Campfire Cuisine - Homemade Biscuit Mix

I shouldn't read when I'm really tired.

We've all done it. Dad came to visit me when I lived down south. After I picked him up after his long flight in, we went past the mall with the big box mart type pet store and Dad points at the sign with an exclamation of "Pet Whorehouse! What kind of town do you live in !" (It was pet WAREhouse).

The other day I glanced at FOX's online website and saw Supermodels Predict Weather (the word was actually supercomputers) and visions of some six foot two size zero blonde being used as a human lightning rod came into my head. It didn't stop there. Riverwalker over at Stealth Survival ran a story about a savory cooking ingredient which, in my state of 3 hours of sleep, I read as "Wild Chile Penguin" (it was Pequin). How do you catch the wild Chile Penquin, and once you do, how do you prepare it for your stew?

He's had some fun with me since then, much to my great amusement. Then this morning, I'm opening up my own archives of recipes and read one as "Homemade Buick" (not Bisquick). Actually I HAVE made biscuits at camp that were as hard as a Buick, but not from this recipe.

I may need sleep or glasses. I definitely needed breakfast.

We've all used Bisquick (though Jiffy's product is just as good), but I've really noticed a price increase. So make your own. Homemade Baking Mix. It's pennies per serving and will store for months, longer with a freezer if you make in bulk.



One favorite use, is for Poor Man's Sourdough Biscuits. Perfect for camping. Just mix two cups of the mix, 1/4 cup sugar, a handful of raisins, a teaspoon of Penzey's Vietnamese Cinnamon and about 1/2 a can of beer.


Mix ingredients lightly, adding just enough beer to make a thick dough. Pat out on a floured surface and cut with a biscuit cutter (or a small glass dipped upside down in the baking mix).

One trick to tall biscuits. When you cut into the dough lift it straight out. Make sure not to twist the cutter as this releases air in the dough causing the biscuits to turn out flat.

Place biscuits in a greased 14 inch dutch oven, placing them about half an inch apart. Place the lid on the Dutch oven and let the biscuits raise for a few minutes, then bake over hot coals for 15 20 minutes (if you want to do this on the grill at home use 12-14 briquettes bottom and 18-20 briquettes top ( or 400° F.) for 15-20 minutes.



NOTE: For even browning make sure to turn the oven and lid 1/4 turn in opposite directions every 5-10 minutes.

You don't need to bring much with you to make these, just make sure you check your favorite supermodel for the weather before you load up your gear. You don't want to get caught in bad weather and encounter any wild Chile Penguins out there.

From the archives - HOTR Tool Time

Going to be a couple days before I have a break, so for my tool lovers, or new readers, a blast from the past. .

What do you do when your night stand starts looking like this. . .


The old house is on the market, the pink counter tops gone, some fresh paint to fix some gouges he wall from moving things around, and some updating. It's been slow in the sales market and it looks like I'm going into year two with it on the market, priced for much less than I have in it, let alone what I paid for it.

I thought I'd learned a lot when I bought the Range. Now I"m learning more, but I'll need to as I still plan on building a log home sometime in the next year or so, if this big old place sells without my losing my shirt in the deal. If will be fun.

This has been a year of changes and decisions. A promotion at work which gave me some money for lofty projects, just not the time. Yet I've managed to find a little time to access myself and what skills I had on my own, or could learn. And learn I did.

Home on the Range tool lessons

LIVE SIMPLE. START SIMPLE

A SHOP VAC perhaps. And yes, it WILL suck up a dead mouse, that diamond earring you've been looking for AND an entire Hostess Snowball. But you don't want to.

T0 accompany that, you can add some COMMON FASTENERS which come pre-stripped for easy over torquing.

NOW ADD OUR BASIC SUPPLIES

WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off of bolts and other things quick as a wink so when they drop to the floor they are even harder to see. Can also be used on those college era cookie sheets that you really need to throw away.

SKILL SAW: A portable cutting tool used to make things 1/4 inch too short.

ADJUSTABLE WRENCH: Phase one of the detailed process of completely stripping a bolt head. Not to be mistaken for an Adjustable Wench which was popular during Medieval Home Remodeling.

PLIERS: Used to attempt to remove said bolt heads. Can also be used to attempt to pull corkscrew from wine bottle after mangling Roberta X's wine opener. (I told you Tam, we needed C4 on that thing.)
BELT SANDER: When hand sanding is not enough, this handy little electric job can turn the most minor touch up jobs into a complete home finishing project as quick as you can say, a la' George Jetson, "Jane - STOP this crazy thing".

SAW - The Congress of tools, it starts with a good idea and a straight course, then turns every which way due to lack of direction and a tendency to lean to the Left, ending up with something that doesn't even begin to look like the original plan.

VISE-GRIPS: When heated up during any welding project, they make handy branding tools.

OXYACETYLENE TORCH: When you thought that setting fire to your kitchen towel was going out of style, get one of these! Useful for lighting any flammable object in your shop on fire in only seconds.

