Hillstock/Hillhouseapalooza: Day 2

So.  As y’all know from Day One’s post, when Hillstock began, we put our nearest and dearest and newest and oldest to work, oiling our house.  And they did an excellent job.  So good that when they were finished, we rewarded them with a float down the St. Mary’s River that nearly ended in hypothermia.

Clearly, Day 2 needed to be mo’ betta.  Luckily, Brother Dear and I had scheduled Day 2 as the Memorial Hike Day – we like to take our nearest and dearest and newest and oldest on an epic hike each year, in honor of Howard’s life, the last part of which was spent eating up Glacier National Park’s many fabulous miles and phenomenal peaks.  Our test each year: to pick a hike challenging enough for Howard’s approval, but not so challenging we actually kill our Hillstockers.  We’ve chosen better some years than others, but we’re never going to make everyone happy.  Hiking with 30+ can never make everyone happy.  Or maybe anyone, I don’t know – you’d have to ask the Hillstockers!  However, judging from the number who return each year, we must be doing something right.

This year’s hike, much discussed and agonized over: Avalanche Ridge.  No, you probably haven’t heard of it.  What trail there is ends several miles before one arrives at Avalanche Ridge, a place so shockingly unusual that the venerable Gordon Edwards describes it in the Climber’s Guide to Glacier in one word: “SURPRISE!”  It overlooks Floral Park, Avalanche Lake, Sperry Glacier, and Comeau Pass, among other natural wonders.   And it starts off innocuously enough, from Logan Pass, the one place in the park that nearly every touron deems worthy for exiting their rental car.  A wide boardwalk trail leaves from Logan Pass, and after a mile or so, one arrives at a lovely deck overlooking Hidden Lake and Bearhat Mountain:

Ah.  Early summer morning in Glacier.   A little smoky from the fires in British Columbia, but my heart sang arias as we descended the trail to Hidden Lake, forded the creek, and began the jaunt to Avalanche Ridge.

The journey involves some effort.  Here, Mike and Alissa are giving it their all.  I love them.  And they are U FLORIDA folks.  That should tell y’all something.  Go Dawgs!

The journey also involves coordination, such as that displayed by Pseudo Sister, as she attempted to rescue a water bottle dropped by a fellow Hillstocker on a rather steep incline en route to Avalanche Ridge.

The journey involves lung capacity, and hamstrings.  Mine were both being stretched, here.

But the journey is well worth it.  Here, Mags and Brother Dear celebrate their ascent!  I know Howard was pleased.

Surprise!  And this is just a teasing glimpse of the world beyond Avalanche Ridge.  I’m not posting any more pictures.  You’ll deserve to see them if you make it here!

It was rather windy up on the Ridge, and we didn’t linger long.   This darling goat awaited us on the scramble down.  I love mountain goats.

We gave Chase the gold star for effort on Saturday – he smiled ascending and descending Avalanche Ridge, even when he wanted to curse us.  Kirk received the same gold star for his tube-blowing-up-efforts-without-whining on the previous day’s flirtation with hypothermia.

Honeydew posing on the way home, Mt. Reynolds in the background.  In 2007, the Memorial Hike was actually a climb of Mt. Reynolds.  On that memorable day, we learned some valuable lessons about taking 40+ people mountain climbing.  As in, we will never do so again.

Here, the Hillstockers bunch up on the way down.  They are all precious to us.  As we gathered together and counted heads, we paused and had a short memorial service for Howard, Chris Street, and others we’ve loved and lost too soon.  I thought our time together was how a memorial service should be: awkward and sincere and warm and watery and open ended.  After all, we never fully close the door on grief and mourning.  But as time goes on, we learn how to keep that door shut for days, and eventually, months on end.  And it is a door that, for me, needs to be opened occasionally – I must air my memories, lest they become moldy and moth ridden.  And that would not do, for neither Howard nor Chris were anything but vibrant, especially in the mountains.

On the way home, more mountain goats bade us safe travels and good memories.

As did a herd of Bighorn sheep.

And my beloved former boss, Evonne – to my delight, we ran into her on the trail!  Evonne is top notch.

Finally, the cluster I was with arrived at the Logan Pass Visitor’s Center.  And what to our wondering eyes did appear but 3/4 of our group, taking up 2/3 of 1 important lane of the Logan Pass parking lot.  Do you see them, right of center?

