Got a Match? No, You Can't Have One

Danger! These are unlicensed matches!

The second chilly day row, and again I built a fire in the wood-burner, striking a match on the flagstones where it sits and touch the flame to a little pile of twigs and newspaper.

Striking a match. A "strike-anywhere" match, a.k.a. kitchen match. Tried to buy some lately?

They have been going away. Maybe you can blame "Brussels," in other words, the European Union, which outlawed "strike-anywhere" matches — as opposed to the "safety" strike-on-box/book type — effective May 31, 2018. (Some people claim that they started disappearing earlier than that.)

That should not affect North America, but you know the story: big companies often stop making products if they lose part of a market. So if little Hans and Francesca must be protected against strike-anywhere matches, so must we.

Last winter I went into a King Soopers (supermarket chain owned by Kroger) looking for strike-anywhere matches, which I use mainly for the wood stove and secondarily as a survival tool, keeping a few stashed in every backpack, etc. 

They were not there in the picnic and barbequeing stuff, where I had always found them.

I asked a clerk. "Oh, we don't carry those anymore." America's largest supermarket owner is saying no more kitchen matches? The only strike-anywhere matches were the extremely long, decorative, and expensive ones that some people use to light fireplaces, charcoal grills, etc.

I immediately went online and bought several years' supply. Here is a website devoted to them — that's what happens when something becomes a niche market, I suppose. They are "dangerous."

This website discusses strike-anywhere matches, "safety" matches, and how to waterproof the former. to make "storm matches."

Matches in general are disappearing from popular culture. Back when people smoked in bars, when those people wanted to light up, they might ask the bartender for a light, and he would pull a book of paper matches (printed with the bar's name, of course) out from under the bar and set it by their drink. 

Restaurants and cafes had bowls of free matchbooks by the cash register — when was the last time you saw some of those? They just quietly went away.

People used to collect them. An uncle of mine had a wall in one room covered with matchbooks that he collected, and he was not the only such interior decorator. 

Minnesota newspaper writer James Lileks, a big fan of mid-20th century pop culture, has a huge online matchbook museum. It's indexed, with photos and commentaries.

So between the demise of public smoking and some EU bureaucrat deciding citizens can't be trusted, matches are turning into this niche market, and pretty soon you will have to go to an outdoor-speciality store to find them?

<

Should SAR Leave the Body on the Peak?

A Colorado Air National Guard Blackhawk helicopter
on a mission near Ouray (Ouray Mountain Rescue Team).

Last August, three volunteers from Mountain Rescue Aspen were injured by rockfall on Capitol Peak as they searched for a missing climber.

One was hit by a "micowave-size rock" that smashed into her hip. "She sustained a comminuted femur fracture (broken in three or more pieces), multiple pelvis breaks and a fractured vertebra."

While she was expected to recover, I suspect that she will feel those injuries for a long time, perhaps the rest of her life.

The injured rescuers were airlifted off the mountain by a Colorado Air National Guard helicopter. (The ANG frequently helps out on these situations.)

The climber, a 32-year-old man from Madison, Wisconsin, was left up there. Some of my climber friends on Facebook were deeply disappointed. 

The Pitkin County team told the family it did not see a way to safely recovery the body at this time.

“It was a difficult decision, but we’ve collectively decided to leave Kelly McDermott’s body on the mountain where it currently rests,” [Sheriff's Office representative Alex] Burchetta told CBS4. “We’ve spent the past month or so working on alternate recovery plans and simply were not able to come up with one that provided the level of safety necessary to conduct another recovery mission.”

But how many people should risk their lives to bring down a body? My county's Search and Rescue Group, which is large and active, has done it multiple times. But no one has ever gotten a smashed pelvis in the process. (I realize that the injuried searchers did not know that their missing climber had died.)

It's a different order of magnitude, but many bodies have been left on Everest and other big mountains. One corpse, nicknamed "Green Boots," is a well-known landmark to climbers on the North Face. There may be as many as two hundred others.

There are several intertwined problems here.

Most Search and Rescue people are volunteers. I know some locally. They work hard and pay a lot of their own expenses. Should they climb after corpses, or should friends and family take care of that?

SAR groups are more focused on living people who need help, however. They defend their "no-charge" policies, saying that free rescues save more people. The Colorado Search and Rescue Association states their policy:

The State of Colorado has declared that backcountry search and rescue is an essential service in Colorado.  The Colorado SAR community believes SAR is a service that should be provided to anyone, regardless of ability to pay.  These civic minded volunteers do what they do for many different reasons, including simple humanitarian support for their neighbors and visitors. They enjoy being outdoors, and many of them talk about the personal pride that comes from working as a team to save lives.   SAR teams, in many ways, help sustain the Colorado way of life.  Charging for services, especially in a punitive context, does nothing to further this culture and likely would injure Colorado outdoor tourism. . . .