TABLE SAW: A large stationary power tool commonly used as a shop trebuchet, to fling hard objects into that wall you just dry walled.

FLOOR LAMPS: When the low/med/high button shorts out to only the 747 landing light position, it can be used to find the wire brushed bolts or interrogate prisoners.

PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Useful for poking a hole in the top of the brownies to see if they are done. There's a rumor they can be used remove screws but it's only a rumor.

SCRATCH-AWL: Rumored to be good for making a pilot hole for drilling. However, true to its name, when you put it in your tool belt, it scratches ALL, including the wearer.

STRAIGHT SCREWDRIVER:A tool for opening large paint cans that you will need after using the belt sander.

WIRE CUTTERS: Common divining rod to determine if electricity is nearby.

HOSE CUTTER:A tool used to make hoses too short (I won't even touch the subject as to why women can't measure).

HAMMER: Occasional tool of violence in places where guns are outlawed. It is well known that the hammer is commonly used in other states to destroy the areas immediately surrounding where you are trying to hit.

UTILITY KNIFE: Handy for use in cutting open packages from the UPS guy. Works equally as well on refund checks, plastic bottles or small plastic reloading supplies that you really needed. Best left out of the hands of those prone to "packaging rage".
TWEEZERS: Forget those stray eyebrow hairs, this thing can actually remove wood splinters!

PHONE: Tool for calling your shooty buddies for help. Do NOT lose this item.

SNAP-ON GASKET SCRAPER - my oldest brother restores old cars, so I found this in the toolbox. I'm not sure WHAT it is for, but it will get rid of the Barkley yard landmines from the bottom of your shoe after your made that trek out to the little barn.

E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: Viagra couldn't make this tool any harder. Harder than any drill bit ever made, it will snap off into bolt holes faster than you can say "hey, what are you doing tonight?"

PRYBAR- useful for that cookie that just does NOT want to let loose from the pan after baking.

TROUBLE LIGHT - What my friends probably call the headlights of my truck as they hit their driveway. The home remodelers very own tanning booth. Sometimes known as a "drop light", from the tendency to drop it on a hard surface and break it one day past its warranty, it's a good source of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin which will help with S.A.D. as well as that urge to take the pry bar and . . . . Its main purpose however it to consume expensive 40 watt light bulbs at a rate equal or greater than all the .30-06 cartridges used in WW II.

AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that converts energy produced in a Indiana coal-burning power plant into compressed air that travels to power an impact wrench that grips rusty bolts last over-tightened when your Hoosier Grandpa was young and efficiently rounds off their heads.

DUST MASK - useful for drywall or that blind date your well meaning friends set you up with.

The best part? Learning, laughing about those things with those who have been there, be it remodeling, dating or dead mice.

At the end of the day you find out just what you can do with the tools you have and the friends that accept you, despite your imperfections. and the giant mess you seem to make. I found out a lot about my home. I found out a lot about myself. Namely, that I was a lot more blessed than I realized I was.

Home on the Range Ghostly Tales

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.- - - H. P. Lovecraft

The story is "Phantom Bomber" of Longdendale, from which a story in Haunted Britain and Ireland, the details are crafted. On the high moors of England, such as Bleaklow, numerous wrecked airplanes litter the rugged terrain, remnants of more than fifty aircraft that have crashed into the peaks during and after WWII. One such pile of tortured debris is all that remains of a US B29 that crashed in 1948 taking with it the souls of it's 13 crew. It is said that the ghost of it's pilot, Captain Tanner, has been spotted casually looking around the wreckage.

There is the endless speculation that this and the other crashes were caused by the area's strangest phenomena, the "Longdendale Lights".These strange, ethereal, flickering balls of blue flame were known to the locals as the "devil's bonfires" and were attributed to either fairy folk or evil witches, with records of their appearing going back as far as the 16th century. Even today their source has managed to evade the sophisticated equipment of professional mountain rescue teams. In 1998 the residents of a youth hostel witnessed a brilliant blue light that illuminated the entire district and lasted for more than three minutes. Drivers on nearby highways have been known to swerve, mistaking the lights for an oncoming car. Others, thinking the lights were the distress flares of an injured hiker or climber, would frequently call out EMS services, all of whom have grown long accustomed to the flickering lights fading slowly away as they get closer to them. It has been suggested that the pilots of the crashed planes may have mistaken the lights for beacons meant to guide their planes and followed them into permanent stony, silence.

In late 1997 as the stories of Captain Tanner and his lost aircraft faded into local folklore, two women, out on the high moors for some star gazing, were surprised by the sudden emergence from a empty sky, of a low flying airplane in the sky that disappearing around one of the peaks. The same aircraft was witnessed by a farmer, as it flew so low over him he dove for the ground. Only moments later, several others heard the sound of a plane crashing and saw an orange glow light up the sky. A search party was quickly organized based on the many reports and a mountain rescue team plus a RAF helicopter, searched ever square inch of the moorland, for an airplane that was never reported as missing. Whatever the witnesses had seen had apparently vanished into the dark night - And the stores began anew. Had the "Phantom Bomber"of Longdendale returned?