Here’s a closeup view.  They appear to be celebrating the end of the Memorial Hike in style!

And after we had all arrived, we got a little visit from two park rangers.  They were apparently curious about us and our obviously stylish parking lot celebration.

“What kind of group are y’all?”

This question, which was not actually asked with a Southern accent, was met with brief silence by our pack of 30.

“Uhhhh.”

“We know each from law school – from Babb – from Charleston, South Carolina – from Missoula – from yoga class – from the University of Georgia – from Martinsville, Virginia – from Washington & Lee University – from Montana bar review – from Whitefish – from rehab.”  That last one was just a joke, but it may or may not have caused the park rangers to ask my lovely friend Amy, pictured far right, for her ID.  She may or may not have been drinking Freixenet champagne in the parking lot, which is completely legal and clearly medicinal at the end of a long hike, but suspicious when your face is so beautiful you do not appear to be over 21 years of age.  I don’t think the park rangers were as amused by us as we were by them.  Howard would have been tickled beyond reason.

Here are some of our Hillstockers, hiking for Howard.  Thanks so much to each of you for hiking with us, and for honoring our brother, Howard.

Back row, left to right: Stephanie, Honeydew, me, Brianne, Anthony, Hank, PK, Jen, Jeff Street, Judah, Jason, Kirk, Mike.

Front row, left to right: Amy E, Mary Lyons, JC, Richard, Brother Dear, Pseudo Sister, Kelly, Magalie, Alissa.

Not pictured: Mom, Dad, Neil, Chase, Frank, Michy.

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  Some photo credits to Brother Dear.  All Rights Reserved.

 

Hillstock/Hillhouseapalooza

What I remember about Howard’s funeral: trying to sing America the Beautiful.  Seeing friends from high school I hadn’t seen in years and trying to act like I was at a cocktail party and not a funeral, trying to ask them about their husbands and their dogs and their cute shoes.  Trying not to cry.  Trying not to wail.  Trying.

A year later, when the worst of the storm had blown through and I was once again able to find peace in the breaking dawn, Brother Dear and I began trying to think of a way to honor Howard’s life.  We wondered aloud, how can we gather our friends together to remember our brother, in all his vivacity and beauty, without being sad?  And after a while, we decided to invite Howard’s friends, my friends, and Brother Dear’s friends out for a week of camping at Hillhouse, our home near Babb, Montana that is named for our brother.  Brother Dear wanted to call this week Hillhouseapalooza.  I wanted to call it Hillstock.  Both of us won.  Neither of us really had any idea exactly what we would do with our friends once they arrived in Montana.  But that very first year, introductions were made, new friendships blossomed, epic hikes were accomplished (by lots of folks who’d never been off the proverbial sidewalk, much less climbed a peak in Glacier National Park!), and Beer Olympics was born.  And Howard was remembered, mostly joyfully, by those who loved him best, and those who never met him.

August 27 will mark six years without Howard.   This past weekend marked the fifth Hillstock/Hillhouseapalooza.  Here’s how the first day, Friday, went this year:

There would be no Hillstock without Mama Stone.  Brother Dear and I have always known that we hit the Mother Jackpot, but this fact is emphasized for us during Hillstock.  Mom preps breakfast and dinner for 50.  And I’m not talking about buying some cereal and a couple jugs of 2%.  The woman serves us real grits, breakfast casserole (with and without sausage – she is always thinking of our vegetarian friends), hot ham biscuits, fruit, yogurt, and bacon.  And let’s not forget the 25 pots of coffee she brews.  Above, she’s slicing up real Virginia country ham for the biscuits.  Yum.

While Mom was working on biscuits, Brother Dear and I welcomed our guests who had flown and driven from South Carolina, Maine, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and parts beyond by handing them each a coffee can of linseed oil and a paintbrush and telling them to get to work.  To our shock, they did not argue with us or call us terrible hosts (to our faces, anyway!) and they immediately got down to business.  And the every-other-year task of oiling our entire cedar home was accomplished in four hours, as opposed to the four days it generally takes us.  Thanks, y’all.  Above, PK and Anthony are on the scaffolding, working on the boards above the garage doors.

Pseudo Sister, Brother Dear, and myself worked on the patio.

