You’re looking at the ephemeral pond that forms below the dam from the leaks. (It’s not so ephemeral either. It’s pretty much always there now.) It runs along the south border of the acre where I have the pecans planted. (The ones that have survived are doing well, thanks for asking. Several are now taller than I am.)

I have no objection to the pond as a feature of my forest. We’ve sometimes spotted deer having a drink here. And the footprints in the mud suggest that the raccoons and opossums visit it. Plus it is great for the amphibians. In the spring and summer, every inch of it seems to have a few tadpoles squirming about or soaking in the sunlight.

But there is a problem with it. It’s just deep enuf to make getting across it impossible (without soaking our boots and socks, that is). And we’re often down in the pecan acre on our way somewhere else, so it would be helpful to be able to get across the ephemeral pond. In the past, we would either divert our feet half way up the dam to cross above the overflow outlet or we would hike farther to the east near our property line and find a place where the pond was narrow enuf to allow us to leap across (sometimes even successfully). But I’d always envisioned a series of stepping stones set in the pond that would let us simply walk across and still allow the water to flow for the benefit of the wildlife.

The problem was finding the right kinds of stones and then getting them there. I don’t have many slabs of rock in my forest, at least not ones that are on the surface of the ground. The few I’ve found are made of sandstone, they’re not very big, and they’re at the other end of my 80 acres. I knew I could wrestle a few of these into the bed of the Prolechariot and then drive them down to the pecan acre to try placing them, but I suspected that I would not be satisfied with the result. Besides, there was always something else to do, including sitting in the comfy chairs on the shady porch overlooking the sparkling lake and contemplating the universe.

But then I had the two overflow spillways built on the north and south sides of the dam. At first, I didn’t see the benefit of these to my stepping stone ambition, but a little patience showed me otherwise. We’ve had at least two high-water events when the water coursed down the two spillways (one time washing them out). What this did was expose a lot of the bedrock on the south spillway. Much of this limestone is fractured and simply resting on the top of the ground. And while much of this is also too big for Pablo to move (even with his super powers), some of these are exactly the right size and thickness for using as a stepping stone in an ephemeral pool. And, these stones are uphill from the pool.

So on a recent visit I took the wheelbarrow across the dam to the south spillway, and, after a little wrestling, managed to get one of the rocks in it. Then I had to navigate it down the spillway — harder than it sounds since the surface of the spillway is rocky and rutted, and with only one wheel on the barrow, I found myself getting hung up a few times. But with patience (again) I managed to get the first down to the pool, and I tipped it into place. (If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see that the two stones are resting on top of ice.) I then repeated the effort and placed a second stone in (on) the pond.

Problem solved, right?

Not quite.

This second photo shows you the stepping stones as viewed from the north. The ice had melted (and since reformed) and the stones are resting on the bottom of the pond, still thick enuf to allow them to break the surface. They’re perfect for stepping on (that’s why they’re called “stepping stones” in case you were wondering). The problem lies with that tuft of grass you see at the bottom of the bottom photo. It’s not much of a tuft. In fact, it hides mostly water, and by stepping there, you get the chance to soak your boot and sock. (Which is why our past “leaps” over the ephemeral pond weren’t always successful.) This wasn’t a problem the first time I placed the stones since the ground was more frozen and the “tuft” felt solid.

So I need a third stepping stone. Fortunately, I know just where to find one. And this time I think I’ll use a two-wheeler to transport it down the spillway and put in place. If you’re free and want to help, just let me know.

This is me. It’s a mugshot of me.

I have a good-looking mug, don’t I? Actually, I won the mug from the estimable blog Edifice Rex last week when Annie had a contest. (I was born with the face I have.) I’m not generally a winner, so this was a big deal for me.

Yes, that’s a duck in the background sitting on the shelf.

Cancel whatever vacation plans you have for this year and change them for a visit to Portland, Oregon!

During my Great Hiatus, my family had a number of significant events. Among them were four graduations (graduate school, police academy, medical school, and medical school) and one wedding. Medical school and medical school were married in a lovely Persian wedding ceremony in an art gallery, and then, after a two-week diversion to Greece for their honeymoon, moved to Portland to begin their residencies. (She in internal medicine, he in pediatrics.) I’d always heard that medical residency meant long hours and exhausted bodies and minds, but apparently it’s just a little bit of a bother and a lot of fun and free time.