The final words of two experienced crews in Sabres in 1954 only add to the mystery. The brand new aircraft were flying in the Peak District, the pilots flying in low cloud, with the latest in navigation gear. "Where are we?" asked one pilot". "I'm not sure" said the second. And then as they apparently spotted a third aircraft, the second pilot gave the order that would fly them into their fate. "Just follow the other jet through the cloud". Since no other planes were known to be flying in the area at the time, many people wonder if they were perhaps lured to their deaths by the appearance of the Phantom Bomber. Many will chalk it up to spatial disorientation, in the frequent and sometimes surprising low fog that is common to the area, and that would be easy to do. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientific attempts have been made to explain such an event. The results are always inconclusive and distract us from what a ghost story really is.

Few people truly believe that headless ghosts haunt Celtic castles, that restless spirits chase the shadows in every abandoned old farmhouse. But sitting in a darkening room, in a facility that is completely empty but for key personnel, as the winds of Autumn brew around shuttered windows, one can't help but summon up the genuine wonder for those things that are never truly explained. I believe that despite our outward desire for explanation and logic, most members of the public would rather tell stories of haunted hills and ghost airplanes then listen to a dry litany of special disorientation, ground fog and fuel starvation.


For despite our modern conveniences, our science and technology, can we not be surprised that modern man still feels that shadowed belief in spirits, haunting those places in which they were once so affected, when we ourselves scarcely separate ourselves from past lives and past longing, ever hovering over bygone times and all their emotions, in late night, darkened hours, lingering in the past places in which we were loved. Hoping in the dark misty hills of our hearts, we will remember and be remembered.

For despite our technology, we are still dreamers. Certainly I know one half Celt, half Norse woman that is, even if she is still a big kid at heart.

Goblin Gorp - recipe on the sidebar

As Shakespeare said.: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Whether our dreams are that of coherent order and forensic logic or haunting memory of those places we wish we could revisit, I can't help but think just how small my being is. How infinitesimal within the world's workings, the grand chaotic design. As I pour another cup of tea, I'll light a small lamp, for suddenly I feel very insignificant. Insignificant and small, as moonlight flits amongst the shroud of Spanish moss, the wind tapping on the window like a ghostly finger, the night but one last lamenting kiss.

Happy Halloween ! - Brigid and Barkley

The Moon is Up - Reflections From a Pad in Florida

The moon is up over a small body of water draped by Spanish Moss. Standing at the shore line is a night heron, it's reflection the only thing moving on the rippling surface. It waits and waits, in defiant countenance. Waiting for what? Dinner, or simply the water to respond to his presence. Maybe it waits because it has nothing else to do.

It's getting later, the gathering of darkness outside, the night almost here. What is night but short space when the dark dims so soon, and the echo of a owl's wings brush against the windowsill. Just a short interlude in the sun's dance. Despite the solitude of a hotel room far away, I've enjoyed a little time away from home, as night gathers into warm folds of dark cloth against my cold legs, brushing away any remains of a chill. Just sitting as the brightness dims to a fog shrouded glow of streetlight. Breathing deep as I watch the trees, a few stubborn leaves still attached, a brace of tattered flags against ancient wood, branches a canopy of familiar order. Sitting until a full moon rose, and eased a heart quickened by new thoughts, long buried feelings that want to go to paper, but cling to my brain.

As moonlight creeps in, a cup of tea fills the room with warmth and soothes my spirit as the outside world begin to stir. The room is dark, unfamiliar, nothing to do this evening but open the computer and put my thoughts, my story to paper, gathering those thoughts that scatter around the room this evening as if a window had been left open.

You're all had some evenings, preoccupied with work and life and deadlines and every one's needs but your own that you miss so much. Missed as you are busy planting the seeds of gardens that grew only weeds, of preflighting craft that would never fly, while moments for the things that make you truly happy are so very far away.

I missed the moonwalk because I was a young teen, because frankly I didn't care. I was wrapped up in the loneliness and fears of adolescence, friends and a new school. Missed a momentous event wrapped in my own angst. Missed grasping the complexity of fate that brought those men to that mission.


White burned on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967, with Chaffee and Grissom. To die while flying is something we all know is a possibility, but the two of them had already moved passed that fear, jockeying to the finish of an event that would mark our century, the race to the moon. Then the sudden unforeseen future immolated their dream and Aldrin went in his place.

What if we knew, that moment, that experience was the last we would ever have.

We all do things, see places,see people, thinking. I'll see them later. I'll tell them that something that would mean the world to them later.

But we don't.

Things change, people change. I remember visiting Stonehenge, and then years later, when I went back there was a fence around it.