The Summit County Rescue group tells the story of a young hiker who became stranded on Colorado’s 14,270 foot Quandary Peak. She called 911, but asked the SAR coordinator just to “talk her out of the area,” which was a dangerous, technical part of the mountain. The sun had already set and it was getting cold, but she repeatedly insisted the team should not come to help her. The SAR coordinator finally asked why she didn’t want help, and she replied, “I can’t afford it.” He explained there would be no charge and she finally relented.

There are a few caveats to the no-charge-for-rescue doctrine. First, if you are rescued by a backcountry SAR team, they may call in other resources that do commonly charge for services, such as ambulances and medivac helicopters.  Health insurance plans may offer coverage for these kinds of medical transport.

Colorado charges a fee on hunting, fishing, and all-terrain vehicle licenses that helps to fund Search and Rescue groups. I wonder what percentage of hikers and climbers buy the stand-alone COSAR card. It is a fundraiser, but it is not "rescue insurance."

A recent New York Times article states,

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge of inexperienced hikers venturing into the outdoors. And that in turn has increased the pressure on search and rescue teams, as well as the costs. Increasingly, states are looking for ways to penalize people who take unnecessary risks. But some question whether these laws might also discourage people from seeking help soon enough after putting their lives at risk because of an honest mistake.

New Hampshire passed a law in 2008 that allowed it to seek reimbursement if state officials deemed that a rescued person was negligent.

 Colorado's SAR community is resisting this movement, so far.

When I took National Outdoor Leadership School wilderness first-aid classes, one question always bounced around in my head. The instructors always seemed to assume that the helicopter — or the SAR team — would be there when we needed them. But what if they did not come? What happens when they have too many incidents to cope with, "essential service" or not?

Would people be more careful if they knew that help was not just a cell phone call or beacon activation away? 

My neighbors like to say that if a violent crime occurs, the nearest sheriff's deputy is at best twenty minutes away, so you had better have your own Plan B. And we rural volunteer firefighters are not as quick to respond as an urban fire department either. What will you do until we arrive?

Is it fair to ask that of mountain hikers and climbers? 

How would it change things if you went up the mountain knowing that no one—except possibly your friends—would come looking for you if you did not return on time?

Everybody Thinks Something about the Resort-Town Housing Crisis

Victor, Colorado, had lots of houses when it was a mining town.
Not so many second-home owners back in those days.

Mountain and resort-town housing — the lack of it — is lighting up Rocky Mountain news sites. Town councils are suddenly turning nasty and seeing seasonal homeowners as the obstacle to year-around workers finding a place to live. Or they start cracking down on short-term rentals. Breckenridge, for example:

Breckenridge, with its ski slopes reaching into the middle of town, is a short-term rental haven. The town has 3,945 privately owned homes and condos that vacationers can rent. The town council, in an effort town leaders described as a way “to protect our quality of life and the fabric of our community” and “fiercely protect the character of Breckenridge,” on Tuesday unanimously approved a 2,200-property cap on so-called exempt short-term rentals in the town. Those are the homes that are not part of a larger hotel-like complex that offers a staffed front-desk and security. . . . The vacation-rental strategies deployed in Aspen, Breckenridge, Chaffee County, Crested Butte, Eagle County, Grand County, Steamboat Springs, Telluride and  Summit County all differ, but one thing is clear: The largely unfettered growth of short-term rentals in Colorado’s high country is coming to an end.

Hotel owners must like the idea of capping short-term rentals a lot.

I feel like I have been on all sides of this issue. I have sought Colorado small-town housing in situations of "Take it now, it's the best you can get." 

Then not along ago, I was walking down a street in Taos, New Mexico, and recognized a little apartment where as a twenty-something I had a short-term relationship with a woman who lived there. I don't remember how we met or how she supported herself. What I thought instead was, "I bet that's an AirBnB rental now."

Yet my wife and I were staying in an AirBnB rental nearby ourselves! We like to be able to cook our own meals, for one thing. Sneaking an electric hot plate into a motel room gets old.

On the other side, we were short-term rental landlords from 2002 to 2020, when our county briefly shut down all short-term rentals because of the pandemic — just when we had decided to change from a do-it-yourself approach to listing with VRBO. 

When we switched our "guest cabin" from long-term to short-term, we knew we were taking a rental property off the market in an area where rentals are very difficult to find. But there were advantages from our end:

• Short-term renters do less damage. They don't leave junk cars on the property or mysteriously acquire extra dogs.
  
• The cabin's well is a little unreliable. It is easy to call someone to haul water for the cistern for short-term guests, but that would be really expensive to do for long-term renters.
• The short-term approach let us block out times for family and friends and for our own occasional travel. 