Nearly as soon as they moved to Oregon, our son began urging us to come visit them. Her parents had already come for a visit, he pointed out, and he began scouring the internet for reasonably priced plane tickets for us. He had a week of vacation in November, and he all but insisted we come. Plus, he noted, we could save on lodging expenses by staying in their apartment. With them. In their tiny apartment. In their bed. In their newlywed bed. (They would sleep on the couch and on the floor!) How could we turn down such an offer?

And we didn’t.

Portland, and at least this part of Oregon, is a wonderful, progressive place. I liked it almost as much as I like New Mexico, which is saying a lot. (Had the sun made an appearance during our week in Oregon, I might have ranked the state even higher. In fact, this was my third trip to Oregon — our daughter and her husband lived there for a number of years before moving to Brooklyn, and we visited them twice, though we stayed in bed and breakfasts then. Nonetheless, the sun must have been taking its own vacations on those visits because we never saw it!)

The city of Portland is full of all kinds of attractions to keep visitors occupied (including a four-story bookstore that takes up an entire city block — I had to get an extra piece of luggage to carry home all of the books I bought), and by venturing out a little from the city, the natural wonders of the area manifest themselves for appreciation and awe. The Columbia River Valley may be one of the most impressive sights I’ve seen, even comparing favorably to the Rift Valley, but I can only say “may be” since a dense fog had fallen on the day we ventured there. Still, while we couldn’t gaze across the impressive gorge, more close-in spectacles were visible. The southern side of the gorge is dotted with many waterfalls, and every one of them calls out for being photographed. Too bad Pablo’s camera was accidentally left on some oddball setting and made most of his images get a blue cast to them. He managed to discover the problem and correct it in time for the photo above, and good thing, too, since it was the most impressive of the impressive photo opportunities of the whole trip.

Yes, that ribbon of white in the upper left is a waterfall. It’s the upper fall of the two that comprise Multnomah Falls. (Hence the plural designation.) This sight alone was worth the cost of the airfare. The water runs all year, so one could conceivably vist Oregon in a season when the sun is shining and be even more impressed. (I hear there’s a mountain in the area, something called Mount Hood, that is a sight to behold, but I’ll have to take that on faith. All I saw when I looked to the horizon where I was assured it rose was clouds and fog.)

We didn’t hike to the top of the falls, though there is a trail all the way up, but we did visit the lodge at the base (that little building you see in the foreground) and had breakfast and bought some postcards. The breakfast was okay, but the setting was perfection, which made the meal more savory. And the unfinished trail beckons. I’m not sure when we’ll be back to Oregon, so take my advice and go there yourself. Then let me know what you find.

Flike and sticks go together like peanut butter and jelly. Flike and small trees go together too. Flike and logs sometimes go together even.

It’s getting harder each day to remember the frightened little pup we brought home from the breeder one cold November night two years ago. He clung to Libby’s chest as though he wanted to merge with her. He hid in the back of his little kennel, and for a while we feared he couldn’t even walk. Or bark. Those misconceptions were erased quickly, however, and now Flike is 65 pounds of energy and enthusiasm. He’s all play, all the time.

The photo above comes from a recent visit to the off-leash area at a neighboring park. It’s a big park and they must have devoted forty acres to people and their dogs. Flike does not do well with other dogs. Or rather, he does not share well. If he has a stick and another dog attempts to play tug with him, Flike will often drop the stick and lunge for the other dog. A few seconds of snarling and yipping ensue, and then the dogs part, and Flike returns to his playful persona again, as though nothing had happened.

On this particular park visit, we also had Queequeg along. In our house, he is the alpha male. Flike may have nearly sixty pounds on him, but he defers to Queequeg’s instructions, enduring clinging bites on his lips as Queequeg makes it clear when he doesn’t like something.