I remember the last flight in my favorite jet airplane. Pilots are like many drivers. We say we just like the experience, but there is always that one car that sucks us in, and the feeling for it is as akin to those things we won't say to a human being as we'll ever know. That day, if I'd known it was the last flight, I might have paid more attention. I could have pulled the remnants of the flight into my memory before the hangar doors closed so that on late nights in hotels I could draw them out slowly over a cold beer and smile. But, at the time, it was just a flight, just another too early wake up call, the rush to get the cargo loaded up, the weather checked one last time, coordinate customs and security, contract fueling and a slot for landing that wouldn't get us shot down. Just another launch in a hurry to get to someplace that in 10 years no one would care about. So for the life of me, I couldn't remember.

But our mission was done and it was likely that another 3 letter group would now take the airplane. I'd still have a job, still flying, just not THIS airplane, this serial number, my favorite bird.

So I grabbed a Cub from the local airport and took it for a last flight. Drifting along in a small airplane is nothing at all like flying a jet, and the only thing I've found that's close is sailing. It's like those evenings as a kid when you could lay out in the backyard, on your back looking upwards, trying to name the stars, watching for satellites that moved through the clouds on their slow steady line. The deep relaxed breath of no worries, that's what flight is like in a small taildragger. To drift in the presence of the clouds, far enough above the earth is to get a sense of what it is to be blessed. It is said that when Christ needed to center himself he did forty days in the wilderness. I think I get a taste of that when I get days in the air.

I chose to fly out over the lake, as the water is my second favorite home. I soar above the crystal waters and drink in deep of the day, quenching a thirst not born of the body, but of the spirit. An eagle drifts past me. I pop the window open to catch a scent of the earth and hear the drone of the little engine. Time settles comfortably into itself, resetting my own internal clock with the reassurance of continuity.

I still had a job, I just didn't know exactly what the next mission would be. But I'd still have the memory of that last flight, held in, as long as I could, like breath underwater, to sustain me in the airless days ahead.

Fate doesn't always wait for us. Everything we do has risks. Changing jobs, changing homes, falling in love. Do we sit quietly inside ourselves as life turns into ashes because we're afraid of that risk? I look up at the remnants of the moon and my answer takes shape in the sky, words, warmed by thought, made fluid, begin to flow and the story continues.

Come to the Dark Side

We have CAKE

Dark Side Chocolate Cake with Coconut Pecan Icing

One pan for the cake, one pan for the icing. A dark and easy snack cake.

A few HOTR hints for a tall fluffy cake.

(1) Use the freshest ingredients available

(2) Have all your ingredients at room temperature before you start.

(3) If the recipe calls for greasing the pan as this one does, do NOT grease the sides. The cake needs something to hold on to to get a full rise for a tall light cake. Try greasing a pole and then try to shimmy your way to the top of it (not that I ever tried that or anything).

Road Warrior Week Continues - Taking to the Sky

This one is dedicated to the "guy that buys the dog food" at Lagniappes.

When you take on the role of a flight instructor you think about two things. All the flight time you're going to build so you can get that airline job for the aviation majors, or tuition money for folks like me, and for a select few, the sheer satisfaction of giving another person their wings, the realization that what you can do can be passed on, like a runners torch. For most, the desire is a combination of both.

Earthbound, we all all many things, male, female, conservative, liberal, blue collar, white collar. Aloft we are all simply pilots; a small group of individuals who have discovered that vast space where perfect contentment is intertwined with the exhilaration of pitting your wits and your skill against an open sky; a face off with the elements of nature, a match with the heavens that heightens every sense you have.

Earthbound we have limitations as varied as our lives. As pilots, life is simpler as our will is freer; our lives, however different, are truer and more defined. No matter what we cherish in life, we cherish it more; home, friends, the smell of fresh tilled earth from a mile up, the heady gulp of pristine, crisp air that clears both our lungs and our heads. It's a joy worth sharing, and as a newly minted flight instructor I was ready and able.

But what they don't explain when you're putting in the hundreds of hours of study it takes to be a Certified Flight Instructor is this. In this wondrous exchange are the frequent days that if mother nature isn't trying, student will be actively trying to kill you. And smiling while doing it. Because the student hadn't yet learned that just because you weren't yelling at him didn't mean you hadn't just avoided bent metal by nano seconds. That would come after solo.


I put myself through college and grad school flight instructing. I wasn't an aviation major, interested in science and criminal justice, but it was a lot better way to make tuition than "would you like large fries with that". I remember some of the students vaguely. I remember some vividly, the imprint of their panic stricken Steve Urkel "Did I do THAT" expression burned into my brain. There was one fellow to whom I was demonstrating how to recover from a stall, the event where the angle between the chord line of the wing and the relative wind is such that airflow is disrupted and the wing stops flying. The nose drops, you level the wings and you add power. Piece of cake. Except in this case the student took my words "just gently lower the nose" to mean shoving the control yoke full forward with 180 pounds of push. I didn't know it would go that far forward. Forward, straight into the ground, coming up at 100 miles an hour.