Financially, we probably did not do as well, since the business was highly seasonal, but we paid the taxes and insurance and got the income-tax write-off for rental properties. But we could have rented it to that newly hired schoolteacher that you read about in all the news stories, the one who ends up turning down the job because s/he can't find a place to live.

There’s no affordable housing in Mancos. Zero rental units. Nearly no houses on the market. The town’s school district struggles to hire teachers because they can’t find a place to live. It’s the same story with the town government, the hospital and the nursing home.

Maybe if we get the well-situation worked out, we can do that. And new flooring downstairs. Et cetera.

Small towns that want to build municipally funded housing find problems too. Some have to go with geology, others with the construction economy.

Pagosa Springs, for example, has earmarked land for affordable housing but struggled to get the attention of developers. After receiving zero responses to a request to build a dozen units last spring, the town this fall expanded the development to include up to 64 units on three plots of land, offered at little to no cost. It got three responses. 

“These guys are making good money right now building custom homes,” Pagosa Springs councilmember Mat deGraaf said of developers. “If you’ve ever worked in the trades, you make hay when the sun shines. And right now the sun is shining so I don’t fault them.”

So even when towns want to spend money on housing, there can be obstacles.

I don't think it does much good to beat up on that out-of-state person who owns a "Christmas house" in Blue River or Telluride though. They can rent short-term (given a local property manager), but they are not going to rent to that cop or schoolteacher because they themselves want to use the house or condo at certain times. How do you get around that problem? (And don't suggest expropriating these "exploiters"' houses at gunpoint—not likely to happen.)

Playing the "quality of life" card and capping short-term rentals, however, might be politically feasible, but there will lots of pushbacks from people who depend on that income to pay for the "Christmas house." And there is an economic argument.

One short-term rental manager said,

“All the business owners in Breckenridge who rely on visitor spending, they are getting it from my group,” said Carol Kresge, the manager of the sprawling home that was originally built as a B&B but now can be rented short-term by vacationing groups who pay as much as $4,000 a night. . . . “Hearing that short-term rentals are destroying the character of Breckenridge is disturbing and it’s just not true . . . The visitors who visit the lodge are the character of Breckenridge. They come into town and they spend their money at the local restaurants and shops. A cap on short-term rentals is a broad brush approach designed to solve a problem that hasn’t been well defined.”

The economic argument leads to a larger question: Can outdoor recreation "save" small towns in pretty places. Some economists say no. But that is a separate blog post.

3D Adobe Printing Could Be an Option for Southwestern Builders

 

Me in my good black shirt at a job site.

Back when I was a college student, I spent a couple of summers laying adobe bricks in Taos, New Mexico. Under the tutelage of the foreman, Phil Rael, I got to be fairly good at spreading the zoquite [local slang, from Nahuatl] and setting the bricks. 

In the project pictures, the bricks were trucked down from San Luis, Colorado, where they were made in some rehabilitation program for junkies, or something similar. They were top-quality, asphalt stabilized, a little larger than the local homemade variety.

They arrived on an old flatbed truck by two middlemen. I was trying to document this project, and those two were a little camera-shy. Here is one of them, Pat W. I kind of think he dealt in more than one kind of bricks. 

But that is so old-school! Now they are using 3D printers with adobe in the San Luis Valley -- at least in one pilot project. Sweet!

Combining indigenous mud-based building materials with 21st century robotics, California-based Rael San Fratello created the oddly beautiful structures of “Casa Covida,” their “proto-architectures” that connect high- and low-tech traditions. Its name is a nod to both the pandemic and the Spanish word for “cohabitation.” The project recently took a virtual bow in an impressive hour-long event hosted by the Architectural League NY. (The video is online.) The partners, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, spoke from Antonito, in southern Colorado, and took questions about their work and about “the social agency of design" . . . . .

Pat did not like being photographed.

The creators’ overall goal is to prove that low-cost, low-labor construction is possible, efficient and safe. Think of it as the highest of low-tech. Or down-to-earth high tech.

Using clay, water and wheat straw found onsite, the project aims to“push the boundaries of sustainable and ecological construction.”

It's still an early-stage project, not open to the public. 

What I always liked about adove was the plasticity. You want an arch over there? OK, we'll make one. Was that course of bricks a little out-of-plumb? We'll make it up on the next one. Once it's plastered, no one will know the difference.  

But this new approach goes so much farther! Check out the photos and videos here.

High Country News Editor Spooked by Cowboy Hats

Heather Graham in "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," a Nineties movie with a Seventies sensibility.

Brian Calvert, current editor of High Country News, recently had an anxiety attack about cowboy hats.

He probably has not read far enough back in the archive to know this, being relatively new, but this not the first time that HCN has tied itself into knots of political correctness over Western wear.

