by Pete Bodo
Evening, everyone. Jackie-Oh kindly turned over the Deuce Club to me today, but before we get rolling with our summer vacation stories, let me make a TWibe PSA regarding the Cincinnati Masters tournament; Jackie is headed there as you read this, and she left me this note for those of you planning to visit Cincy:
We'll be gathering for a TWibe dinner at Carrabba's Italian Grill at 7:30 PM on Sunday, 8/16. It's located at 5152 Merten Dr., at the corner of Mason Montgomery Rd. and Merten Dr. I've never been, but it's close to many of the hotels and the actual tournament grounds - and features a pretty fabulous menu. If you plan on being there, please send me an e-mail by Saturday, 8/15 (and include your cell phone number, so I'm able to contact you in case anything goes awry). You can write me at either my Tennis.com e-mail here or by clicking on my name in blue in the Comments. Can't wait!
Now, on to DC matters. Last week, Luke (he's 6 and change now) and I lit a shuck for Montana, to spend time with our friends Julie and David on the Milk River Ranch, an enormous cattle-and-grain spread on the high plains. If you drive the "Hi-line", the east-west Rte. #2 in northern Montana, you could be forgiven for gazing out at those endless wheat fields stretching left and right and, apart from that enormous sky, thinking there was nothing interesting or noteworthy about it.
But go where there's water (or has been, any time more or less in the past 6 million years, and keep in mind that northern Montana was once a huge brackish sea/swamp)and you'll find coulees and canyons - some of the most dramatic landscape you'll see anywhere. And whizzing by you'd never know they were out there, because the coulees are like inverted mountains scooped into the earth, often undetectable across the face of the prairie. If you were in a plane high overhead, the land in many places would look like a giant lace doily - the holes representing the coulees dug out over centuries, with fantastic, nearly sheer walls festooned with hoodoos and geological rubble of every description and color. Bands of different colored mineral deposits are everywhere, including on the flat bottoms. it looks as if God just got plumb tired of making the earth and left the job unfinished.
The Milk River is a significant artery, so the Milk River coulees are deep, and filled with fragrant sage brush (my favorite of all scents) and, of course, game - you want to find game, go to where there's shelter and water. The mule deer and elk spend their time commuting from the vast feeding fields (cultivated or left to go "natural" thanks to the awesome Conservation Reserve Program); the antelope mostly stay up on the plains, because they can outrun anything in their domain.
!Lukemrr2 As the Milk runs right through the MRR, it has dramatic, deep tributary coulees - here's a brief video of my boy, Luke, standing at the edge of one of the broader, sparsely rubbled ones. BTW, I used my new Flip camcorder.(the Ultra HD) on this trip, It's an amazing, ridiculously user-friendly device, and the quality is, oh, about 10 times better than what you get from YouTube when you post via the Flip-user site (I sure hope these links work; I just pulled them out of emails sent to myself and pasted them in).
Really, I cant say enough about this camera, which comes with a built-in USB plug, all the software to do anything you want with the videos, editing-wise, and pretty much with one click - including "snapshots" that are as good as stills shot by a typical digital camera. And the unit is the size of a pack of cigarettes (not that I know anything about that!).
Anyway, it was harvest time at the ranch; Julie and David's kids, Roald and Maia (named for the Maiasaura, or "good mother" dinosaur, remains of which are scattered over this paleontological wonderland) were home from college to help. Some of the fields at the ranch are 200-plus acres in size and Luke enjoyed riding in a combine, a farm vehicle with tires taller than I am and a space-ship like, two-seat, air-conditioned, FM-radio equipped bubble for a cockpit. The combine harvests the wheat, separating the kernels of wheat from the stems and chaff, and blows it into the top of a full-blown semi truck, from which it's blown into the grain silos at the ranch, ultimately for transfer to the mill in Great Falls or the railhead, where it's loaded into railway cars. The sheer scale of everything out west - landscape, machinery, distances - can be hard for an easterner to grasp.