For a moment, the woods below rushed up to greet us with a deathly slap, air rushing past with the speed of infallibility, mocking the effort of lift, the effort of life. But, for altitude and instincts born of hours of repetitive movements, that might have been our last flight. But it wasn't, and with a tustle of controls and the movement of the throttle we were climbing back up, with the power of an engine and the unrending breath of youth. Inhaling life from death, not realizing just how close it was until it was over. In that moment I was reminded that nature did not care if we were young and high up on the food chain. The sky, with it's solitude and freedoms, creates a perfect stage for exultation or loss and we are very small actors in the arena.

I have always been an avid outdoors woman and a hunter, bow and firearm. I felt as comfortable in the woods as I was in the sky. I loved getting up early, getting into the camo and sneaking through the woods like I was on some sort of covert mission. Climbing up a tall tree stand trying to hold a heavy 20 gage Belgium Browning semi-auto in one hand was interesting to say the least. I know the pilots I hunted with, more than once, took bets to see if I'd make it into a particularly tricky stand without yelling for help. It might have taken me 15 minutes but I got into my stand solo and the view was incredible.

I remember my last firearm hunt out West. It started snowing early and it was -6 degrees. I had on long johns and two pairs of coveralls and I still had to clench and unclench my muscles to generate warmth as the day wore on. Finally, my friends went back to the house, out on 500 acres in the far North. They'd teased me about being a wimpy girl, so I ate my peanut butter sandwich and stayed out in the blind until almost dark. I'd seen some does and some youngsters but I would only take a full grown buck, venison to get us through the long winter.

Right as the last of the days light leeched out of the sky, a big buck came, moving along the tree line in the distance. I sucked in a breath and fired, one shot, at near dark, as he ran for the thick of the forest. As the shot cracked into the frigid air, the buck leaped into the woods, as I stared, still, amazed at how a living thing like that will keep going, and how far, when it is already dead from that single shot through the heart. But the snow was heavy and darkness was on me and by the time I got down, out of the blind, tracking him was difficult.

When I finally got to where he lay, the white tail a small sign in the deepening pool of blackness, I stood, hairs rising up along my forearms, my breath hot in my chest, despite the snow and the cold. I wasn't alone. Something instinctual kicked in and I stopped in my tracks. There, crouching over the remains of that magnificent 12 point buck was a dark shadow, merged onto my kill, hunched over the ribcage, dark on darkness, where I couldn't tell where one shadow began and another ended. Something uttered a low throat-ed growl at me; it wasn't some body's pet and it was certainly not some cuddly woodland creature from a PETA ad. The stink of something primordial was in the air, more than blood, less than my own fear and I knew that I was moving downward quickly on the food chain.

Shooting at it in near total darkness would only have pissed it off, so I slowly backed away and let whichever scavenger or predator had found my buck have it's due. I'd taken something that, in the realm of the wild, wasn't mine to take, and something more powerful was going to take it from me. I carefully made my long way back to the safety of the house, the fear seeping out of me like the deer's blood onto the snow.

We think, as humans, we have dominion over the wild and especially when we are young, we think we are immortal. But when we are in those places, be it the forest or the skies, we are on the edge, and living is accomplished on an edge that is neither a humanitarian or lenient. The slow, the infirm, the careless . . . perish. And there will be blood. I am reminded of that daily. With each scene, each violent stoppage of that which is life, I develop a deeper appreciation of just being here, breathing, living flesh and bone. For it was in that cold wood on that dark night as I stared into the glowing eyes of something toothed and fanged, that I realized that this seemingly sturdy body, that serves me subtlety and so well, is only so much meat, and my thoughts and life history would only be a night's sustenance to some creature of the woods. . . or to fate.

We've all had that experience in one form or another, in deep woods or clear sky. The one that scares the wadding out of you, bringing out instincts ingrained in your breath, making you reticent to get back anywhere near what caused the situation in the first place. "Getting back on the horse" as they call it. Sometimes it's a near accident, sometimes it's the real thing. Most humans experience it at least once. For pilots it's something no one escapes, ever. Show me a pilot who says they've never done anything a little risky and deeply regretted it, or did everything textbook perfect only to be doused with the cold waters of mechanical failure, and I'll show you someone who's flying is limited to desktop simulators.

Sometimes the event leaves physical scars. But for most, the scars are internal and you only touch them, gingerly, and with trepidation, in late night hours of retrospection. I've talked to many a pilot that's had a scare, or through the hand of fate, damaged their beloved craft, and the first thing they say is "I'm never going to fly again". A few don't. But only a few. The rest, like myself, look at the event not as a "near death" experience, but a measure of that which they have proven they can handle. The event may fade in time, but that which it brought to you can never be destroyed, it's cataloged back in a pilots memory to be retrieved in later years, when it can and will save you again.