Back when HCN was published in Lander, Wyo., before Ed and Betsy Marston took it over in the 1980s (as I recall), they published an earnest editorial asking whether  environmental activists in the West could wear snap-button "Western" shirts, for example, lest they unwittingly identify with eee-vul ranchers and other earth-rapers.

The irony there is that "Western wear" as sold on Main Street was formalized by urban tailors after World War Two as costumes for musicians and actors. Even foreigners know this:

HCN founder Tom Bell wearing a
"problematic symbol." I don't mean
the eye patch.

El traje de vaquero era utilizado en esta época por los colonizadores, los hombres de montaña y durante la Guerra de Secesión o Guerra Civil Estadounidense. Igualmente, con los años ha ido popularizándose gracias a su relación con el estilo musical denominado country de la mano de cantantes como Gene Autry o Roy Rogers, muy populares en EE.UU. durante los años 40 y 50. 

In addition, without cowboy hat-wearing, environmentally concerned Wyoming rancher/biologist Tom Bell, who founded High Country News, Briant Calvert would not have his job and editorial pulpit.

Brian Calvert needs to tell these Navajo rodeo contestants
that their hats are "problematic." (VICE magazine).

Did he think about that before writing how the cowboy hat was "a symbol of power and exclusion"? That it is nothing but a prop to show who is American and who is not? He needs to get out more. Maybe he could meet these guys in the photo at right. They clearly are insufficiently "woke."


The broad-brimmed hat is practical in sunny country, as generations of wearers have known. And if it threatens to blow off, you need a "stampede string," as the old-timers called it.

And they are flattering to almost everyone. You don't have to be Heather Graham. I am sure that my grandfather, who sold Stetson hats in his store, had a whole line of patter about that!

Me, I've got one Stetson "Open Road, " kind of a compromise style, and one no-name low-crowned, pine sap-stained broad-brimmed hat in my cranial wardrobe. I plan to keep wearing both of them.

Reunited with my Favorite Seasonal Ale

I missed my favorite Colorado seasonal brew, Odell's Isolation Ale, completely last year. By the time that winter had arrived, it had vanished from the stores!

As the owner of a small Pueblo liquor store with a good craft beer selection put it, "Beer is like clothes these days. They sell the fall line in the summer, and by fall, it's gone."

This year I timed it right. They seem to have switched to cans. Oh well, I can still pour it in a glass — except when there is firewood to split.

The liquor store owner says it might last through November. Then it's time for the spring seasonals, apparently. Time is out of joint.

Driving Around Looking for a Farmers Market

Farmers market in Westcliffe, Colorado.

A few years ago, we had a membership in a CSA farm on "the mesa" outside Pueblo. In the summers, we planned our weekly shopping/library trip to coincide with the day when we could harvest or pick up our fruits and vegetables.

Then "our farmer" had some life changes and closed his operation, scattering his interns to the Colorado winds.

Vegetable gardening here in the foothills is a tricky operation, so for more volume and variety, we relied on farmers markets.

Only most of them that we see are only about 10-percent fresh food to begin with. The rest are selling crafts, preserved foods (jellies, etc.), burgers, brats, tamales, homemade soap, CBD products, house plants, fabric thingies, wooden thingies, adoptable dogs . . . you name it.

We made a circuit of four or five markets in a three-county area but more or less settled on the Saturday market at El Pueblo History Museum. In June the Pueblo Chieftain proclaimed,

The grounds of El Pueblo History Museum will soon be inundated with farm-fresh produce, crafts made by local artists, popular Pueblo food trucks, and countless other locally made goods as the museum gears up for the annual El Pueblo Farmers Market.

"Inundated" is not the word I would use. Yes, there were food trucks, but some food vendors that had been there last year had disappeared. One organic-grower couple whom we called "the Ravens" were back, but with less than usual. On our first visit, the third week of June, we bought some veggies from them and from Arkansas Valley Organic Growers. AVOG's radishes were too woody to slice, and their mushrooms were about a day away from rotten.

M's very favorite grower was not there that day or subsequently. Meanwhile, the museum's market day had shifted from Saturday to Friday, putting them in head-to-head competition with another one in town. In an editorial titled "Dueling Farmers Markets," the Chieftain noted,

Obviously, it will be tougher for shoppers who work regular weekday schedules to make it to either market, unless they can find time on their lunch hours. Trying to spend any significant amount of time browsing at both markets on a lunch hour would pose a significant challenge. . . .  it seems logical that at least some of the vendors would like to hedge their bets by selling at both markets. For small mom-and-pop operations, that will be difficult, if not impossible, with the conflicting dates and times.

In Fremont County, the Thursday market in Florence seemed sparser than ever in terms of actual food. One significant organic grower had dropped out two years ago for unspecified reasons, while another, smaller operator decided that he was better off selling from his own farmstand two days a week.