And Crusher was with us that day too. He and his family were visiting us from New York over the holidays, and we made a trip to the off-leash area part of our festivities. (We were fortunate to have unseasonably warm weather recently.) Crusher is a nervous, Chihuahua/Boston Terrier mix, and like our old Sheltie Max (who now stays full time at Roundrock), I don’t know that he knows he’s a dog. Crusher enjoys frequent off-leash visits to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but that must be familiar turf to him. At our park he seemed more frightened and clinging and fussy. But he loves me, and that’s the most important thing.

This is, if my memory is accurate, the fourth balloon remnant I have found in my woods. We were hiking through the Hinterland on our way to the southeast corner one day last month when I spotted this unlikely color amidst the grays and browns of the winter forest. I thought I knew what it was as soon as I saw it, and when I examined it I was confirmed.

I’m not sure what to think about this. Balloons escape little hands all the time, but how many of these are there? Granted 80 acres is a lot of space, but if I can claim four fallen balloons in my otherwise unremarkable rural space (four discovered fallen balloons), then how littered is the planet with these things? I’ve found four balloons but only one plastic grocery bag in my forest, and plastic grocery bags are a scourge on the planet.

I’m not objecting to the litter in my forest so much as marveling at the coincidence of the particular nature of this litter. Is there something about my little bit of forest on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks that attracts stray balloons? (I can imagine all kinds of metaphors here about lost dreams, spent ambitions, deflated egos, bags of gas, bright and shiny baubles. Feel free to suggest your own.) Should I ever happen upon another fallen balloon, maybe it will finally be one with a note attached. That would be fun.

So I stomp about my forest and sometimes uncover little surprises like this one. Little mysteries that wake me in the small hours of the night and leave me pondering. I don’t suppose that’s a bad way to be.

 __________

I misspoke above. My 80 rural acres are a remarkable place. They are filled with round rocks!

How many hundreds of times have I driven or walked by this gorgeous white oak and never noticed it?

As I may have mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been working to clear more ground (in the former Blackberry Corner) so I can expand the pine plantation this spring. (The pines have been one of my few unqualified success stories at Roundrock, and I want to build on that. Plus I’m always eager to increase the diversity in my forest.)

The tree above stands at the southern edge of the area I am opening. I suppose I never noticed it before, even though the road is about thirty feet away, because it was lost in scrubby growth and small cedars that were at eye level.

The tree is growing just on the edge of my western property line — the land you see behind there belongs to Good Neighbor Brian. It’s part of the ridge top that has good, deep soil, and there is a grove of large, old white oaks growing on his land and tumbling onto mine. When I’m rambling in this part of my forest, I often stop to cut away some smaller tree that is encroaching on one of these giants. (In about a hundred years of effort, I should have that job done.)

As I was clearing the scrub in preparation for the pine planting in a few months, I “found” the giant above. (Note, for my forest, this is a big tree. I have some bigger trees, but I cherish all of them.)

Of course it’s hard to take a photo against the sky like this. It was an overcast day, so I couldn’t even hope for a blue background to help. But if you can’t take a photo of a tree, perhaps you can take a photo from a tree.

The low, solid branches were calling for me to climb the tree, and so I did. (There was a broken branch about fifteen feet up the tree that I wanted to remove — you can see the white spot where it was on the trunk in the photo at the top of this post. That was my excuse for acting like a boy and climbing a tree.) Libby and the dogs had wandered down the road to the pond, so no one was around to tell me to stop acting like a child.

I didn’t climb very high, as you can tell from the angle of the photo, but there’s every chance that I’ll do it again.

I have begun keeping this Reckoning post in answer to an accusation made by someone close to me. (For more on that, see this post.)

January – Another dismal start. We only made one visit to Roundrock that month. It was a work holiday (the Monday after the new year), but I can’t explain why we couldn’t find another opportunity to visit.

February – Again with only a single visit. I am perplexed.

March – The pattern is sustained. Only one visit, in the middle of the month.

April – Now this is more like it. We made three visits, including one overnight. We were there three Sundays in a row, probably with some tree planting involved. Why can’t every month be like this? (And we managed to have a wedding this month. Quite the event – a Persian ceremony in three languages. Lots of dancing and food.)

May – We managed two visits in May: a Sunday and the succeeding Saturday. It was unlikely that we did any swimming on either visit, but it is possible that we visited our friends’ farm pond and tried to harvest some of their bass for our lake.