I remember well one of the first students I had after getting my Certified Flight Instructors Certificate. He showed up for his $10 introductory flight lesson, and we spent about 15 minutes cruising around the foothills of the mountains while I demonstrated the joys he would experience if only he signed up for lessons. As we started our descent for the airport, and the power was reduced, there was a huge "BANG" from the engine,and after a few belabored rotations the prop came to a halt. The prospective student looked at me and said "is it SUPPOSED to do that??".

Uh. . . . . no.

I remember MY instructor teaching me, time and time again, what to do when a rare engine failure occurred and with that experience, I simply acted. I set it up in a glide for a small grass strip that was close by and broadcast a MAYDAY on the local Flight Service Station frequency. They came back with "what are your intentions?" to which I replied "We're going to crash, you moron." or something equally professional. But we made it in to the strip uneventfully with nary a scratch on the plane. I never saw the student again and I had to give him his $10 back so I had no dinner that night.

Was I scared? Absolutely, though I didn't show it. Did I get back in an airplane the next day. Yes. More for the desire to eat than any philosophical direction as to how I should proceed with my life. But, trust me, it would have been so easy to stay on the ground, tethered by all the emotions that a perceived failure can bring, the portent of your own vulnerability illuminated by the near accident. But I didn't then, nor in later years when Mother Nature or a cranky Squirrel Boeing tried to beat me up. You shouldn't.

You calm your nerves or fix your trusty steed and go back to the actuality of flight, not the dream of it. Of smooth polished wood and metal. Something you can touch and smell. A symphony of sound and curves and surfaces that displaces the air that then fills your soul. You move past your fear and enter back into that relationship with the one thing that lets you be a part of something greater than you. Yes, there's fear, and it's growling at you from someplace dark, but it's only for the moment. For like most true airmen you have that supreme confidence in your airborne destiny, like that of birds and their wings, that unruffled belief in your own abilities that launches you, hesitant but full winged from the safety of the nest out into the sky.

Where you belong.

Posts from the Road - Rules of the Stagecoach

This listing of rules for Stage Coach Passengers was found in a very old Durango, Colorado Newspaper.

1. If the stage team runs away or you are pursued by Indians, stay in the coach and take your chances. Don't jump out, for you will be either injured or scalped.

That's OK, he'll buff out.

2. In cold weather, abstain from liquor, for you are subject to freezing quicker if under the influence than if you were cold sober. But if you are drinking from a bottle, pass it around. It is the only polite thing to do.

3. Don't smoke a strong cigar or pipe on the state especially when women and children are present. If chewing tobacco, spit to the leeward side.

4. Don't swear, snore or lop over on neighbors when sleeping. Let others share the buffalo robes provided in cold weather.

Buffalo robes are not to be confused with the Buffalo Snuggie

5. Don't shoot firearms for pleasure while enroute, as it scares the horses.

6. Don't grease hair with bear grease as travel is very dusty.


7. Don't discuss politics or religion.


8. Don't point out sites where robberies have taken place.


9. And don't imagine you are going on a picnic, for stage travel is inconvenient.


You all travel safe now!

Thoughts Laid Out in Black and White

I carved our names upon a tree
simple words marked a plaintive plea
The text incised on darkened wood
with trembling hand as best I could
But in so writing tears would fall
for the bark's surface was far too small
Still my hand etched away in vain
with faith that it would be seen again
hope that these small woundings of a stem
might speak to someone who passed by them
I hope they see past the mark or stain
to small etched cuts of the heart that remains
Brigid 2010

Did you ever cut your initials into a tree? (and no, it's not a great idea tree-wise). Or etch the name of a secret crush back in school days, absently in a journal, not being able to think much beyond the words that made up the name of your beloved?

Short words are easy. It's the long strings of words that can break us, or make us. In the middle of a presentation today I had a blank moment and what came to me was "I lost my train of thought".

Where did that expression come from? Though we use it for everything from absentmindedness to excusing our disjointed ramblings by its loss, it was elaborated four hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes in a somewhat different meaning:

By Consequence, or train of thoughts,

I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called,

to distinguish it from discourse in words,

mental discourse.
When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever,

his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be.

Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.

Hobbes was quite the thinker, probably why Bill Watterson chose the name for his sardonic tiger in my favorite comic strip.

My personal lumbering boxcars of thought, speeding on through this railway station we call the Internet, is fueled by very early mornings, and a couple of cups of coffee, needed to get me moving as my days often start well before sun has risen.


Train of thought. The term just doesn't seem to fit our new age, when abundant discourse is sent forth in the click of a mouse, words and and ideas flirting between computer terminals in nanoseconds, with voluminous paragraphs abbreviated to simple text messages. In an age where entire freight cars of words are reduced to tiny particles of matter, the term "train of thought" seems to be a disappearing trail of smoke in our vocabulary. Sonnets and poetry reduced to . ;-) and "luv ya" in our rush to our next appointment. People spend hours each day texting and twittering without as much as a spoken word to someone they care about. If Hobbes were given a blackberry instead of a quill, would he have written Leviathan?