In Custer County, the Westcliffe farmers market was the healthiest of the bunch, in terms of producers' offerings, which (being Westcliffe) included local grass-fed beef and too-sweet Amish cakes and breads. My favorite tamale vendor was there too.The county's population triples when the summer people arrive, and there is a distinct vibe of said summer people wanting to shop there in order to participate in local culture. (I have no problem with that.)

Also, there is live music, although you have to wonder if "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" is music for food-shopping.

M. and I weighed the reasons why we visit these different towns, and in the end, we started planning some errands so that we could visit the farmstand. No more chasing the perfect farmers market.

But I still need to buy and freeze more tamales.

San Isabel, Where the Internet Ends, Sort of

That mysterious box at lower right.

My friend Galen has been visiting the Lodge at San Isabel since boyhood; me, I probably came first in the late 1980s. On a fishing trip last week, we stopped to photograph this newish sign (not 1930s original), but we noticed something else — the functional pay phone.

The information sheet that you get when asking about the lodge's rental cabins makes it clear: no mobile phone service (unless you have a satphone), no wifi at the lodge or cabins, no broadcast television, and no satellite-based TV or Internet access. (Some homeowners have satellite dishes, of course.) You can borrow DVDs to watch. Messages for guests are posted on a notice board by the main door.

Otherwise, go fishing. Go for a walk. Paddle a kayak. Do something.

It is almost like "the land where the Internet ends," a piece about Green Bank, West Virginia, that ran in the New York Times last month.

Green Bank is home to several giant radio telescopes, all set in a "National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain with few cell towers or other transmitters." (That sounds a lot like much of the Wet Mountains, if you stay off the ridges.) Scientists studying weak signals from the cosmos want no interference. The area also attract "electrosensitives," people who think that cellular phone signals and other transmissions make them ill.

The writer, Pagan Kenndy, wonders,

Activists have already created “dark sky reserves” to protect wilderness from artificial light. In the future, might we also create “privacy reserves” where we can go to escape the ubiquitous internet?

As it happens, San Isabel is (mostly) in Custer County, where to the west, in the Wet Mountain Valley, there is already a "dark sky reserve" with a website, "star parties" and so on.

She talks to a stranger in line at a convenience store. There is something odd about him.

The man carried himself oddly, with his chest puffed out and his head swiveling as if to scan everything in the store, from the hunting gear to the Little Debbie display case. I thought his posture must have been a remnant from his brain injury, but then realized everybody seemed to be walking around with the same heads-up attitude. Take away the cellphones, it turns out, and you also take away the cellphone hunch. And with nothing else to do but meet one another’s eyes, people talk. 

 Or they are gazing at the lake, watching the ospreys dive, looking to see if the trout are rising.

How Can You Be Neutral in the Chile Wars?

To be loyal to my bioregion, I have should have this license plate, but . . .

In August 2018 the state of Colorado announced an addition to its growing collection of specialty license plates — the Pueblo chile plate.

After months of working to get the famous pepper to appear on a Colorado specialty license plate, Pueblo farmers, the Visit Pueblo Convention and Visitors Bureau, Pueblo Chile Growers Association and Greater Pueblo Chamber of Commerce celebrated its availability at the steps of the Pueblo County Courthouse Monday morning.

The new plates went on sale for $50 early Monday [August 6, 2018].

“This is a great thing for the Pueblo Chile. People in Colorado want to be a part of it,” said Dalton Milberger, president of Pueblo Chile Growers Association and of Milberger Farms in Pueblo County. . . . Former Pueblo County Commissioner Liane “Buffie” McFadyen, who helped Esgar kick off the idea for the license plates, said the plate represents another part of brand layering to increase Pueblo Chile’s market share competing with the rivals from New Mexico.

The Empire, however, had made a preemptive strike. New Mexico's 2017 chile pepper license plate was already winning awards in 2018.

Gov. Susana Martinez said she was proud to accept the award.

“Chile plays a significant role in our state’s culture and is one of our greatest treasures," she said. "This license plate lets the world know that New Mexico is — without a doubt — the Chile Capital of the World.”

In a bid to become the Princess Leia of the Pueblo Chile Rebel Alliance, Colorado State Representative Daneya Esgar (D-Pueblo) announced in February 2019 that she had gotten a tattoo of a Pueblo chile pepper with the words "Death Before Hatch."

She also sponsored the license plate bill. (Photo: Pueblo Chieftain.)

I would put the Pueblo chile plates on my Jeep, but I admit to some fear. I am in New Mexico two or three or four times a year. Would I face road rage from Hatch Empire loyalists? Would pickup truckloads of Hatch Stormtroopers blast me with their pepper cannons? Should I risk it? Maybe I should stick with the generic "greenie" plate.