June – Again with two visits. Both on Sundays. It’s possible that on the latter visit we dipped our toes in the lake for a swim. I guess I need to keep more complete records.

July – Only two visits the entire month, and the second was on the very last day! What is wrong with the world? At least we probably went swimming.

August – We managed two visits in August. Again it was a Sunday and the succeeding Saturday. It’s very likely that we went swimming. Wouldn’t you in the Ozarks in August?

September – We made two Sunday visits this month. I suspect there was no swimming involved.

October – We made only one visit in October, but it was a good one, spending a three-day weekend at the cabin. Still, by definition, this only counts as one visit.

November – Another overnight visit, but it was only me (and the dogs) this time as Libby was off in Kentucky at the film festival. We also managed to make it out there on the day after Thanksgiving, which is my sort of protest to the consumer culture on Black Friday.

December – Three visits! And the last one was a gimme — I hadn’t expected that one to happen. No overnights (though the temps had been mild enuf).

So let’s see what the tally is. If my math is correct (check me) we made 22 visits to Roundrock in 2011. Once again, this fails to meet the “every other weekend” accusation that has been made in the past. And honestly, I wish I could be guilty of such an accusation.

We ventured out to Roundrock on the day after Christmas because several visiting offspring professed a wish to go. (I say “professed” because I suspect they really think I want them all to go.) This last-visit-of-the-year was unique in all of our many visits over the decade-plus we’ve been going there. This time we brought guests.

In the hundreds of visits we’ve made to Roundrock, we have never brought along any people who were not immediate family members. Not once. (Well, once, but that was more of a touch-and-go rock collecting trip than a Roundrock visit, and it was many, many years ago.) Our guests were my visiting son-in-law’s parents, sister, and grandmother, who is an octogenarian.

I’ve always considered my woods to be my Fortress of Solitude, and my Cabin at the End of the Road to be my private getaway. So it was a big step for Pablo to allow “strangers” to enter the domain. (Not that these fine people were strangers. After all, not only did they contribute a son-in-law to my family, but the father among them conducted the wedding ceremony for #3 Son, Aaron, and Amber. So we have some little history. Still, this was pretty much the very first time we ever brought anyone along.)

It was a cold day in the woods — the temperature never crept above 40 degrees and the sun never made an appearance. Plus we had intermittent rain, though it was more like sprinkles but enuf to have us retreating indoors frequently. And with an octogenarian among us, we didn’t do any hiking beyond a slow venture across the dam to see what there was to see. (The lake was significantly up, which warms my black and shriveled heart since it gives my poor fish enuf depth now to survive the winter.) But we didn’t cut down any trees or liberate any cedars from their earthly toil or collect any rocks for the wall I’m building behind the cabin. It was a mostly sitting-around visit to the woods. (Note that Flike had several new arms along for throwing sticks. He liked that change.)

But #1 Son, Seth, built us a fire and we cooked hot dogs and veggie burgers over it and supplemented that with plenty of other food left over from our holiday feasting. And our guests brought along small, home-made apple pies in foil packs that we cooked on the coals. And then we burned up a lot of wood that had collected around the cabin area (Pablo is always on the alert for fire hazards. Poor guy — he’s almost obsessed with it.) And at the end of our visit we all agreed it was a fine day.

Now, many days later, I can hold my jacket to my nose and smell the campfire again. This redolence is a souvenir of the visit. It’s a rich and honest smell that I don’t get in my day-to-day routine, and it’s a reminder that I should have more campfires when we go to Roundrock (despite my near obsession with the hazards).

Maybe memories made with family and friends are the richest of the riches I can find in my woods.

No, I did not get a box of hyphens as a holiday gift.

I have a pile of gravel near the cabin that’s left over from when I had my dam guy clean up the fire ring area. It’s been an extraordinarily useful resource to have around.