Anthony even got up on the roof to soak the last couple of boards.  Thank you.

And when it was all over, some of us gathered for an oily picture.  Wouldn’t you love to be invited to a camping party, told you couldn’t shower at your hosts’ home because their well is decrepit, that you must drive eight miles south to shower at the KOA or Johnson’s, and then put to some of the dirtiest work around?  It’s amazing Brother Dear and I have any friends left!

But we had a plan to wash the oil off.  Tubing!  Here, Brother Dear ties down tubes, float tubes, and kayaks in Dad’s pickup.  Neil and Chase are supervising.

As are Pseudo Sister, Anthony, PK, and Stephanie.

There are no pictures of the tubing trip.  Because after we soaked our friends in linseed oil, then we froze them in the river.  And yet, Hillstock continued.  As will these posts, tomorrow.

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

behind every good man …

Is a hard working woman.  Here are the three that keep Hillhouse and its accompanying outbuildings from being shut down by the health inspector.

Pseudo Sister, Mom, and me.

Every now and again the three of us get rewarded for our intimate relationships with the mop, the washing machine, the sink, the dishwasher, and the very back of the refrigerator.  Sunset near Babb generally makes up for pruny fingers and peeling nails.  And sunsets like this one even take the sting out of scrubbing toilets …

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

ethereal

July 19.

Clouds clinging to one another, obscuring the mountains.  Sun dipping towards the western horizon.  Honeydew, DSH, Pseudo Sister and me, collapsed on the couches.

Stragglers from a front hydrating the windows.  The pink light begins to command my attention, and I lay aside a piece I am writing, and rise from the couch.

The clouds are circling around, setting up for a glorious farewell to the day.

And then the clouds move back in, and somehow everything is even more resplendent than it was a minute before, supersaturated color bleeding through gauzy layers of cloud.

As the clouds increase in viscosity, the mountains become steely gray knights, gathering around the round table before the battle, shrouded in Merlin’s mists.

Ethereal.  Pulchritudinous.  Sublime.  Mesmeric.  These words were created for evenings in July, in Montana.

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co. All Rights Reserved.

 

buzzin’ birthday cake

My world was rocked yesterday when I realized that I am not the only girl in the world who finds Darling Summer Help … well, darling.  Yesterday, DSH, or “Dish,” as we’ve taken to calling him, journeyed to the big city out on the prairie to pick up his … Darling Girlfriend.  And it turned out that Darling Girlfriend’s birthday is today!

So, Pseudo Sister and I set out to make a special dinner to commemorate her arrival to near Babb.  We visited the “wedding gifts closet” and selected a darling cake pan for Darling Girlfriend’s birthday cake.

And then we called my mama for her fabulous Rum Cake recipe … if you’re gonna eat cake, it better be rum cake!  Rum cake is absurdly easy to make and guaranteed to impress.  It took less than 5 minutes to whip up, and in those 5 minutes we were distracted by the Bacardi and forgot to take pictures.  While the cake was baking, we prepped elk medallions, spicy-steamed-green-beans, potatoes-n-vidalias, and green salad.  Mmmmm.  Have y’all figured out yet that we’ll seize on any reason to cook a good meal at Hillhouse?  Especially for a birthday!

The cake finished baking, and Pseudo Sister and I poked holes in it and poured the rum-butter-sugar glaze all over it and tried to restrain ourselves from gobbling down the whole thing.  We sliced a little bit of cake off each half in order to put the two halves of the beehive together, and were impressed with the finished product, though the bees themselves are hard to see in this picture.

Pseudo Sister and I were models of self restraint yesterday.   We had to sit there and smell this cake for hours before DSH and DG returned home … but the look on Darling Girlfriend’s face was worth it when we served her the cake!

Happy birthday, Darling Girlfriend!  We appreciate your sharing DSH with us this summer.

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

America

Brother Dear, Pseudo Sister, Darling Summer Help, Honeydew, and myself brought in the best holiday weekend of the year with a bang this afternoon.  And by that I mean a real bang.

We took the .22, 30-30, 7mm mag, 1 semi-auto 12ga, 2 pump action 12ga, 20g pump action, bb gun, .357 Sig, and .44 magnum revolver out for an afternoon of skeet and target shooting.  What could be more American than that, on a Friday afternoon?