Meanwhile, our Mirasol peppers are getting hotter. Last year (2018), dry weather kicked up the hotness of Pueblo chiles, this expert says:

Dr. Mike Bartolo with Colorado State University's Arkansas Valley Research Center looks specifically at local crops around the area, especially chili peppers. 

“I don’t know if we have any scientific evidence to validate that peppers are getting hotter," said Dr. Bartolo. "But certainly with hot dry conditions we experienced earlier in the summer, it wouldn’t be too surprising if that was the case. Especially if they were water stressed."

Not everyone in Pueblo is in agreement on whether the new crop's heat has increased. Pueblo chile pepper growers, like Kasey Hund with DiTomaso farms, says the pepper's level of spiciness is noticeable.

The power of the Pueblo Alliance continues to grow. And there is a long-range plan at work here — I blogged about it in 2007: "Chile Peppers and Pueblo's Identity."

Nuestra Señora de Cannabidiol

Buy CBD products with spiritual benefits. Ledoux Street, Taos, New Mexico.

'False Spring' Pasta

We are used to "false spring" along the Eastern Slope of the Rockies.

Maybe now, with the last snow melted, this is the real spring, but I am still calling this dish pasta falsa primavera — with fillaree, lamb's quarters (quelite cenizo), clover, and dandelion, all picked within yards of the house.

Never Underestimate a Bolo Tie, and Other Gift Suggestions

It's time for Southern Rockies Nature Blog's seasonal gift guide.

• Booze and smoked meats are always good

• I like books. Maybe you know someone who would too. Two that caught my eye:

Lines on a Map: Unparalleled Adventures in Modern Exploration

Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture

• Or how about a bolo tie? I got my first one as a college student — it's the one on the right with the green "stone," which is probably plastic, but I did not have much money then.

Like tattoos, every bolo tells a story — but you can take it off at the end of the day.

"Never Underestimate the Bolo Tie," writes someone with deep New Mexico roots.

For most of my life, I associated this unique type of neckwear with old men, New Mexican politicians, and the 1980s. Even though as an Okie the bolo tie isn’t foreign to my state, I never thought I’d personally sport one.

That all changed at my grandfather’s funeral.

When we laid him to rest, each of his grandsons who served as pallbearers sported one of Grandpa’s old bolo ties.

I picked one from his collection that stuck out to me. It’s a silver keystone with an oval piece of turquoise inlaid in it. Simple, but distinguished.

I was wearing a pair of dark jeans, cowboy boots, white shirt, and brown sport coat. It’s a getup my grandpa would have worn. Rugged, yet refined.

I put the bolo tie on and gave myself a look in the mirror. I was expecting to feel awkward and self-conscious wearing it, but to my pleasant surprise, I thought it actually looked quite sharp on me.

"The Kind of Men Who Carry Pocketknives"

 A good article from Appalachian Magazine:

"Though less than forty years have passed, I am often astonished to see just how drastic the world has changed from the time I was a small boy.  Some of these changes have been for the better, but others – just to put it bluntly – I’m not so sure about.

"Yes, technology, vehicles, and even our day to day lives are a far cry from how the world was only a generation ago, but when I survey the changing landscape of America, the greatest change I see is found in the people themselves."

Read the whole thing.

Making Money from Old Stuff in Southern Colorado

Main Street, Florence, during a car show (Colorado Life).

• Colorado Life is not as wide-reaching a magazine as New Mexico, but they did get off the beaten Denver-ski towns-ghost towns path recently to do a piece on a small town in southern Colorado that has reinvented itself as "the antiques capital of Colorado."

Florence boomed in the 19th century, but it wasn’t one of Colorado’s innumerable gold- and silver-mining boom­ towns – black gold was the specialty here. Florence had the first oil well drilled west of the Mississippi River, and the local oilfield was just the second in the nation to be commercially developed. Alexander M. Cassidy, who kicked off Florence’s oil industry in 1862, went on to found a company that evolved into Conoco.

• As long as we are on the antiques-and-nostalgia kick, there is a small enterprise in the gold-mining town of Victor making tin cans with 19th-century labels. Collectors and filmmakers know where to find them.

A couple of summers ago, she got a call requesting cans for the second season of AMC's "The Son," featuring Pierce Brosnan and taking place in the old West. Proper props were needed for a target practice scene, Karen was told.

"I didn't tell the cans they were gonna be shot," she says, regretfully.

• Today's junk, tomorrow's antiques: "Gear That Doesn't Work," from Outside magazine. Hang on to that titanium spork; it might be worth something some day.

"One of Our 50 Is Missing"

Click to enlarge.

The current Southwestern drought does not stop at the border but extends into northwestern Mexico. Sitting here with a mid-day temperature of 98° F., humidity of 8 percent, and only a tenth of an inch of rain, if that, for the week, I was wondering When will it end?