Log trains passed behind my house when I was a child. Passed down through the forested hills where we romped, grew up, fell in love and carved our names on trees. As they traveled down those hills towards the timber mills at night, their path would cut shadows across our neighborhood. I remember as a small child how the sound would intensify as my Dad would read to me at bedtime, as shadows would slide over the wall above my bed, over the model boats and planes and trains my brother and I played with. And with the shadow came one of the first sounds of my memory, the mournful wail of a train, competing with my Dad for sound, so he would speak louder and more clearly, forcefully driving each word outward, the phrases connected and intact and uninterrupted and in that moment I discovered my love for words. And for trains.

In daytime we'd ride our bikes along the tracks, looking for diesel smoke in cold air, throbbing engines, hoping for a quick glimpse. The yard at the timber mill had more than one track running into it, and as two trains would arrive, you'd hold your breath in fear of a collision, only to have one veer off and stop, while a long line of cars safely passed. I think of the missing man formation, in which a squadron of fighter planes performs a low pass, one separating and flying off to the heavens. A ballet of mighty machinery.

I'd memorize the names on the cars going by, forming the words in my mouth while smelling the fresh smell of wood going into the paper mill. So many cars, so many words. Each leaving a memory, branding my thoughts with its impression, burning into my head with the sunlight streaming through the slats. Carrying it's load of mighty trees fallen to make paper for which the words will one day affix themselves. Paper clean and bare with promise.

Behind my house, a new train, miles of unexplored tracks to walk, tracks crossing across the landscape of this new life, when viewed from the air, almost forming letters, writing of new adventures. A poem composed of ancient ties and abandoned depots, a sad lament to the forgotten forms of old trains, to lost thoughts and the art of speaking in deep clear sentences, now reduced to emoticons and abbreviated texts. How do you reduce your feelings to 3 or four letters, and quick clips of syllables that mean so little? Words sent through space, silently with no weight.


My Dad no longer reads to me at night, but he sends me letters, real letters, though his household has email and a cell phone. The letters are written in clear, flowing script that belies his 88 years and in which he talks with steady and unflinching repose, of watching all his friends pass on, of navigating life in a body that aged long before his mind. He writes of the family and of his days of laughter and prayer, words of humor, of inspiration, of compelling faith. Sheets of paper that for years have charted a course for me through adulthood. Sheets that lie carefully tended, fragrant and dry in a drawer, where I will have them years after he's gone, abiding strength still radiating from his descriptions of love and loss, the papers having a weight to them of his life. A weight that will keep me anchored.

How do you do that with a text message, how do you convey such feelings of family in a smiley? How do you explain what it feels to live, to breathe, to love, to fly, in a twitter message? For those thoughts make up boxcar after boxcar of the steady motion of thought, sturdy boxes of space and time, their spaces containing the heavy load of lust and longing, pride, fear and desire. A train barrelling forward in steady progressions as moving clouds fly overhead and shafts of sunlight peer through sliding cars, into their depth. As others transmit through satellites and space, I watch the landscape from the viewpoint of the train. Structures of iron lace, the suddenness of buildings, clouds of morning mist all crossing my line of sight, my muscles straining with the curves through corn shrouded fields, moving with the train, thundering through empty fields of past loss into meadows washed with light. I rush into the rain as the cars gain speed, waters cleansing the windows on which I look out on life. I hurl words into the darkness of an upcoming tunnel and wait for their echo back.


Train of thought rushing on. Life viewed as a passing landscape in which I live in the midst yet best write about it only as it has passed my window, a memory behind me trailing in the smoke of the engine. I don't have a blackberry. I don't MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Only on rare occassion do I text. I blog. I blog for me, to release words that need to come out at the end of the day. The stories may be too long to catch the interest of the masses looking for quick, short entertainment, of which there is plenty among the white noise of the Internet. My communications outside of here as well are lengthy strings of words, heartfelt messages splayed out on paper, their sincerity driving their movement, under my pen, the words stringing out behind me. Sometimes I hit send, somethings they just stay, hesitant to go beyond the confines of my longing.

But the words will always will be my own, the track they follow a mystery until that next bend is rounded. Words composed of past journeys on ancient rails, washed clean by wind and rain, and tempered by time. A story written to the mournful sound of a train whistle echoing through abandoned dreams and ancient memories, waiting for the echo of my words.

Tracks

It's that time of day where the heels are inevitably blistered, having walked in too new hunting boots along a trail, looking carefully for the signs, leaving my own tracks as I head out into the cornfields.

Tracks. Those of a deer unseen, watching from the brush, then scampering off, with a flick of contempt for my poor attempt to sneak up on him.

