pretty tight spots (into some, too, truth be told) for more than 25 years.

Back in the tent, I gathered items I'd need in case I got stranded on the way out and had to spend the night curled up under the skirt of a fir tree. Making sure my sleeping bag and rifle were secured, that both jerry cans were full of spare gasoline, and camp was "locked up," we set out, me and Grover the Jeep. Having hunted this area for so many years, we'd situated our camp where we knew the snow wouldn't drift too deeply. On semi-level ground at first, I drove primarily on the crests or windward slopes of hills, trying to avoid the lee-side of timber patches so I wouldn't get bogged down in deeper snow.

I figured out pretty soon that the snow would be less than 18 or 20 inches deep if I could see the tops of a certain kind of grass, and that much snow I could plow through. Oh yeah, I'd put chains on all four tires before I left camp, so I had pretty good traction but knew the risk would be getting high-centered...or ramming into a snow-obscured fallen tree or boulder...or churning into a ditch or depression and losing traction altogether. "Follow the grasses," that was my mantra. Man, it sure was beautiful out there in the heart of this wilderness!

I made it to the beginning of the 4x4 trails which I knew, 20 miles later, would bring me to an actual hard-packed dirt county road (underneath how much snow I didn't know). Even in very muddy conditions and with waterholes that could hide a Mini-Cooper, that 20 miles normally took about an hour to drive. But I couldn't risk the actual 4x4 trails because the ruts were snow-filled and Grover's undercarriage would flounder on his belly. Driving mostly on the high-side above the normal jeep road, I could keep track of where I was (the snow really did cover up a lot of landmarks) and I'd also lower my risk of dead-ending at some woods and having to backtrack. Also, I had to make sure that when (not if) I did get stuck, I'd be able to find a good anchor within reach of the 150' winch cable.

And I got stuck for sure, more times than I could count. There'd be places where no grass showed at all and I had no option but to run the jeep full tilt in the desired direction until enough snow piled in front of the grille and brought me to a stop. Then I'd get out, drag the winch cable to the best available anchor (boulder, log, standing tree) and dig & winch myself back to "regular" running. Then do it again, and again, and again. I soon stopped rewinding the winch, just loosely coiled the cable and brought it up over the windshield onto the passenger seat. Nineteen of those 20 miles out to the road took me from shortly after sunup to the beginnings of dusk. But then, within sight of Deep Lake, I ran out of high ground and had no option - I had to jump the jeep off the upper lip of a roadcut and down onto the roadbed five or six feet below. No option.

Jump I did, right into a bed of snow deeper than any so far since it was sheltered by the road bank. Dragging the cable out as far as I could, I wrapped my heavy logging chain around the base of a boulder as big as the jeep itself and hoped I could winch myself to the boulder instead of the other way around. It worked and, after several more similar pulls, I broke onto a section of road blown free of snow (more or less) and could actually drive (more or less) instead of ramming snow until it stopped me.

I passed Deep Lake frozen in ice and snow for the winter and took off my tirechains when I joined up with the plowed forest service road that led down out of the mountains and to the interstate. Got to the nearest town, got a hotel room for the night and called the guys in Boulder. They held a meeting and decided to stick to the original plan - they would meet me at the hotel in two days and we'd see then what the upper road and trails back into camp looked like. If the snow had settled enough, we figured we could plow back into camp and have a fine hunt. And that's exactly what we did.

Deer and elk and coyotes, oh my!

Warm air and fog

drift along the soft ridgeline

remembering you

Mornings are cooler now, evenings too. Rains visit at odd hours through the day, sometimes accompanied by summer storm's sturm und drang. The grass still green, but not as green as just a couple weeks ago, and on my walks I notice cottonwood and tuliptree leaves beginning to yellow and drop to the ground.

My heart turns to Colorado at this time of year. I love Colorado autumns....aspen, with their brilliant white trunks and limbs and bright gold silver-dollar-size leaves; elk and deer still grazing in the meadows and sleeping on the upper slopes of the high mountains but keeping their eyes on the coming winter. This is grouse season, too, those wily brown distant cousins to turkeys. How they startle me as they launch themselves into the air, bursting from their clever hiding place practically under my feet or next to my shoulder!!

I've spent many many weeks up in the flattops of the Western Slope, 35-40 miles off any known highway and a mile or more from any recognizable Forest Service road. And this season, as the world moves into fall, brings back fine memories of lying in the tall grasses, simply looking at clouds as they drifted west to east, sometimes not that far over my head. I'd listen to and enjoy watching insects, birds and all sorts of varmints as they crawled, flew, hopped, walked, scurried, scuttled and meandered their way in this high-altitude environment. Coyotes would eyeball me as they traversed a clearing with ears, eyes and noses just barely above the grasstops, on their guard lest I prove to be a threat.

One time my father and I went up in October to cut firewood (standing dead lodgepole pines make excellent fires). We planned it for a couple weeks before elk season. In two days, we felled and cut up enough wood to fill a '72 Blazer and the trailer it pulled. When he left to take it back to Boulder and get the hunting crew ready, I stayed in our camp, alone, for the next nine days, "holding the fort" for the hunting group.

I was blissed out. We'd hunted this area for more than 40 years so I was quite familiar with the terrain. I wandered among stands of dense black forest, crossed clearings from livingroom-size up to the area of a small town, hiked 1000' elevation changes several times a day, all just to see what new there was to see. I tracked an elk herd -- 25-odd cows and calves mostly, along with some yearling bulls -- and it was great fun. They'd execute their best groupsneak through the woods while I, knowing their habits, paralleled them from 50 yards or so off that backtrail. I was quiet enough and crept slowly enough that they didn't see me even though they knew I was somewhere close. I trailed them for a whole day, watched them bed down in the evening.

Then, one afternoon about 4 days before the other guys were due, it began to snow. And it snowed. And the wind blew. And it snowed and blew for a day and a half. When it stopped, the ground was blanketed with 22" of snow -- and that was where it hadn't drifted! When I emerged from the wall tent two days later, the world was completely changed - almost totally quiet, and sparkling with millions of points of light. I remember thinking to myself, "This is going to be quite a challenge..... and GREAT FUN!" It was both and then some.

(to be continued)

Bull elk watching me

beige fur and long sharp antlers

just wait for winter