So I went looking online for 2018 Southwestern monsoon forecasts and found one from The Weather Network. Pretty informative — but also geographically "challenged."

I scrolled down through the charts and graphs and found this video: "Must See: Time Lapse of the Monsoon Season in Mexico."  Late summer rains do start first in Mexico and then move northward. And ponderosa pine trees do grow in the Mexican Sierra Madre.

But wait — that logo says "Angel Fire Resort," which is in northern New Mexico, admitted to the Union in 1912.

And who will appreciate that error more (I hope) than the editors of New Mexico Magazine, which for decades has run an item in every issue titled "One of Our 50 Is Missing" (archived here).

Even today, traveling in the USA and elsewhere, New Mexico residents are complimented on how well they speak English, while postal clerks in other US states tell people that they must fill out a customs form to send a package to Las Cruces. And so on.

Should we cut TWN some slack because they are headquartered in Ontario?

When is a Lawn not a Lawn?

The unmown lawn.

When I was a kid, I made money mowing lawns, after we moved into Suburbia. (I guess Dad used to cut the grass at the ranger station — I was too young to do it.) I learned to tune up the Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine (5 percent of the nation's air pollution?) and to face the big decision: Do I got around the edge of the lawn and then spiral inwards, or make back-and-forth stripes, boustrophedon-style?

At some point, my outlook changed. Maybe it was living the summer after high-school graduation in this sort-of communal house (four guys trying to be "spiritual") where the oldest, the organizer, saw no need to cut the grass around our little rented house near downtown Loveland, Colo.

Then the city came after him, so we cut the grass and front and let the back go wild, under the apple trees. That was something new for me, raised on the ritual of weekly mowing. Liberating, even.

Fast forward: M's and my Manitou Springs house had only a tiny area of flat ground, which we planted to vegetables. The rental house in Boulder's lawn area had been covered with plastic and gravel in the front, and there was basically nothing but a tiny bit of dirt (enough for lettuce and onions) in the back. In Cañon City we had irrigation water, so again a big garden took up most of the back yard, ornamental plants much of the front, and I mowed the leftover bits to comply with city regs. No fertilizing.

Why do we spend so much money and work so hard for what amounts to a biological wasteland around our house? Why do we spend hours of time and gallons of gasoline? Why do we water it when it withers in the summer sun only to spend more time and money to cut it down again? Lawn grasses don’t feed my family or invite pollinators onto my property. I’m not baling hay to feed cattle through winter. The best reason I could come up with for our culture’s obsession with a neat lawn is the man versus nature, bending it to our will motif — creating order, our version of it, out of disorder. And with this illusion of control we advertise to everyone else that we have the money and time to waste resources.

That is from "Green Menace: The Futility and Stupidity of the American Lawn." Read the whole thing — it is where I got that air-pollution figure.

When we moved into the woods, the idea of lawns seemed laughable. But now the minimalist lawn is re-purposed as a firebreak. Reduce fuels! No fertilizing. No weedkillers. No watering, beyond what Tlaloc sends us.

I mow three or four times per summer, but I call it "fire mitigation," thus satisfying both me-now and the kid who used to mow for pocket money.

For more: "Why Prairies Matter and Lawns Don't."

How much lawn is too much?  41 million acres.  That figure makes lawn the most widespread plant under irrigation in the contiguous US.  Three times more acreage is covered in irrigated lawn than in irrigated corn, and that’s a conservative estimate.  All of that once precious water used on those 41 million acres of ridiculous, non-native turfgrass to keep it unnaturally green – how can people be so blind?

We'll Build a Sheriff's Office, and We'll Get Texans to Pay for It.

A friend was driving into the county a couple of months ago on a certain road, and I warned him to s-l-o-w  d-o-w-n about about mile marker 55, because that road is the sheriff's favorite speed trap.

The sheriff actually said in a recent meeting that traffics fines pay for one deputy's salary, not that he has a lot of deputies.

And Texans hurrying up from the south to get to the ski areas pay a good share of that.

According to the county weekly, these Texas communities were recently represented in our revenue stream:

• Pilot Point
• Hays (County?)
• Fort Worth
• Cypress
• Galveston
• Trophy Club

Trophy Club? To get there, do you go through Trophy House and Trophy Wife?

Of course, our little county is nothing compared to the effort that Wyoming law enforcement makes during the annual Border War. I heard that even Sheriff Longmire was down there writing tickets.

Notes from a Small-Town Independence Day Parade

Kids and and early-model Farmall Cub tractor. Can't beat that.

Florence, Colorado, has joined the trend towards "wet" parades. The parade route is divided into two halves: all units move through the dry half first, and then at an intersection, those who do not wish to continue—such as units with lots of bunting and young children—peel off.

These spectators are staying dry.

As we frequently do, our little fire department contributed a unit to the parade — and a unit to another parade in another small town. For the second year running, I drove in Florence.