Happy Fourth of July!

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

Montana-Kinda-Day / Zen and the Art of Homestead Maintenance II

ICSF is off at a hearing in Shelby today, so she asked me to fill in with another guest blog.  Here’s another day of vacation from Bar-Review.

The day started off at the cabin, and it was just about as pretty a morning as you can ask for this side of Paradise.  I spend a lot of time on the front stoop or in the hammocks, so this is the view I take in most days.

The tower used to have an old steel windmill on top of it- it ran the pump for the well.  It must have blown off in some wicked wind  (which if you’ve been following ICSF’s blog, you know that happens fairly regularly).  I found the wreckage of it back in the woods…not salvageable.  Someday I’d love to put a wind turbine up there, some solar panels on the pump house roof, and have the whole place run off the grid.  Maybe even sell some juice back to the power co-op.  Dreams.

Anyways, the morning was more chores- fixing a closet coat rack that was poorly installed and then collapsed under the weight of 8,000 unnecessary articles of clothing.  ICSF was VERY concerned that her wedding dress was getting wrinkled…I wasn’t aware she had plans to ever wear it again.  Women.  Cleaned the furnace filter, worked on the garden, painted some more storm windows.

I surmise that my penchant for ‘chores’ comes from my Dad, who has always been a top-rate handyman.  When the folks first got the house in Spencer, there wasn’t much money for hiring professionals, so Dad did most of the work himself.  He’s always figured that if some guy who may not have his GED can do it (and get paid $40 an hour to do it), then the rest of us can probably figure it out too.  Dad got the Time Life series of how-t0-fix everything back in the late 70s.  I’ve got several dozen of the tomes up on my bookshelf in the cabin now, and they are fantastic resources.  Dad has taught himself (and me) how to safely and properly wire all of the electricity for a house, how to plumb any fixture with plastic, copper, or steel pipes, how to roof with asphalt shingles or steel plating, the correct manner of properly using all manner of saws, drills, and other tools, and how to maintain all aspects of a home.  He is the Zen-Master of Homestead Maintenance.  Sound like he has lots of fun projects over at that new house in Whitefish!

Well it was a gorgeous day, so Pseudo-Sister and Darling Summer Help and I decided to enjoy it, Montana-style.

With guns, of course!  Didn’t see that coming after the photo of fresh growth did you?  We loaded up my pickup and drove over to one of the ranch’s junkyards that has all sorts of fun targets and a good backstop.  I showed Pseudo-Sister and DSH how to safely handle, load, and fire a .22, 30-30, and a 12ga shotgun.  Pretty sure they had a blast (PUNS!) and we definitely wrecked some bottles, cans, and random bits of rotten old metal.  The 30-30 and the shotgun were very novel for both of the new sharpshooters, but we had the most fun plinking with my old .22.  They both turned out to pretty darned good shots.

Annie-Oakley-Routine over, Pseudo-Sister and I cleaned up and got prepped for a good-ole-fashioned Montana Potluck.  We both worked for years at Johnson’s Cafe down in St. Mary, and our boss-lady Kristin always throws a killer birthday party for herself.

Kristin is an amazing woman, and one day I’ll tell ya’ll all about her (although NOT which particular birthday we were celebrating).  So we wandered down hwy 89 and hung out with some old friends, met some new ones, and stuffed ourselves with delicious grub.  Kristin’s father, Lester Johnson, died less than two years ago, so we climbed back in the pickup, put ‘er in 4 wheel drive, and headed up to the Johnson family plot to pay our respects.

Not a bad spot to spend eternity, eh?  As my Uncle Vince would say, what an amazing place to NOT build a house!

After visiting with Lester for a few moments, we took the truck down a muddy, narrow, aspen choked track back up St. Mary Ridge.  It eventually got too nasty, so we jumped out and walked.  Pseudo-Sister and I followed some fresh black bear tracks down to a little beaver pond hidden by willows and cottonwood trees, doused ourselves in deet (didn’t need it for once!), and set up our fishing rods.  We kept our eyes on the water and our ears tuned for any bears crashing through the woods behind us.  We caught a dozen or so fish in a half-hour, and Pseudo-Sister managed to land a nice little cut-bow hybrid (by hooking it through the eyeball, of course).