We went down one day to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indians, and had a good time at the pow-wow. I especially liked the Inter-tribal parade and dance. Check out the 5-year old Native princess who appears early in this video; hope you can hear me talking to my neighbor in the gallery, a Gros Ventre gal who lives on the rez. The setting of the pow-wow, in Mission canyon was spectacular. The canyon is in the Little Rocky Mountains, one of the many "free-standing" mountain ranges on the plains. On another afternoon, we drove around in the Sweet Grass Hills , one of the most sacred of Native sites. You can see the Sweet Grass clearly from the ranch, as well as the two other portions of the sacred triangle composed of the Sweet Grass Hills, the Bears Paw, and Cypress Hills.
!Horses Most mornings, Luke and I drove a few miles down to the corral to feed the horses, including the one he rides, the ancient but wonderfully wise and patient Studley (you can see him above, crossing the Milk). In many ways, this was a trip of firsts - Luke for the first time got out of the truck and opened the tube-gate for me to get through, then closed it - all without me having to leave the vehicle. He also shot a rifle (a .22) for the first time, neatly drilling a plastic Gatorade bottle on his, oh, 54th attempt. And, in a Denver airport restroom, he relieved himself at the urinal the adult way, unbidden by me, without dropping his trousers to expose his pasty white behind. It was almost sad to see; you know how fast they grow up.
On our third day, while hiking out from the corral on the two-track dirt road, Cassie (David and Julie's black lab-golden retriever mix), crow-hopped sideways about 10 feet in front. Simultaneously, we heard the unmistakable warning of a rattlesnake that Cassie had almost run onto (you can see it, slightly above and right of center, in this brief clip). A few days later, it was Luke's turn - if that's the right word. We were walking along the road and I saw something that looked like a stick but wasn't - I shouted, "Luke, stop!" But the next moment he stepped on the rattler's tail. The snake shot away, three feet off the ground, and landed all coiled up and rattling. Thankfully, my boy stepped on the very end of the tail, and the serpent's automatic reaction was to flee, not strike. It was a close call, though.
!Claybank Most days, we hiked around the edges of the coulees, occasionally scrambling down to inspect a strange formation or particularly intriguing geological feature. Once, while we were looking into a coulee, a Mule Deer popped its head out from under the lip of a boulder not 20 feet from us, then bolted up the slope and out onto the prairie. She had been sheltering, perfectly hidden, on a cool, narrow ledge in the shade of the car-sized rock. Up in the Sweet Grass, we scared up a Golden Eagle, a close relative of the Bald Eagle and probably the most majestic of all North American birds. It flew alongside the car, not 20 feet distant, for some time. At night, the coyotes sang and the fierce, dry heat of the plains yielded to the cool night, and we lay in bed listening to the rustle of the breeze in the pines and cottonwoods planted to create breaks that shelter the ranch house from the often powerful wind and the snowdrifts of winter.
The time went fast, too fast, and we both wished Lisa (my wife and Luke's mom) had been able to make the trip. But there's always next year, and I'll be going back to the ranch in October, solo, for the opening of big-game season. Luke learned a lot on this trip - perhaps a little too much. The little rascal has come up with a new trick, based on my (utterly necessary) habit of raising my voice to a full-blown holler when he ignores whatever it is that I'm asking or telling him to do -which is pretty much always.
Now, after I yell, he'll look at me and do a perfect - and I mean perfect - imitation of me, tone and all. Then he'll grin at me, his eyes bright, saying nothing but daring me to keep a straight face. And I'll be danged if, despite my best efforts, I can go five seconds before my shoulders start to heave and laughter explodes through my nose. And nothing pleases the little shaver more.
Well, that's the story of my trip. So how about sharing yours, maybe posting an image or video clip or two? I'll try to go on-line tonight, when we get to the farm. Have a great weekend, everyone!