Hah, what is your puny squirter against a city water truck? (Florence VFD photo)

The wet half of the parade is a water battle between spectators and parade units. The former have all manner of squirting apparatus plus garden hoses hooked to spigots on buildings. The latter have open tanks of water, buckets, and squirt guns — plus some of us have fire engines.

Soak that cop! Soak his Can Am Spyder Police Edition! You know you want to. (Florence VFD)

In our case, the fire engine is a brush truck (small wildland engine) with a gasoline-powered pump. (Most large fire pumpers run their pumps off the engine, which means that the vehicle must be stationery to pump.) We restrict ourselves to one-inch hoses, two of them. Our complement included the oldest firefighter, a retired Navy pilot who loves this stuff, and the chief with his wife and three children.

Wet-zone combat.

Me, I just rolled up the windows and drove toward what I knew was coming — the downward blast from one Florence's aerial nozle.

Into the (watery) hell mouth.

I noticed this year a couple of purpose-built wet-parade units, like this one below. Also, this "Murica" thing is becoming meme-ish. Who started it?

Two views of the same truck, with water tank filled and ready.

Who says oil and water don't mix?

In the end, what makes a parade (along with high-school bands) is somebody riding something. I asked the two riders on the saddle longhorns if I could take their picture. They agreed, and said that they had been in the parade the last two years as well. "That's the trouble," I said. "When you're in the parade, you can't see the parade."

While we were waiting, the oldest firefighter remarked on the incongruity of devoting a parade to spraying water in an arid state.

"Maybe we're celebrating Florence's senior water rights," I said. "They go back to the 1860s, I think."

As I wrote once before, humans love orgies.

Living "Free" in the Real South Park

Robert Dear's stationary RV in South Park (Colorado Springs Gazette)

It was around 1970 or a little earlier that someone subdivided several square miles of South Park, the altiplano of Colorado, at the foot of Wilkerson Pass, north of US 24.

The real-estate developer cut roads across the cold, dry, and windswept pasture land east of tiny Hartsel and put up green-and-white street signs with names like "San Juan Drive."

And then no one bought most of the lots (except for some more scenic, hillier ones) because they were cold, dry, and windswept.

I used to drive by there a lot when I lived in Manitou Springs, now not so much. So I missed its transformation into a "gritty" community of "RVs, Tuff Sheds and nylon tents," as the Colorado Springs Gazette describes it. 

The area came onto the media radar a year ago because Robert Dear, who shot up a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding five, had been living there in a permanently parked motor home, "equipped with solar panels, a wood stove and a ramshackle fence encircling a storage shed, chickens and a yapping dog."

Shelters started popping up within the past five years, but the situation compounded with the so-called "green rush" after recreational marijuana was legalized in 2012, many residents say. . . .

The explosion in emergency calls is fueled by out-of-control trash fires, faulty generators and embers dumped in the woods, among other hazards, officials say.

Getting to the emergencies can be difficult, because many lack addresses.

"A lot of them are societal dropouts. They just don't want to be a part of it," [Hartsel Fire Protection District Chief Jay] Hutcheson said.

It is a harsh place to live. The Ute Indians came through only in the summers, while the early ranchers picked sites with more shelter and water. (Hartsel is on one fork of the South Platte River.) Five acres out on the flats — I would not want to live there year-around. Gardening is out of the question. The hot springs at Hartsel, developed commercially in the 1870s, have been closed for decades, so you can't even go soak off the grime.

We see this story played out elsewhere, and it's all "live free or die" until someone starts a forest fire. Or starts shooting. The "problem," if you define it as a problem — and should we? —  is not homelessness in the ordinary sense, because people can buy little acreages cheap. (No utilities.)  But then some of them turn into literal basket cases:

Two years ago, Hutcheson encountered a family of five living in a tent. While removing a woman on a stretcher, he said he "postholed in 3 ½ feet of snow" and fell backwards, fracturing a vertebra. "Surgery. Plates. Screws," he said in recounting the episode.

Other calls have brought his workers to places where people "are living in their own filth, with no sanitary precautions at all," he said.

The bureaucratic response, of course, is more regulation.

Maybe if you want to go West and re-invent yourself, all that is left are places like this.

Bojon Pride

The license-plate holder reads, "Happiness is being Slovenian."

It was the big "Slivovitz" decal in the pickup's rear window that caught my eye. "Bojon" or "bojohn" is Southern Coloradan for a person of Slovenian descent, but also is applied to people with roots anywhere in Eastern Europe.

See also, "You might be from Pueblo if . . . "

Spotted yesterday on Union Avenue, itself now dignified as the Historic District — not part of what is traditionally considered Bojon Town, but not far away.

The neighborhood is not what it used to be, and the big topic is being a Superfund site and all the ramifications of that.