Arriving back at Hillhouse, we watched a splendid sunset sink north of us into Canada.  There was an incredible straight sheet of cloud hanging behind Chief Mountain, with a gradient of color stretching from a deep heart-of-watermelon red to up to a light pre-ripe cantaloupe orange, like a painter was practicing getting his shades just right before setting to work.  It was still light enough to see when I walked back to the cabin around 11:30pm.  Just another perfect day near Babb.

 

Zen and the Art of Homestead Maintenance

This is my first blog post- I thought it would be about something deep or funny or at least interesting.  NOPE, just gonna write about what I did yesterday.  So here’s a day in the life of Brother Dear at Hillhouse.

Ya’ll have no idea how much work it takes to make this place look decent.  I had forgotten myself, until the folks decided to move over to Whitefish.  I’m fairly certain we’d all gotten used to having somebody around to mow the lawn, cook 9/10ths of the meals, keep the house sparkling, and do a million different things to make everything feel like home (Mom), and another somebody to fix everything that breaks, keep the flies, mosquitoes, and yellow jackets away, constantly maintain the physical structures at Hillhouse, and keep the hot tub in proper perfectly functioning order (Dad).

I believe Court and I grew accustomed to all of these borderline-menial, yet extremely important tasks simply being “taken care of” while we were off at work, hiking, tubing, 4-wheeling, fishing, or otherwise gallivanting.  Not that we didn’t help or even spearhead, but there are only so many hours in a day and having Mom and Dad around certainly makes thing run smoothly.

So today I tried to get a jump on “maintaining” the property.  I got up around  6:30 and brewed a pot of coffee and contemplated the day up at the cabin.  I had the place to myself as “Darling Summer Help”  dove out of bed around 4:30am to go help “Honeydew” move some bees around.  Yes, Dear Reader, it does actually pain me to refer to these individuals in such a borderline-silly fashion, but these seem to be the restraints of fine-blog-posting.  I’m just trying to follow the rules.  As I stepped from my living room to my kitchen, the first two projects were immediately apparent:  with all of the kitchen supplies recently brought from Charleston, Virginia, and Missoula, the cabin kitchen needs more cupboard/shelf space…but that’s for another day.  The second project came to me as I walked by the sink towards the door…a very distinctive, unique, and unwelcome odor drifting down from the attic.  Guano.  Bat Poop.  When we first “fixed up” the cabin we hauled out 450 gallons of Guano from the attic, but that’s a story for another blog.  Needless to say, I am VERY familiar with this particular odor, and have spent five years trying to relocate it.  However, even at 7am it was getting hot as blazes and the attic was probably approaching 100 degrees, so I (smartly) decided to focus my attention elsewhere.

Elsewhere turned out to be the Big House, where I drank several more cups of coffee, had some breakfast, and ‘helped’ Courtney and Natalee prepare for their day.  Soon enough they shuffled off to their respective obligations and I was left to my own devices.  What to do?  Oil the house…no, that would take several people practically forever.  Fix the lighting situation in the kitchen…no, that’s definitely for another day with lots  of help.  Grab the chainsaw and start clearing 4wheeler paths along the fenceline…nah, it’s hot and I don’t want to have put on long pants.

So many options.  I needed to clear my mind.  Why not climb up on the roof and see what’s going on up there?

Marvelous!  Mornings like this are why the pond in front of Hillhouse is called Gretchen’s Mirror rather than Gretchen’s Sinkhole.  There was a bit of bad news up on the roof though… Another rough winter did its dirty work on the paint on our overhead steel hail-protector.  Nothing I can do about that today though.

Time to get to work.  I set about my first task- taking the storm windows off the cabin.  The storm windows are probably twice as old as I am, and a few them appear to be held together by gravity, precedent, and wishful thinking.  There are 12 on the house, but two stay on permanently.  I loaded up all the removable ones in my pickup and carefully made my way down to the garage.  After a jaw session with a recently-returned neighbor, I set to the task of fixing up the windows.

Some of them just got a little sanding and new coat of paint, while others got the full treatment.  I carefully hammered the wooden strips holding the panes onto the frame back into their correct position with a block of wood and a mallet, added a finishing nail and some glue here or there, did a little glazing and caulking, and tried my hardest not to make anything worse off than it was before.  I think they came out looking much better, and they may even get a second coat tomorrow.