Since the cabin was built (two-plus years ago!), I’ve created retaining walls both behind it and in front of it. I used this gravel to set the grade for the walls and to back fill them. I’ve also used this gravel to improve the path behind the cabin. You can see a bit of this path in the photo above. Let it be said that the cabin is now fully accessible to those with more limited mobility. For a view of the less accessible (but more interesting) path to the porch, have a look at this post. (This path, which is between three and four feet wide, not only increases the fire break around the cabin, but I’m told it increases the critter break as well. Supposedly, mice prefer not to cross open areas for fear of predation from above. A broad path around the cabin would seem to provide such an open area. Maybe it works. In the two years we’ve had the cabin, we’ve never seen any evidence of mice within.) Wheelbarrow loads of gravel have been pushed up the hill to patch up parts of the road through the trees. And with all of that I’ve only used about a third of the pile.

I have grand intentions to continue the retaining wall in front of the cabin all the way to the road. That’s about forty feet of wall, and though it will get “lower” as it progresses (since the ground falls) it will still require the same grading work below the stones and a fair amount of backfill. Once that’s done, I intend to improve the grade in the area around the fire ring to remove a bit of the slope there and bury some roots that might otherwise trip the unsuspecting.

Then, perhaps, I will have used up the rest of the gravel. And then it will be time to order another load. There are many uses for gravel around a cabin camp.

One additional use that is slightly evident in the photo above is the fact that the gravel provides a fine place to put Flike’s fetching sticks. Flike will grab any random stick out of the forest and bring it to me to throw for him. But I have also cut some sticks for him out of various woods. (Persimmon seems to be a good one.) They’re of the right length and have enuf density to make them good for throwing. Plus they hold up longer under his crushing jaws. So these special sticks we shove into the gravel at the end of our visits. My thought is that they will rot more slowly this way, protected more from the insects and microbes that do their slow but relentless work on them. Plus, with the sticks collected in the gravel, Flike knows just where to go when he bursts from the truck door on our arrival. He grabs a stick from the gravel and immediately brings it to me. Smart dog.

Above is an actual photograph. It’s not just a box of blue grabbed from the color palette. On a recent visit to Roundrock, a gloriously warm day last month, I pointed my camera to the robin’s-egg blue vault above me and took this shot.

Obviously, I need to clean the lens on my little camera.

Long-time readers here (both of you) will know that Pablo loves the Southwest of these United States and visits New Mexico whenever he gets the chance. There is a blue that people in that part of the country often paint their doors that I think looks beautiful. We’ve flirted with the idea of painting our front door in suburbia that color (which would make it contrast with the color scheme of the house, but you may have noticed how many houses have an incongruously colored front door. I think it’s supposed to send a message: blue for good luck, red for welcome, yellow for fever, whatever).

Anyway, Libby and I were strolling one of the galleries at the Nelson here in Kansas City and came upon a photo like the one I show above. The photographer had taken a photo of the sky over Sante Fe. I took it to be a link to the blue doors so common there (the blues aren’t exactly the same), and I thought it was clever in a minimalist way. Then, on that gloriously warm day last month, I took my own shot of the sky over the Missouri Ozarks.

I’ve made nearly two thousand posts to this humble blog since I began it back in 2005. In all of those posts there is a lot of junk. I don’t mean the substance of the posts or the nature of the writing (which is golden) but things like dead links and odd characters that won’t reproduce and my poor Saturday Matinees. (I have fifty of those scattered across the years.) I had posted my matinees at Yahoo and then embedded them here. Alas, Yahoo retired that service, so all of my videos here on the blog are dead. It’s my intent to restore those links someday, and I may even do so, but I’ll need to figure out some system for that. I suppose YouTube.

I had many recurring features here in the past. On Sundays I would have a sort of porridge of unrelated comments and links (and like porridge, they were mostly bland but still very nutritious). I may get up the gumption to do that again, but I suspect it was part of the drudgery I had imposed on myself in those days that eventually had me running from this blog, screaming. We’ll see if I return to that.

Similarly, I had posted factoids of Missouri natural history at the bottom of most posts that I gleaned from my Missouri Natural Events Calendar. I probably won’t return to that feature, in part because the facts tended to repeat themselves year to year, and after five years I think I had the subject covered sufficiently.

I will continue to use the word “enuf,” pushing the boundaries of the language.

The Contact RRJ function has been restored. I wondered why no one was sending me emails. Now they can!

I really meant it when I said I did not intend to oblige myself to making daily posts here.

It’s good to be back!