Vodka, Cherry Coke, and an SKS Rifle

All the worries these days. So here is James McMurtry's "Choctaw Bingo." You know who his daddy is, right?

I mainly like this song because aside from being drenched in Southern Plains au-then-ti-ci-ty, it is the only song that I know of that name-checks my mother's birthplace, Baxter Springs, Kansas. And bois d'arc/bowdark trees.

Of course, she was one of the good girls, and her grand-daddy was the postmaster, as long as there was a Democrat in the White House. She would be horrified.

The lyrics, if you need them, are here.  The Russian navy still uses SKS rifles for some parade units, without steel-cased Tula ammunition.

Cannabis Consumption and the Colorado Hunter

It had to happen. I opened the 2017  Hunting Guide from Colorado Parks and & Wildlife, and there was a long sidebar titled "Nonresidents' Guide to Marijuana Laws in Colorado."

It covered the basics. Watch out for edibles: "A retail marijuana clerk warned that it is easy to lose an entire weekend when you don't know how much to consume or how it will affect you." (And if you have a five-day season, that's 40 percent of it.)

And always this: "Don't even consider taking some home with you, whether flying or driving."

But the lyrics of a Simon & Garfunkel song  popped into my mind, "The 59th Street Bridge Song":

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feelin’ groovy

(Eventually I figured out what the song was about)

Good advice for the big-game hunter, right? Slow down. You move too fast. You've got to make the season last. Just kicking down the aspen grove. Looking for deer and . . .

Well, maybe not during the hunt. But can think of at least one well-respected Colorado wilderness hunting writer who always has his evening smoke. In fact, he introduced me once to the White Widow.

. . . . Where were we? Did you say something? Is this the path to my tent?

First There Is A Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain

Click to embiggen.

I look at the façade above the front door of the defunct Ponderosa Restaurant in Magdalena, New Mexico, and I wonder why it is asymetrical.

Then I see that it duplicates the outline of Magdalena Peak on the southern horizon.

And I think of a pleasant piece of psychedelic pop from years ago.

Look What Smokey Bear Left in my Stocking!

The Fiddlin' Foresters

Am I opening presents early, when Smokeymas is still a week away? Not really, I found this CD, "In the Long Run" by the Fiddlin' Foresters, at ARC today.

I had no idea that (a) the US Forest Service had an "official old-time string band" and (b) that their website had been presidentially singled out by Barack Obama as an example of government waste. Was that a taxpayer-funded banjo too?

Thank heaven we have saved $10 annually on domain registration fees. The deficit will melt like snow in May if we keep this up.

The album is still available.

I played it on the long drive home from Colorado Springs. They do a tricky thing in the middle, moving from the campfire-singalong jollity of "Smokey the Bear" through another cut and then into "Cold Missouri Waters," which is a song I rarely listen to because it interferes with my vision, and that's not what you want at 65 mph. Jane Leche gets into Joan Baez territory with the vocal track (YouTube).

"Is that about a wildfire?" M. asks.

"Mann Gulch," I manage to say, although my voice sounds funny.

But let's be real. The song is a weeper, but I was not even born yet when the events took place.

I am thinking more of a sunny dining hall at the Wheaton College science station/summer camp in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. A boy sits off in a corner while his father, the Pactola District ranger, gives some students a quick version of what would be today the S-190 and S-130 "red card" wildfire-training classes, in case they have to fight a fire on or near their 50-acre site.

Sheet music to "Smokey the Bear" sits on the rack of the upright piano in the dining hall, and the ranger is telling the students how you should never run uphill from a fire, how something bad happened in Montana not too many years before.

Camouflage, Sawyer's Chaps, and Culture War

I went into one of the hardware stores in the next county north recently to buy some saw chain and a new depth-gauge file.

Sawyer's chaps

Then I decided that if Kevlar chaps were good enough for the fire department (we upgraded last year, as well as getting a second saw, a Stihl* with 30-inch bar for taking down big hollow cottonwoods), I should have my own.

So I started looking for my size in the fluorescent orange, but what was this? Camouflage sawyer's chaps. Huh?

Meanwhile, the store's sound system was thumping out Justin Moore's culture-war** anthem, "Bait a Hook," in which the speaker denigrates his ex's new boyfriend:

He can't even bait a hook
He can't even skin a buck
He don't know who Jack Daniels is
He ain't ever drove a truck

Obviously, since no one holding a screaming chainsaw is interested in concealment, the cammie chaps are just a fashion statement.

Yes, camouflage has fashions. Not improvements necessarily, but fashions.

Colorado wildlife photographer and writer Tim Christie, who likes camouflage, wrote in the March/April 2014 Colorado Outdoors how one magazine's editor rejected three-year-old photos: "It's a super photo, Tim, and we could use it except the camouflage clothing is outdated."

"Our advertisers," continued the editor, "appreciate seeing their latest patterns on hunter images in the magazine. It's a reality of the publishing business . . . . You've got about two, or at most, four years after a pattern's been released before camouflage clothing worn by a hunter dates an image."

What is this, The Devil Wears Realtree?

And Christie could only write that paragraph in a state-supported magazine like Colorado Outdoors that takes no ads.

But for culture-war purposes, any pattern on your ball cap or jacket is enough to make a statement — even WW2  "jungle camo" for the retro look. Or Russian klyaska, which you wore before anyone else had ever heard of it.

* Stihl is sure ahead with the brand marketing — hats, shirts, sunglasses. I am waiting for the seat covers and dog collars.

** Aside from Hank Williams, Jr.'s "A County Boy Can Survive" (1982), when did C&W music get all culture-war-ish?

Windchimes in the Wets

The Haunted Windchimes, a Pueblo-based folk/roots music band, playing outside the Songbird Cafe in Beulah, Colo., in the foothills of the Wet Mountains.