While the paint was drying, I walked up and down the driveway leading to Hillhouse with my trusty lopers and trimmed back all the aspen, cottonwood, and willows encroaching into our thoroughfare.  Hopefully this helps with some of the snow drifting problems we’ve had, but it was mostly just a cosmetic overhaul.  I hopped on a 4wheeler (Ginger, because she’s a redhead) and helped the recently returned Psuedo-Sister move a bunch of her junk around from barn to barn (seriously, we move stuff from barn to barn on at least a weekly basis).  While schlepping, I realized that the cabin, tack barn, and pump house could use a good weed-wacking, so I got to work on that.   Psuedo-Sister did her best Mom-impression and made me a delicious seared ahi-tuna sandwich for lunch.  Mom always keeps us well-fed around here, and a good lunch is crucial to proper and timely Homestead Maintenance.

In between window painting sessions, I pressure washed all the windows and doors at Hillhouse and then Pseudo-sister helped me clean them by hand.  They were totally covered in smashed bugs, smashed bird bits, and other smashed detritus.  Nasty stuff.  I bugbombed the pump house, killed a bunch of yellow jackets, set out traps, and inspected the bat house.  I needed a break, so I took Ginger for a cruise and let Roy chase me all over the property.  Very fun.

It was getting to be late afternoon at this point.  The weather was wild all day, with storms splitting around Hillhouse to go north and south of us.  I could write another thousand words on the variety of weather yesterday, but I’ll save that for a phone call with Dad.  This picture should show a bit of the variety we got- this little storm spit out some serious lightning just southeast of us.

With little energy left, I hopped on the lawnmower and got to work on the front lawn.  Our lawnmower…well, it’s a piece of work.  The belts are always slipping off the wheels so you have to get down and manually put them back on in order for the mower blades to engage.  It is also kind of liking riding on top of a giant vibrating can opener.  Hillhouse’s lawn looks flat…but it’s not.  Trying to mow the lawn in high gear will definitely leave you with the sensation that your backbone is trying forcefully wiggle its way out of your body.   I’m thrilled that the folks are loaning us their posh John Deere whenever it gets here from Virginia.  It’s even got a cup holder!

So that was my day.  I probably forgot some stuff.  It was basically a lot of chores.  I loved it.  A younger-me would be shocked at such a statement as I used to dread weeding the garden, helping Dad with the fences, mulching, raking leaves, whitewashing, cleaning gutters, etc.  I did quite a bit of it as a kid, mostly because Courtney was always very busy ‘studying.’  Right.  Now, I find doing these manual tasks extremely gratifying- even though probably nobody will notice that driveway is cleared out or that the storm windows are whiter, I know.  We all take great pleasure in maintaining Hillhouse, and I hope our devotion shows to our friends and neighbors.

As the sun went down, the light perfectly reflected off the old Swiftcurrent Lookout and it looked like it was a huge flame on the mountaintop.

We closed off the day with a delicious meal of buffalo-stuffed peppers and all sorts of sides- which Darling Summer Help expertly paired with some delicious brews from his home state of Wisconsin.  Finally, we built a fire up in the big field and the whole strange Hillhouse family sat around and watched the clouds of another amazing sunset.

It’s really, really good to be home.

 

what we caught on the wide Missouri

As I mentioned earlier this week, we spent our Memorial Day Weekend on the wide Missouri River.  Our objectives: to catch up with dear friends and family.  And to snag some paddlefish, of course.

We arrived on Thursday afternoon and spent most of Friday waiting out the rain.  But Saturday dawned bright and breezy, and our three boat owners got together and managed to haul everyone and their favorite chair, cooler, and fishing rod, out to an island in the wide Missouri.

Brother Dear caught a pallid sturgeon, a member of the Acipenseridae (sturgeon) family of fish that originated during the Cretaceous period 70 million years ago.  According to Wikipedia, the pallid sturgeon has remained essentially unchanged over the last 70 million years, and is considered to be a relic of the dinosaur era.  The United States Fish and Wildlife Services has apparently called the pallid sturgeon “one of the ugliest fish in North America,” and for once in my life, I must agree with the bureaucrats.  Pallid sturgeon are endangered, so Brother Dear threw this one back.