Tracks. Those of squirrel and rabbit and the red fox in pursuit of something distant even as he shouted my passage with the red warning flag of his tail.

I love this time between the onset of fall and the opening day for whitetail. It is its own season, the land waking wet and ready in the morning, the time between fire and frost. There's still enough light to plan the hunt before that opening day when the brief sun will only flame the ice, sun sparkling on particles of frozen glass on ponds and ditches, the deer on the move seeking water in the windless cold as you wait. Waiting in readiness, holding in your own heart's heat until it's safe to release it.

Hunting season is soon to start, time to scout out the land, and lay out where I will hunt some weeks hence. A season far enough away that my scent is long gone by then. Close enough that the lay of the landscape remains true, the smell of the earth neither budding or fading, holding in the smell of living things that I will track.

I woke up early this morning to the first real nip of Fall in the air. It's always colder here then you''d think, and with November creeping up, I know the summer has finally drifted past us. I love Fall, the air ripe and sharp with the smell of burnished sun on dying leaves, while the faint wisp of chimney smoke from that first fire is melancholy. I listen longingly for the sound of a train from beyond the cornfields, and look up for the comfort of a hawk riding the wind in a cold sky, letting me know I'm not alone. Autumn is upon us, and with it, not just whitetail season, but the end of another year.

As I opened the door to let Barkley out, the warm air rushes out, set loose in a sudden gush and I think about how quickly time gets away from us. Shadows stir, the season shifts and before you know it, another year is behind you. A chapter closed, a fresh page awaiting you.

The summer is past, with days on the run, and still evenings aloft, and all too soon you're herded inside walls, the routine of chilled mornings and dark nights, cold absolution for the time you spent out in the sun in months past. The days themselves were unchanged, but what you were able to do in them was, with mornings and nights passing in the immaculate intervals of quick daylight and long nights in front of the fire wishing for the cold to pass and Spring to arrive. Yet, when Spring does start, you think again of how quickly another season flew away, and of the last months you ask yourself - did you really accomplish anything to warrant the passing of precious time?

I remember one cold night in front of the fire pondering over Joseph Conrad's story "Youth", an old man's story of his perilous experiences as a young seaman on a storm-wracked coal liner. Having always been a headstrong girl, taking on one dangerous job after another, I empathized with what he said. "I remember my youth and the feeling that I will never come back anymore, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men".


When I'm in the woods I'm tracking time. Stalking unseen creatures as I attempt to still the sun in it's frame, hanging on to that last bit of daylight while sheer will and ammo remain still in my pocket. I notice everything, the smell of oak burning somewhere, the splash of the breeze, all soaking into my skin and bones, a rich broth of life that warms me.

There, a set of deer tracks , the dew claws marking earth soft from a rain. Buck or doe? At first glance it is impossible to tell, the rounded tips more a sign of wear than a sign of it's gender. I can't tell if the deer was dragging it's feet. Some say that bucks will drag their feet to conserve energy, yet in deeper snow all deer will do so.

The ground free of precipitation, in this case the second track was slightly inside and short of the first. Since a buck's chest is wider than his hind quarters, and the body is longer, this may well be the male of the species. I follow it, seeking his travel routes, the local watering and bedding areas, being careful to be as quiet as possible. Even this soon before season, I don't wish to advertise my presence.

Tracks.

Another step ahead, so many little steps in these woods, small steps forward, breaths of longing inhaled and out, so much yearning and release in these steps, these woods. Minutes and hours spent searching for something I knew was there all along, if I was just patient.

So many would have given up and gone back, the burgeoning cold branding their skin; the light quickly fading. So many people that, no matter where they love, don't belong to the land. Those that watch battles that they will never fight, in hopes of inheriting some conquest they had no part in. People who track the easy road, sanctioned and protected, never tasting of the blood and the sweat that puts the food on their table, the shelter of their home, buying it with measures of time they did not earn. Taking much, giving little.

Perhaps such people would say that all I will accomplish here is the passage of time, yet I know I'm after much more. Following the footsteps of the wildness that still exists, a great old buck, growing large through time and caution, striving not just to stay alive, but to warm his coat in the freedom that is the outdoors. Moving away, leaving defined marks in the soil that stay. Like me, living simply, leaving my mark. Taking from the earth what is needed to survive, leaving small bits of myself in is place, signs of a life lived as well as I knew how, a heart that strove. I follow the tracks, but I follow more. A way of life, a pride in self sufficiency that stays even if I come home empty handed, and stomach growling.


I follow the tracks, small marks and measures of a life that say that I did more than pass this way, I lived. I look up into the trees at the red bloom of a small bird, singing without wind but with penecostal fire, singing out remaining moments in a short life between melting and freezing, the souls sap flowing. Breathing, desiring, as the trees of the woods and the liquid tranquility of a rushing stream speak or a mere small red-winged songbird sings. A tiny bird who truly believes that in this moment, we're eternal, and for an instant, may very well be.