A small army

Here in the high desert, it's fire season. A thunderstorm is not welcomed for the cooling rain that it may bring, but feared for the fires that it may generate. Last year there were no fires in our immediate area, but this year is different. For the last couple of weeks there have been large fires burning in Sisters and the Mitchell area, sending smoke our way. So we really didn't notice when the fires started here. The Two Cabins Complex, as it is called, consists of several smallish fires to the east and south of Monument. The fires were initially started by lightning from a storm we had on the 8th. Since then we have had two more thunderstorms, and several other fires have come up and then been suppressed. Since Monument is at the center of this complex, the fire fighters are using our town as a base of operations.

When you put 478 fire personnel, 5 helicopters, 19 fire engines, and several prop planes into a town of about 200, it's an overwhelming change. A small army has descended upon Monument. Overnight, they arrived and set up camp. The streets are crammed with official looking vehicles and crawling with people. There is a city of tents filling the park and stretching across the football field. A constant procession of supply trucks arrives on the highway. The airport has been taken over with a couple of Blackhawk helicopters and an RV parked on the runway.

As for the fires themselves, they are not as threatening as the devastating fires that threatened the town in 2001. [That fire complex was about 10 times the size of this one, and so serious that the National Guard and FEMA were called out.] One official web site says that 971 acres are involved, the fire is 50% contained, and they expect that it will be 100% contained by tomorrow. Another official web site implies that the crews will be here for awhile. Yesterday's storm may have started more fires, and there may be more storms on the horizon.

I'll add some photos of the tent city to this post when I get a chance.

Some successes

July came and went in the blink of an eye, didn't it?

Somehow we convinced ourselves that the problems under the house didn't need our attention in July. We ordered all the supplies necessary to install plumbing, but haven't started the project yet. And as for the beam, well, the house hasn't fallen down yet. I guess I should feel some sense of urgency about these things, but...

We have settled into a nice summer routine. Every morning I get up, feed the creatures, and close the windows to keep in the cool night air. I fiddle around lazily till ten or eleven, then Gavin gets up and we have coffee. I take my second cup of coffee out to the garden to see if the deer have found us yet, and to see if I have a ripe tomato yet. So far, no deer, and only cherry tomatoes. It's very peaceful in the garden, with the lush greenery all around and the bees buzzing in the squash blossoms. I kind of hang out there for awhile, pushing squash vines into the trellis, poking at bean plants, tasting herbs, examining corn tassels. Then I water the garden, pick cherry tomatoes and squash, have some lunch, and disappear into the basement studio, where it's nice and cool. If I'm lucky, I get some work done. Gavin usually gets to work about the same time. Almost every day, we stop working at about seven and go down to the pond to see if we can catch some fish. We usually catch some. I've actually caught dinner a few times now. Rainbow trout and bass. The sunfish are easy to catch too, but darn hard to clean. We stick around the pond till the mosquitoes start biting, and then come home and make dinner. This leads to a lot of barbequeing in the dark and 10 pm dinners, but I don't hear anyone complaining.

Here's a photo of one day's harvest from the garden. I tend to pick tomatoes every other day, squash every third day, and herbs and lettuce about once a week. So this is not really representative of a single day's worth of growing, more like the best day of any given week.



I got a handful of pickles a couple of days ago, and fresh dill too. Not enough to bother with any kind of formal pickling routine, so I just stuck them in some vinegar, water, salt, garlic, and the dill, and put them in the fridge. They are already tasting like real pickles. So good that I don't know if I'll ever bother making "real" pickles.

Still, no ripe tomatoes yet. Out of about 20 plants, only maybe 10 of them even have baby tomatoes on them. And of those, about 1/3 of the fruits have blossom end rot. The five Prudens Purple only have one measly baby tomato to show for themselves. Not gonna grow that variety again!

I discovered that I was a chronic under-waterer. I don't suppose that our sandy soil helps, but I really can't make any excuses beyond that. So I got a soaker hose for the tomatoes, and have been flooding the rest of the poor thirsty babies with the hose almost every day. In the last two weeks, the garden has gone from sort of measly and bug-eaten to lush and vigorous. I can only imagine what it would have looked like if I had been giving it enough water all along.

In another week, we will have been here a year. I wish I could say that I feel like celebrating, but I kind of don't. I really love it here and I'm so grateful that we've been able to be here a year, but if we want to stay here, we're going to have to figure out how to support ourselves, and we're not there yet. And I thought we would be, after a whole year! This milestone kind of thinking is really hard on me, because I always want to look back and evaluate how I'm doing compared to what I wanted to do, and I haven't even come close to achieving my goals. I'm trying not to think about it, and to just keep plugging along.