Nephew Kameron caught a mighty fine catfish …. mmmm, yummy!  Good work, K.

Honeydew caught Kameron, after he ran across the line Honeydew was setting up for him and got his feet tangled up.  As a result, Kameron successfully set the barb in Honeydew’s finger and yanked it out, all in the span of about 10 seconds.

Several folks caught paddlefish, including Amy’s brother Travis:

Apologies to the rest of y’all that caught a paddlefish … this was the only good picture I managed to get … isn’t she beautiful?  I think we named her Esmerelda.

And what did Pseudo Sister and I catch?

Some rays, for sure … with pretty niece Taylor.

And a little bit of a champagne buzz, too.  Hey, someone had to celebrate all of the hard work going on around us!  Way to go, anglers!

2010.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

Across the Wide Missouri

Sometimes, when I am homesick for the South, that canopy of green that my childhood was played under, I will set my I-Pod to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and let the mournful, sweet strains of Shenandoah fill the room.  It’s also been recorded by Bing Crosby, the Statler Brothers, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia & Dave Grisman, Arlo Guthrie, Glen Campbell, Judy Garland, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, and Trampled By Turtles, to name just a few artists who must also find comfort in its quiet reflections.  Here are the lyrics, in case you’re not familiar with this old folk song:

Shenandoah

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you,

Away, you rolling river

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you

Away, I’m bound away, cross the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,

Away, you rolling river

Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter

Away, I’m bound away, cross the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you,

Away, you rolling river

Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you

Away, I’m bound away, cross the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

Away, you rolling river

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you

Away, I’m bound away, cross the wide Missouri.

I grew up in Virginia, not terribly far from the Shenandoah Valley and River.  I’ve crossed the Missouri River many times, coming and going from Montana, and this song is always on my mind when I do so.

Last year, I joined Honeydew on his yearly Missouri River paddlefishin’ pilgrimage, in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.  And as I said in a blog post outlining the highlights of our weekend, going paddlefishin’ was a choice I would make again.  This year, we chose to camp at the Fred Robinson bridge, right where Highway 191 crosses the wide Missouri, about 75 miles south of Malta, Montana.  There is no cell service.  Heavenly.

We picked up our precious niece and nephew on our way to the wide Missouri.  Honeydew surprised Brother Dear and I with his skill in keeping them entertained during our endless ride east across Montana.  Let’s just say that we left Babb around 9:30am and didn’t cross the wide Missouri until nearly 5pm.  By contrast, Pseudo Sister left Denver at 5am and arrived around 3pm.  No, it doesn’t actually take a full day to drive from Babb to the James Kipp Recreation Area on the Missouri.  But it does when you stop twice at McDonald’s, once at the liquor store, and then take 7 year old and 27 year old males with you to the grocery store in Havre.  Just to name a few stops we made!

This is Honeydew’s best friend’s baby, Tucker.  He is just over a year old and just darling.  Smart, too.  Case in point: he helped us unpack the truck and grabbed the donut holes first.  And no, I don’t normally purchase donut holes.  Or Doritos, mint-fudge-covered-Oreos, blue frosted cookies, Munchies, real Coke, or York Peppermint Patties.  See above, taking 7 year old and 27 year old males with you to the grocery store.

This is Amy, Tucker’s mom/wife of Honeydew’s best friend, giving Tucker a ride through the campground.  Tucker is all boy.  He loves his Tonka truck.  He loves his mama, too.

Our home on the wide Missouri.  Tucker’s dad graciously put up the wall tent for Honeydew, Brother Dear, Pseudo Sister and myself to sleep in.  We felt fairly first class.

This area of the CMR reminds me just a little bit of Savannah, Georgia.  The tall, graceful cottonwoods sway with perfect rhythm and languor in the breeze.

This is Honeydew’s family’s campsite – along with his niece and nephew, his brother,  mom, stepdad, and stepsister joined us, and set up a fantastic campsite, complete with canopy dining area and American Flag.  We’re proud to know ’em.

And here’s Honeydew’s best friend giving Tucker the thrill of his life.  The expression on Tucker’s face matched all of ours when the sun came out on Saturday, and we packed up our gear and coolers and took to the wide Missouri to catch some paddlefish.  More about that later.  Happy Memorial Day!

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